The She-Wolf

by Maurice Druon

  The two priests had found no difficulty in meeting. Canon d’Hirson had had Edward’s envoy pointed out to him.

  ‘Reverendissimus sanctissimusque Exeteris episcopus?’ he asked him. ‘Ego canonicus et comitissae Artesiensis cancellarius sum.’fn1

  They had been instructed to meet at the first opportunity. And this opportunity had arisen here. And now, sitting side by side in a window embrasure at the end of a corridor, their beads in their hands, they conversed in Latin, as if they were making the responses to the prayers for the dying.

  Canon d’Hirson had a copy of a very interesting letter addressed to Queen Isabella from a certain English bishop who signed himself ‘O’. The letter had been stolen from an Italian businessman while he was sleeping in an inn in Artois. Bishop ‘O’ advised the Queen not to come back for the present, but to gather as many partisans in France as she could, to assemble a thousand knights and land with them in England to chase out the Despensers and that wicked Bishop Stapledon. Thierry d’Hirson had the copy on him. Would Monseigneur Stapledon care to have it? A paper passed from the Canon’s cloak to the Bishop, who cast an eye on it and recognized the clever, succinct style of Adam Orleton. If, he added, Roger Mortimer took command of this expedition, the whole English nobility would rally to him within a few days.

  Bishop Stapledon gnawed at a corner of his thumb.

  ‘Ille baro de Mortuo Mari concubinus Isabellae reginae aperte est,’fn2 said Thierry d’Hirson.

  Did the Bishop want proof of it? Hirson could give him whatever proof he might require. It would be enough to question the servants, have the comings and goings at the Palace of the Cité watched, or merely ask the familiars of the Court what they thought.

  Stapledon concealed the letter in his robe, under his pectoral cross.

  The crowd was beginning to leave the bedroom. Monseigneur of Valois had named the executors of his will. His great seal, bearing the lilies and surrounded with the inscription: ‘Caroli regis Franciae filii, comitis Valesi et Andegaviae’,fn3 had been impressed in the wax poured on to the ribbons hanging from the document.

  ‘Monseigneur, may I present to your high and saintly person my niece Béatrice, lady-in-waiting to the Countess?’ said Thierry d’Hirson to Stapledon, indicating a beautiful dark girl, with liquid eyes and swaying hips, who was approaching them.

  Béatrice d’Hirson kissed the Bishop’s ring; then her uncle whispered a few words to her. She went back to the Countess Mahaut and murmured in her ear: ‘It is done, Madame.’

  And Mahaut, who was still standing near Isabella, put out her great hand and stroked young Prince Edward’s forehead.

  Then everyone went back to Paris. Robert of Artois and the Chancellor because they had to attend to government matters. Tolomei because he had business. And Mahaut because, now that her revenge was in train, she had nothing more to do here. Isabella because she wanted to see Mortimer. The widowed Queens because nobody could find room to put them up. Even Philippe of Valois had to go back to Paris for administrative matters concerning the great county of which he was already the de facto lord.

  There remained beside the dying man only his third wife, his eldest daughter, the Countess of Hainaut, his younger children and his personal servants. Scarcely more people than there would have been round the deathbed of some little provincial knight, although Valois’s name and actions had concerned the world from the Atlantic to the Bosporus.

  And next day Monseigneur Charles of Valois was still breathing, and the following day too. The Constable Gaucher had been right; there was still life in that broken body.

  The whole Court during these days went to Vincennes for the homage that young Prince Edward, Duke of Aquitaine, was to render to his uncle, Charles the Fair.

  Then, in Paris, a brick fell from a scaffolding very close to Bishop Stapledon’s head; after which a footbridge gave way under the prelate’s mule, while he happened to be following it on foot. And again, one morning, as he was leaving his lodgings at the hour of early Mass, he found himself in a narrow street face to face with Gerard de Alspaye, the ex-Lieutenant of the Tower of London, and barber Ogle. The two men seemed to be out simply for a stroll. But did people leave home at that hour of the morning merely to listen to the birds singing? A little silent group of men was standing in the mouth of an alley and, among them, Stapledon thought he recognized the long horse-face of Baron Maltravers. A convoy of market-gardeners, which was crowding the street at that moment, gave the Bishop the opportunity to hurry back to his own door. That very night, saying goodbye to no one, he took the road to Boulogne, where he embarked secretly.

