“No lands,” he said, “and the castle and manor of Rougemont-sur-Seine will shortly be in need of a new lord. Until the French have come to their senses, and accepted as as their rightful liege, I must set good Englishmen to rule over them.”
I must have looked baffled, for he neighed with laughter, a most unexpected noise coming from such a self-possessed man. Umfraville and Warwick joined in, as wise nobles do when their king laughs.
“You did not expect such bounty, eh?” cried Henry, “tut, man, you deserve no less. The hero of Caen, the poet of Rouen, and now the survivor of - what was the damned place called?”
“La Tour Sombre, sire,” said Sir Thomas, “or so the local villages termed it.”
Henry snapped his fingers. “That’s it. The Dark Tower. Ha! They will be singing ballads of you before long, Page.”
“Unless he writes them himself, sire,” remarked Warwick with a thin smile, to another burst of royal mirth.
The tension inside the pavilion evaporated. This was the first and only time I saw the human face behind the stern iron mask Henry presented to the world. He seemed younger than his thirty years, and the burdens of kingship were briefly shrugged away.
It mattered little to him that I had failed in my mission, to escort the so-called Lady Constanza to Paris. I knew nothing of her fate. Nor did the King choose to enlighten me.
Warwick leaned down to whisper something in Henry’s ear. “I am amiss,” cried the king, thumping the arm of his chair, “my lord Beauchamp has reminded me, quite rightly, that one cannot be made a baron without first being dubbed a knight.”
He flowed gracefully to his feet. “Robert,” he said, “fetch my sword.”
The king’s sword rested in its scabbard on a stand next to the king’s armour. Umfraville lifted out the blade with a smooth hiss of oiled steel on leather, and presented it hilt-first to Henry.
My soul raged with conflicting passions as the sword tapped me lightly on both shoulders: pride, embarrassment, relief, shock, joy, all jostled and fought with each other, like rats in a barrel.
“Rise, Sir John Page,” said the King.
25.
Two days after my elevation to the baronage, Rouen surrendered. It was not unexpected. Henry had been discussing terms with the burghers for weeks, ever since it became obvious that no relief would be sent to the city.
On the Feast of Saint Wolstone, a Thursday, the King went to meet the burghers at a religious house outside the walls. There they knelt before him and delivered up the keys to Rouen.
That night Henry sent the Duke of Exeter with a strong guard to enter the city, and formally claim it in the name of the King of England. I watched the Duke ride through the gates with great pomp and ceremony, preceded by a troop of mounted esquires carrying banners that displayed the lions and lilies of England and the cross of Saint George. The French were ready to greet our men, and heralded them with much playing of brass trumpets, pipes and clarions, as though we came as friends rather than conquerors.
“Saint George! Saint George!” cried the people gathered in the streets, a right scarecrow crowd, half-dead from months of hardship. The expulsion of the poorest citizens had enabled them to eke out their supplies a while longer, but now they were reduced to the final extremity. Even the wealthiest burgher resembled a living skeleton, fleshless and sunken-eyed, almost lost under his rich robes of office.
“Much of the folk that were therein,
They were but bones and bare skin,
With wan colour as unto lead,
Unlike to living men but unto the dead...”
These lines are part of the final verse of The Siege of Rouen, the poem I had left unfinished when the King sent me to Paris. After my escape from La Tour Sombre, and my unlooked-for promotion, I decided to complete it.
Exeter rode through the city and gave out bread and alms to the starving rabble. This was done on the order of the king, who well knew how to win the love of the people he intended to rule. The Duke then took possession of the castle, and set up the banners of England, France and the Holy Trinity over every major gateway.
After sitting outside Rouen for so long, I finally gained my first sight of the interior on the Friday morning after the Feast, when the King himself entered the city. He rode at the head of a formal procession, followed by a rabble of archbishops and abbots holding aloft richly decorated crosses (naturally, the high churchmen were first to the spoils) and a long line of nobles, knights and men-at-arms.
