Isabel the Fair

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  Both clergy and barons had given him a chance, they said. Men like Pembroke and the elder Despenser had sincerely hoped that he would have learned his lesson by the time he came home from Ireland — that he would have lived less flamboyantly, and sharpened his wits on others less painfully. But such behaviour seemed to be in the structure of the man himself. Contrary to their belief, Piers Gaveston really did not seek to offend them nor did he work himself into such a prominent position for any politically ambitious purpose. As the Queen-Dowager could have told them — having watched him grow from orphaned adolescence — it was just that he had to have blood-horses and beautifully cut clothes, and was too arrogant and reckless to curb his tongue. And because his enemies, being but human, found it harder to forgive a few ill-timed words of ridicule about themselves than any carefully thought-out treachery against the State. Marguerite even knew that, being without deliberate animosity himself, Piers often found the intensity of their desire for vengeance incomprehensible; but that, unlike Edward, he did not invariably underestimate it. Of late he had had a pretty shrewd idea of the lengths to which his enemies would go.

  “It looks as if I shall need one of your island fortresses after all,” he said, for once scarcely covering his irritation with a show of indolent amusement.

  “My contentious uncle of Lancaster tells me that they intend to read their precious document in public from the steps of St. Paul’s,” Edward told him.

  “The ten commandments according to Saint Thomas, complete with fanfare and heraldry!”

  As usual, they were talking unreservedly in the Queen’s solar, from time to time including her in their conversation in the casual manner which annoyed her most.

  “My subjects up in the north have been complaining about this Robert Bruce raiding their villages, and Parliament wants me to lead an army up there against him,” said Edward. “And to crown everything, Isabel, your father chooses this depressing moment to insist upon my going over to France to pay homage for Guienne.”

  Isabel knew only too well that her frequent complaints to her family were building up a barrier between herself and her husband, but she always hoped that her father’s backing would help the barons to get rid of Gaveston. She merely shrugged, but Gaveston caught at the news with relief. “What could serve us better?” he asked. “If we go up and fight the Bruce you have an excellent excuse not to go to France, Ned. And we shall avoid being in London either when all this baronial storm of self-righteousness breaks.”

  “That is a good thought,” agreed Edward, ignoring the half-weary, half-contemptuous tone in which it was made, and seeming, for once, quite pleased to go to war. “Let us set out as soon as Gilbert and our Constable Segrave and the rest can get sufficient forces together.”

  Isabel noticed that even his own familiar friend looked at him with puzzled amazement, as though marvelling how one who had gone campaigning with that arch-strategist Longshanks could have imbibed so little military sense. “There will be no grazing for our horses up there until early summer,” he pointed out. “March is all very well for the hardy Scots who can make do with a fire under a hedge and a griddle and sack of oats under their saddles, but surely you remember, mon cher, how they used to burn their own villages sooner than let our men have a crockful of food?”

  “I suppose you are right. And with Gilbert having talked me into remitting the war tax, we shall be hard put to it to take sufficient stores with us.”

  And so the expedition was put off until June when Isabel, surprised to find that Edward wanted her, went along, too. She could probably have coaxed him to leave her in comfort with Marguerite and her two boys, but, much as she hated sharing him, she hated still more the thought of being left behind.

  “It is no fit traipsing for a gently nurtured woman,” grumbled Bringnette, reluctantly superintending their packing.

  “Queen Margeuerite always went,” pointed out her rapidly maturing nursling.

  “Her husband knew how to look after her,” muttered the old lady, unappeased.

