Isabel the Fair

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  “Or so that you may catch her among the dungeon rats?” grinned Gaveston. “Your wishes are my command, Madam. But since the dungeon steps may be ill lighted, allow me at least to lead the way.”

  Hating to be made fun of, Isabel followed him, with Edward, Gilbert, the clever-looking young Despenser, and her two ladies at her heels. Edward motioned her to go first. As she had suspected, there were no steps at all to negotiate. Only the handsome service screens at the entrance to the Great Hall, lightly carved as lace, where they halted and through which they could all see what went on within. Although it was almost spring a cheerful fire crackled on the hearth and at the far end of the hall, in the clear light from a tall oriel window, a young girl was laboriously picking out a tune upon the strings of a gaily-ribboned lute. She had authentic Plantagenet red-gold hair like Gilbert’s. So deep was her concentration and so quietly had Isabel contrived their approach that the girl remained unaware of them until her brother gave Gaveston a friendly push and he strode forward into the hall. At the sound of his footsteps Margaret swung round and saw him. For a moment she stood transfixed with glad surprise, then flung the lute down on the nearest chair and ran like the wind to meet him. As soon as she turned Isabel saw that she was not beautiful, but though her lashes were sandy and her cheeks freckled, her whole face was radiant with joy. “Piers! Piers!” she cried, flinging herself upon him with childish abandon. And, sustaining the shock of her onslaught in mid-hall, Gaveston lifted her shoulder high and kissed her.

  “I have brought the new Queen to see you, sweeting. She is very lovely,” he said.

  “Oh, that will be wonderful! And Uncle Edward too, I hope. And Gilbert.” Set down on her feet again, Margaret looked beyond him towards the screens, prepared to curtsy, but not seeing her peeping visitors, turned back to hug him once again. “But having you yourself to visit me is what I care about most of all,” she confided vehemently.

  “Not with very good news, I fear. I am going to Ireland, Margaret.”

  “For long?”

  “To live there.” Eavesdropping with the rest, Isabel noticed that there was none of the usual brittle joking in his voice when he talked to this child-wife of his. To her he explained things gravely and carefully. “The King is making me Lord Lieutenant.”

  “Oh, but that will be another splendid honour for you, will it not?”

  “Honour?” Gaveston repeated the word doubtfully. There was a short silence while he stared over her head, seeming to have forgotten her in the self-reproaching of his thoughts. Perhaps, thought Isabel, she was used to being forgotten for, withdrawing her adoring, importunate little hands from the gold-flecked grandeur of his cote-hardie, she folded them sedately before her. “Although you will miss all your friends, we should find interesting work to do there,” she said, with a dignity inherited from generations of ruling forebears.

  Gaveston came out of his trance-like preoccupation. “So you really want to come with me?”

  She drew back in momentary horror. “Oh, Piers, please!” she entreated. “You would not be so cruel as to think of going without me?”

  He drew her to him again and kissed her with unmistakable gratitude. She was his wife, she must go or stay as he ordered; but in his moment of defeat it meant something to him that she could not bear to be left behind. “Of course not, my little love,” he promised. “But you must come now and welcome our guests. We must not keep the Queen waiting any longer.”

  Chapter Eight

  Edward saw Gaveston off at Bristol and even lent him his own ship, the Marguerite. He arranged for an escort of other craft, and had his own tailor design fine new clothes for him. And to the further annoyance of the Barons, who had stripped Gaveston of his earldom and publicly burned the enfoeffment charter, their exiled enemy was wildly successful as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. His fine presence and the trappings of his servants overawed the people he was to govern; without carping critics his energy and talents had full scope, and the very fact that he had been banished by the hated English ensured him a welcome. Judging by the accounts which began to filter through he was working hard to make the King of England’s power felt. Instead of issuing useless orders to the chieftains of the more inaccessable and troublesome counties, he lost no time in collecting an army and personally leading it out against insurgents; he built new strongholds, and his personal bravery appealed so strongly to his Irish soldiers that they were proud to serve under him. Flauntingly he enjoyed the role of proxy prince, and the Irish, with their poetic patriotism and their starved love of pageantry, played up to him.