As a baron, albeit an extremely minor one, I was entitled to ride among the lesser knights and peers in the middle of the procession. I must have cut an impoverished figure among so many richly dressed men in my plain, battered half-armour, with no esquire to carry my pennon, but I cared little. The awesome splendour and majesty of the occasion overwhelmed me, and the stark contrast between the plump, well-fed look of our soldiers and the pitiful state of the French.
All eyes were naturally drawn to Henry. He rode on a black charger, and wore a mantle of black damask, black gauntlets, black hose, and a breastplate of polished gold. Golden pendants, stamped with the Plantagenet lions, overhung the flanks of his charger. His gold-hilted sword was tucked inside a scabbard of black velvet, and he rode with one gauntleted hand resting lightly on the pommel: an unsubtle reminder of where his real power lay.
The procession halted at the minster, where Henry dismounted and followed his chaplain inside to hear mass.
From the grand archway rolled the sound of plainchant. The hymn was Qui est magnus Dominus? or ‘Who is the greatest Lord?’ On that day, the question scarce needed to be asked. Henry was the victor, the favoured one of God, and no man present could deny it.
I had my own modest glory to celebrate. The Bastard of Kingshook, the Wolf-Cub, outlaw and homicide and fugitive from justice, had contrived to win a knighthood and a barony. Great good fortune had come my way, and in the final lines of The Siege of Rouen I paid tribute to Him who I owed thanks:
“They that have heard this reading,
To His bliss may He them bring,
For us He died upon a tree,
Say amen, then, for His charity.”
Once Rouen had fallen, those towns and castles still in French hands rushed to make their peace with Henry. By early spring, the whole of Upper Normandy and the Seine valley was in his grasp. With the lion’s share of the duchy secured, he set the seal on his conquest with another formal procession in Rouen, this time wearing his ducal robes.
Those were grand days to be an Englishman in France. Normandy was ours, the French were either in full retreat or fighting each other, and the opportunities for land and profit seemed almost endless. France is a huge realm, and Henry had need of loyal men to help him govern it. Any Englishman, no matter how low-born, could hope to stake his claim to a piece of conquered territory.
My share, the little barony of Rougemont-sur-Seine, was a fair beginning, the first rung on the ladder I intended to climb. It wasn’t very large, consisting of just two knight’s fees, and small ones at that. Less than fifteen hundred acres, though at least the land was fertile enough. Much of it was low-lying pasture and forest, watered by a tributary of the Seine.
The castle held evil memories for me, and I had no great desire to see the place again, let alone dwell in it. Still, only a fool snubs the offer of a castle and a lordship for the sake of a few nightmares.
My actual title was a vexed question, and one Henry, with characteristic attention to detail, wanted to settle according to French custom.
“Since you are bastard-born, with no claim to lordship in England,” he informed me, “you may not call yourself baron. That is a privilege reserved for nobles. Instead, as a commoner raised to rank and title, you are the seigneur de la baronnie, or lord of the barony.”
Formal titles mattered little to me, and I happily accepted his judgement. What mattered was the land, the status, and the wealth that would (with God’s grace) flow from both.
I soon
realised that Henry’s gift was not so generous after all. My pay of a shilling a day was enough to sustain myself, and perhaps one servant, but that was all. In desperation I appealed to the king for funds, and he reluctantly ordered his clerks to advance me the not very princely sum of four pounds.
This was rather less than the yearly income of the smallest manor in England. Kingshook had subsisted, barely, on five pounds per annum.
“His Majesty must favour you,” sniffed the pinch-faced clerk who wrote out the receipt, “be careful you do not sacrifice that favour, Sir John.”
His meaning was clear: use this money wisely, for if you come again, begging for alms, the king might take offence.
Four pounds was enough for my purposes, at least for the time being, and there was no shortage of labour. Now the campaign in Normandy was over, hundreds of men were discharged from the army. Not only soldiers, but cooks, carters, tailors, surgeons, huntsmen, grooms and all manner of camp followers. Just enough men were retained to fill the garrisons of the conquered duchy.