  The short campaign against Scotland brought forth no lions, unless it were Robert the Bruce, battling for the freedom of his country. Apart from a brief march into the Highlands, accomplished with considerable loss and danger, Longshank’s son seldom left the border town of Berwick. The place became an army headquarters to which men like Gloucester, de Warenne and Nicholas de Segrave returned between sorties. And Isabel, living there in comparative comfort, wondered sometimes whether her husband were merely prolonging his stay there in order to avoid the barons who had refused to accompany him. Piers Gaveston held the key town of Roxburgh, with its great sprawling castle, all the time hoping for the kind of victory which even the Black Dog of Warwick could not ignore. But his urgent desire to engage the Bruce’s army seemed fated to frustration, and the whole campaign, lacking a fiery leader, resolved itself into the capture of a series of strongholds which the canny Scots had already dismantled. After a maddening winter spent mostly in trying to trap the most mobile army imaginable in the southern Highlands, Gaveston travelled secretly and painfully to Berwick to report. Or to set eyes on his friend again. And even Isabel, being bored to tears, was not ill-pleased to see him. The exasperating winter had taken toll of him. For once he was sick and subdued and could not stay for long in the saddle, but as soon as he had rested and been treated by the King’s physician, Bromtoft, even Edward’s blandishments could not keep him. He returned to Roxburgh full of a premonition that only a spectacular victory could save him; but the barons, learning of his sickness, were only too glad to relieve him of his command. The Earl of Angus and Sir Henry Percy of Northumberland were sent to take over the armies, while the King of France offered to negotiate a truce. And by the following summer King, Queen and court were back in London, where Gaveston faced a foe far more implacable than the Scots.

  The ordinances which twelve chosen barons had been preparing were read in public. This time the King would be forced to sign, and his favourite would have to go. In all London there was scarcely one dissentient voice. Even Gloucester and the Despensers advised their sovereign to give in, if only to save his friend’s life.

  “Must he go to Guienne again?” sighed Edward.

  “No. We said exile. Is not Guienne part of your Grace’s kingdom?” said Lancaster, daring to rage more loudly now that the man who had so often discomforted him in the tilt-yard was at last lying low. “Besides, peers and populace alike consider that the foreigner has feathered his nest there too well with English gold.”

  “Foreigner!” his royal nephew shouted back at him, in the nearest approach to a Plantagenet rage which Isabel was ever to behold. “Was not my sworn brother Piers brought up in England since boyhood? And has he not fought for her as valiantly as his father did before him? You lack common logic, milords. Guienne, it seems, is ‘foreign’ when it is a question of a subject’s birth, but ‘part of my kingdom’ when it comes to a question of his exile.”

  But finding himself hopelessly opposed, he wrote to John, Duke of Brabant, his sister Margaret’s husband, asking him to receive his friend. He asked for, and received, letters of safe conduct for him. And Piers Gaveston was seen no more about London. Edward spoke a good deal about the papers and about a ship lying off Dover. But there were some who said the papers were never used, and seamen who claimed the ship never sailed, and rumours began to spread that someone answering to the tall Gascon’s description had been seen wandering about in Devon and Cornwall. The King did not deny it. At the barons’ bidding, he obligingly ordered investigations to be made. “Make a careful search in all the castles of the said counties,” he wrote, in his own rather niggling little writing, to Hugh Courteny of Devon. “For we have commanded all our county sheriffs, and the constables and wardens of the said castles, to assist you whenever they shall be required to do so in our name.”

  Graciously, with his own hand, he gave the order to Aymer de Valence of Pembroke. “I, too, should be comforted to know the whereabouts of m
y life-long friend,” he said to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Sadly but charmingly, he stood on the steps of Westminster Hall, speaking to individual members of Parliament as they went out. He had brought his Queen in order to show on what good terms they were, and because the sight of her always pleased them. He was the bereaved and reasonable monarch, and everyone was grateful that the threat of civil war had been averted. The departing barons bowed low. Even Warwick bowed as low as his girth and his armour would allow, believing that he had licked some sense into Longshanks’s feckless cub at last.

  But Isabel noticed the lightness of her husband’s lithe stride when they were gone. Returning to their private apartments she watched his eyes, and saw nothing of that desolate lost-boy look which had depressed her days all the while Gaveston was away in Ireland. “Are you really very anxious?” she ventured to ask, laying a hand on his.

