The Conquering Family

by Thomas B. Costain

  The King allowed Berengaria to accompany him on his campaigning this time. This did not mean that she saw much of him. It meant staying in the manor houses of small nobility some distance back from the line while Richard was directing the movements of his troops. Occasionally there would be a sound of furious galloping and she would see the standard of England and her husband riding in the van, his breastplate and taces flecked with foam, his heaume removed from his head so that the wind carried his great yellow mane behind him like a tawny streamer. This was the greatest pleasure she was able to get from his permission to follow him to the front, a glimpse every now and then of Richard riding by.

  Greed was the cause of Richard’s death, which came about soon after. His war chest was nearly empty and the justiciar who had replaced Hubert Walter was unable to raise much money. It came to the war-mad monarch’s ears that a great treasure had been found near the castle of Chaluz in Limousin. The nature of the find was exaggerated as the story continued to spread, and when it finally reached the avid King it had become a dozen figures of knights cast in pure gold around a table of the same precious metal. As suzerain of Limousin, he was entitled to half of any treasure-trove and so he was both incredulous and angry when the lord of Chaluz reported that what he had found in reality was only a few old coins. Richard decided he would collect by force and he led a band of his Brabançon mercenaries, under a captain named Marcadie, into Limousin. They besieged the castle and Richard, in an ever-mounting rage at the resistance of his vassal, swore that he would hang every man, woman, and child in the place. He would probably have done so if an archer had not aimed well from the top of the beleaguered walls and lodged his arrow in the royal shoulder.

  The wound was not deep, nor had a vital spot been touched. The surgeon made awkward work of extracting the bolt, however, and as a result gangrene set in. It became apparent then that Richard was going to die. Realizing it himself, he forgave the archer (but Marcadie afterward flayed the man alive and then hanged him) and tried to make up in penitence and prayer for all his many sins.

  Berengaria was with him at the end. She sat beside his couch and saw his strength ebb away and the high color of his cheeks change to the gray of death. She was beside him when he breathed his last. If Valhalla had resounded with toasts when he came into the world, there must have been a stirring in the Elysian fields when his soul departed.

  He had been King for ten years, this violent man who died of violence. The tower of blocks had toppled over for good; and with the death of Richard the Angevin empire, left to the care of John, toppled also.

  4

  It would be pleasant if it could be recorded that Berengaria’s life flowed in easy courses after Richard’s death, but unfortunately she continued the victim of fate’s buffeting. Within a few weeks she lost her only sister Blanche and the friend who had stood by her in all her trials, the King’s sister Joanna. The latter had married again, a genuine love match, and her husband, Raimund of Toulouse, became involved in the religious persecutions of the Albigenses in the south of France. In his behalf Joanna came to beg Richard’s assistance and arrived soon after her brother’s death. The shock caused her to give birth prematurely to a son, and she died herself the following day.

  For more than thirty years thereafter Berengaria lived quietly at the city of Mans, where she founded the abbey of L’Espan. While John was King she had continual trouble in getting her pension, which was all she had to live on, and she found it necessary to write letters to Queen Eleanor and Pope Innocent III about it. The Queen, who had always been fond of her, arranged the matter at once. Later the Pope had to threaten an interdict on a number of John’s castles and honors to make him pay the poor Queen what he owed her. When John died there was a matter of more than four thousand pounds owing to Berengaria, and the debt was compounded in some way. Thereafter she seems to have received the payments with regularity. She died in 1230 and was buried in the abbey she had founded. It is said she was glad to be rid of the cares of this life.

  Few figures in history have been as unfortunate as this Navarrese princess. Poor little linnet wedded to a falcon! Poor little neglected Queen! Of all the royal ladies of the island kingdom, she shared one distinction with none—she never saw England!

  CHAPTER XI

  The Unsolved Mystery

  HISTORY has depicted John as a monster of wickedness and his reign as an unrelieved record of cruelty and oppression. The once landless prince who succeeded to the throne in spite of being the fourth of Henry II’s stalwart and healthy sons was probably as bad as he has been presented, selfish, cruel, shameless, cynical, lustful, dishonorable, and utterly false. The available facts justify this far from pleasant portrait.

  He was not one of the fair-haired and handsome Plantagenets. It has already been noted that he was somewhat fattish as a boy, and he had now developed into a broad and heavy man, almost squat, and with a square face which was showing more than a trace of jowl. His eyes were dark and he wore a black beard which avoided stringiness by a process of much curling and waxing. But in spite of not possessing that outward guise of nobility which the rest of the brood had and which sometimes concealed the lack of it within, John had a way of making friends. The facetious strain which had cropped out first in William Rufus had been handed on to him and, when he wished, he could be highly amusing. There is too often about men of the worst character a capacity to compel interest and sometimes admiration. The picture of Satan which has been conceived and developed over the years is proof of the fascination he exerts on most people—the hypnotic eye, the strongly marked features, the polished and sophisticated manner. There was something mephistophelean about the new King. Men enjoyed his company, and he had a definite attraction for women. Those who yielded to this attraction always had reason to regret it. He had so little honor in him that the plucking and crushing of a bud were almost simultaneous, and he was so lacking in what might be termed the decencies of dalliance that he would seduce a woman one night and boast of it openly at supper the next.