  And he took with him, not only the copy of Orleton’s letter, but ample evidence against Queen Isabella, Mortimer, the Earl of Kent and all the lords who formed their entourage.

  In his manor in the Île-de-France, a league distant from Rambouillet, Charles of Valois, abandoned by nearly everyone, and withdrawn into his own body as if he were already in the tomb, was still alive. He, who had been called the second King of France, no longer paid attention to anything except the air which entered his lungs with an irregular rhythm and, from time to time, with agonizing pauses. And he was to continue breathing this air, which was life to all God’s creatures, for long weeks to come, indeed until December.

  PART THREE

  THE DISINHERITED KING

  1

  The Hostile Spouses

  QUEEN ISABELLA HAD been living in France for eight months; she had learnt what freedom meant and had found love. And she had forgotten her husband, King Edward. He no longer held a place in her thoughts, except in a rather abstract way, as if he were a tiresome legacy left by some older Isabella now defunct; he had passed into the dead zones of her memory. She could no longer remember, when she tried to do so to exacerbate her resentment, even the smell of her husband’s body or the exact colour of his eyes. She could recapture only the vague, fluid outline of his over-long chin and blond beard, and the disagreeable movement of his back. Though memory might be proving evasive, hatred on the other hand remained tenaciously present.

  Bishop Stapledon’s hurried return to London confirmed all Edward’s fears and showed him how urgent it was that he should make his wife return to England. And yet he realized he must act cunningly and, as Hugh the Elder said, lull the she-wolf if he wanted her to return to her lair. For some weeks, therefore, Edward’s letters were those of a loving husband regretting his wife’s absence. The Despensers also played their part in this duplicity by addressing protestations of devotion to the Queen and joining their supplications to those of the King that she should afford them the joy of her early return. Edward also told the Bishop of Winchester to use his influence with the Queen.

  But on December 1 everything changed. On that day Edward flew into one of his sudden, hysterical rages, which were so un-royal and yet afforded him the illusion of authority. The Bishop of Winchester had just given him the Queen’s answer; she refused to return to England for fear of Hugh the Younger and she had also informed the King of France, her brother, of the fear she had of him. No more was necessary. The letters Edward dictated at Westminster, during five continuous hours, were to cause the Courts of Europe considerable stupefaction.

  But first he wrote to the Queen. There was no question of ‘sweetheart’ now.

  ‘Madame,’ wrote Edward, ‘we have often asked you, both before the homage and after, that for the great desire we have that you should be with us and the great unease we suffer due to your long absence, you should come to us as quickly as possible and without making any more excuses.

  ‘Before the homage you were excused by reason of the furtherance of the business; but since then you have informed us through the Honourable Father, the Bishop of Winchester, that you will not come, through fear and mistrust of Hugh the Despenser, which astonishes us greatly; for both you with regard to him and he with regard to you have always praised each other in my presence, and in particular on your departure, by special promises and other proofs o
f confident friendship, and also by your letters to him which he has shown us.

  ‘We know for a fact, and you must know it equally, Madame, that the said Hugh has always done all he could to maintain our honour; and you know too that he has never done you any harm since you have been my wife, except, and by chance, on one single occasion, and through your own fault, if you remember.

  ‘It would much displease us, now that the homage has been rendered to our very dear brother the King of France and we are in such friendly relations with him, that you, whom we sent for peace, should be the cause of any coldness between us and for false reasons.

  ‘That is why we ask you, and charge you, and order you, that you should cease making excuses and feigning pretexts, and should return to us with all haste.

  ‘As for your expenses, when you have returned as a wife should to her lord, we will order them in such manner that you will lack nothing and in no way be dishonoured.

  ‘We also wish and command that you make our very dear son Edward come to us as quickly as possible, for we have a great desire to see him and speak to him.

