Isabel the Fair

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  Although it was only September Robert le Messager had insisted upon a fire being lit lest the guest room should be damp, and Isabel was glad to sit in the only chair before it. “The Bishop of Hereford wrote that we must bring at least a thousand men,” she said, with the same secret, mocking laughter in voice and eyes. “And for some reason that charming Sir John of Hainault became inflamed by the sight of beauty in distress and begged Count William to allow him to espouse our cause and bring a sizeable army of Flemings. He himself is in charge of them, of course. And milord Mortimer is down there on the harbour now giving instructions to at least a thousand Englishmen who have joined us. So that already we have nearer three thousand. And, believe it or not, my dear Ghislaine, their wages will be promptly paid!”

  It was this frequent unbending from the royal hauteur to almost youthful gaiety which endeared her to the closest of her attendants. “But how, Madam? You would need to pawn your crown to pay all those men,” laughed Ghislaine, less timid than she used to be before she became a cherished wife and new-made mother.

  “Oh — somehow,” answered the Queen evasively. “I always believe in paying for service. Although — as I should well know — there is a service of the heart such as yours and Bringnette’s which no mere coins could repay.”

  Their slow, mutual smile was settlement enough. “Since your Grace cannot sleep, will you not sit quietly and tell me of your journey?” suggested Ghislaine, to cover their moment of emotion.

  “Life seemed to be all sunshine and kindness in Hainault,” recalled Isabel, leaning her head back gratefully against a cushion. “My cousin and her huge kind bear of a husband prepared everything for the comfort of our journey. We slept at a place called Mons and sailed from Dort. Milords of Kent and Mortimer were anxious to disembark unobserved, at night, on some lonely beach; but, God pity us, it was so very dark and lonely on your beach that there seemed to be no habitation at all. They rigged up a kind of tent for me from the Syrian carpets which Sir John had put in the cabin. One of our smaller ships had run aground and been staved in on some rocks, and the sailors dragged some of her timbers across the shingle and lit a fire to warm me. But they dared not make too big a blaze for fear of attracting enemy attention. It was a blustery night and although I wore Milord Mortimer’s cloak I sat and shivered till dawn. But then I could stand the suspense no longer — the suspense of not knowing what lay ahead of us — so I gave the order to march, and as soon as it was light we saw this little town.”

  “And the workers out in the fields came running with news of your arrival, and Thomas of Brotherton, Earl of Norfolk, rode out through the city gates with all his armed men to meet you.”

  “And greeted me with the assurance that we were on his land and that already a small army of barons and knights and retainers were here to greet us. And even some of the Bishops, with Adam Orleton of Hereford. I do not think I have ever heard more welcome words. Though it seems so foolish now, looking round at all the friendly faces, to think how afraid I have been of failure.” She sat for a while in brooding silence before remembering the lateness of the hour. “But I must not keep you from your bed any longer, Ghislaine, or I shall have black looks from Robert in the morning.”

  Ghislaine made her obeisance. “And you, Madam?” she asked, anxiously noting the return of tired lines which excitement had hidden.

  “I must be alone awhile — to realize it all.”

  The Queen’s voice sounded as if she were already alone, and almost before the door was closed she was pacing the room again. Trying to realize the magnitude of the thing she had done, and to assess the encouragement of success that had so far attended it. Realizing that she had put herself in the position of a traitor, and praying for strength to carry her plans through. Picking up her white ermine cloak which had been carefully brought ashore, she flung it about her shoulders and began rehearsing for the morrow when she would ride inland, through familiar towns and countryside, testing the heart of England. But her sure intuition made her throw the priceless thing aside. “This is what will gain the chivalrous indignation of the men, and the woman-to-woman sympathy of their wives. This once queenly gown all mired by exiled roads and tom with sitting on inhospitable beaches,” she decided, spreading the spoiled skirts which Ghislaine would have discarded and controlling her dancing steps to a semblance of frail sadness. “This is how they shall see me — with neither heralds nor pursuivants nor crown. I will ride among them and smile and stretch my hands for their unwashed mouths to kiss.” Enchantingly, she began to mime her role. “And they will shout for me as they used to do, only more wildly. And this time Edward will not ride beside me, a figurehead acknowledging an ill-deserved part of what was never his. This time it will be all mine, the shouting and the cheering. And this time it will carry me on — to Westminster? To God knows what.”

