King's Man

by Angus Donald

  It was a deception that Marie and Osric used which was kindly meant: a lie of love. And yet I feel that I have been betrayed – not by Osric, my mole-ish bailiff, nor by my bustling daughter-in-law, but by my own fogged and aged mind. Perhaps Nur’s curse has come true, at last, and I am in truth losing my mind. I see the past so clearly now, I can remember so well the days when I was young Sir Alan of Westbury, a knight of great prowess and courage. But the present? What am I now? A confused old man who leaps out at his servants from behind doors to catch them in imaginary crimes. A dotard.

  I remember my glorious past so clearly, and my head is there for most of the day while I write. And where better to spend my last few years on this earth than with my younger, stronger self – with that young man so full of light and love and hope? The indignities of age come to all men who live long enough – but not all men can say that they had the friendship of kings and outlaws and heroes in their prime; that they walked proud and tall, without fear – before the weight and care of years bowed their backs. But I can. I can say, I can swear before God, that I have played my part on the world’s stage. And played it to the fullest.

  Perhaps I am a silly old fool now, perhaps Nur’s malice has reached out to me from beyond the grave. I know that some might say that the black Hag of Hallamshire’s other prophecies also came true: my lovely wife Goody is dead; and my son Rob, too. But I tell myself that I do not believe in curses: that they are no more than idle talk to frighten children. And I was a warrior, once, a knight of England – and so I will fight; I will fight her witch’s curse – as Goody fought her in the hall at Kirkton on the day of our betrothal; I will fight with all my strength to keep my mind hale and whole. I will struggle to keep my foolish fears at bay. For I can see now that Osric never had the intention of doing me harm. Nor Marie neither. We are reconciled, my loyal, harmless, mole-ish bailiff and I, and I have humbly begged his pardon for my foolishness.

  But I still do not like him.

  Historical note

  King Richard the Lionheart left the Holy Land in the second week of October 1192. The Third Crusade had been only a partial success and, after three years of fighting the Saracens, the Christian warriors were exhausted and their numbers were much depleted by disease, desertion and death in battle. Richard finally agreed a three-year truce with Saladin, the great Muslim general, under which the Christians were to keep a thin strip of land on the Mediterranean coast and several important strongholds, and pilgrims were to be allowed to visit Jerusalem unmolested.

  This face-saving temporary agreement allowed King Richard to make plans for his return home, something that he badly needed to do. In his absence, King Philip Augustus of France had been encroaching on his lands in Normandy, and his ambitious younger brother Prince John had been steadily increasing his power in England, illegally taking and garrisoning castles with his own men and constantly undermining the authority of the officials put in place by King Richard to govern the country in his absence. King Richard fully intended to return to the Holy Land, once he had settled matters in Europe and seen off the threat to his throne from his brother, but events were to conspire against him.

  Unfortunately, the Lionheart’s forthright character meant that he had made many powerful enemies during the course of the Crusade. He had fallen out with Philip of France, a close boyhood friend, and had insulted Duke Leopold of Austria, the leader of the German contingent of the crusaders. He had even alienated Henry VI, the Holy Roman Emperor, by supporting King Tancred of Sicily against him. The Emperor controlled most of Germany and much of the Italian peninsula, southern Spain was in Muslim hands, corsairs infested the North African coast, and France was barred to him by King Philip – so Richard knew that he would have a problem getting home by land. Furthermore, the naval technology of the day did not allow ships to overcome the powerful currents flowing through the strait of Gibraltar and pass westward into the Atlantic, thus preventing Richard from taking the long way back to England by sea.

