William Marshal: Guardian of England
The Complete Series
Richard Woodman
© Richard Woodman 2018
Richard Woodman has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
This omnibus edition first published in 2018 by Sharpe Books.
Table of Contents
THE KNIGHT BANNERET
THE KING’S KNIGHT
Guardian of the Realm
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THE KNIGHT BANNERET
BOOK ONE OF A TRILOGY WORK BASED UPON THE LIFE OF WILLIAM MARSHAL
Richard Woodman
© Richard Woodman 2018
Richard Woodman has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2018 by Sharpe Books.
J.P.G.
For love of chivalry.
Table of Contents
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO THE TRILOGY
CHAPTER ONE: THE IMP OF SATAN, 1146
CHAPTER TWO: THE ANARCHY 1147 - 1153
CHAPTER THREE: M’SIEUR GASTE-VIANDE 1154 - 1160
CHAPTER FOUR: LE COUP D’OEIL 1160 - 1165
CHAPTER FIVE: THE HOUSEHOLD KNIGHT 1165 - 1167
CHAPTER SIX: THE KNIGHT ERRANT 1168 - 1170
CHAPTER SEVEN: A KING’S MENTOR 1170 – 1173
CHAPTER EIGHT: WAR 1173 - 1174
CHAPTER NINE: A-TOURNEYING 1175 - 1178
CHAPTER TEN: THE FALL FROM GRACE 1179 - 1182
CHAPTER ELEVEN: AN END TO AMBITION 1182 – 1183
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO THE TRILOGY
William Marshal, or William the Marshal (1146 – 1219), is the first commoner in European history to have had a memoir of his life written; it was set down shortly after his death. What follows in these pages is the first of two books loosely based upon this and the several biographies that the discovery of the History of William Marshal (in 1861) subsequently inspired. It seems to me that William Marshal’s life had a well-defined formative period followed by an extraordinary maturity during which he retained his vigour into his seventies.
However, this is a work of the imagination not history, a fictional representation of the man behind the legend, intended to discover perhaps why, even to his contemporaries, William Marshal acquired the soubriquet ‘the Greatest Knight’. Although my story relies heavily on the principal incidents in William’s life, and, of course, many of the powerful characters who shared his lifetime, a number of the lesser players are my own invention, chief among these is Robert de Salignac. Such a presumption is necessary to develop a narrative that seeks a speculative answer to questions that remain open about William. What made him the man he was, coming as he did from a troubled childhood of parental repudiation – at least on the part of his father? How, in a brutal age, did he earn that peerless reputation among many of his contemporaries when the hands of some were firmly set against him? What made him serve five kings, not always with unblemished loyalty, and among whom was ‘Bad’ King John? Why is there a statue of him - a powerful magnate - in the Palace of Westminster suggesting he was an architect of English liberties?
Who knows for certain? All I can do is offer the reader what I consider a plausible enough evocation of a great Anglo-Norman, a self-made man who lived in an era when one’s descent mattered, the Church was all-powerful, when Heaven and Hell were very real and life hung by a thread; when Kings were anointed of God’s good Grace and called thereafter in the Almighty’s name – not Majesty in their own. Under the invigilation and spiritual jurisdiction of Holy Church, the politico-military system of his day was feudalism, a structure of apparent simplicity until dynastic ambitions, treacheries and sexual confusions made it a horror, riven by the lust for power, ruthless ambition, disloyalties, repudiations, murders and a complete disregard for those at the bottom of the social pile. It was an era when most women were mere pawns and the vast majority of people were held in the thrall of serfdom. Without land a man was nothing and while William was not intellectual or over-gifted with political nous, he succeeded – often against the odds and despite falling from grace on more than one occasion – in establishing himself and his family as a major force in the realm. As is often the case from such origins his dynasty did not last long.
