In the Name of the King
Page 1
By the same author
Honour and the Sword
In the Name of the King
A. L. BERRIDGE
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 2011
Copyright © A. L. Berridge, 2011
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-195770-8
Contents
Acknowledgements
Editor’s Note
Maps
PART ONE: The Hero
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
PART TWO: The Fugitive
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
PART THREE: The Man
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Historical Note
Acknowledgements
In the Name of the King is a work of fiction, but many of the people and events depicted are real. André de Roland’s journey takes him through one of the most turbulent periods of French history, and would never have been possible without the map and compass provided by so many experts in the field.
I am particularly grateful for the inspiration of Robin Briggs of All Souls, Oxford, who first alerted me to the ambiguities surrounding the fate of the Comte de Soissons, and also to Dr Jonathan Spangler of Manchester Metropolitan University for his invaluable assistance in uncovering the mysteries of the Battle of La Marfée. I would also like to thank the many historians of the H-France community who have generously guided me in my research, especially Professor Melissa Wittmeier of Northwestern University in Illinois for her help deciphering some obscure passages in the Mercure François, and Professor Orest Ranum for advice on mid-seventeenth-century Paris. Theirs is the credit for any historical insights offered by this novel; any mistakes, I’m afraid, are my own.
I have also profited enormously from the advice of experts in the use of historical weaponry, in particular Kevin Lees and Ian Shields for practical help with the musket, and Cris de Veau of the Tattershall School of Defence for his advice on swords and swordsmanship.
I’d also like to thank my agent Victoria Hobbs and editor Alex Clarke for their faith and editorial help, Stephen Guise for his sensitive and meticulous editing of the manuscript, and my long-suffering husband Paul Crichton for his patience. Last but not least, I must express sincere gratitude for the encouragement and support of my colleagues in the Thirty Years War unit ‘Hortus Bellicus’. To them and the thousands of men and women just like them, who freely give their time to make history come alive for those who now rarely encounter it in schools, this novel is very respectfully dedicated.
Editor’s Note
It is with this present collection of the Abbé Fleuriot’s documents that the story of André de Roland really begins.
The papers published under the title Honour and the Sword related those circumstances that shaped him as a national hero: the murder of his parents during the Spanish Occupation of Picardy, his upbringing among his former subjects, and his final victory in restoring the villages of the Saillie to French rule. Yet the man who survived these events is also a hybrid. Educated from birth to uphold a strict code of honour, he has since imbued not only the gentle humanity of his illegitimate half-brother, former stable boy Jacques Gilbert, but also the libertarian creed of soldier and former tanner Stefan Ravel. These qualities proved admirable in the defence of his home village of Dax, but now he is to encounter a France rigidly divided by caste and convention and already torn by civil conflict within the greater context of the Thirty Years War. How he fared there, this history will tell.
But it is not I who will tell it. I present the reader only with my translations of the Abbé Fleuriot’s papers, comprising in this case a handful of letters, the diary of the girl André loved, and a series of remarkably frank interviews conducted by the Abbé himself. As before, the translation preserves the informality of the verbal accounts by substituting modern idioms for those of seventeenth-century Picardy, but I have taken fewer liberties with both the written sources and the remarkably controlled and occasionally stilted expression of the tavern girl Bernadette. Hers is one of the voices new to us, while others are familiar, but the reader must use his own judgement to determine which are the most reliable.
Edward Morton, MA, LittD, Cantab
Cambridge, March 2011
Maps
PART ONE
The Hero
One
Jacques Gilbert
From his interviews with the Abbé Fleuriot, 1669
I know what you’re thinking. Sometimes I wake up sweaty from nightmares I can’t remember and think the same thing.
But it’s bollocks really, and I know that now. There’s nothing I could have done to stop it happening, not the boy the way he was. For André to be safe it was the whole world needed changing, but you’d have had to be God to do that, and I don’t think even God could have done much with France just then, back in the summer of 1640 and the middle of a war.
You can’t blame us for not seeing it. We’d left Dax that morning with the crowds cheering because the Saillie was liberated and we were finally out of danger. André and I were travelling in triumph to his grandmother in Paris, with nothing to do when we got there but be looked after and made to feel important. The sun was shining, we were free and riding through Picardie with harvest starting all round us, fields of hops and golden barley and women with their skirts tucked up singing bawdy songs as they slashed. André was singing too, that slushy ‘Enfin la Beauté’ de Chouy used to like, and I knew he was thinking about Anne. Everything felt exciting and full of hope, and it wasn’t till we got clear of Lucheux I realized anything was wrong at all.
