Over the course of the next seven years, de Molay and other Templar officers were tried at least half a dozen times, and each time testimony was extracted by torture. Hundreds were subjected to the rack, or to thumbscrews. Others had their fingernails pulled out at the roots. Thirty-six died under torture; 122, including de Molay, confessed. Most of the confessions stuck, but not de Molay’s. Neither did his recantation. Nor his next confession. The Grand Master would admit, for example, to “denying Christ” only to repudiate his admission months later. Admission, recantation, repeat, again and again. In 1310, Philip lost patience and sentenced sixty-seven of the recanting Templars to be burned at the stake. In 1312, the Templars were dissolved by papal decree, and de Molay, along with the remaining Templar leadership, was condemned.
On the morning of March 18, 1314, de Molay and a number of other senior Templars were brought to the Île de la Cité in the middle of the Seine to hear sentence passed by a group of cardinals commissioned by Pope Clement for the task. All present believed that the accused would admit guilt in return for life imprisonment. Instead, de Molay and his lieutenant, Geoffroi de Charny, standing in front of the church of Notre Dame de Paris, confessed only to betraying their own order to save their lives: the charges, they vowed, were false. While the cardinals departed to consider their next move, King Philip did not. He ordered the accused transported to the Île des Juifs, an island on the Seine just west of the Île de la Cité.* By sunset, a pile of wood was constructed, and the two unrepentant Templars slowly burned to death, refusing a final offer of pardon, and—apparently—screaming no more than was necessary in order to produce one of the more enduring pieces of the Templar myth: through his dying screams, de Molay supposedly pronounced a curse on both the pope and the entire royal family, to the thirteenth generation.*
The folk memory of de Molay’s execution has survived even longer, partly because of the viselike grip that the Templars continue to exert on historians, popular novelists, aficionados of the Shroud of Turin (whose image is supposed, by some, to be not Christ, but de Molay), Freemasons, and assorted conspiracy theorists. But part of the enduring power of the scene, the one that greeted Isabella upon her return to her father’s capital, is how well it illustrates the ascendant power of secular rulers over religious authority.
Within days of Isabella’s father’s exhibition, in the most direct form imaginable, of his power over the Templars, she was to demonstrate a very different talent for influencing events—in the palace intrigue that became known as the Tour de Nesle Affair.
Like so much else, the story of the Tour de Nesle can be traced back to the beginning of the feudal era. When Charlemagne’s brief Carolingian empire was divided among his three grandsons, the result was three proto-states: the western one became the nucleus of modern France; the eastern one, a patchwork of German-speaking principalities that wouldn’t be unified until the nineteenth century. In the middle was the kingdom, later the duchy, of Burgundy. Its strategic location, and enormous wealth, meant that, for five hundred years, no French ruler had ever forgotten the importance of neutralizing, or even better, annexing, the province.* Isabella’s father, Philip IV, had gone further than most, marrying each of her three brothers to Burgundian princesses: Louis, the eldest, married Margaret, daughter of the duke of Burgundy; Philip married Jeanne, daughter of Otto, count of Burgundy; and Charles married Blanche, another of Otto’s daughters.
None was a love match, particularly not those of Louis and Charles. Few dynastic marriages were, as Isabella had every reason to know. She was, therefore, perhaps particularly astute in detecting evidence of infidelity, and her family wasn’t especially discreet about such matters. When Edward and Isabella had traveled to France in 1313, Isabella had presented distinctive purses to each of her sisters-in-law, two of whom immediately gave the gifts to their respective lovers: the brothers d’Aulnay, Gautier and Philippe.
If they thought no one would notice, they didn’t know Isabella. During an encounter at court, she recognized the embroidery on the purses, and, after her return to France in February 1314, told her father of her suspicions. Her motives for doing so remain unclear. A good guess is that she was engaged in her own game of thrones; by removing the mothers of every potential heir to the French throne, she opened a path for her own son, the future Edward III of England.* Her father was considerably less concerned about his daughter’s strategy than he was furious at his daughters-in-law. The king had all three of them followed, and in less than a week, Blanche and Margaret led the king’s agents to the tower of Nesle, or Tour de Nesle, a structure on the left bank of the Seine that the king had purchased from the nobleman Amaury de Nesle in 1308. There, the two princesses—at first, it seemed that Jeanne was involved as well—entertained the d’Aulnays, and were entertained in their turn.