  “Which all goes to show that without the entertainment of the King on his mind Piers can be both a spectacular and a capable ruler,” said Marguerite.

  Isabel picked up her mirror, which was frequently near at hand these days. “The people always shout and throw up their caps for me whenever I go out of the Palace gates,” she remarked complacently.

  “They adore you. And I am thankful they do. It is part of what I was trying to explain to you in Boulogne. About the ordinary people’s sense of justice protecting you. But it does not help to ease the tension.”

  “Perhaps not. Though with a husband who seems little moved by the fact that other men call me ‘Isabel the Fair’, even a drayman’s admiration is pleasant.”

  Marguerite regarded her thoughtfully. That she should enjoy all this adulation was natural enough. But her aunt was well aware that the lovely little Queen had taken to riding out frequently of late, and smiling more devastatingly at the crowds, in order to encourage public applause. Marguerite suspected that Lancaster had suggested it but, while deploring the manoeuvre, there was nothing much she could say about it. “Did you know that Edward has written to the Pope asking him to absolve Gaveston from his oath if he should return?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “No!” Isabel laid down the mirror instantly. “Then he means to try to get him back?”

  “For the sake of your happiness it is to be hoped that his Holiness will refuse. In spite of all Edward’s apparent frivolity, he is, as you know, in some ways very devout, and would not imperil the eternal peace of his friend’s soul, I think.”

  “Whether Piers is away or not seems to make very little difference to my happiness,” confessed Isabel sadly.

  That evening Isabel talked with Sir Walter Reynolds and the King’s secretary, and next morning she coaxed Edward to deal with some of the documents which had been awaiting his signature for weeks. She even sat in his work room, quiet as a mouse, hoping to keep him at the hated task.

  “There you are, Walter,” he said, throwing down his pen. “That ought to satisfy them.”

  Isabel knew, too, that when her husband spoke of “them” in that hating voice he was alluding particularly to a half-dozen or so of his most powerful barons. “What is it that they are specially wanting you to do now?” she asked, as soon as treasurer and secretary had gathered up the papers and bowed themselves out. “Was not Piers’ going enough?”

  “Nothing would ever be enough for my uncle of Lancaster. He was probably born grumbling at the quality of his mother’s milk. And he and Warwick stir up the others. Of course, they are always girding at me because we have lost Scotland. That is perennial. And also because we are lax — or less brutal — in Wales and Ireland and all the other places my famous father set his heel on.” Edward got up and called to a page to have his horse saddled, and stood for a few minutes by the window looking out at the parklands of Windsor and wishing forlornly that his friend were with him on such a lovely morning.

  “Well, Piers is putting that right in Ireland far more efficiently than any of them could, for all their war-obsessed minds and standing armies,” he said, turning back to grin at her triumphantly.

  For the first time Isabel tried hard to take an intelligent interest in the complicated affairs of a kingdom for which she really cared little. “But those are big national questions, Edward. I meant what are all those documents they keep sending you to
sign, and the things which Parliament keeps trying to force you to do?”

  “If only Parliament, instead of wasting so much time prying into my private affairs, would support me in setting up a flourishing staple for our cloth trade in Flanders!” sighed Edward. “There would be no need then for any of us to keep trying to raise money by dubious means, and more of the people might be able to send their sons to school, or to study for the priesthood, which I should be glad to see.”

  “Why cloth particularly?” asked Isabel, who had more personal experience of silk brocades and furs.

