The Magnificent Century

by Thomas B. Costain

  Hubert de Burgh, crippled with disease, his memory almost gone, had only one answer to give the King when brought into court. “Had I wished to betray you,” he declared, “you would never have obtained the kingdom.” He was thinking, no doubt, of how he had thrown the plan of French conquest into confusion by refusing to give up the castle of Dover and stubbornly straddling their lines of communication.

  The old man had enough shrewdness left, however, to entrust his defense to an able advocate, a clerk named Laurence who had been his steward and was now at St. Albans. Hubert had reason to know that the mind under the tonsured poll of this obscure clerk was sharp and clear and that he had an almost uncanny knowledge and command of the law. Laurence justified the faith reposed in him and by a splendid display of logic and legal reasoning tore the case against his former master into shreds and tatters. When he was through, the innocence of the accused had been established to the satisfaction of everyone, except perhaps Henry himself. The King had to be placated, however, and so the court closed the case by confiscating to the Crown four of the castles still belonging to the defendant. That the decision had been no more than an attempt to save the King’s face was made evident later when the castles were restored.

  It is strange that, after the triumph he had scored, the clerk Laurence disappeared completely from sight and, seemingly, spent the rest of his days in obscure activities in the monastery at St. Albans. If Henry had possessed any gift at all for governing he would have drafted the brilliant clerk into his services, as Henry VIII would do later when he discerned the possibilities in a man named Thomas Cromwell concealed in the shadow cast by the great Wolsey. But Henry had already found a man who pleased him, one John Mansel, and for many years thereafter would look to and act upon the advice which this favorite adviser would whisper in his ear. It will be seen later that Mansel was a man of considerable ability but that he possessed the same stubbornness of mind and the same blindness to public opinion from which the King himself suffered.

  Hubert de Burgh died on May 12, 1243, and was buried at Blackfriars in London. His wife married again, her second husband being Gilbert, third of the Marshal sons. His own son, John, by one of his first marriages, was not allowed to succeed him, and the earldom of Kent lapsed for the time being. Thus ended the dream of establishing a great family which the once hated upstart had always kept in his mind.

  England’s Most Unpopular Queen

  HENRY was twenty-nine when he married. This was not due to any disinclination on his part for the state of matrimony. On the contrary, he had been anxious to have a wife and had striven hard to find one.

  As a boy he seems to have admired the Scottish princesses who were held at Corfe Castle as hostages, and his first thought when old enough to take a mate was that he would wed Marion, the younger of the two, even though she was a number of years older than he was. As Princess Margaret, the elder, had married Hubert de Burgh, the Council refused to sanction this plan, holding that it would be derogatory to the royal dignity to have one of his own subjects as a brother-in-law.

  Disappointed in his first choice, Henry sought a bride in three different European courts in turn. It was considered wise to cement relations with Germany, and the Bishop of Carlisle was sent to Vienna to propose a marriage between Henry and a daughter of Leopold of Austria. A son of Henry of Germany carried off the lady, however, under the very nose of the discomfited bishop. Matches were then proposed for him with a daughter of the Count of Brittany and a Bohemian princess, without results in either case. Henry began to believe that some malign influence was at work or that a more positive force was working against him. When the charges were revived against Hubert de Burgh for the last time, the King added a new item to the familiar farrago of claims, that it had been Hubert himself who had secretly connived to prevent him from marrying. He even went to the extent of asserting that in one instance Hubert had conveyed to the prospective bride the information that he, Henry, was “squint-eyed, silly, and impotent, that he had a sort of leprosy, and that he was incapable of enjoying the embraces of any noble lady.” This absurdity may have been based on something which had happened, an intrigue, perhaps, to prevent one of the matches from being carried through, but it is indicative of the character of the King that he would publicly refer to the matter in this highly undignified form.

