A Pride of Kings (The Plantagenets Book 1)

by Juliet Dymoke

  ‘You told me once,’ Isabel said, ‘that when he came drunk to your bed he – he used such practices that –’ she folded her lips tightly and then went on, ‘I would have thought that more shaming.’

  Avice’s face burned and she raised her head. ‘You – you and Amicia – you know nothing of men like John. But for all that I was his Queen and now I am to be nobody.’

  Her sister touched her cheek. ‘Never that, my dear. And you will wed again. Since Geoffrey of Mandeville came back from France I have noticed him looking fondly at you; it would not be too poor a thing to be Countess of Essex.’

  The Queen, so soon to be dethroned, turned an even deeper colour. ‘How can I think of another marriage? I can only think that a Frenchwoman, a child, will take my place. John will have her, he is determined although she is betrothed to Hugh of Lusignan, and I – I shall enter a nunnery.’

  ‘Never!’ Isabel laughed at her but in a kindly manner. ‘You are not made for the cloister.’

  Avice rose, the picture of pale outraged womanhood, and said mournfully, ‘I shall ask your husband to write to the Holy Father for me. Everyone attends to William.’

  ‘Better ask him to invite the Earl of Essex to dine with us,’ Isabel said mischievously. She was in fact sorry for Avice, but she agreed with Amicia’s sentiments, and wished that Avice could take life a little less earnestly. William had taught her to laugh at it. But her smile ended in a little sigh. She wanted to see him so much, but he was away in Normandy with the King; he was so important a man these days, always busy about state affairs, so often used as an ambassador to foreign courts because of his tact and his reputation. She wished she could have stayed in Rouen, but it seemed William sensed trouble and sent her home accordingly. Now she spent most of her time either at Pembroke or the Marshal manor at Caversham near Reading, or at Clare with Amicia. Only today all three of them were in her London home with its pleasant garden leading down to the river. It was probable that William was returning with the King and she wanted to be here if he did so.

  But it was a brief visit for the King went back to France within a few weeks and married the Lady of Angouleme within a day or two of her impending union with Hugh of Lusignan. The marriage caused a storm throughout France but John cared nothing for that and when he brought his bride to England to be crowned he was inordinately proud of her. Young though she was she was developing fast, promising great beauty, with dark rippling hair and the manner of a coquette that was enslaving her much older husband.

  Furious, Hugh issued a challenge to the King of England. ‘Fool!’ John said. ‘Does he think a king can risk his life in single combat? Tell him to look for another woman for his bed. There are plenty for men of his degree.’

  ‘Sire,’ William told him, ‘this will stir up trouble with King Philip.’

  John gazed at Isabella who tilted her head, her smile full of secret allure, and it was doubtful whether he even heard.

  ‘She is a witch,’ Hubert Walter said in private to the Earl of Pembroke. ‘She has bewitched our lord so that his thoughts are no longer his own.’

  William, loving his own wife as he did, nevertheless saw something unpleasant in the way John behaved with his child bride, and he did not deny Walter’s remark, but he had other business to discuss with the bishop. He wished to found a religious house where the souls of the Old King and of his former young master might be prayed for daily to the end of time. There was a stretch of land on a lonely part of the coast of Cumbria that had come to him from his wife. There, the bishop suggested, the monks might find solitude as well as caring for the needs of the few fishermen on that desolate coast. William agreed and put some of his great wealth into the building of a Priory at Cartmel for the Augustinian Canons. He would visit the brethren as soon as he might, but present events sent him hurrying back to Normandy in the King’s train.

  Rumour reached them that King Philip was on the march. Despite his outward friendship with John in earlier days, Philip was determined to seize back all that the Old King had won and a show of force was necessary on the Norman side. At Christmas at Caen, William with Gilbert and Will FitzHenry, now Earl of Salisbury in the right of his new wife, Ela, spent much of the time hunting the forests nearby. Riding through the snow-covered woods in search of game Will speared a boar. Watching while the men tied its feet to a pole to bear it back to the palace he blew on his cold fingers. ‘Will you go further?’ he asked his companions. ‘I’ll wager my brother will still be warm abed when we return.’