  The whole story of Richard’s return is not entirely clear; the facts are fragmentary, and sometimes seem contradictory, but most scholars agree that Richard decided to attempt a clandestine eastern land route homeward. After sending his wife Berengaria by fast ship to Rome where she would be protected by the Pope, he made a feint westward towards Sicily, then doubled back, entered the Adriatic and sailed north. It was the end of the shipping season, the weather was stormy, and after a couple of stops Richard ultimately landed on the northern Adriatic coast at Aquileia, near Trieste in north-eastern Italy – although some scholars suggest that this landing wasn’t planned and he was shipwrecked there after bad weather. Either way, that’s where the King found himself on or about the 10th December 1192, ashore with only a few companions and hundreds of miles from friendly lands.

  Disguised as a Templar knight, or possibly as a merchant, Richard headed north into the heart of Europe, making for safe territory controlled by his brother-in-law Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony. However, after an icy, gruelling, dangerous journey on poor roads, the King was apprehended by Duke Leopold of Austria’s men. It was only a few days before Christmas, the weather was awful and the King was apparently sheltering in a ‘disreputable house’ or brothel on the outskirts of Vienna. Some stories suggest that it was his aristocratic habit of demanding roast chicken for dinner, rather than humbler fare, that led to his discovery; other tales say that it was his companions’ practice of calling him ‘Sire’ that somehow gave away his royal identity. Neither Richard nor his companions had much talent for clandestine operations, it would seem.

  Duke Leopold must have been delighted to have his great enemy the King of England in his clutches, and he promptly locked Richard up in Dürnstein Castle, a stronghold on the Danube fifty miles to the west of Vienna. He also informed his overlord, Henry VI, the Holy Roman Emperor, of his windfall, and a letter still exists (read out by Walter de Coutances in my story) from Henry VI to Philip Augustus of France, which has the Holy Roman Emperor gloating shamelessly about the capture of this returning royal pilgrim. Seizing King Richard was considered an illegal act, as Pope Celestine III had decreed that knights who took part in the Crusade were not to be molested as they travelled to and from the Holy Land. Both Emperor Henry and Duke Leopold were subsequently excommunicated for Richard’s detention.

  As was the custom of the day, Richard was passed from stronghold to stronghold in the German-speaking lands controlled by Henry and Leopold until he wound up at Ochsenfurt in mid-March 1193. It was there that English emissaries, in the shape of the abbots of Boxley and Robertsbridge, caught up with their captive King and began the long negotiations for his ransom and eventual release.

  I should mention here that I have no idea what these two worthy abbots looked like, and absolutely no evidence that they resembled each other in the slightest. My portrayal of them as near-identical was mere whimsy and was inspired by Thomson and Thompson, the wonderfully bumbling detectives who appear in the Tintin books. A homage to Hergé, you might call it.

  Negotiations for Richard’s release took the best part of a year – and King Philip and Prince John really did make a counter-offer of eighty thousand marks to the Emperor to keep Richard imprisoned until Michaelmas 1194. But after strenuous diplomatic efforts by Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, the payment of 100,000 marks – an enormous sum, perhaps twice the gross domestic product of the whole of England at the time – and the handing over of hostages, the King was released in early February 1194. One little-known fact about the wheeling and dealing that preceded his release is that one of the conditions for his freedom entailed King Richard doing homage for England to the Emperor, making Henry VI his feudal overlord. Richard submitted to this ceremony but, as this was viewed as rather shameful, great efforts were made to keep it a secret.

  Sadly, there is no historical basis for the legend of Blondel and his role in locating his captive king. But the legend goes like this: after King Richard’s imprisonment in Europe, his loyal friend
and faithful trouvère Blondel – a nickname for anyone with blond hair – searched high and low for him, playing his lute outside the walls of castles all over Germany in an attempt to find his lord. While singing a song under the walls of Dürnstein Castle, a song he had written with King Richard during the Crusade, Blondel was rewarded by a familiar voice singing the second verse from a small cell in a tower high above him. The loyal trouvère had found his King, and all would now be well.

