Isabel the Fair

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  And then she noticed that Ned was not seated but was standing rigidly beside the throne with a hand clutching one of the carved arms upon which his father’s hand had so often rested. “He is overcome. He is so young and by nature shy,” she thought, wishing that she could go to him and whisper reassurances, telling him that none of the real burden of ruling all these fierce-looking men and the famine-impoverished country would rest upon his shoulders — that she and Mortimer would be behind him, bearing it all. But when he spoke she was once again mortified to find how little she had ever understood him.

  He was facing them all, frowning as he did in moments of stress. His voice seemed to have deepened to manhood and held no tremor. “When his Grace the King sent me to France I gave him my allegiance. And without his bidding nothing that you can say, milords, will induce me to wear the crown during his lifetime.”

  In the following silence someone’s mailed glove, knocked accidentally to the stone floor, sounded sharply as a blast-fired arrow. His hearers were struck still in the midst of various movements so that they stood like so many suddenly arrested statues. “Bravely done!” Isabel’s divided heart cried out to her son. But seeing Mortimer’s angry start and the way the blood darkened his cheeks a cold thrust of fear went through her as she realized that all unwittingly, in loyalty and love, the boy might be signing his father’s death warrant. The thought of such a consequence had never occurred to her before. To take from a man who had proved himself incompetent all power to harm the country further was all that she — and they, surely — could want. Even she, who had suffered most, had slaked most of her desire for vengeance with Despenser’s death. She brought herself back to warm, everyday reality when Ned returned to his chair of state beside her and members began to discuss a more legal form of deposal. After all, it would perhaps be more satisfactory in the end to have everything done legally, some of the peers were saying. There was the possible interference from the Pope or from France to be considered. Mortimer with all his hot urgency was irritated and impatient of the delay to his thrusting plans, but Ned, who had been trained to acquiescence on so many points, could not be coerced about this one thing. He could not, or would not, see that with the nation solidly at their back Parliament could force the King to agree to anything. “In any case, you can scarcely crown me without the regalia, and my brother John tells me that our father took it from the Jewel House when he fled from the Tower and has it safely bestowed somewhere up north. I would, Madam, you would let me go up to Kenilworth and see him!”

  It was a cruelly bewildering situation for a lad of fifteen and clearly he wanted above everything to talk with his father first. But that was the last thing which his mentors wanted. It was Bishop Orleton, of course, who took it upon himself to go, saying that it needed a churchman to acquit the King of his Coronation vows. “Which were made to God, not to you, you fire-eating traitor!” Edmund of Kent was heard to mutter, having been led into deeper waters than he had ever imagined or desired.

  In spite of Parliament’s rare unanimity it was a decision which weighed heavily upon men’s souls — to depose an anointed king. Only Edward’s years of unpredictable folly and frivolous neglect and the blindness of his inordinate affections could have driven them to it. Of the three bishops who refused their oath of allegiance to his son, one was so badly mauled by the excited mob that his maimed condition served to silence any loyal waverers who might have joined them. Orleton travelled to Warwickshire with Sir William Trussel, the Proctor of Parliament and Sir Thomas Blount, who had been steward of the royal household; and the Palace of Westminster and the City of London settled down to wait with hopeful if conscience-stricken anxiety for their return. And when the uneasy days of waiting were over and the Parliamentary deputation rode back through Newgate and Cheapside they brought the regalia with them.

  Their account of the few days they had spent at Kenilworth was disconnected and coloured by party prejudice. Each man’s story was of the particular part which he had played. The supporting Bishops of Winchester and Lincoln, it seemed, had at first used arguments and persuasion. But Edward had been incredulous and dazed, and at sight of his bitter opponent Orleton and of Trussel, who had proclaimed the death sentence on Hugh Despenser at Hereford, he had fainted. His host and the other two bishops had been all concern, but almost before he was fully conscious again Orleton was preaching at him with all his customary fierceness, drawing up a denunciatory catalogue of all his sins and shortcomings since boyhood. Some of them utterly irrelevant and frivolous, the soft-hearted Bishop of Winchester reported sadly. Small, half-forgotten happenings within the privacy of his own palace for which only Blount could have scraped a perfidious steward’s memory.