Adultery was bad enough; adultery with a royal princess, the very definition of lèse-majesté, was treason. In April 1314, the Paris Parlement—the highest court in France, essentially the king’s council—found both princesses and both brothers guilty. Each of the princesses had her head shaved, and was sentenced to life in prison, at Château Gaillard in Normandy, the great castle built by Edward’s great grand-uncle Richard Lionheart. There, each died, coincidentally, not to say suspiciously, within weeks of the date their cuckolded husbands ascended the throne: Louis in August 1314, and Charles in February 1322.
Their lovers didn’t have it quite so easy. Both of the d’Aulnay brothers confessed after unspecified tortures, were castrated, and their testes fed to dogs. Each was flayed alive, then spread-eagled on a wooden cartwheel, where they had their arms and legs broken with iron cudgels while the wheel slowly rotated. Finally, after both torturers and audience had tired of their entertainment, they were decapitated and their shattered bodies displayed for all to see.
The brutal drama was memorable on its own terms—in 1832, Alexandre Dumas turned it into a play named, perhaps a little unimaginatively, La Tour de Nesle—but it is also the first real evidence of the true character of the onetime French princess, grown to be an English queen. Until 1314, Isabella’s impact on events had been largely anodyne, when it had been noticed at all. That was about to change. Isabella had started to earn the epithet that the poet Thomas Gray gave her in one of his eighteenth-century Pindaric odes: the “She-Wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs, that tears’t at the bowels of thy mangled mate.”*
• • •
The rains of 1315 made Isabella’s talent for royal intrigue, at least temporarily, irrelevant. As England was attempting to recover from a completely lost harvest (really two lost harvests, though Edward didn’t know that yet), Edward was obsessively trying to repair the army that had been defeated by Bruce’s infantry. Among other things, he ordered that his Irish footmen wear chain mail and, to pay for it, required that freeholders with property in excess of £2 provide themselves with iron gauntlets and helmets. He didn’t stop there. The king introduced a new set of levies on each manor—in the terminology of the day, on each “vill,” essentially every rural community smaller than a township—requiring them to provide a specified number of soldiers, which cost the agrarian population not only men but money: approximately 24 shillings for even the lowliest footman, of which 7 to 8 shillings went to equip him with the most basic tools of the trade: a sword, knife, or bow, or sometimes all three. During the worst famine in centuries, Edward was requisitioning men at an unprecedented pace; some cities were required to provide men for forty days’ service, armed with padded doublets, chain-mail hauberks, basinets, and iron gauntlets, thus putting the heaviest burdens on the population least able to cope with them. And he did so during the two years of 1315, and 1316, when the torrential rains had destroyed the roads on which his armies would have had to travel. England was taxing its peasantry to pay for an army that it could not afford, at a time when it was unable even to deploy it.
Edward’s defenders (and there are more than a few) might resp
ond that it’s unfair to chide the king for these seemingly dissonant policies. Sovereigns confront crises as they appear, and they can’t ignore any of them completely. At the same time he was, however unwisely, rebuilding the army destroyed by Bruce, Edward faced the worst inflation in British history as the pound lost more than half its value from the beginning of 1316 to the end. He also had to manage his increasingly deteriorating relationship with the earl of Lancaster, as a series of councils increased the earl’s direct involvement in government throughout 1316. The earl (who, careful readers will recall, had declined to join in Edward’s 1314 expedition) even planned his own invasion of Scotland . . . and this time Edward played turnabout and refused to join in.