  ‘We won’t see him before dinner,’ Gilbert agreed. He was puffing a little, his belly over-large these days and pressed against the pommel of his saddle. ‘Holy God, his father could bed the old Queen and beget a son in one night and be off to the other end of his empire the next morning.’

  ‘There will be no empire left if his grace does not exert himself,’ William said. He leaned forward to take a fresh spear from d’Erleigh, having broken his in an endeavour to bring down a hart. ‘My animal will be wounded and in the undergrowth somewhere. John, set the lyme-hounds to flush it out.’ And when the huntsmen moved off, calling in their own peculiar way to the hounds, he added, able to speak freely to these two as he would to no one else, ‘King Philip knows only too well what sort of man John is and he won’t be slow to take advantage of it. The spring will see his banners unfurled.’

  He was proved only too right, but for once John bestirred himself, perhaps because his mother was concerned. She was at Mirabeau and Philip, who had taken the cause of Arthur of Britanny under his wing, sent the sixteen-year-old boy with the Lusignans, still indignant over the matter of Hugh’s stolen bride, to seize that stronghold.

  ‘By Christ’s Wounds,’ John said, ‘they shall regret the day they dared to hold my mother prisoner.’

  In forty-eight hours he led his troops the eighty miles from Le Mans to Mirabeau and fell on the besiegers. William stormed under the barbican with picked knights and there was fierce fighting in the outer bailey. He had lost none of his skills and the years lay lightly on him, no fat on his body and his muscled right arm as strong as ever. He and his men drove the Breton troops to the closed gates of the inner bailey and there over a mound of corpses forced them to yield. And to his astonishment among the knights was a tall stripling, Arthur of Brittany. The boy wore a sulky look, his eyes dark with anger as he flung his sword at his captor’s feet.

  ‘Take it, William Marshal, and may God curse you.’

  William signalled to John d’Erleigh to pick up the sword. ‘He will not do so at your command, my lord,’ he said, and John riding up gave a shout of triumph.

  ‘By all the Saints, my lord Pembroke, here’s a fine catch! Well, nephew, you have done very ill by me to besiege my mother. You will pay for this piece of folly.’ He ordered his men to seize and chain Arthur fast and then with his barons beside him entered the gates now opened wide by the frightened garrison. Some twenty knights surrendered, including Hugh himself who looked at John with naked hatred.

  Queen Eleanor was in the hall to greet her victorious son. She was eighty now, white-haired, her face lined, but she held herself proudly today, her eyes bright as they rested on the youngest of her brood.

  They greeted each other with a kiss and then John said, ‘Have they ill-treated you, my lady? While they held you have you suffered any discomfort? If so – ’

  ‘They have not,’ she answered at once and looked keenly at him. ‘I charge you, John, not to harm Arthur. He has used you treacherously, but he is your nephew, my own grandson.’

  ‘I did not think you would care, considering how his bitch of a mother behaved to you,’ John broke in and Eleanor flashed one look at him that reduced him to silence.

  ‘Then you do not see beyond the end of your nose,’ she retorted. ‘Constance is less than nothing to me, but Arthur is a Plantagenet. Treat him well and perhaps he will learn where his best interests lie. He is still a boy. And as for Sir Hugh, you owe him a favour, you cannot deny that. It wil
l not hurt you to be generous to him, and he has behaved towards me as a chivalrous knight should.’

  John’s lids were lowered. ‘As you wish, madame,’ he agreed in a silky voice. He signalled to his half-brother Salisbury to remove the prisoners and then in a different tone asked had the Bretons drunk all the wine in the place? He was knowledgeable about wine and during supper sampled enough that it was necessary afterwards for two of his attendants help him up the stairs to his bed where he sat laughing and hiccupping and demanding the prettiest maidservant to share it with him.

  All John’s needs having been supplied, William and Salisbury retired down the spiral stair to the small chamber seized on by Jehan for his lord. When the door was shut Will said, ‘Do you think he will heed the Queen?’

  William’s face was grim. ‘Only as long as she is beside him. But I heard her say at supper that she would like to journey south to Poitiers, her own city. She has been a great lady; I doubt there was ever a Queen like her.’

  ‘I know,’ Salisbury agreed. ‘She was always kind to me and to Geoffrey, and she had no reason to be so.’