  And as she moved back and forth in the small tavern room, swaying and smiling graciously from side to side, remembrance of their cheering and her briefly-tasted sense of power rose in her, exquisite and heady as good wine. It was a part of her — a temptation and a weapon — a fierce secret enjoyment which even her lover could not share. And as the days of her journeying passed, with their scenes of wild enthusiasm, it became a craving and a necessity, a rich dangerous food from which she drew strength so that Mortimer and all her followers marvelled at her decisive courage and her determination to push forward.

  Her cousin Lincoln had joined her. His men with the badge of the red antelope were everywhere. And as they all marched, four thousand strong or more, people flocked to them from every place they passed through. And everywhere her troops were fed, because it was a known fact that Queen Isabel paid people for their pains. Frenchwoman though she was, the English saw in her a saviour from a state of disorder of which they were sick to their very souls.

  As they approached London they halted, coming upon a parchment signed with the royal seal, attached to the door of a town hall. Robert le Messager ran up the steps and read it aloud to her while her officers gathered round. It was a proclamation offering a thousand pounds for the head of the arch-traitor, Roger Mortimer, and all who had taken up arms against their King. And, coupled with the silent angry looks of the crowd in that part of the country, was enough to give them pause. Mortimer himself laughed carelessly, reaching across him to pull the notice down and tear it across and trample it beneath his muddy boots. But Edmund of Kent blanched, and Sir John of Hainault, uncertain of relative values and conditions in a strange country, came courteously to the Queen and asked if it was her pleasure to push on or to turn aside.

  “The King makes special exception of your Grace, of the Prince and myself,” pointed out Edmund of Kent, retrieving a piece of the fluttering parchment and touched almost to the point of wishing himself back at his brother’s side.

  Isabel was touched too, but she looked at Roger Mortimer laughing carelessly on the steps of the little town hall with his strong body in danger from the poignard of any King’s man, and steeled herself against such weakness. “My friends’ lives are as dear to me as my own. I would neither profit by such exception, nor change our plans,” she said, leaning from her saddle to touch her faithful Flemish knight on the shoulder.

  “Then we ride on?”

  “We ride on, but we will first give his Grace the King an answer to his proffered reward of a thousand pounds for the head of milord Mortimer. An answer which I fear he will not like,” she said. And seeing that they all awaited her pleasure, she raised hand and voice to call an order to le Messager. “My good Robert, have one of the clerks of this town write a bigger parchment offering double that sum for the head of Hugh Despenser.”

  The great shout that went up almost drowned her words. She knew that it was the most dangerous thing she could have done — the biggest offence to Edward, who had shown himself desirous of treating her generously. But judging by the way in which her decision uplifted the hearts of her followers it was also the most popular. And she saw the look
of admiring gratitude in Roger Mortimer’s eyes as he swung round in sudden surprise.

  “Would it not be wise, dear sister, to write a kind of manifesto to the people explaining that our coming in arms is in no way intended against the King, but rather to deliver the kingdom from the oppression of those who mislead him?” Kent was urging pacifically, after a few soothing words to the young Prince who had been urgently plucking at his sleeve.

  Isabel’s eyes sought Mortimer’s, knowing well that both of them intended to go further. But he nodded assent. “It would be expedient,” he agreed.

  “Such a document can scarcely be prepared in the saddle. I should need time for thought,” she objected, not too anxious to commit herself.

  “If your Grace pleases we could turn aside and pass the night at Wallingford,” he suggested, having been familiar with the place when in the household of Piers Gaveston. “Then proclamation of the reward and manifesto of our motives can be published together in London in advance of our arrival.”