Those same defenders could, with even more justice, point out that Edward’s concerns with Scotland and his own nobles certainly didn’t mean that he was unaware of the famine afflicting his realm. In April 1316, the king wrote to the bishop of Durham complaining of “an unaccustomed dearth of grain” and accused his subjects of hoarding “an immoderate amount.” The realm’s poor, he continued, were “daily dying from famine and starvation.” The king published a plea to the English clergy, asking them to persuade hoarders (“with efficacious words”) to sell at a reasonable price, encouraging them to use any method up to and including excommunication to get the message across, “lest the cause of such ruin and death be imputed to those having grain and refusing to sell it.”
The real problem, however, wasn’t hoarding but supply. Efficacious words were going to be insufficient, which even the king recognized. So, since England’s waterlogged fields couldn’t grow grain, the king offered promises of safe-conduct for grain merchants in order to encourage them to find their supply elsewhere in Europe. The storms of 1315 were so outrageously large, though, that “elsewhere in Europe” meant “somewhere in Europe that was still able to harvest its crops.” Northern France and the Low Countries were just as affected by the weather as England. The trading cities along the southern coast of the Baltic were better able to supply salted fish than grain, and those on the northern shores were experiencing their own shortfalls in everything from grain to meat and dairy. In the winter of 1316–17, the tax collectors of King Birger II of Sweden (which had already been subject to decades of “difficulties and afflictions of wars and oppressions, of taxes and tribulation”) attempted to transport taxes in kind—cheese, meat, and so on—out of Swedish territories surrounding the Gulf of Bothnia, and met a full-blown tax revolt, followed by mass executions and confiscations. England’s only likely sources of grain were as far away as Spain and Italy.
Along with an increase in the distance traveled by seaborne grain came its companion: piracy. During the fourteenth century, the piratical trade was dominated by three maritime communities: the Gascon city of Bayonne, at the very southern tip of Aquitaine; and the Cinque Ports, towns on the coast of Kent and Sussex, including Dover and Rye, that were traditionally obliged to provide ships for the defense of the English Crown and just as traditionally winked at the smuggling and piracy that fueled their economies; and Normandy.
Though Edward I and Philip IV had asserted sovereignty over their own territorial waters, each king intended it as a keep-off sign for the other—certainly not for pirates. During the feudal era, piracy was less a matter of eye patch–wearing, cutlass-wielding thieves than an informal bit of maritime commerce (or, occasionally, a part of irregular warfare; one of Bruce’s privateers, Thomas Dun, was practically a legend, attacked in England as “a cruel pirate”).* To the degree that it made its way into the courts, it was treated as evasion of debt—a kind of legal self-help carried out by individuals. Four years before the rains of 1315 initiated the Great Famine, Edward II announced a schedule of fines for piracy, but they were to be paid by the pirate’s home port, not the pirate himself. Pirates wouldn’t typically be hanged from yardarms for another three hundred years.
Like their seventeenth-century cousins, fourteenth-century pirates preferred targets with holds filled with cargoes such as gold and jewelry. The disastrous years of 1315 and 1316, however, weren’t normal in any sense. During the spring of 1316, so many southern English ports were regularly attacked, ships burned, and warehouses ransacked, that on April 4, 1316, Edward took the extraordinary step of commandeering dozens of ships “for the repulse of certain malefactors who have committed manslaughter and other enormities on the sea upon the men of this realm and upon men from foreign parts coming to this realm with victuals.”
Like almost all of Edward’s tactics, it had little effect. England was starving, unable to feed itself, and even when able to purchase grain from elsewhere, barely able to ship it home. It was also very nearly bankrupt, facing the biggest financial crisis in a century, as England’s loans from both Edward’s Italian bankers and the pope came due at the same time. The events of 1315 and 1316 are a litany of catastrophe: Two lost harvests. A near total destruction of England’s roads. Northern cities subject to constant raids by Bruce’s lieutenants, especially James Douglas. It seems almost farcical that one of Edward’s best-remembered efforts for dealing with the famine was aimed more at restoring his own image than his subjects’ farms. That’s what appears to be behind his decision to commission a spectacular psalter: a luxuriously illustrated manuscript bound in red velvet and featuring not only the Book of Psalms but more than two hundred scenes from the Old Testament. The so-called Queen Mary Psalter—though composed around 1316, it wasn’t named until it was presented to Queen Mary I in 1553—is notable not just for its beauty but the extraordinary amount of attention it paid to the story of Joseph: the one about the seven fat years and the seven lean years. The devotional was an unsubtle public-relations stunt intended to promote Edward’s ability to cope with the failed harvests; predictably, however, the “curious image of Edward II as the good pharaoh never achieved much currency outside the circle of his sycophants and clients.”