  In the morning Eleanor left, and it was Will who helped her into the saddle for she disdained a litter. ‘Beg your brother to keep his word to me,’ was her last injunction, but neither he nor William had much hope of it.

  They marched north to Falaise with the prisoners and there John’s young wife joined him and once more he lay in bed until noon. Arthur was well treated and given a large chamber. But the castellan of the castle, one Hubert de Burgh who was well known to William, confided to him that despite outward appearances he had doubts about the King’s intentions towards Arthur and he was clearly uneasy about his own responsibility for the prisoner.

  ‘Why?’ William asked, though he shared those doubts. ‘Has anything untoward occurred?’

  ‘The King came to see him last night,’ de Burgh said. He was an honest man, plain spoken and loyal to the royal house, a soldier born and not without ambition, but his eyes under his thatch of dark hair were troubled. ‘The King spoke in smooth tones – you know how he does – asking Arthur to forget that he had any pretensions to the throne, but the boy cried out that he had a better right as his father was the elder brother.’

  ‘No one can deny that,’ William said slowly, ‘If Geoffrey had not been killed in that tourney –’

  ‘Aye, the matter would have been straightforward then, but mind you, my lord, I do not think Count Geoffrey would have sat well on the throne of England, and as for his lady –’

  How Constance would have queened it over Eleanor, William thought, and there was no doubt Eleanor would have retaliated with vigour. ‘I think we may thank Almighty God we escaped King Geoffrey and Queen Constance,’ he said. ‘And it was Richard’s dying command that his brother should succeed him. He knew the naming of Arthur as his heir would cause worse feuding. What answer did the King make?’

  ‘Oh, he strutted in front of the lad, all smiles, but he pointed out how high the tower was and how fast he held him. Arthur answered that nothing could frighten him into denying the rights he held from his father.’

  ‘He has courage,’ William admitted. ‘Perhaps we might have made a king of him in time – but it is best as it is. I’m sure of that or I’d not have set my hands between John’s.’

  ‘I suppose you are right.’ De Burgh took a long pull at his ale, a leather jug set between him and his companion. ‘How fast your boys are growing – William seems set to be as tall as you. How large is your brood now?’

  William smiled. ‘I’ve had two other lads since Richard, Gilbert and Walter, and three girls. Matilda is to wed Hugh Bigod soon.’

  ‘Your wife has served you well.’ De Burgh paused for a moment, looking round the great hall, that hall where William the Conqueror had grown to manhood, dominating his barons from mere boyhood by sheer strength of personality. How he would have disapproved of John’s licentiousness and indulgence at the table, he thought. He and William had sat down to a game of backgammon by the light of a rush dip, but most were extinguished now, the hall in semi-darkness, men rolled in their cloaks on straw pallets wherever they could find space. De Burgh looked closely at his companion’s face and wished it was the Marshal who was in charge of the prisoner in the high tower instead of himself.

  Presently William went to his chamber and there young Richard raised himself on his elbow. ‘Father – is it very late?’

  ‘Why aren’t you asleep?’ William asked, smiling down at the boy. From his own great strength he was always the more protective towards Richard, not despising the boy for his lack of physical attributes as some fighting men would have, nor packing the lad off to a monastery. Perhaps Richard would end his days in the habit but not yet, for he was not fully grown and he had the will to earn his knighthood which, to his father’s mind, was more than half the way to it; bodily strength might yet come. He sat down on the edge of the bed they shared. ‘I thought you would be tired after the hawking.’

  It was the one sport the twelve-year-old Richard loved. ‘It was good today,’ he said and lay down again, looking up at his father. ‘My new peregrine has learned to come back to the lure and she brought down a fine catch.’

  ‘You have a knack with the birds. You excel your brother in that.’

  ‘William hasn’t the patience, but I wish I could pull his bow. I can hardly bend it at all.’

  His father stood up and began to undress. ‘William will be a warrior, but there are other things, my son.’

  ‘I suppose there are,’ Richard said sleepily, ‘but mother wants us all to be like you.’