  Although this charming legend has many highly improbable elements, there really was a Blondel, a famous trouvère from Nestlé in France who was a contemporary of the Lionheart and, if he didn’t actually seek out King Richard by playing music under castle walls in Austria, at least he has been immortalized in another way, as some thirty of his songs have been preserved in French museums and libraries – including one that begins ‘Ma joi me semont …’ on which I have loosely based Alan Dale’s song ‘My Joy Summons Me’. In reality, the Emperor and Duke Leopold would have gained little advantage in hiding King Richard’s whereabouts from Richard’s followers. They wanted the ransom money, and they needed to be in touch with the King’s subjects if they were to negotiate a price. I have to admit that because I like the legend of Blondel, and wanted to include it as a key element of the story, I have made slightly more of the importance of finding King Richard than would bear close historical scrutiny. If anyone is interested in reading in more depth about the real history of Blondel de Nestlé, trouvère culture in general and King Richard’s capture, imprisonment and ransom, I’d recommend David Boyle’s excellent book Blondel’s Song (Penguin Viking, 2005).

  The Siege of Nottingham: 25th to 28th March 1194

  On King Richard’s return to England in early March 1194, he found that the popular tide had turned against Prince John. Indeed his treacherous brother had already fled to France, leaving the men still loyal to him to hold the castles in England that he had snatched from the King. Within a few weeks almost all the major fortresses in England had surrendered to Richard’s men – and the castellan of St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall really is reported by contemporaries to have died of fright at the news of the King’s return. The last castle to hold out was Nottingham, perhaps the best-fortified stronghold in England at that time (see map at the front of the book) and considered practically impregnable.

  After landing at Sandwich on March 13th, King Richard paused only to give thanks for his release at Canterbury Cathedral before surging north towards Nottingham, gathering troops as he went. On his arrival, the castle defied Richard and, despite the King riding around the walls in plain view wearing a light crusader’s mail coat with his personal standard prominently on display, the constables of Nottingham (Sir Ralph Murdac and Sir William de Wenneval) claimed that they did not believe it was the Lionheart himself but merely enemies of Prince John who were trying to eject them from the castle by tricking them into thinking it was the King.

  And so battle commenced.

  On the first day of the siege, after a particularly bloody assault, King Richard’s men captured the outer bailey of the castle, and later in the day the barbican of the middle bailey was attacked, but the fall of night meant they had to leave the barbican in enemy hands. The gatehouse that Alan of Westbury attacks in this book would have stood on the spot where the later, stone-built gatehouse now guards the entrance to Nottingham Castle. I imagined Alan and his brave men attacking the wooden castle walls roughly where the bronze statue of Robin Hood now stands. During the course of the battle, towards the end of the first day, the palisade of the outer bailey was burnt down, either torched by King Richard’s troops or by the defenders.

  On the second day, Richard erected a gallows in the outer bailey just out of crossbow range and hanged several sergeants and menat-arms he had captured the day before as a warning of what would befall the defenders if they did not surrender. I have to confess here that Sir Ralph Murdac was not among those unfortunate men who were hanged – the historical Murdac was indeed once the sheriff of Nottinghamshire, and then a loyal follower of Prince John; he married Eve de Grey of Standlake Manor, and he was also constable of Nottingham Castle at the time of the siege, but it was not until about two years later that he was to die in unknown circumstances. My defence for this bending of the truth is that I think of myself as a storyteller, not a historian – and for the purposes of this story, and my future Robin Hood stories, my fictional version of the real Ralph Murdac had to die.

  On the third day of the siege, after a severe battering from Richard’s newly constructed artillery, negotiations began for the surrender of the castle. The King was merciful and the knights of the garrison were all allowed to go free after suitable ransoms had been arranged. England was once again securely in King Richard’s hands.

  Mortimer’s Hole

  When I was researching and plotting this book, I found myself – or rather Alan Dale – in a bit of a jam. I wanted to have my hero locked up in the bowels of Nottingham Castle, awaiting certain death, and then for him to be miraculously rescued by Robin Hood; but I couldn’t for the life of me think how this could realistically be accomplished. So I went to Nottingham to have another look at what little remains of the castle and seek inspiration; and while I was there I came across, and took a guided tour of, Mortimer’s Hole. Problem solved.

