Isabel the Fair

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  To Mortimer and Lancaster it was a usual practice of war, but because of his age they might have had pity. Sir John of Hainault even loitered about her tent as if waiting for her to intercede. And her half-brother, hearing the hammering on the rough-hewn scaffold, came and asked her outright to spare the elder Hugh Despenser. The man was nearly seventy and had held the town valiantly, he said.

  But of all his words it was only the hated name she really heard. “Now we may never catch the younger one,” she lamented. “Hang the obstinate old dotard in his armour." Her thoughts went back to the wretched days when he was for ever drawing the King’s attention to her smallest extravagance and to the cruel way in which his daughter-in-law had controlled and baited her. “I will exterminate them all,” she vowed.

  The long thin body in armour was still dangling there when the son was caught. To Isabel’s intense relief her husband had escaped. Their little craft, hidden near some back postern of the castle against the emergency of surrender, had set sail for Lundy Island. But contrary tides and winds had driven her back and forth, finally bringing her exhausted crew within sight of Bristol again, so that men on shore, after watching their failing efforts, had rowed out with a rescue party in a boat belonging to a Knight called Beaumont. On finding the importance of the people whose lives they had undoubtedly saved, Beaumont delivered Despenser up to the Queen. The news of his capture so overrode all else that for a while few further questions were asked. But listening to the garbled and evasive accounts of Beaumont’s men, Isabel suspected him of conniving at the King’s escape, for which she and Ned and Edmund of Kent were secretly so grateful that no one pressed him further. It was even rumoured that Edward, who was the better swimmer of the two, had swum across to Wales where a loyal farmer, finding that he could groom a horse and thatch as well as any of his own serfs, had saved him from pursuit by setting him to work on his land, and that he was now being cared for by the monks of Neath.

  “Now we can go back and take possession of your capital,” said Sir John, whose methodically trained mind still saw it as the main objective.

  “And take our prisoner with us,” agreed Isabel, with deep satisfaction. She had no need to give instructions for his conveyance. Mortimer had seen to that. “Your marshal, Sir Thomas Wager, has found the meanest mount in all Somersetshire,” he grinned. “Its bony ribs will gall him all the way. And Wager’s men have crowned him with filthy straw from the stables. As a subtle reminder of how he tried to lord it over us all, no doubt.”

  “Tell them to add a tabard with the Clare arms so that his lady wife may be associated in his shame,” said Isabel.

  The extent to which Hugh Despenser was hated was terrible. Or was it, she wondered with that disconcerting streak of honesty, that she herself had bewitched people into blindness to the intimitant brilliancy of his statesmanship which would have protected both them and the Crown from the dangerous, over-weaning power of the barons? They rushed out from the shops and houses and hovels to throw midden at his straw-crowned head and, goaded by Bishop Orleton’s sermon, followed him out of each town blowing upon hunting horns and beating kitchen pots in derision. They would have laid down their very coats for her feet to tread on.

  At the Bishop’s request the royal party turned aside to Hereford to rest and refresh themselves in his episcopal palace. There they kept the feast of All Saints with all the good cheer that helped to swell the prelate’s well-lined belly. And there Isabel found her second son awaiting her, sent by the kindness of the Sheriffs of London. It was good to see him again. He was growing up a studious, intelligent boy, though with little of his elder brother’s strength and energy. He was able to give her a graphic account of all that had been going on in the Tower and, being a born mimic, to delight her and amuse the whole company with an excellent

  picture of his proud cousin Eleanor Despenser reduced to wheedling panic. With all the music and laughter, and having her sons and friends about her, it was easy to forget Eleanor’s husband lying shackled in some cell beneath them.

  “On such a holy Feast day should we entirely neglect our prisoner?” asked John of Hainault, whose chivalrous visions were beginning to be dimmed by disappointment so that his thoughts kept turning to a more mystic crusade in the Holy Land.