  Edward kissed it and shrugged sadly, so that the stiff gold cape about his shoulders touched the soft brown of his hair. “The May Queen tells me she says a daily prayer for him to St. Christopher,” he said evasively. “To her Piers must be almost one of the family and she was always kind to him. Her sympathetic heart pictures him hungry among the ruins of Tintagel or half-frozen on some Welsh mountain.”

  “I will have those new musicians play to her this evening. The ones my Uncle brought me from Paris last week. And you should come too, Edward. They will cheer you.”

  After supper, when her visiting uncle and Marguerite with her two boys were gathered in the hall, and the French musicians were tuning up, Isabel sent Goodwin Hawtayne, her steward to tell the King that they were ready.

  “Edward loves music when he is depressed,” Marguerite was saying to her brother, while the boys, glad to be released from their tutors, seated themselves on stools at her feet.

  But Goodwin Hawtayne returned alone, and seeing that he looked worried Isabel drew him aside. “Is the King not coming?”

  The man spread deprecating palms. “Madam, I regret, I do not know.”

  “But you left a message with one of the gentlemen of the bedchamber to remind him, surely?”

  “The door was closed. There was no one about. Except that someone within was singing softly to a lute.”

  “The King himself, of course. Then why did you not — ”

  “No, Madam, it was not the King. At that moment I heard his Grace’s voice down in the courtyard. Looking at his sorrel mare that went lame, I think. And — ”

  “Yes, Goodwin?”

  “That wizened-faced Gascon with the burn scar was standing on the stairs with drawn sword outside the King’s room.”

  Isabel’s fingers flew to her mouth. “Dragon!” she whispered, her lips scarcely sounding the word. “Did you say that I had sent you?”

  Apparently the man had said nothing. Shame-faced, he stood looking down at the points of his shoes. “He was glaring at me. He squints. He has the Evil Eye. And he is said to be the best swordsman in all England and France,” he muttered.

  At that moment the King arrived, all charming apology for having kept the company waiting, and it was as the steward had supposed. “It was that mare your brother Charles gave me, Capet,” he explained to his wife’s visiting uncle. “I fancy the damp of our climate must have got into her shoulder joints. My head groom is good, but I wanted to run a hand over her myself on my way here. Forgive me, dear Isabel. These new French musicians of yours should be a treat for all of us.”

  Although Isabel would have wished it otherwise, it was in such family moments that she came nearest to finding complete happiness. Herself unobserved, she could enjoy looking at her husband’s flawless profile and at the contented relaxation of his athlete’s body, and forget that she did not come first with him. Poignantly aware that her own beauty was matched well with his, she could believe for a little while that they were the perfectly wedded couple of her dreams. At such times she had only to stretch out her hand and he would hold it affectionately on his knee, and she could almost beguile herself into imagining that he held it with secret passion as a lover.

  Chapter Ten

  For Isabel, so young and capable of pleasure, the extraordinary shocks and disappointments of early married life were a bewildering disillusionment. Only her vitality and power of retaliation saved her from being physically stunned by them. The misfortunes which Edward courted seemed incredible. Little had she dreamed, when coming in so much splendour to be Queen, that in a few short years she would find herself a fugitive from her husband’s capital, and sharing his ignominious retreat before his subjects’ wrath, in company with the favourite who was the cause of it!

  They had fled northward and every step of the way since Gaveston had joined them had been resented by her.

  The great hall of Tynemouth castle was stark and draughty, with no feminine touch to render it suitable for the reception of a Queen. The flight from Newcastle had been too hurried for Edward to bring any of their furnishings, so that no cushions softened the window-seats and no tapestries warmed the walls. An insufficient supply of torches threw shadows on the flagstones and a keen wind howled up-river from the sea. In spite of gusts of smoke which kept bellying out from the vast chimney and soiling her green brocade gown, Isabel crouched over the fire to keep warm.