  It is hard to understand why the many casts made in the matrimonial waters failed to get more than nibbles. Henry was handsome enough, he was of agreeable address, his tastes were cultivated, and he had a reputation as a man of learning. The English throne was ranked in the top bracket of international importance, and the country was attaining once more to some degree of opulence. No reasonable explanation has been found; but the fact remains that Henry, anxious as he was to find a wife to share his throne and sit by his side, finally gave up in despair and for the space of four years made no further efforts in that direction.

  Perhaps by way of compensation the young King turned his attention to aesthetic concerns. He became much interested in poetry and minstrelsy and still more deeply in the great developments which were being seen in architecture. The title of Henry the Builder, which was given him later, was well deserved, for he became an intelligent leader in that field and left monuments behind him to attest his vision and taste. He was sincerely devout (so much so that his fellow monarch, Louis of France, had to order churches closed in advance in order to get him by them), which put him in complete sympathy with the movement to create a purely English type of cathedral and church. The preaching of St. Bernard had roused in the Christian world a deep reverence for the Virgin Mary, and from this had grown the tendency to have Lady Chapels in all important edifices. Henry’s first venture in building, therefore, was the beautiful Lady Chapel at Westminster. He was dreaming and planning at this early stage also of rebuilding the abbey; a work which he accomplished later.

  It was in his mind that he would make Windsor Castle into a great King’s residence, worthy of the nation and the throne. The First King’s House, which Henry I had erected for his lovely Saxon bride, had been badly damaged in the sieges to which it had been subjected, although the Hall and St. Edward’s Chapel still remained, in a somewhat battered condition. Henry’s mind was already filled with a picture of what he would do: a three-sided wall to enclose the level ground west of the Norman keep which could allow for three baileys (courtyards devoted mostly to domestic activities), and in the lower of these there would rise a much handsomer house than the one the first Henry had provided. He was planning royal chambers for himself and the Queen (when he succeeded in persuading someone to be his Queen), a large and magnificent chapel to be dedicated to Edward the Confessor, his favorite saint, and a Great Hall which would be the finest thing of its kind in the kingdom. All this he brought to pass in due course.

  When Henry reached the age of twenty and nine it was agreed in the Council that the problem of finding a wife for him must be solved at once. The choice fell on Joanna, daughter of the Earl of Ponthieu in Normandy. It is probable that the girl’s mother had been angling for Henry because it is on record that she sent him a present of a costly table of Sardinian ivory, whatever that is. A favorable response was received from the parents, and Joanna herself was said to regard the prospect with approval. The marriage contract was drawn up and ambassadors were posted off to Rome to obtain the consent of the Pope.

  The ambassadors had reached a point within a few days’ journey of their destination when word was received from Henry that they were to return at once to England. He had changed his mind. A princess had been found who more closely touched his fancy and who, moreover, was ready to become Queen of England. It was unfortunate that the ambassadorial party did not ride a little faster or spend fewer nights in Paris so that they might have completed their mission before being recalled. Joanna of Ponthieu might or might not have made Henry a good wife, but the lady on whom his choice had fallen was to prove the most unpopular queen England ever had.

  2


  Provence at this stage of history was smaller than it had once been and much smaller than it would become later. It was, in fact, a mere slice of land east of the Rhone, too unimportant for egress to the Mediterranean, too restricted to contain any city of size save the old Roman town of Orange. It was still, nevertheless, the symbol of the South, the cradle of literature and minstrelsy, the core of European culture and sophistication. Here the troubadours loved and sang, finding the Courts of Honor a fitting background for the cultivation of the muse, their inspiration waxing in the lovely gardens and the plantations where the white mulberry grew.

  The Count of Provence was Raimund Berenger V, who made his headquarters in quite restricted splendor at Courthezon, close to Orange. The classic age of the troubadour was passing and the high-flown sentiments which had made the sirventes a tedious form of enjoyment were giving way to a more robust form of ballada after the fashion of Bernard of Ventadour, who sang:

  “You say the moon is all aglow,

  The nightingale is singing.