  “Send him some of this excellent roast peacock, Orleton,” said Mortimer good naturedly. His own face was flushed and moist with good fare and he lapsed into the English tongue embellished with a cheerful Welsh lilt. “Customary it is to give a man a good meal before he dies, look you.”

  Apparently he no longer bore his enemy much ill-will. It was easier for a man, Isabel supposed. He had caught him and would get back his land. But not even the Despenser’s death could give her back her marriage — nor her clean, self-respecting soul.

  She said nothing and the meat was carried to the prisoner, but he would not touch it. “He has refused all food since we took him,” reported Sir Thomas Wager.

  “Perhaps it is afraid he is lest the Queen has poisoned it?” suggested Mortimer, being more than a little drunk.

  “Or hopes to cheat us of his death,” said Lincoln, remembering the horror of his father’s.

  “He never was an athletic man, like the King or Gaveston,” said Wager. Seeing his royal mistress’s face redden with anger and becoming aware of the tactlessness of his allusion, he added hurriedly but earnestly, “The fact is, milords, I should warn you that in my opinion he may not reach London alive. There were those days and nights without food, tossing about in that crazy boat. And the stunning blow to his pride. And even when my men bait him he scarcely seems to hear them now.”

  Isabel thought she detected pity in his voice, and saw it reflected in one or two faces about the festive table. She had set her heart on making Hugh Despenser suffer sharp insults of the crowds in London, where she had suffered so much from him and his. But one could not have everything. “Then I pray you, milords, fix the hour of his trial for tomorrow,” she said.

  “Trial?” hiccoughed Mortimer.

  “Why waste time on trying a dog?” muttered Lincoln.

  “We must at least make some semblance of it,” insisted Isabel coldly. “With milord Bishop’s permission — tomorrow — here in Hereford.”

  And so next day in that same hall from which the festive tables had so recently been cleared a macabre sort of trial was held, with the prisoner slumped on a stool, too weak to stand or answer the long list of charges. Everything he had ever done seemed to be remembered and brought up against him, from weaning the King’s natural affection from the Queen to being partly responsible for the death of Lancaster. Even the disaster of Bannockburn was heaped upon him. But he was dazed with hunger and did not seem even to hear when the dreaded sentence of “to be hanged, drawn and quartered” was passed upon him, or else he must have been emulating his father’s stoic courage.

  Only at the end as he was led from the hall did a flicker of life seem to return to him.

  “I am sorry, Hugh Despenser, that you will not have time to come to London and see who reigns now at Westminster,” she mocked, bending from the bishop’s borrowed throne as he passed.

  At the sound of her familiar clear light voice his steps dragged to a standstill, so that his chains rattled against his suddenly halted guards. His dark eyes beneath their drooping lids seemed already to be looking at her from a great distance. His pale lips spat back her venom. Up to his last hour he was determined to be her most virulent enemy. With a last effort he managed to raise his voice sufficiently for those nearest to her to hear his cruel parting thrust. “Edward said — tossing out there in that boat — that if he had no weapon, he would willingly crush you with his bare teeth.”

  It was his final crow of victory, wiping out the impression of kindliness made by Edward’s exclusion of her name from his proclamation of punishment, and killing any half-belief she might harbour that her husband still cared for her — if not as a wife, at least as the mother of his children. Isabel left the ha
ll and went swiftly to her room. She was unconscious of how long or how short a time elapsed before Roger Mortimer came to her.

  He walked to the window and drew the curtain back with one hand and held out the other to her. There was nothing else for it but to go, or know herself too cowardly to mate with him. She got up and walked slowly across the room and stared out across the courtyard and the sea of upturned faces to a tall platform surrounded by the glinting steel of soldiery. She saw the figure hanging from it, without armour but with a grotesquely crooked head. But for the strong warmth of her lover’s hand she would have fallen.

  “He is already insensible,” he told her mercifully.