  ‘The Honourable Father in God Wautier, Bishop of Exeter,29 has told us that some of our banished enemies, who are with you, sought him out to do him bodily harm if they had had the time to do so, and that, to escape such perils, he hastened back to us because of the loyalty and allegiance he owes us. We tell you this so that you may understand that the said Bishop, when he left you so suddenly, did so for no other reason.

  ‘Given at Westminster the First Day of December, 1325.

  ‘Edward’

  If his anger broke out in the first part of the letter, to be followed by lies, the venom was very cleverly placed at the end.

  Another and shorter letter was addressed to the young Duke of Aquitaine.

  ‘Most dear son, though you are young and tender in age, remember well what we charged you with and ordered you to do on your departure from us at Dover, and what you then replied, for which we were most grateful to you, and do not go beyond or contravene in any way what we then said to you.

  ‘And since all is done and your homage is received, present yourself to our very dear brother, the King of France, your uncle, and take leave of him, and come to us in the company of our very dear wife, the Queen, your mother, if she comes at once.

  ‘But if she does not come, come yourself at once and do not remain longer; for we have a great desire to see you and talk with you; and do not in any circumstances fail to do this, either because of your mother or anyone else. With our blessing.’

  The repetitions and the irritation manifest in the ill-constructed sentences showed that the writing of the letters had not been confided to the Chancellor or a secretary but was the work of the King himself. One could almost hear Edward’s voice dictating. Charles IV, the Fair, was not forgotten. The letter Edward sent him repeated almost phrase by phrase the points he had made in his letter to the Queen.

  ‘You will have heard from people you can trust that our wife, the Queen of England, dare not come to us through fear for her life and the mistrust she has of Hugh the Despenser. Of course, beloved brother, she had no need to mistrust him nor any other man living in our kingdom; for, by God, neither Hugh nor any other living man in our territory wishes her ill, and, if we discovered such existed, we would punish him in such a way that he would be an example to others, which we have sufficient power to do, thank God.

  ‘That is why, very dear and beloved brother, we particularly pray you, for your honour and our own, and that of our said wife, that you should do everything in your power to see that she comes to us as quickly as possible; we are much chagrined to be deprived of her company, a thing which we would never have allowed had it not been for the great trust and confidence we have in you and in your good faith that she would return when we wished.’

  Edward also demanded the return of his son and denounced the attempts at assassination made on the Bishop of Exeter which he attributed to ‘the enemies and outlaws over there’.

  Undoubtedly, his anger on that first day of December must have been great and the vaults of Westminster have echoed long to his furious shouting. For Edward also wrote to the same purpose and in the same tone to the Archbishops of Rheims and Rouen, to Jean de Marigny, Bishop of Beauvais, to the Bishops of Langres and Laon, all peers spiritual, to the Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, as well as to the Counts of Valois and Flanders, peers temporal, to the Abbot of Saint-Denis, to Louis of Clermont-Bourbon, the Great Chamberlain, to Robert of Artois, to Mille de Noyers, Master of the Exchequer, and to the Constable Gaucher de Châtillon.

  The fact that Mahaut was the only peer of France who was excepted from this correspondence was proof enough of her relations with Edward and that she already knew enough about the affair to make it unnecessary to write to her officially about it.30

  When Robert opened his letter he was overjoyed, and went off laughing and slapping his thighs to his cousin of England. It was exactly the sort of situation that was calculated to delight him. So poor Edward was sending couriers to the four corners of the realm to tell everyone of his marital difficulties, defend his little catamite and announce publicly that he was unable to make his wife come home! How unfortunate the lords of England were, what a sorry King they had, and how weak were the hands that had inherited the sceptre of William the Conqueror! Nothing so ridiculous as this had occurred since the quarrels of Louis the Pious and Alienor of Aquitaine.

  ‘Turn him into a proper cuckold, Cousin,’ cried Robert, ‘and make no bones about it. Let your Edward’s horns grow so long that he has to bend double to get through the doors of his castles. Isn’t that what he deserves, Cousin Roger?’

  And he gaily slapped Mortimer on the back.