&nb
sp; The landmarks were gone. I nearly missed the turning by Luchuel because the windmill had disappeared, and couldn’t keep straight for Milly because I was looking for a spire that wasn’t there. Then we came to the hamlet of Petit-Grouche, and I understood. I remembered it as a cluster of farm buildings, a wooden church, and a yard with a water trough and stone well where children used to play. Now the trough was dry and clogged with leaves, the well’s rusty chain hung without a bucket, and the smell that drifted up was brackish and sour. There was nothing else but a circle of burnt stones where the church ought to have been and a field of sunken oblong patches with wooden crosses. The Spaniards had been through.
The war seemed to be everywhere after that. We kept passing soldiers on the roads, grim marching ranks stamping through lines of tall poplars, all heading for the border and the siege of Arras. When we reached Amiens there was a whole army camping in the fields and we couldn’t even get in the gate. The guards said the King was there and half the court with him, they were mustering a force to break the blockade round our starving troops. ‘Not a bed to be had anywhere,’ they said. ‘Everything’s for Arras.’
I thought that was a bit much actually. I mean André was the Chevalier de Roland, the man who’d held the Dax Gate and opened the way to Spanish Flanders, they ought to have been chucking flowers and stuff, not leaving him to kip in the fields. I started to argue, but the boy touched my arm, said ‘Stefan’s at Arras,’ and turned away.
I didn’t give a stuff about Stefan, the one good thing I could see about Arras was him being stuck in it, but I sort of understood all the same. That night I looked at the campfires and listened to the men playing ‘En passant par la Lorraine’ on little tin pipes and got my first glimmering of the truth. We were using what felt like every man in France to take a single town in Artois, but there were Spanish and Imperial armies all over Europe, and us like a little tiny island in the middle. It was only a matter of time before they came again.
We’d fight them. We’d always said we would, and André was old enough now, just weeks off seventeen. The firelight was catching the side of his face as he sat watching the soldiers, and I remember noticing the little dark shadow that meant he needed a shave. He was ready.
We’d got a little respite while the Comtesse saw to his education and chose a regiment, but André obviously wanted it right now. We were getting breakfast next morning when trumpets started blaring and people came pouring out of the gates to line the road, so he just grabbed the bag of andouillettes and rushed to join in. Drums were rumbling in the distance, and beneath them the clatter of hundreds of hooves.
‘The Noble Volunteers,’ said a grizzled musketeer next to us. ‘The Immortals. Fancy themselves, don’t they?’
They did. They came prancing out with standards waving, not just those cavalry guidons but great flags with gold fringes and men specially to hold them. Their clothes were silk and velvet with so much gold in the fabric the sun flashed off it and hurt my eyes.
‘The Grand Écuyer,’ breathed a woman with a bosom so big it nearly blocked the road. ‘Ah, how handsome he is, how young and beautiful.’
She was looking at the one in front, a fair-haired boy with a petulant mouth and dimpled chin who only looked about my age.
‘The Marquis de Cinq-Mars,’ said André, with a mouth full of sausage. ‘Monsieur le Grand. He’s the King’s favourite, isn’t he, Monsieur?’
‘Favourite?’ said the musketeer, and spat. ‘That’s one way of putting it.’
André looked confused. I was shocked myself actually, I mean I knew that stuff went on, but you don’t expect it of the King when it’s against the Church. I wondered what the other nobles thought about Cinq-Mars, and noticed a young one right behind who looked like he wanted to kill him. He was beak-nosed and nothing like as handsome, but held himself like the most important man in the world.
‘D’Enghien!’ cried the crowd as he passed. ‘D’Enghien!’
André took another sausage, saw a pikeman watching him enviously and gave him half. ‘The Duc d’Enghien,’ he said, like I was deaf. ‘Everyone’s going to bloody be there, and all we can do is watch.’
I thought that was just as well. I don’t mean I knew what was coming, I never thought Cinq-Mars or d’Enghien would mean more to us than they did right then, but I already knew André wasn’t ready to take his place among them. He’d got the birth, he’d be Comte de Vallon when his uncle died, but you’d never have known it to look at him. His clothes were shabby, his manners rough, his voice had almost as much Picardie in it as my own. I’d done that myself, of course, I’d trained him to pass as a peasant in order to survive, but watching him mixing with the crowd, calling a musketeer ‘Monsieur’ and sharing our andouillettes with a broken-nosed pikeman, I wondered if I’d maybe overdone it. When the rest of the army came out and I saw him blowing kisses to a camp prostitute I was bloody certain of it.