  “Such foolish things!” exclaimed Isabel to Edmund of Kent. “Like the evening when he made that fat painter of his dance on the supper table, or the times when he and Gaveston used to scandalize the foreign envoys by playing pitch-and-toss or mimicking pot-bellied prelates like Orleton himself when they ought to have been attending to the grave bleatings of a Council meeting. Things which happened when he was young and which Piers Gaveston has already paid for. Do you remember, Edmund?”

  But it was dangerous for either of them to remember because it brought back a sort of nostalgic tenderness for a time when the court had been young and gay and Edmund, at any rate, had received nothing from the King but an elder brother’s indulgent kindness. Instead it was far safer to feel shame and disgust when the Bishop of Lincoln described how Edward had dressed himself dramatically all in black and how he, who could out-ride any of them, had sat weakly in floods of tears beneath the flaying of the self-indulgent prelate’s final denunciations. “What could a woman like me want with such a womanish creature?” thought Isabel, her doting eyes upon Mortimer’s virility and her mind upon the upstanding courage of her elder son.

  Finally Edward had agreed to give up the crown on condition that it should be his own son who wore it, and even thanking them for having seen good to choose him. “He will do better than I,” he had said, sending for the glittering regalia. And when the deputation described to Isabel how the Proctor had, in the name of England, renounced all oaths of allegiance ever made to him, and how Blount, his steward, had broken his staff of office there and then before him as if he were dead, the Court knew beyond doubt that Edward the Second was deposed.

  “Do you suppose that he is kindly used at Kenilworth?” Isabel had asked, under cover of the wild shouting, plucking at the wise Bishop of Winchester’s sleeve.

  “Quite kindly, as a State prisoner. Or rather, Madam, as a guest in the house of a relative who has learned consideration from his own afflictions,” the Bishop had assured her, adding some words which had puzzled her at the time. “Too kindly, perhaps, for Edward Plantagenet’s ultimate good.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  After years of muddled government and baronial bickering, it seemed as if a new and hopeful era had dawned at last. And it was a woman who had brought it about. A woman with a strong man beside her to carry out her commands.

  It was this unsuspected side of their Queen’s nature, so long and so cleverly hidden beneath an appealing air of ill-used fragility, which amazed the people and commanded their respect. She had only to ride out from the palace to be surrounded by delirously cheering crowds. She was in her early thirties but success lent her a spurious air of youth. And when she smiled at them with eyes sparkling like the Nativity star, with the frosty air whipping colour into her cheeks, and her children gathered about her, the simpler of her subjects were almost ready to believe that the Madonna herself had come among them to improve the hard poverty of their lives. Isabel the Fair could have done anything with them then.

  There was someone now who attended to affairs of state, they felt, and who seemed to have a firm hand on every necessary matter at once. It was French Queen Isabel who, soon after her return, had thought to grant leave of absence to most members of her household to enable them to visit their homes,
and who had taken the trouble to understand ordinary people’s English, and who even had the insight to know that foreign soldiers, however useful they might have been in bringing about this happy state of affairs, were never really welcome for long in this insular land. There were to be special festivities in their honour this Christmas, and then they were to go back to Hainault.

  Thomas Plantagenet, Earl of Lincoln, now succeeding to his father’s Lancastrian title, had come to London for the Coronation and to bestow knighthood on the young king prior to the ceremony, and it was Isabel who honoured Sir John of Hainault by asking him to assist at the investiture. How dearly Edward of Caernarvon would have loved to knight his own son no one stopped to think. In all that blaze of excitement and preparation he seemed to be deliberately forgotten, except by the inarticulate lad who was the centre of it all.