  I’d rather watch the red wine flow,

  And hear the goblets ringing.”

  Raimund was determined to maintain the old standards and had gathered about him so many singers who still waxed ecstatic over a lady’s eyebrow and filled their verses with classic allusions that the impression was created of a court of great brilliance. He was a composer himself, and his wife Beatrice, who had been a princess of Savoy, was as famed for her compositions as her beauty. It was in this rarefied atmosphere that the couple raised a family of four daughters who were to become more famous for their loveliness than the court was for its culture. The charm of the Provençal princesses was on an ascending scale, each one to arrive being more highly praised than those before her. Marguerite, the first daughter, was fresh and pretty with dark hair and fine eyes. Eleanor, the second, was thought at first to have transcended all comparison and was known as La Belle, although Sanchia, who followed her, was of such subtle charm and fascination that she was described as “of incomparable beauty.” It remained, however, for Beatrice, the fourth daughter, to set men’s hearts thumping and the fingers of troubadours to fevered twanging of lyres. Two of the balladists at the Provençal court were temporarily deprived of reason for love of the entrancing Beatrice.

  The father of these four fair charmers was so poor that his household, which is described as “noisy with youth,” traveled about from one château to another in order to take advantage of all the food which was grown, sometimes staying in one place no more than a single night. Money was so scarce that clothes were handed down, from mother to daughter, from one child to another. The officers of the household had patches on their elbows; the minstrels sometimes did not get the suppers for which they sang. But the atmosphere was always gay, the intoxication of Provençal gardens made up for the lack of the vinous kind, and when supplies were exhausted the court trumpeter, Mort-du-Sommeil (Death of Sleep), would sound his horn and a laughing cavalcade would ride on to the next château, confident that ahead of them the harvests had been good and that there would be fat capons and plenty of stubble geese for the table.

  Count Raimund was so poor, in fact, that he never possessed enough money to make up a suitable dowry for any of his beautiful daughters. He had an asset of much greater value than gold, however, an officer named Romeo of Villeneuve, who possessed such a shrewd head on his threadbare shoulders that he could devise ways and means of snaring kings for the lovely brood without paying out as much as a single coin. This Romeo had already managed to marry Marguerite to King Louis of France. It would have been a most successful match if the mother of Louis, Blanche of Castile, had not become so accustomed to running the kingdom and keeping the royal household under her thumb that she could not share her son with another woman. Blanche made so much trouble for the young couple that they were only happy in their castle at Pontoise, where the King’s chambers were directly above those of the young Queen and there was a discreet winding stair connecting them. The two married lovers used to meet on the stair in great secrecy, after setting watchers to give them warning if the formidable tread of the Queen Mother were heard on either floor.

  About the time that Henry’s proposal of marriage was sent to Joanna of Ponthieu, the nimble mind of the machiavellian Romeo was considering means of attracting his attention to Eleanor La Belle, who was now fourteen and ready for marriage. The scheme he evolved was roundabout but sufficiently ingenious to accomplish its purpose. Eleanor had begun already to dabble in versification and had completed a long and romantic poem about one Blandin of Cornwall who had fallen in love with Princess Briende and underwent all manner of adventures and tests for her sake. Romeo saw to it that a copy was sent to Richard of Cornwall (who might be expected to see a compliment in it to himself), written in Eleanor’s own fair hand and with a note from her as well. Richard, who was passing through the South of France on his way back from the Crusades, was as charmed and flattered by this attention as the wily majordomo had conceived he would be. If he had not been married happily to Isabella of Pembroke, he might have sought the hand of the royal poetess himself, having heard glowing reports of her beauty and refinement. He did the next best thing; he sent the poem (it is still in existence and a perfect sample of adolescent fervor) to Henry and hinted that here, perhaps, was the very best consort for him. Henry was as much dazzled by the genius of the fair Eleanor as his brother had been, and his imagination became inflamed with the reports he heard of the court of Provence and the charms of Eleanor La Belle. He decided to jilt the Ponthieu heiress and propose himself instead as a husband for the second of the daughters of Provence. Fortunately his Council agreed that there would be an advantage in having Louis of France as a brother-in-law, and negotiations were started at once. Procurators were hurried off to Provence to act for the King, the bishops of Ely and Lincoln and the abbot of Hurlé.