  William gave a low laugh and got into bed, setting his arm about the boy’s warm body. He wished other men had the joy out of their children that he had out of his. He thought of the Old King and the bitterness that had grown up between him and his sons, and he prayed that his own boys would not serve him thus. Young William was showing he could be headstrong; he was Salisbury’s squire and eaten up with ambition to be a great jouster, to emulate his father who even now, in his fifties, no one had ever unseated, and William encouraged his son, teaching him as he had once taught the Young King and Richard and Geoffrey and John. He thought of that other Plantagenet boy, only a few years older, barred in the room above, and wondered whether King John had any mercy in him.

  ‘He has none,’ Hubert de Burgh cried out some two weeks later, in answer to that unspoken question. He was nearly in tears. ‘Jesu, my lord, what would you have done?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ William said, ‘but as God sees me I could not have obeyed the King.’

  ‘Nor I.’ De Burgh put his head in his hands, his fingers stuck deep in his hair. To blind the lad – hardly older than your William. And I’d grown fond of him. He stood firm against the King, even when he came drunk to the cell and taunted him.’

  ‘Adversity has brought out the best in Arthur,’ William gave a heavy sigh. It had been a grim business. Hearing those horrific orders – John in his crafty way realising that a blinded enemy was no enemy at all – Hubert de Burgh had refused to admit the King’s men to the prince’s cell and had given it out that he was dead in the hopes of saving his life. But this had caused such a commotion throughout France that the castellan lost his nerve, confessed, and brought his prisoner to the King at Rouen. Now Arthur was shut away in a cell there and de Burgh was in fear not only for Arthur’s life but for his own.

  ‘What shall I do?’ he asked William. ‘The King has said he is glad that no harm has come to the boy, that his men were exceeding his orders, but how can I believe him? The prince will die, my lord, I know it, and I can do nothing.’

  ‘Please God you are wrong,’ William said. But Arthur was close within the most remote cell in Rouen castle, a maze of hidden rooms as William knew from his previous command there. Now the castellan was one William de Braose, lord of Bramber Castle in Sussex, a bull-necked, loud-spoken man, a close companion of the King, and in William’s opinion likely to stop at nothing
to keep in favour.

  For a while Arthur was forgotten in a clash with Philip of France, but a few weeks later John d’Erleigh came to William with a startling story. A fisherman, it seemed, had discovered a body in the Seine and reported it to a guard at the gates of the city. The guard had informed the lord of Bramber and the body was taken away for burial. The fisherman had been treated to supper by some of de Braose’s men and had become violently ill, dying within a few hours of that fatal meal. It was whispered that he had been poisoned but de Braose denied it, calling the whole tale nonsense.

  Salisbury went to his half-brother and asked plainly if the body had been that of their nephew Arthur, but was met with a blank stare and a pointed remark that Will must have other things to attend to.

  ‘Jesu!’ the Earl said to William, ‘my father never resorted to secret murder to dispose of his enemies.’

  ‘We have no proof that Arthur is dead,’ William said.

  ‘No, but do you doubt it?’

  William did not, but the mystery remained. Men began to look even more warily at the new King and King Philip, judging accurately the character of his rival, marched into Normandy and seized that thorn in his flesh, Château Gaillard, while John lay in bed at Caen fondling his Queen.

  William and the other commanders did what they could but without orders and without support it was a hopeless task. Remembering Richard’s words William set out to try to relieve the beleaguered garrison in ‘Saucy Castle’ and wished with all his heart for a sight of Richard at the head of his troops. With all his faults the Lionheart knew how to make war.

  There was fierce fighting with the French on the wet slippery rocks of the river bank, William’s men charging with their cry of ‘The Marshall, The Marshall’ and for a while that name put sufficient fear into their enemies that they drove them back across the bridge. But there was no way they could reach the castle for the whole might of the French army about the rock outnumbered them ten to one. John promised to send supplies by ship, more mercenaries, more siege weapons, but none came and William, pale and angry, stalked his camp and stared up at the rock. Within were the remnants of the Norman garrison commanded by Roger de Lacey, but bravery alone was not enough to save them. De Lacey sent out the women and children for he had insufficient food and, trusting in French mercy, thought it more important to keep his own fighting men fed. The refugees tumbled down the hill towards the bridge, carrying pathetic bundles of belongings, but there the French drove them back. De Lacey refused to open the gates again and for two weeks two hundred of these women with their children crouched against the rocks, their cries haunting the English camp day and night.