  He had the same irreverence as Richard, but unlike the lionhearted brother who could blaspheme freely and refuse the sacrament for seven years without any feeling of penitence or fear, John had such a belief in later punishment that his slips from grace were invariably followed by much frantic seeking for forgiveness. There was in him a noticeable tendency to model himself after the great brother in small ways. “By God’s feet!” had been the invocation which Richard had rolled out in his fine voice at moments of stress and anger. John, whose voice could be a little shrill, made his, “By God’s teeth!”

  Strangely enough, he had more of a turn for scholarship than any of the kings from William the Conqueror down, including that so-called man of learning, Henry I. He was known to have read Hugh of St. Victor on the sacraments, the Sentences of Peter Lombard, The Romance of the History of England, and The Treatise of Origen, which was an extensive browsing into the field of learning for a king in those days. He was a hard worker and a continuous traveler.

  Such, then, was the man. There is even less good to be said for him as a king. He ruled as though only his own interests and desires counted. He had no wisdom and not a trace of statesmanship, but on many occasions he showed a degree of political craft. If he failed in the resolution to fight an issue or a battle to a finish, he had some sagacity both in government and generalship. He possessed a keen capacity in money matters. One instance will show how much shrewdness he could show on occasion. The city of Liverpool owes its early rise in importance to a flash of good sense which John had the first time he passed the Mersey and saw that here was the place for the much-needed northern port. There was ruthless management in the way he changed the little collection of mud huts into a flourishing town, planning it himself in the form of a cross with seven side streets, and allowing immunity to runaway villeins and slaves while there (how the lords of the manor protested!) and their freedom if they remained a year and a half. Such episodes, unfortunately, were no
t frequent.

  It must be stated in fairness to this much-derided ruler that history has been too prone to saddle him with all the blame for the breaking up of the Angevin empire. The French possessions formed a ramshackle structure, joined together in the first place by such intangibilities as royal marriage ties, held by nothing more durable than the vows of the ruling families. The brisk people of England had nothing in common with the easier-going inhabitants of Aquitaine. Their interests were as far apart as the tongues they spoke. The English had grown tired of shedding their blood and emptying their pockets in the endless strife of ducal factions abroad. They had reached the point where they flatly refused to shoulder war burdens which brought nothing but a sense of importance to their kings.

  The magic of Richard’s name had kept the empire intact, even though the tides of separation were rising high in his time. With John came the deluge. The last of the sons made a pitifully poor attempt to hold back the flood, but the result would have been the same if he had been a great military leader and a political genius combined; though perhaps in that case the triumph of the French would have been slower and more costly.

  John was the complete tyrant, and the people of the island kingdom suffered injustice and deprivation under him. Inasmuch as his oppression led to Magna Charta, however, he was the first and most noteworthy of the bad kings out of whose evil rule came good. The loss of Normandy and the Angevin provinces, although it humbled the pride of the nation, was another great benefit which grew out of disaster. As will be demonstrated later, it blew away the final trace of racial disunity in England. The Saxon and the Norman merged at last into the Englishman when the King ceased to be a colossus with one foot in London and one in Rouen.

  These two developments of such major importance, and the fact that his reign provides history with one of its great unsolved mysteries, make the years of John of the deepest interest, even though they are filled with evidences of a depravity fit to chill the blood.

  The story of John begins with his contest for the crown, and this leads at once into the intricacies of the aforesaid mystery.

  2

  England could boast at this time of a fine knight who has appeared once briefly in these pages: when Richard, pursuing his sick and beaten father from Le Mans, found himself facing a man who treated him with the scorn he deserved. This was William Marshal, so called because he held the high post of marshal of England. He was now the Earl of Pembroke and military commander in the Rouen district. Later a detailed account of this remarkable man will be given, but at this point, with a new-made grave still to be closed and a successor to be chosen with a loud clatter of arms, it will suffice to say that William Marshal was the greatest fighting man of the century (not excluding the doughty Coeur de Lion with his battle-ax) and a fine, human fellow of high character and undeviating principles.

  It was in the late hours of the evening that a servant wakened the marshal from sleep with news of the death of Richard. The soldier, who was now in his middle fifties and inclined to sleep heavily, roused slowly and sat up in bed, exposing his bare torso and long muscular arms. He did not at once take in the full significance of what he had been told, then he sprang energetically from bed and struggled into his camise. Over this he hastily dropped the gambeson, a padded shirt to protect the body from contact with the metal. Then came a hauberk of jazerant work which was much used at the time, a coat of steel plates attached to a base of canvas. Sleeveless surcoat and a pair of heavy leather boots reinforced with metal completed his costume.