  Edward had gone out on to the battlements to hold yet another consultation with the Captain, but she was not alone. Piers Gaveston was lounging by a table at which he and the King had been playing chess before Edward, rising hurriedly on hearing of the approach of a messenger from Newcastle, had sent half the carved pieces rolling to the floor with a sweep of his sleeve. Since his departure Gaveston had been idly making an intricate military formation with such pawns as remained on the board, his long scarlet-clad legs stuck out before him.

  Small wonder that she did not want to talk to him. But for him she and Edward and poor rheumaticky old Bringnette would be comfortably at home at Westminster enjoying the pleasant new apartments he had planned for her, with the Thames and not the Tyne flowing beneath their windows.

  But for Piers Gaveston this country of her adoption would not be riven by force, with the barons in arms and their sovereign in flight before them.

  As Marguerite had foretold, Edward had stood firm for his friend, and in so doing had shown a Plantagenet’s courage at last. “If only it had been for me he had so rashly defied the whole world, how I could have worshipped him for it!” she thought.

  Practically alone, sometimes threatening, sometimes cajoling, he had refused to sign the ordinances unless Parliament allowed Gaveston to remain. As a last hope he had taken up arms and appealed to the Londoners to support him, but even the Mayor and Sheriffs had sided against him in this particular issue. And the barons, determined to impose their decisions, had parcelled out the authority of the country between them. Gilbert of Gloucester, still trying to mediate, had been made responsible for the orderliness of Kent and Surrey, Lancaster for the rest of the south, and the Earl of Hereford for the eastern counties. When Edward had prepared to march northwards Henry Percy of Northumberland had been warned to guard the Scottish border, and a final insult flung at the King by a suggestion that he might try to betray them by making common cause with Robert Bruce. Pembroke and de Warenne were sent in pursuit of Gaveston, with orders to bring him to trial. And Edward, refusing to abandon him, had met him in York, bringing Isabel with him and hastily strengthening the defences of the city.

  So deeply immersed was she in reviewing the immediate past that she scarcely noticed how low the fire had burned, until Gaveston saw that she was shivering. “You are cold,” he said, rising and throwing on some more logs without interrupting their unsought solitude to call a servant.

  “Edward is a long time out there,” she said, speaking to herself rather than to him.

  “It may be that Lancaster’s army is already advancing from Newcastle.”

  “And you stay idling here, knowing what it has already cost Edward to stand by you!”

  “He
has stood by me to the last ditch,” agreed Gaveston, without complacency. “And this may well be it.”

  “You mean that they will besiege us here?”

  “It is only a matter of time. If it comes to that I promise you that I will go before they harm him.”

  They were talking in the level tones of people accustomed to each other’s company. He picked up Edward’s cloak and put it round her shoulders, and while she jerked it more closely about her he seated himself in Edward’s vacated chair on her side of the chess table. They had been in this unwilling kind of partnership for so long that even their personal safety had become a shared concern, and neither of them had much doubt about his ultimate danger once he separated from the slender protection of the King’s company.

  “Have you never really loved any woman, Piers?” she asked, with a genuine interest which wiped out more antagonistic issues.

  Gaveston seemed to be turning back the pages of his mind. “Yes, once,” he said.

  “You mean — a long time ago?” asked Isabel, wondering if Edward knew of it.

  “A very long time ago.”

  “And for some reason you could not marry her?”

  He laughed with sudden, short amusement. “There was a very good reason why I could not.”

  Finding some part of him which she had never known, Isabel momentarily forgot even the last vestige of her hatred. “I am sorry,” she said. “What was her name?”

  “Claremunda.”

  “And was she as beautiful as the name?’

  His fingers were setting out the chess men for fresh conflict, but his thoughts were far away. “I suppose that for me she had the beauty of all women, because no other has ever taken her place. She was brilliant and gay, and if I close my eyes when passing the roses in your garden, I can draw back into my being the scent of the lovely clothes she wore. Sometimes she would read me poems or dance with me. I was barely seven and she was the shining centre of my world.”