  “Because this country teems with sheep. Our farmers shear them and our merchants export the wool. The Flemish weave it into cloth and make fortunes selling it all over Europe. And still the short-sighted Londoners get furious with me every time I encourage a few foreigners over here to show them how to make the cloth themselves and get much bigger profits. The people up in East Anglia are beginning to have more sense. They know that our wool is the best in the world and are setting up their own looms. But even when I tackled those numbskulls in Parliament about it only Aymer de Valence of Pembroke had the wit to see or the honesty to admit that that is why Norfolk and Suffolk are becoming the richest counties in England.”

  Watching with affection his enthusiasm for his pet industrial project, Isabel remembered how his step-mother had once remarked what a good manorial husbandman he might have made. “I see now what Marguerite meant about the wealth of this country being on the sheep’s backs,” she said, with a smile. She had intended begging Edward to release Robert le Messager from the Tower, but decided that with so many other worries on his hands this was not the moment. With the instinct of an alluring young woman, she realized that a request for something she had set her heart on was likely to be more propitiously received in bed.

  As the weeks passed even the barons had to admit the brilliance of Gaveston’s rule in Ireland, and the gloom lifted. When a favourable reply came from Rome, Edward went about singing and was seized by an unusual spurt of energy. He began to cut down his personal expenditure and to attend to the various grievances of Parliament with new vigour, hoping to be in a better position to bargain with them. Incensed with his neglect of the realm, which they had hoped would be lessened during the royal favourite’s absence, barons and prelates sat for long hours in the Painted Chamber at Westminster solemnly preparing documents by which they intended to control their sovereign’s private life and force him to rule the country conscientiously as his father had before him. They drew up ordinances which stipulated that he should not go to war or leave the country without the consent of Parliament, that he must curtail his own extravagance and the gifts he made to favourites out of his wife’s dowry or the country’s money, that all taxes should be properly audited and that all Gascon hangers-on at court must go. And much as he disliked some of these clauses, Edward intimated that he would sign and accept them in exchange for Gaveston’s return. He would, thought his exasperated wife, have signed away his own life if it would have done Gaveston any good.

  Because of his compliance, public opinion began to veer in his favour. Aymer de Valence and a few of the other more moderate peers were prepared to put the well-being of the country before their personal prejudices. Young Gloucester, who stood well with both sides, good-naturedly acted as mediator, so that in the end even Lancaster and Warwick were persuaded to give their reluctant consent.

  And so Piers Gaveston came home, covered with heartily grudged honours. Not being sure of his welcome and having learned some modicum of wisdom during his lieutenancy in Dublin, he had the sense to come quietly across Wales, and had the pleasure of finding Edward in Chester to meet him. There was a new air of responsibility about the man which tended to lessen his enemies’ animosity and even made some of them afraid to thwart him. And as soon as he and Margaret reached London and he found that the earldom of Cornwall had been restored to him, he improved public opinion still more by returning to the Crown all those revenues which Edward had given him in exchange.

  December brought the coldest winter within living memory. From Gravesend to London the Thames was frozen over so thickly that citizens, looking out from the windows of their houses on London Bridge, beheld the amazing spectacle of a bonfire blazing on the icy surface of their river. Edward took Isabel and her ladies, muffled in fur to the eyes, to watch people dancing round the warmth of it, while ’prentice lads played furious games of football among the frozen shipping.

  On the surface life appeared to be full of goodwill and merriment, but underneath all the movement and shouting flowed a tide of anxiety and suffering. Neither by road nor barge could food be brought into the city, ravenous rats gnawed winter stores in warehouse and granary, wood piles could not be replenished, old people died and prices rose. Before the court left for what Gilbert of Gloucester called “a real country Christmas” at Langley, in Hertforshire, that amiable young man persuaded Edward to abolish the tax which Parliament had levied in order to pay for a spring campaign against the marauding Scots — a move popular enough at the time with the hungry southerners, but less likely to prove popular among men of the north whose homes were burned and raped along the Scottish borders.