Most of the discharged soldiers were faced with the stark choice of finding new employment in some lord’s retinue, or begging on the streets back in England. Thus I had no difficulty in finding five stout archers to take into service, along with a groom and a cook. I paid each of them a penny a day, roughly equal to half their pay in the army. A touch mean, perhaps, but they were desperate and I had to make my funds last.
After carefully studying a few maps, and talking to veterans who knew the country around Rougemont-sur-Seine - largely through having ridden over it, burning crops and slaughtering any peasants they happened to encounter - it became clear that my new lordship was a worthless ruin. The castle was most likely derelict, since the old Baron was dead and his only living kinsman executed on King Henry’s orders. His followers had all been hanged with him, and I expected the few remaining servants had fled.
“The land is all burned and wasted,” one captain of hobelars informed me, “it was in a bad position, see? Caught right in the middle of the fighting.”
He jabbed his dirty thumb at a point on the map, near the north-west extremity of the lordship. “There’s a village there,” he added, “or was. A pretty little place, with houses made of pink stone and a church with a spire. Not much left of it now. My lads spent the night there, some five months gone. We had been badly cut up in a skirmish with some French men-at-arms, and were in a rough mood. The villagers took the brunt of it.”
“Fire and sword,” I sighed.
He nodded. “We torched the houses, and looted the grainstores before firing them as well. The villagers ran to the church for sanctuary. Fools. A couple of my lads stacked logs against the door to trap them inside. Then we shot fire arrows through the windows. Lord, you should have heard their screams, and got a whiff of the stench! Man-meat, when roasted, smells much like pork.”
It was a familiar tale. The skyline of Normandy was black with the smoke of burned-out settlements. Both sides used fire as a principal weapon of war, and King Henry swore by its use:
“War without fire,” he once remarked, “is like sausages without mustard.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “You and your lads,” I snarled at the captain, “have made a beggar of me. If the land is wasted, and the villages depopulated, I will have no income.”
“War is war, my lord,” he replied indifferently.
The old Baron, it seemed, had done me no favours by failing to defend his territory against bands of marauders. No doubt he was too sick, or too busy with his vicious amusements.
There was nothing to be done save inspect the lordship for myself. My tiny household set out from Rouen on a bright, chill day in early March, to retrace my steps to the place where I had known so much pain and fear.
We were accompanied by Herr Hartmann, the German knight-turned-mercenary who shared my torments at La Tour Sombre. In my excitement at being knighted, I had forgotten to ask King Henry to bestow a favour on Hartmann. Oppressed by guilt, I invited him to join us.
“Back to that blasted castle?” he exclaimed when I found him, seated outside a tavern in Rouen market, “Donnerkeil! The scars on my backs have still not healed. I would as soon journey to the gates of Hell.”
I noted his shabby appearance, and the cup of rancid ale he nursed in his swollen and callused hands.
“The war is over, at least for a time,” I said, “bad news for fighting men who live by the sword, and have no other trade to follow. What will you do when your pay runs out, Herr Hartmann? Live on grass and berries?”
He sniffed, and upended his cup. “I had some thought of going to Italy,” he answered as the piss-coloured liquid splashed on the cobbles, “there is always work for soldiers there. Or else go east.”
“East?” I said, “you mean to fight the Turk?”
Herr Hartmann gave me a shrewd look. “No need to go so far as that, my friend. A war is brewing in the Kingdom of Bohemia. Such a war, as will eclipse this petty brawl in France.”
I had some vague notion of what he meant. Rumours and snatches of news occasionally reached my ears, of rebellions and holy wars tearing through the complex patchwork of kingdoms that lay east of the Holy Roman Empire.
Along with most Englishmen, I paid scant attention to any of it. We were concerned only with France, and the lands Herr Hartmann spoke of were as distant and mysterious as the backside of the moon.
“Come with me to Rougemont-sur-Seine,” I said, “and tell me more of Bohemia and your homeland on the way. At least I can provide you with food and drink, and a roof over your head, until you decide what to do.”