  Then he would not know when they dragged his entrails from him. And when they came with a freshly sharpened butcher’s knife to quarter his body, which the King had loved, he would be already dead.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  That night Isabel slept more soundly than she had slept for months. It was the sleep of exhaustion after achievement, of cessation from long-sustained effort. She felt as if some difficult chapter of her life were over, and hoped optimistically that the pages could be closed. On waking she resolutely put the past behind her and looked forward to the future. Success beckoned, and bound up with vain ambition was her sincere intention to shine as a benefactress to England. All the scraps of statecraft which she had gathered from her family and all her own natural ability were brought to bear upon the task. If the Constitution were to be altered so that power rested in her hands and Mortimer’s, she wanted everything to be done decently and in order.

  Before leaving Hereford she sent messengers on ahead summoning Parliament to meet at Westminster early in the New Year. As she did not know where the King was she summoned members in his name if he should be present, and failing his presence in the name of herself and of her elder son, whom she named Guardian of the Realm with the full consent of the lords with whom she travelled. It would be for Parliament to make the next move.

  The journey back to London with the delirious delight of her subjects manifesting itself on all sides was another personal triumph, and her evenings, when her great cavalcade stopped to rest, were enlivened by the company of a fellow border lord of Mortimer’s called Thomas Berkeley. One of her first acts on landing had been to free him from prison, at Mortimer’s urgent request, since the young man had nearly died from gaol fever as the price of supporting him. “His castle is a few miles south of Gloucester on the English side of the Severn,” Mortimer told her. “And although small compared with Caernarvon or Ludlow, it could be of the greatest strategic value. For which reason, coupled with the liking I have for him, I have given him my young daughter in marriage.”

  Isabel had taken an immediate liking for the courteous young man, and was sorry to see the ravages which the fever had set upon his lean, attractive face; and he on his side had displayed the most touching gratitude to her for delivering him from the prison where he had suffered so grievously. Since he was Mortimer’s son-in-law she had even found time to ride out from Gloucester to Berkeley with them when he went to give some hasty instructions to his steward before throwing in his lot with theirs. It was an autumn day, aflame with russet and gold, and the comfortable domesticity of his castle pleased her, set as it was in flat sunlit fields and seeming to guard the peaceful little village at its gates. Although overwhelmed by her unexpected arrival, Glaunville, the steward, ordered an excellent meal, and Isabel, coming from the hospitality of the hall, paused a while outside the guard room before going out into the courtyard where their horses waited. “I shall always remember Berkeley Castle as a pleasant, sunny place,” she said politely.

  “Yet it can look grim enough when the mists creep up over the river meadows,” admitted its owner, with his sensitive smile, as they rode out of its courtyard. And when she looked back from the lane beyond the village the sun had gone in and the Severn mists were beginning to creep like grey ghosts towards the castle walls, and she shivered a little, seeing something of Berkeley’s isolated sadness.

  On the way to London they heard news of Edward. On learning of Hugh Despenser’s death, he had come out of his safe retreat and deliberately given himself up, heedless of ail consequences. “How foolish, and how characteristic of his clinging loyalty to the favourite of the moment,” thought Isabel, realizing how much he must hate her now that he knew of his friend’s ignominious journey and execution.

  “Beaumont has him safely in Monmouth,” Mortimer told her. “Shall we wait where we are until they come and bring the King with us into London?”

  “And humiliate him as you humiliated the Despenser,” thought Isabel. Not only was her instinct to protect Edward from physical harm, but she shrank from the thought of meeting him. She felt she had too much to answer for, and that too many hurts had been exchanged between them. “I cannot bring myself to talk with him, and he has said that he never wishes to see me. If I am to continue knowing happiness with you, Roger, I must be allowed to forget all that unhappy past,” she pleaded.

  “Then we will persuade Lincoln to remain behind in charge of him,” decided Mortimer. “Good fighter as he is, we can spare him better than some because of his blindness.” Isabel appreciated his deference to her wishes, knowing through the close fusing of intention which bound them that he himself was not one to put out of mind unpleasant realities, but would have preferred in his blunt way to bring the King before Parliament and make a quick decision. “The fact that Lincoln is a relative would make the arrangement more seemly in the eyes of the world,” she said. “And I would have him fetch the King to Kenilworth for the greater comfort of both of them.”