  Rouen was packed to the eaves with the birds of prey who collect at the first taint of blood on the air: mercenaries who swaggered in the streets and swilled in the taverns, announcing themselves as not engaged by a careful absence of color in their clothes, even to a discarding of scarves; heavy-chested Flemings, flaxen Germans and Danes, dark and sallow condottieri from the boot of Europe, all waiting to sell themselves to the highest bidder; tougher and more evil than these, the contractors with supplies to sell, diabolically clever fellows with paid bravoes at their heels; and, of course, spies, informers, secret agents, pimps. Rouen after nightfall could be likened only to the back streets of hell. Here a dagger thrust in the ribs was as common and as little thought of as an oath. Although William Marshal had never known a moment of fear in his life, he was too old a campaigner to risk the blackness of the streets without an adequate guard. The wind and the rain, the oldest of campaigners themselves, were on the attack when he started out, with sudden swoops which made the lantern dance on the brown-bill carried in front of the party and caught the midnight wayfarers full in the face, so that rivulets of water ran down their necks under the open iron pots they wore on their heads and got into the armor where it could not be dislodged. All through the centuries man has devised one absurdity after another in the way of apparel, but never has there been anything to equal the discomfort of body armor in a heavy rainstorm.

  The shaven-poll who admitted them into the courtyard of the archbishop’s palace turned them over to a brother inside and then ran for the cover of his wicket at the gate, knowing the playful habit soldiers had of beating the buttocks of priests with bill handles or treading on their toes with iron shoes. Those inside were equally expeditious in leading the marshal to the bare apartment where the old primate was still bending over his endless documents.

  Walter of Rouen heard the news with such a sense of shock that for several moments he said nothing. Then he pointed out the danger of delay in getting the succession settled, and the two of them fell into a serious debate. The archbishop took the stand that Arthur of Brittany, the heir of Geoffrey, who had been born between Richard and John, had first right to the throne; which was correct, according to the accepted law of primogeniture. Marshal shook his grizzled head in denial. Arthur might have the right, but it would be a bad thing to choose him King. He was a foreigner, this boy named after the great Celtic King, and by report he was as proud and tricky as his father had been (the handsome Geoffrey had always been counted the troublemaker of the family) and as strong-willed as his mother, Constance of Brittany, who hated the Plantagenets. England needed a man, declared the marshal, and it would be better to take John.

  They discussed the matter with full consciousness that the succession might hinge on what they decided. Between them they could put the might of Normandy back of their choice. Should it be John, who had been born in England and had friends there in spite of everything? Or should it be the unknown quantity, this boy of thirteen who had never been in England and had scarce a drop of Saxon blood in his veins; whose character, moreover, had not yet formed sufficiently to allow them to reach any judgment?

  The marshal stuck aggressively to his selection: John, whose faults were all known and who was wanted by the people of the island with a degree of unanimity hard to believe in view of the reputation the sole surviving son had acquired.

  The archbishop sighed finally and gave in. John, then, it would be.

  “Nothing of which you have done, Marshal,” he declared, shaking his head dolefully, “will you have such cause to repine as this.”

  Although the archbishop was right about what would happen if John were made King, the marshal’s choice was that of England. Across the Channel the feeling against the young prince as a candidate was running high. The evidence on this point is so convincing that it can be taken as fact that Arthur would never have been accepted as King of England, even if all the French possessions had declared for him.

  In the meantime the adherents of Arthur had received the news of the King’s death, and Brittany had blazed into excited support of the prince. Anjou, Maine, and Touraine threw in on the same side. Philip of France turned against his old partner in perfidy and espoused the cause of his nephew. The French monarch announced his readiness to take the field and summoned Arthur to Paris to live in his household and receive education with his own son and heir. In Normandy, which counted most, the strong stand taken by the Earl of Pembroke was keeping t
he people from joining in the rather hysterical swing to the heir of Brittany. Aquitaine, that loyal land, was standing behind Eleanor and was ready to accept whatever decision she might make.

  Eleanor, naturally, chose her only remaining son. John had been so much the favorite of Henry in the bitter last days that there had been restraint sometimes in her attitude toward him. Now this was all swept away. Although she knew full well that John had great faults, she was prepared to battle for him against the grandson who had been trained to hate her by his high-tempered mother.

  Eleanor’s support was what John needed at this critical moment. Touraine had declared for Arthur, but the imperious old Queen instructed the seneschal to turn over the treasure of that province to John, and this was done at the castle of Chinon on April 14. At the same time a few of the nobility swore fealty to him. From Chinon, John rode north into Normandy, where he found that William Marshal had kept the old duchy loyal to him. He was crowned duke by Walter of Rouen on April 25.

  The coronation was conducted with all the old Norman rites. The ducal coronet, which was made in the form of a wreath of golden roses, had always looked out of place on the heads of the hard-bitten men who had worn it. John had broadened out so much that the dainty circlet made him rather absurd. Perhaps he sensed this himself. At any rate, as he took the spear, which was handed to him in place of a scepter according to the Norman custom, he turned and winked at the spectators. At a later stage of the ceremony he let the spear fall out of his hand, and it crashed loudly on the stone paving before the altar. An uneasy silence settled over the cathedral. This was believed a sign that he was doomed to lose the duchy.