  At Langley the festive season was kept with wild abandon. Even in France Isabel had seldom enjoyed Christmas and Twelfth Night revels more. Edward Plantagenet and Piers Gaveston together could have enlivened a charnel-house. And after all those weeks of worry, Edward was happy. He had the ability to be completely happy, like a child, in some isolated segment of time, without either regrets for the past or forebodings for the future. Isabel and his step-mother, Gilbert and Margaret of Glare were all there, and he loved to have his family about him. And above and beyond all, his friend had been given back to him. Gaveston soon forgot the self-restraint so essential to a busy ruler.

  “Do they never think beyond the moment?” said Marguerite, half laughingly, half anxiously, as they watched the two tall young men, in the middle of a laughing, shrieking group of men and girls, toss the King’s protesting jester almost to the rafters, bouncing him with willing helpers from a hastily seized table-cloth.

  When Isabel would have risen to rejoin her companions, Marguerite laid a detaining hand on her knee. “You do realize, do you not, Isabel, that once these ordinances the barons have been working on are enforced they will deprive Edward of all but the outward trappings of kingship? That they will take away all his real power?”

  Isabel looked round to where Gaveston, resplendent in scarlet and Capet jewels, was showing Ghislaine and some other girls the steps of a new masque he had invented. Because of her aunt’s warning the spell was broken. “And he will have bartered it all for that greedy peacock. How I hate Piers Gaveston!” she said fiercely. “How I wish he would go away again!”

  But how would that profit her step-son in the end, wondered Marguerite, who had known him for so much longer.

  The removal of Piers’ dominance would but leave Edward’s weakness. Had he once bestirred himself to emulate his father’s fine example while his friend was away in Ireland? “You see how it was last time,” she wanted to say. But being Marguerite, she could not bring herself to put into words anything so hurtful and, in any case, chattering people were beginning to swirl around them again. “If you cut down the oak the ivy only finds another plant to lean upon,” she said ambiguously.

  But Isabel, too, had a Frenchwoman’s quickness of perception. “Would it twine round a golden lily, do you suppose?” she asked, getting up from the unpretentious stool she had rested on.

  “I pray that it will — when the time comes.”

  “When it comes — not if it comes!” The chattering group had drifted on their way again, and they were momentarily alone. Isabel leaned close to Marguerite, her eyes bright as a cat’s in the firelight. “You sound very sure that Piers will go — for good.” Much as she loved to dance, she was momentarily unconscious of the gay voices calling to her. Her mind was working upon a matter which concern
ed her and absorbed her, and by some swift association of ideas she hit upon the touchstone of her aunt’s certainty. “What was it you heard the Black Dog of Warwick say?” she asked.

  Marguerite held her hands to the blaze, turning them this way and that against the blaze, as though considering their beauty.

  “I heard Guy of Warwick say, ‘Let him call me dog or whatsoever he will, but one day when I see my opportunity the dog may turn and bite him.’ It sounded so — horribly convincing — because for once he said it quietly, without foaming at the mouth as he usually does when speaking of Piers.”

  Chapter Nine

  Back in London the storm began to break. With their ordinances almost drawn up, the barons already felt capable of dictating to the King. But nevertheless Edward was their anointed King, to be spoken to with subservience, and so a scapegoat must be found for him. It was easy enough to point to the all-powerful favourite. Speaking half the truth and relieving their jealousy at the same time, counsellors accused him of having turned away the King’s heart from his people, and of having committed every kind of fraud and oppression. With more complete truth and some small compassion, they declared that his attractive presence came between Edward and the Queen. And this time they refused to omit the clause which insisted upon Gaveston’s banishment from the realm.

  Edward tried to prove his own sweet reasonableness by sending a copy of the stern document to the Pope, and in order to gain time tried to get the clergy on his side. But Gaveston’s greed was a by-word in England. Though he might throw spectacular largesse to a crowd or send generous support to his impoverished relatives in Gascony, abbeys and churches seldom benefited by any offering of his. The Gascon pretended to no devoutness.