  “Where would your Grace wish them to be affixed?” asked le Messager eagerly.

  There were cries of “St. Paul’s” and “Guildhall” and a daring suggestion that since the King and the Despensers had, upon hearing of their landing, taken up residence in the Tower, the Queen’s riposte should be affixed, at dead of night, upon their own gates. And one huge bowman shouted amid roars of laughter, “Put the Queen’s proclamation about Hugh Despenser on London Bridge to bide there till it be joined by his swollen head!”

  But while they shouted and argued Isabel was thinking back into the past, and deciding upon a place which she felt would tend to touch the chivalry in men’s hearts and be most suitable to the cause of a distressed and disappointed Queen. “Do you remember, Robert, riding with me when I first came through the village of Charing and telling me the lovely story of Queen Eleanor’s statue? I would have my appeal to the good people of England fixed there, at the foot of the Chere Reine cross.”

  “Dragon will go on ahead and find means to fix it there against our coming,” said Mortimer, having no wish to entrust such incriminating documents to anyone else. “It should rouse the Londoners to receive us with more assurance when we come.”

  But in the end they did not go to London. Her appeal must have elicited more sympathy than she had dared to hope. All along Mortimer had underestimated her popularity, but the Bishop of Hereford was shrewd enough to persuade him that it could, upon occasion, be a more potent weapon than his practised leadership. Adam Orleton’s spies were everywhere and it was already known at Wallingford that King Edward had sent for the Sheriffs of London and charged them to defend the city, that he had taken his second son John into the Tower with him and was strengthening its defences. His masons were working feverishly from sunrise to sunset, and then by flares at night.

  “Why does he not come out like a man to meet me?” demanded Mortimer. “He and the greedy Despenser rat who hides with him after gnawing at my lands.”

  “Why, indeed?” thought Isabel, sick with shame for the Plantagenet who was her husband. Yet she could not but be thankful for his pusillanimity suspecting as she did that had the rightful King of England risen up in the first place to defend his own from a horde of foreigners, half England would probably have risen with him instead of flocking to her aid.

  All he had done, seemingly, was to send some soldiers to tear down her mocking offer of reward for the Despenser’s head, but a band of mere ’prentice boys had taken upon themselves to encircle the Queen’s cross to defend it. And just as Isabel and her hugely augmented army were about to march for London Dragon rode in with the news that King and favourite had fled, leaving young John of Eltham in the care of Lady Despenser and the kindly Bishop of Exeter, who had been Governor of the Tower since the disgrace of the unfortunate Sir Stephen Segrave.

  “Now is the moment to take your capital city in the Queen’s name!” cried Sir John, lifting his shining sword aloft. And to all present it must have seemed a moment for the successful culmination of an extremely chancy enterprise. But Isabel, already mounted, sat silent in her saddle. In this sudden unexpected division of objective she realized that even taking London, with all the inevitable flattering acclaim, would be but a sidetracking of her real intention — a disappointment to her deepest desire. “The Londoners can be relied upon to hold their City against our return, milords,” she said. “Let us rather ride westward after the Despensers.”

  “They have so long a start.”

  “Once they get into the Welsh mountains they may well escape.”

  “We should like to make sure of London first,” her leaders counselled, in concerted disapproval.

  “I, too, would find it easier to stay. I had hoped to see my children,” she told them firmly. “But there are bigger things at stake, milords. Have we set not out to right the wrongs of this disordered country? And to cure a disease one must first find, and cut out, the canker.”

  “Her Grace is right there,” said Bishop Orleton.

  Roger Mortimer contributed no opinion. He knew that it was neither the King nor his capital that Isabel wanted with such driving intensity — but to get her hands on Hugh Despenser. Those little gloved hands now gripping the reins of her horse as firmly as if they were already about her enemy’s neck. His own desire for revenge ran in the same direction, and he had no wish to gainsay her. “We are ready armed and the sutlers have the wagons laden. We will ride westward,” he ordered.