I told myself the Comtesse would put him right, she’d undo what I’d done and teach him the way a gentleman ought to be. I didn’t think it would matter for the moment, it was just a bit embarrassing, that’s all.
It never occurred to me that it was dangerous. I never even thought of that till the third day, and by then it was already too late.
Bernadette Fournier
From her interviews with the Abbé Fleuriot, 1669
How trusting you are. You do not know me, yet appear sure you can believe everything I say. You seem as innocent as Jacques Gilbert.
Perhaps that is why I am willing to tell you my story. Perhaps in truth it will give me pleasure, for I like to remember the summer of 1640 when I was sixteen years old and as beautiful as your most forbidden dreams and as foolish as a mouse with no head. The war? No, Monsieur, I cared nothing for it. I was in Paris, and to us the war meant only higher taxes, that is all. I worked hard for my bread in those days, for I was the ‘girl’ at Le Pomme d’Or, and though there was also a ‘boy’ for the heavy work, it was I who cleaned the pots and pans and swept the hearth and made the beds, it was I who served the gentlemen who came.
It was not a bad life, for I had a kind master and a little bed all to myself beneath the rafters. It is true that sometimes gentlemen would find their way there, and sometimes I fought them off, and once or twice I could not, and once I did not choose to, for he was young and handsome and gave me a silver écu for myself when he went away. It is true also that the house was the property of Monsieur’s wife, an ugly woman with an enormous goitre who sometimes beat me so hard I dreamed of running to my aunt who kept a house in Compiègne. Yet my life had comfort enough and I had even a friend in the little cat that kept the rats from the horses’ feed. At nights I took her to my own bed, where she would knead me with her claws and make deep rumbling noises that would have been a wonder for twice as much cat as she was. No, she had no name, she was a cat, that is all. So small a thing to change the future of France.
That there was danger in the house I did not think. There were politics, yes, but this was Paris, there were always plots, and still the Cardinal Richelieu kept his head on his shoulders and life went on. I knew only that Madame had a patron, a great lord called Fontrailles, who had lately taken to using our back room for secret meetings with his friends. It is true they spoke in front of me, for I was only the girl and of no more account than the cat, but I learned nothing from them beyond such names as seemed to be in code. They spoke of a ‘Monsieur’ as anyone talks of their master, and sometimes of a nameless ‘M. le Comte’, and sometimes of a man so important he was only ‘le grand Monsieur’.
Some of these gentlemen came so often as to become familiar. No one could mistake M. Fontrailles for reasons you will understand, but sometimes there came also a shy young man of wispy beard and nervous manners, who wore many rings on his fingers and seemed constantly to count them lest one be stolen away. Sometimes there came a languid army officer with thin moustache and cold eyes, who yawned a great deal and wafted his handkerchief as if to disperse a sme
ll. But the one I liked least was a thick-necked fair man with odd eyes who strutted like a cockerel and kept his hand on his rapier as proof of his very manliness. The others spoke of him as a great swordsman, and gave him the name Bouchard.
They were there this day, Monsieur, everything as usual, but M. Fontrailles himself did not arrive and the gentlemen were most put out at the delay. I thought their concern due to a guest among them, a little dark man with a sharp beard who spoke not a word in my presence but was treated by the others with deference and seemed much annoyed by the absence of M. Fontrailles. Monsieur made excuses, he emptied the public room for them and offered wine for no charge, but it was his evening at the Guild and he could not stay longer.
‘You must serve them, Bernadette,’ he said at last. ‘They seem well behaved and I am sure M. Fontrailles will not be long.’
So I remained alone and I served them, and so the damage was done, that day at the end of July when André de Roland came to Paris.
Jacques Gilbert
It was done anyway. We stopped at an inn outside Chantilly, and that’s where it really began, right there.
The grumpy stablehand was busy with a load of soldiers’ horses, so we rubbed down our own and gave them oats from our baggage. I didn’t want anyone else looking after Tonnerre anyway, and it was good for André to bond with his new horse. I knew he still missed Tempête, but he was doing his best with the colt, he’d called him Héros and was using the name every minute, murmuring to him and fondling his ears.
The stablehand watched them and started to look a bit less pissed off.
‘Wouldn’t leave them there, if I were you,’ he said. ‘The army are commandeering everything for Arras. Stick them behind those officers’ horses, no one’ll touch those.’
André looked appalled at the idea of soldiers stealing, but we did it anyway and slipped the man a couple of sous for the tip. He looked down at the money, then sideways at the elegant dress swords on our belts, then up at the rest of us.