  Henry proposed to give his bride the reversion of his mother’s dower, but Raimund Berenger objected to this on the score that his daughter would have to wait for the Queen Mother’s death before having any adequate provision. Henry had become so enraptured by this time over the prospect of getting the belle of Provence as his bride that word of the count’s objections threw him into a panic, as no doubt the shrewd Romeo (whose hand is seen at every stage of the negotiations) had intended it should. He decided at once to lower his own demands in the matter of the bride’s dowry, having set his figure at twenty thousand marks. Without a moment’s delay he wrote to his representatives and instructed them to reduce their demands, even specifying the steps by which they were to come down; first to fifteen thousand marks, then to ten thousand, to seven thousand, to five thousand, to three thousand. They were not told that if the count demurred at the lowest figure (he was certain to do that, not having anything like that amount in his bare cupboard of a treasury) they were to accept the lady empty-handed, but such was Henry’s intent. After sending off his bargaining instructions the King fell into a still greater panic, thinking that he had perhaps compromised his chances, that in Provence they would scorn him as a pinchpenny and niggler. He then sat down in a very great hurry and wrote to his procurators that “they were to conclude the marriage forthwith.” They were to do so with money or without, so long as they procured Eleanor for him and conducted her safely to England. When the question of the bride’s dowry was thus dismissed, Count Raimund promptly agreed to accept the reversion of the Queen Mother’s dower rights for his daughter and the marriage contracts were signed, the major-domo rubbing his hands with satisfaction, no doubt, as he watched the proceedings.

  3

  The boy who had been crowned with a circlet of plain gold belonging to his mother and in makeshift clothes, and had then sat himself down to a chine of beef with a few noblemen instead of the usual elaborate coronation banquet, decided that his wedding would make up for all this, that it would be the most dazzling ceremony in the memory of man. He spent the time before his bride’s arrival in feverish a
ctivities. The royal tailors made wedding clothes for him of gold-threaded baudekin and a whole wardrobe for Eleanor on the same scale. It was his intention to have her crowned immediately after the marriage, and a splendid diadem was designed, studded with precious stones and costing fifteen hundred pounds, an enormous sum in those days. Chaplets of gold filigree, rings of beautiful design, and jewel-encrusted girdles were among the many articles he ordered for her.

  Fearing that she would find the royal quarters at Westminster dingy after the glories (sic!) of Provence, he decided to have the palace redecorated. The Queen’s chamber was provided with handsome new furnishings, and the walls were covered with historical paintings. He gave instructions for the Great Chamber to be painted a good green color and that a French inscription was to be lettered in the great gable. He had no money for all this—in fact, he was in debt for the dowry of his sister Isabella who had married the Emperor of Germany—but this did not concern him. He went on spending, freely and lavishly, with both hands.

  He was not the only one who was busy in England. All the nobility were getting ready for the event, and the citizens of London were going to unheard-of lengths by way of preparation. They were cleaning up the streets and setting up cressets of oil at corners to provide illumination. They were planning pageants and spectacles on a most elaborate scale. Moreover, they were going to have a conspicuous part in the ceremony of crowning the young Queen, figuring, perhaps, that they were entitled to that much after the way Henry had been gouging them by forced loans over the years and suspecting, furthermore, that the cost of the wedding would fall on their shoulders finally. They were placing orders for riding equipment in such a rush that the saddlers around St. Vedast’s were busier than ever before, and horse clawers were at a premium.