  Beneath Nottingham Castle is a network of tunnels dug into the relatively soft sandstone rock that the fortress is built on that dates back to at least the twelfth century and possibly much earlier. One of these tunnels, known as Mortimer’s Hole, leads from the southern part of the castle, where the upper bailey once stood, down through the rock to emerge at Brewhouse Yard, next to The Old Trip to Jerusalem pub outside the castle walls. This tunnel was normally only used by the servants to transport butts or tuns of ale from the brewhouse, where this staple part of the medieval diet was made, up to the castle butteries and storerooms. On the 19th October 1330, Prince John’s great-grandson, a seventeen-year-old boy who would soon become King Edward III, accompanied by a handful of men, used this passageway to sneak into Nottingham Castle undetected and stage a coup d’état. Once inside the upper bailey, young Edward kidnapped Roger Mortimer, the Earl of March – who with Edward’s French mother Isabella had usurped the throne of England – and managed to spirit the captured earl away through the tunnels to ignominious imprisonment and death.

  Once I had heard this story, and visited Mortimer’s Hole, I knew that Robin and Alan could use this secret tunnel to great effect. And I would urge any reader who visits Nottingham to take the tour of these spooky passages – and to have a pint in The Old Trip to Jerusalem afterwards.

  Episcopal inquisition

  In 1184, Pope Lucius III issued the Papal Bull known as Ad abolendam, in which he exhorted all Christian bishops, archbishops and patriarchs to actively seek out heretics and bring them to trial. If they could not prove their innocence, the Pope decreed, people accused of heresy were to be handed over to the lay authorities for their ‘due penalty’, which in the most serious cases could mean a fiery death at the stake. This bull was a response to the growing popularity of the Cathar movement (and others), and was an attempt to curb what the Church saw as an extremely dangerous heresy.

  There is, of course, no record of anyone known as Robin Hood or the Earl of Locksley being tried for heresy at Temple Church, and indeed episcopal inquisitions, more common in the southern Christian lands, were seldom held in northern Europe. But this heretic-hunting institution did exist at that early date and I hope I may therefore be forgiven for inventing a trial, specially sanctioned by the Pope, that brings my pagan Robin Hood into conflict with the Church authorities and his enemies the Knights Templar.

  It must be said that the episcopal inquisitions (an inquisition can refer to an individual court case or the investigative institution) as a method of curbing heresy were largely a failure: and one of the main reasons for this, or so Church militants claimed, was that, as Robin points out to the Master of the Templars
, a confession made under torture was not admissible in court. It was not until 1252, and the Ad extirpanda bull issued by Pope Innocent IV, that torture was officially sanctioned as part of the inquisition process.

  Angus Donald

  Kent, February 2011

  Acknowledgements

  Bringing a book from the vague-idea stage to the physical object you are holding in your hand is a team effort; and, although I get to have my name on the front cover, there are dozens of people who have helped me bring this story alive and into the form you have just read. I will only mention a few of them but any others that I have left out, either by design – such as the former member of the Greek special forces who coached me in certain alarming methods of silent killing – or whom I have simply forgotten to thank, should know that they also have my deep gratitude.

  Firstly I would like to thank my brilliant and hard-working agents at Sheil Land Associates, Ian Drury and Gaia Banks; and also my kind, patient and meticulous editors at Little, Brown: Daniel Mallory, Thalia Proctor and Anne O’Brien. My former Times colleague Dr Martyn Lobley has been full of encouragement and gave generously of his extensive medical knowledge; while Frank O’Reilly and Tez and Dave Tanner of Hadlow in Kent have all provided me with their friendship – and, in Frank’s case, occasionally, overnight accommodation – and each has also helped me to work out some of the intricacies of the fight scenes.