  Isabel had proof of this when, weary of dressmakers and tailors and coiffeurs, she went out into the thin wintry sunshine for a breath of air before the midday meal on Christmas Eve. The snow had been swept from the Palace yard and the splendid Flemish gelding which Sir John had presented to his cousin, the new young King, had been brought round from the stables that its trappings might be approved for the morrow’s procession. At the head groom’s humble request Ned had mounted to make sure that every piece of harness and scolloped velvet horsecloth was as it should be. He was riding the high-spirited creature round

  in circles for the inspection and comments of a group of knowledgeable friends and squires and grooms. And Lord Berkeley, to whom Ned had taken a liking, stepped forward courteously from among them as the Queen and a few of her ladies joined them. “It is true the horse stands nearly sixteen hands, Madam, and is but newly broken in; but I am sure his Grace will be able to control him even in a cheering crowd,” he assured her, perceiving that she was worried lest the gift horse should prove too powerful a mount for her stripling son.

  Too occupied to speak to her, Ned rode once more round the courtyard before dismounting, then turned to pat the gelding’s glossy neck. “What are you going to call him?” Isabel asked, with several tactful Flemish suggestions on the tip of her tongue.

  But Ned turned round to look at her in grave and pained surprise. “What else but ‘Cher Ami’, Madam?” he asked. And Isabel, feeling rather as if someone had unexpectedly doused her face with cold water, recalled the homely picture of a small stocky boy tending a beloved wooden horse made for him by his father. Annoyed by the lad’s undeviating tenacity of mind, she suspected that all favourite horses would always be “Cher Ami” to him, and realized that even in all this last minute rehearsing for tomorrow’s Coronation the lonely man at Kenilworth who had been through it all a score of years ago was very far from being forgotten. In a kind of helpless panic she hoped that, as they all rode through the decked and garlanded streets and the Abbey bells rang out for joy, most of the older citizens would not be thinking of him pityingly, too.

  But if they were, there was no sign of it when young Edward the Third went to his crowning that Christmas Day. Only Isabel herself sat through the ceremony shedding tears she could not hide because she was naturally emotional; because although this crowning set the seal upon the new life which she had schemed for, it was at best only a substitute for the honourable life she had orginally dreamed of, and because — on this day of family reunions — she had hidden in the bosom of her glittering robes a letter from her husband beseeching that he might return to be with his children on Christmas Day. A small thing for a deposed king to ask for, whose lightest whim had always been so instantly obeyed. And a desperately desired thing, seemingly, since it must be begged of a faithless wife whom he had said that he would kill, if necessary, with bared teeth.

  Isabel had composed a gentle reply to be carried back to Kenilworth by one of Lincoln’s men, sending Edward news of the children and saying with half-pitying mendacity that she herself would have brought them to see him but that Parliament had forbidden her to do so. And to blot out the memory of him she saw to it that the feasting and revelling ran high at Westminster from Christmas to Twelfth Night, and that during the general festivities the feeding and merriement of the people outside the palace were well catered for. For mixed motives of gratitude and policy she advised the young king to grant her chivalrous Sir John an annuity, and to shower gifts upon his followers — particularly upon the ladies who had accompanied her from Valenciennes and who could be counted upon to give a good report of the English Court to Philippa’s parents. That the gifts were paid for out of the last remains of the girl’s dowry no one but the confidential clerk of her Exchequer need know.

  As soon as the Flemish supporters had departed Parliament appointed a council of regency presided over by her second-cousin Lincoln and composed of twelve bishops and twelve peers, among whom were Thomas of Brotherton, now Earl Marshal of England, and Edmund of Kent. It gave Isabel a feeling of security to have her blood relations so represented. Plantagenets as they were, the French ancestry which they had shared with her and the May Queen seemed to bind them as closely with herself as with Edward. The easy comments which they made in the idiom of the family circle had always been very different from the more guarded ones which they contributed in English council chambers. And Isabel was quite content for the conduct of the regency to lie officially in the hands of men chosen by Parliament, knowing as she did that the real power would lie with her and with Roger Mortimer. But Mortimer was primarily a soldier and as the weeks passed she found herself more and more frequently relying upon the advice of Bishop Orleton of Hereford, although she had none of that personal liking for the man which she had felt for Aymer de Valence of Pembroke. When the last of William of Hainault’s money had been spent, it was Orleton who helped her to appropriate to her own uses more than half of the country’s revenue. Her dowry, he called it; unctuously explaining to any who dared to criticize that restitution should be made for all the privation which the Queen had suffered under the Despenser’s sway, and that it was now offered in grateful recognition of all that she had done to bring back tranquillity to the nation.