Given Edward’s affinity for bad choices and worse luck, it’s no surprise to learn that when the king sent his most loyal vassal, the earl of Pembroke, on a mission to Avignon to renegotiate the outstanding loans from Pope John, things didn’t work out as planned.* Pembroke, the only English general to defeat the Scots since Falkirk, the king’s rescuer at Bannockburn, and one of the few genuine heroes of an unheroic age, was taken on his return from Avignon by a French nobleman and disgruntled onetime vassal of Edward I whose list of grievances included unpaid wages dating back as far as 1296.
The king had to pay the enormous ransom demand: £10,000. He needed not only Pembroke but the nobles who had coalesced around him. The group, which included the earls of Surrey, Hereford, and Arundel; a number of bishops; and Bartholomew de Badlesmere—a former steward of the royal household who had been named a baron in 1309 after marrying into the powerful de Clare family—joined together to offer a middle way between the king’s favorites and Lancaster’s party. The “middle party” (a later name that suggests they were both more organized and more independent than they actually were) provided the only barrier remaining against civil war, which was becoming uncomfortably probable, though the proximate cause was an untraditional one: adultery.
In the spring of 1317, the earl of Lancaster’s wife, Alice de Lacy, was either abducted by, or ran away with—plausible evidence exists for both—her lover, a squire, Eubulo (sometimes Ebulo) L’Estrange. When the two were offered refuge by the earl of Surrey, Lancaster armed for battle, and his troops attacked Surrey’s. Skirmishes turned into battles, which drew the attention of the king, no doubt looking for anything to distract him from famine, debt, and Scotland, and decided that punishing Lancaster was just the ticket.* Accompanied by fifteen hundred men-at-arms, the king marched to within a mile of the earl of Lancaster’s castle at Pontrefact, where at least one report has the king actually challenging Lancaster to single combat, in support of the earl of Surrey, only to be prevented by the ever-prudent earl of Pembroke.
The alliances among England�
�s earls, always a mess, were about to become even more complicated. The earldom of Gloucester had been vacant technically ever since the death of Gilbert de Clare at Bannockburn in 1314. Or, would have been vacant, if his widowed countess hadn’t been contending that she was pregnant with the earl’s child at the time of his death. After three years of increasingly unkind speculations about the countess’s weight and sanity, his widow finally gave up the fiction of her pregnancy in November 1317. The title of earl disappeared, but not the estates associated with it. Those were divided among the earl’s sisters: Elizabeth de Clare, the youngest, who had married a member of King Edward’s household, Roger d’Amory; Margaret de Clare, the second youngest, and the widow of Piers Gaveston, who had remarried another of the king’s favorites, Hugh de Audley; and the eldest, Eleanor de Clare, who was married to Hugh le Despenser.
In the conflicts that defined Edward’s first years as king, Despenser—usually called the Younger, to distinguish him from his father, Hugh Despenser the Elder, one of the most loyal supporters of Edward I—backed the Lancaster party, evidently more out of pure opportunism than any conviction. Which explains why, when the informal but powerful position of favorite-to-the-king became vacant following the death of Piers Gaveston in 1312, Despenser dropped his connection with Lancaster and presented himself as a king’s man; specifically, in the words of the Chronicle of Lanercost, as “the King of England’s right eye and, after the death of Piers de Gaveston, his chief counselor against the earls and barons.”
The Third Horseman Page 19