  To Sir John of Hainault it must have seemed like turning their backs upon a military objective of the first importance, and a deliberate disappointing of his troops. But if he had learned two things since the day he landed they were that the English with their strange feuds and friendships were inexplicable, and that the beauty of the lady he served was at times almost eclipsed by her courage. And when they halted for a night at Gloucester and a messenger overtook them with the news that London was entirely in the hands of her supporters he began to respect her wisdom as well.

  “Is my son John safe?” she asked immediately.

  “Safe and well, Madam. And the Sheriffs wish me to assure your Grace that they will keep him so until you return to us,” the mud-bespattered man told her eagerly. “They have named him Warden of the City and do but act for you in his name.”

  “Then the Tower itself is in their hands?” said Mortimer.

  “The Lady Despenser ordered the gates to be opened — in panic, after — ”

  “After what?” cut in Isabel. “And what right had that woman to interfere? I had supposed that the Bishop of Exeter — ”

  The messenger, a decent merchant, began to look less assured. “After the mob had murdered him,” he said.

  In the shocked silence that followed his words the Queen’s grief and anger were patent. “They were maddened by misrule. They thought to please, Madam,” he stammered, turning to take a covered casket of some sort from his servant. “The Sheriffs have sent your Grace his head.”

  In mid hall he would have removed the cloth had not Isabel turned away with a horrified cry. Shocked beyond all caring for appearances, she clung to Mortimer. “No! No, I will not look,” she protested. “He was a good old man, and often kind to me. I did not intend when I landed that such as Walter Stapleton should pay for it.” Answering to Mortimer’s warning pressure on her clinging hand, she made an effort to recover her composure and to speak civilly to the abashed messenger. “Take it — take your casket — on to Exeter with all reverence — to his own cathedral, where Devon priests will sing masses for the poor man’s unhousled soul,” she ordered. “And let no man say I had any part in this uncalled-for thing which was done in my name.”

  “A sad miscarriage of revenge, but now we have set ourselves to change our world you must steel yourself to accept such things,” Mortimer warned her that night. “It is not only the culpable who pay.”

  “You will not find me so womanish when it comes to the culpable,” she promised.

  The King and the
Despensers had taken refuge in Bristol castle, and most efficiently did John of Hainault and Roger Mortimer and purblind Lincoln lay siege to it. With their ever-increasing army, to which men from Somerset towns still flocked, the result was a foregone conclusion. Isabel lived with her army. It was one of those times in her life when intense preoccupation crowded out all need of luxury. She waited, strained and hard-faced, in her tent. And when the day of surrender came and a triumphant fanfare of trumpets proclaimed that the portcullis was being raised, she took Ned by the hand and walked across the war-flattened grass to the edge of the drawbridge. Already the boy was taller than she. Isabel could feel him tugging at her hand and saw the eagerness in his eyes, and knew that in a simpler world of his own, apart from all her poor torments and perplexities, he was looking only for his father. It was not Edward whom she, herself, had eyes for. But there should have been three men, and only one — an emaciated old man in armour — came forth through the gatehouse arch. And her momentary pity for the boy’s disappointment was swallowed up in frustrated anger. The father of Hugh Despenser tried to bear himself upright, and she waited until the proud effort of his mailed feet had ceased to sound hollowly above the moat and he was only a few yards distant from her. “Where are the other two?” she called out to him.

  He looked up at her then, thin as a wand and proud as Lucifer. “The King and my son are beyond your reach. They left two days ago by boat.” Her question was answered with as stark a simplicity as it had been put.

  “And you held out alone, to give them time.” She turned away with a gesture of fury and frustration, leaving Mortimer to deal with him.

  She scarcely knew whether Ned had followed her or not. She had forgotten his existence. She sat in the doorway of her tent, trembling all over and gazing across the wide mouth of the Severn. She did not speak until Mortimer came to tell her that they were going to hang the old man before the castle gates.