  Edward, in his fury, had also decided on reprisals, and had confiscated the property of his half-brother the Earl of Kent and that of Lord de Cromwell, the commander of Isabella’s escort. But he had done even worse than that: he had sealed a decree by which he made himself ‘Governor and Administrator’ of the fiefs of his son, the Duke of Aquitaine, and was demanding in his name the lost territory. It was tantamount to repudiating both the treaty negotiated by his wife and the homage rendered by his son.

  ‘Let him, let him!’ said Robert of Artois. ‘We’ll just go and take his duchy from him again, or rather what remains of it, for one can say that the half of it is only uncovered at low tide. And since two campaigns haven’t taught the wretched fellow his duty, we’ll mount a third against him. The cross-bows for the crusade are beginning to rust!’

  But there was no need to raise an army or send the Constable, whose joints were becoming stiff with age; the two Marshals, at the head of the permanent garrisons, would be strong enough to deal with the Gascon lords in the Bordelais who were still weak or foolish enough to remain loyal to the King of England. It was becoming almost a habit. And each time there were fewer adversaries.

  Edward’s letter was one of the last Charles of Valois read, one of the last echoes of the great affairs of the world that reached him.

  Monseigneur Charles died in the middle of this month of December; his obsequies were as pompous as his life had been. The whole house of Valois, and seeing its members in procession one could the better realize how numerous and important it was, the whole family of France, all the dignitaries, most of the peers, the widowed Queens, Parliament, the Exchequer, the Constable, the doctors of the University, the Corporations of Paris, the vassals of the fiefs of appanage and the clergy of the churches and abbeys mentioned in the will accompanied the body, now very light by reason of illness and embalming, of the most turbulent man of his time to the Church of the Minorites so that he might lie between his first two wives.

  It was his fate to have missed, by less than three years, becoming King of France, since Charles IV, his nephew, who had no son, and who was now following his coffin, had no more than that to live.

  The entrails of the great Charles of Valois were taken to the Abbey of Chaâlis an
d his heart, enclosed in an urn, handed over to his third wife to await the time when she herself would have a tomb.

  And then a great cold fell over the kingdom, as if the bones of this prince, from the mere fact of being placed in the earth, had suddenly made the whole of France freeze. People of those times would have no difficulty in recollecting the year of his death; they would merely have to say: ‘It was at the time of the great frost.’

  The Seine was entirely covered with ice; you could cross its minor tributaries, such as the stream of the Grange Batelière, on foot; the wells were frozen, and water had to be drawn from the cisterns not with buckets but with axes. The bark of the trees cracked in the gardens; there were elms split to the heart. The gates of Paris suffered much damage, for the cold fissured even the stone. Birds of all kinds, such as jays and magpies, which were never normally seen in towns, were searching for food in the cobbled streets. The price of peat doubled and there were no furs left in the shops, not a moleskin nor a miniver, nor even a mere sheepskin. In the poorer districts many old people and children died. Travellers’ feet froze in their boots; the couriers’ hands were blue when they delivered their dispatches. All river traffic had ceased. The troops sent to Guyenne, if unwise enough to remove their gloves, peeled the skin from their hands off on their weapons. Urchins amused themselves by persuading village idiots to put their tongues on to the blade of an axe. But what was to remain most impressed on people’s memories was the extraordinary sense of silence because life seemed to have come to a stop.

  At Court the New Year was celebrated rather quietly, partly because of mourning and partly because of the frost. Nevertheless, there was mistletoe and the usual presents were exchanged. On the accounts of the past year the Treasury would show a surplus of seventy-three thousand livres31 – sixty thousand being derived from the Treaty of Aquitaine – of which Robert of Artois persuaded the King to credit him with eight thousand livres. It was indeed only fair, since Robert had been ruling the kingdom on behalf of his cousin for the last six months. He mounted an expedition in Guyenne, where the French arms scored a rapid victory since they found practically no English opposition. The local lords, at the mercy once again of the anger of the suzerain in Paris against his vassal in London, began to regret having been born Gascons. God would have done better by them had he given them lands in some other duchy.