  Mortimer saw to it that her wishes were carried out, and she and her son rode into London to receive a rapturous welcome. She was well aware that his youth and her forlorness made a most appealing picture, and could have wished at times that Roger Mortimer had not pricked his horse forward so frequently to ride beside them. It detracted from the aspect of loneliness with which she played upon their sympathies, and might confirm the rumour of her infidelity which, since their return to England, she had been striving so decorously to discourage.

  One of her first concerns after arriving at Westminster was to make sure that the unfortunate Bishop of Exeter’s body was retrieved from the muddy banks of the Thames where it had been thrown, and sent with all reverence to Exeter. And to punish the ringleaders of the mob who had murdered him.

  “And what punishment will you mete out to Despenser’s widow, who so cruelly spied on you and taunted you?” asked her lover.

  Isabel had often looked forward to the time when she would be in a position to arraign Eleanor Despenser before her and return past humiliations, and strip from her every vestige of her proud Glare inheritance. But now that she had achieved Hugh Despenser’s terrible death most of the desire seemed to be purged out of her, and a kind of surfeited weariness took its place. “Send the woman away where I shall never have to look upon her again,” she besought Mortimer. “And from all the Despenser lands of which you will now take possession, you will surely be able to spare an estate or two for her to live upon.”

  The Queen sent for her small daughters and kept Christmas quietly with all four children around her. She sent gifts to Bringnette, whose first Christmas without her would be lonely in Ponthieu, and rewarded all who had helped her including Sir Eustace d’Ambreticourt and his kind lady in Hainault. Roger Mortimer she created Earl of the Marches. And she began to talk long and earnestly with Sir John of Hainault about the promised marriage between one of his inconspicuous nieces and her elder son, who might, it seemed, so soon be King of England.

  In spite of snow-blocked roads the Parliament she had called was well attended, and tension mounted throughout the country. In one of his inflammatory speeches Bishop Orleton pointed out that if their captive king were to be released and returned to power it would undoubtedly mean the death or imprisonment of all who supported Queen Isabel. Events had now come to such a pass that
they must choose between the two, he said, dwelling upon the danger to which they would all stand, as traitors, if the King returned. Edward of Caernarvon’s failings were freely discussed. A bill was introduced accusing him of indolence, of weakly losing Scotland and of breaking his solemn Coronation oath. Even the crowds gathering at the doors of Westminster Hall shouted again and again that they would be rid of him, and that they would kill whosoever laid a hand upon their Queen and Prince. And the Archbishop of Canterbury set the seal of the Church upon their uproar by announcing solemnly that the voice of the people was the voice of God. Reverting to the fiercer authority of their Norman ancestors, the peers claimed the right to depose a king who had proved himself to be incapable of ruling. Almost faint with conflicting emotion, Isabel heard them preparing to depose her husband and to offer their allegiance to his son.

  “So it is really done, this impossible-sounding scheme which Roger and I spoke of without pretence before we left France,” she thought. A sense of unreality gripped her and in the intensity of her emotion, whether for joy or sorrow she scarcely knew, tears began to run unheeded down her cheeks. As if watching some dream she saw the beautifully proportioned hall lit by shafts of sunlight, the richly coloured tabards and houppelandes of men whose names were parts of England, whose badges blazoned a riot of heraldry against the stone walls and whose daggers were for once sheathed in agreement. She saw their faces, some young, some old, but all sharpened to intensity by the irrevocable importance of the thing they were doing. She saw Mortimer, who had ruled Wales without a crown and who would now rule England in like fashion, lead her fifteen-year-old son towards the throne with its canopy and backcloth of gold against which the three embroidered leopards couchant of England seemed to snarl in unaccustomed shame. She was glad that Mortimer motioned to him to mount the shallow steps to the dais alone and that, having done so, his glance met hers across the crowded hall. She knew by the proud lift of his head that he too was thinking “This daring thing which we two planned together is now as good as done.”