He accepted, with a show of reluctance, and I was glad of his company. The big, fair-haired knight was quick to laugh and slow to judge, and kept me entertained with his inexhaustible fund of war stories. He was about twice my age, and had spent the best part of twenty years as a mercenary, mostly in Hungary and Poland, as well as the service of the Greek Emperor.
“This brand has lopped off a hundred Ottoman heads,” he said cheerfully, swishing his broadsword through the air, “I used to carry the skulls of three Sipahi officers hanging from my saddle-bow, still wearing their spiked helmets. The Greeks and Hungarians thought it a great jest, but the Burgundians cried out in horror and said I was a barbarian. I had no wish to offend my new employers, so left the skulls impaled on stakes in a cornfield somewhere east of Paris. Useful scarecrows, I told the farmer. He agreed, and gave me fifty francs for them.”
I laughed. “Twenty years of soldiering must have paid well,” I said, “have you no lands or castles of your own, then? Where has all the money gone?”
“Wine and women,” he replied vaguely, “the usual things. Gambling debts. I had a wife, once. She was a whore from the Morea, and on the ninth morning I woke up to find her gone. I could stand that, save she took with her a jewelled reliquary and a diadem studded with gemstones. All my booty from the previous campaign.”
He seemed reluctant to talk of his homeland, Westphalia. All I could gather from him was that it comprised a small duchy south of the Lippe River, mostly covered in dark forest.
“A gloomy place,” he said, “I was happy to ride off to war, and leave my brother to die of boredom in our father’s damp little schloss. I have never gone back. Never will.”
We rode at a leisurely pace, undisturbed by fear of bandits or partisans. In this we were unwise, for plenty of dangerous men lurked in the woods. The roads were still empty of civilian traffic, and we passed a number of villages destroyed by the tides of war. Little remained of the houses save blackened gables, and the windows of the churches were dark and silent, sad eyes peering out at an evil world.
Eventually we reached the spot where myself and Lady Constanza had been ambushed. My thoughts once again turned to that mysterious woman as I gazed at the stretch of road, now empty and peaceful. What had become of her? Had she escaped the clutches of the Baron, only to succumb to some even worse fate in Paris? The Duke of Burgundy
was still holed up in the French capital, and showed no outward sign of throwing in his lot with King Henry. Whatever message Constanza carried, assuming it ever reached the Duke, plainly had little effect.
We turned onto the side-road that led through deep forest to La Tour Sombre. Perhaps it was my imagination at work, or merely the onset of spring. but the wilderness seemed less dark and forbidding than before. The trees were in bloom, the shadows of winter had receded, and everywhere was new life and birdsong.
On the last stage of the journey Herr Hartmann’s mood darkened. He was a little drunk, having polished off the contents of two flasks filled to the brim with strong ale.
“Tell me, my friend,” he said thickly, between long swallows from a third flask, “does the name Jan Hus mean anything to you?”
I cudgelled my memory. In common with most of my countrymen, I was shamefully ignorant of anything that didn’t directly concern England, and happy to be so. The doings of foreigners were of little interest unless they could be turned to our profit.
Jan Hus, however, was different. Like John Wycliffe, the English preacher and theologian, he was famous across Christendom for railing against the corrupt doctrines and practices of the church. Unlike Wycliffe, who had the good fortune to die a natural death, Hus was captured and burned at the stake. His execution occurred in the year of Agincourt, and his ashes were thrown into the Rhine.
Other than that bare handful of facts, I knew nothing of him, even where he lived and preached. I admitted as much to Herr Hartmann, who filled the gaps in my knowledge with drunken enthusiasm.
“You mind I spoke of the war in Bohemia?” he said, “well, Hus was a native of Bohemia. Educated in Prague, and ordained as a priest there.”
The German brandished his flask at me. “Hus was still in Prague when the truth became apparent to him. He witnessed clergy, bishops, servants of the papacy, sunk in greed and every form of vice, abusing their privileges as churchmen, feeding like parasites off the poor and helpless.”
The Wolf Cub Page 20