  But tranquillity was short-lived. Before Easter Robert Bruce had begun harrying the northern border again, and Mortimer was wanting to move Edward from Kenilworth. “Suppose the Scots were to swoop down secretly, as the Black Douglas did when you were at Brotherton, and abduct him?” he said, bringing Orleton to her apartments after a council meeting as he so often did of late.

  Isabel looked up in surprise from her steward’s account book which, with a Frenchwoman’s native shrewdness, she always insisted upon checking. “As far south as Warwickshire?” she demurred. “And of what hostage value would he be to them, now that he is deposed?”

  “Of little, Madam, as you say,” agreed Orleton. “But they might well use him as a figurehead to raise sympathy among his former subjects. ‘Behold my dear ill-used brother of England’ and so forth. There are still quite a number of people who are not wholly with us in this matter of his deposition.”

  Isabel set a marker in the book and turned from the table to give them her full attention. “My dear lord Bishop, are you not daily deafened by their cheering every time my son or I ride abroad?” she asked, with smiling indulgence.

  “I admit, your Grace, that I speak only of parts remote from London,” he hastened to assure her. “But there is another point to be considered, which is that the new Earl of Lancaster is now President of the Council. A position which necessitates his being so frequently at court that he can seldom be in charge of his — er — guest elsewhere.”

  “He is half blind in any case,” pointed out Mortimer moodily, poking at a fallen log with the point of his shoe. “And when he is at Kenilworth he allows Edward Plantagenet to go hunting and hawking with him, and the tenants all doff their hats and the Warwickshire women gape admiringly. Your husband, my dear Isabel, makes far too fine a figure on a horse, besides being able to ride twice as fast as any of his so-called guards.”

  “What you mean is
that cousin Lincoln is too kind,” interrupted Isabel with rising acerbity.

  “He certainly allows him too much liberty for your safety. If Edward were to escape and form a party — ”

  It was the masterful man caring for her, for which she had always craved. “Where would you send him?” she asked almost meekly.

  “Further west. Across the Severn if possible. Somewhere in my own domains, where men obey me as spontaneously as they breathe.”

  “We cannot afford to offend Lincoln,” Orleton reminded them.

  “If we make any change he or Edmund would be sure to speak of it to Ned,” objected Isabel, feeling strangely loath to let Edward disappear from her ken somewhere into the wilds of Wales.

  “There may be no need for him to know,” said Mortimer. “I shall organize a force to put down this trouble on the Scottish border and it will be just the moment for a well-grown young princeling to go north and win his spurs campaigning.”

  “I doubt if you could hold him back,” said Isabel, feeling that some of her past shame for her husband was being healed by the manliness of her son.

  “Ned should make a fine enough soldier,” allowed Mortimer, coming to sit near her when the Bishop was gone.

  Always glad of his company, Isabel pushed aside her neglected accounts. “I love you both,” she sighed. “How I wish you liked each other better!”

  “He scarcely ever speaks to me unless he is obliged,” burst out Mortimer, who had set him on the throne.

  Isabel leaned forward with a caressing gesture to lay her hand on his. “What can you expect when you have taken his father’s place?” she asked softly. “Perhaps if you were to — to respect his young dignity a little more. Several times I have seen you walk in public beside him, and others have noted it. Even I, his mother, walk a pace or two behind him now.”