*
Beyond the fact that William Marshal’s life coincided with the first tentative stirrings of what would much later mature into our form of democracy, in that he lived at the time of Magna Carta, it was also contemporaneous with what would develop into medieval chivalry and the full flowering of heraldic symbolism. The tournaments mentioned herein were not the colourful jousts in the lists of a later era, but full-blown war-games played over vast tracts of border lands that one historian compares with today’s Formula One racing circuit. The analogy is apt enough; death by the principals was rare because fortunes could be made from the ransom of captives; there was a value attached to the war-horses known as destriers and their equipage; prestige was accrued from displays of valour and that cherished attribute, ‘prowess’. By such means even a relative nobody - and in early medieval terms William was not much more – might rise as William did to an Earldom and a surrogate King as Regent of England.
Moreover, of course, England’s fate was indissolubly linked with that of France to whose Kings the Kings of England owed allegiance as Dukes of Aquitaine and the lords of other duchies and counties of western France that made up the great Angevin Empire. Such an unbalanced polity was bound to be governed chiefly by the quarrels of the handful of powerful men, and at least one woman, who vied for supremacy therein.
Though born in England, William Marshal was thus part of this feudal Anglo-Norman Ascendancy imposed a century earlier upon his own conquered territory by his namesake, King William I – the Conqueror. This upper stratum of the social order, in which his father was of minor importance and his mother rather better born, spoke Norman-French. With this in mind I have occasionally used words familiar to him without italicising them; destrier is one example, mesnie (the knights attached to a great nobleman’s household) another. As for knighthood and chivalry, the former was a far less socially elevating affair then than later. It conferred the acceptance of a squire or un-dubbed fighting gentleman (and ‘gentleman’ derives from this period, though few were characterised by gentleness) as a competent warrior by his peers. Hence, off stage in these pages, it is William who ‘knights’ his vastly social superior, the ‘Young King’ Henry. The ceremony, such as it was, consisted of a girding on of a sword and belt, dubbing actually being a blow to the shoulder with the fist of he who bestowed the honour. As for chivalry, this too was embryonic, developing as part of the emerging ritual and eventual refinement of the tournament (as a later, limited spectator sport confined to lists, lists in William’s day being the meeting points in the wider-ranging tourney), and an important aid to identification on the battlefield. Even in full-blown war capture and ransom rather than death was the easy fate of a cornered and outnumbered baron, though the same could not be said for their common soldiery. Moreover, ‘chivalry’ (a word deriving from horsemanship) had few of the connotations we attach to it today.
Like notions of ‘honour’ – usually a peevishly dangerous self-esteem – a knight of William’s time was never the ‘parfait gentle knight’ that Chaucer attempted to peddle. He might pray but he readily killed, maimed and murdered in his or his overlord’s name. It was in such dutiful conduct that ‘loyalty’ was to be found and William’s story must be read in this light.
Because Angevin England and Capetian France were so intertwined and the use of the same names was so common, I have occasionally resorted to the French spelling of a name for a person originating in what we now call France – Guillaume for the Lord of Tancarville, for example – to differentiate from their English cousins. The greatest difficulty arises in making the distinction between the ‘Old’ King Henry (Henry II, nicknamed ‘Curtmantle’) and his heir who was crowned within his father’s reign as was then the fashion, and generally known as the ‘Young King’. The title Prince of Wales had not then been coined and I hope that the reader is spared confusion by the somewhat repetitious use of ‘Old’ and ‘Young’. Furthermore, to emphasise the contemporary importance – not to say dominance - of feudal precedence, I have capitalised all titles and ranks. Although the English Kings of this era are best known to history as early Plantagenets, their contemporaries referred to them as of the House of Anjou.
Finally, though he would have been bound to an overlord, a Knight Banneret bore his own ‘device’ – an early form of coat of arms – and employed his own household knights in his mesnie. Few were unlanded, as was William during the years covered by this tale (1146 – 1183).
*
One of the great unanswered questions about William Marshal’s life is what happened to him in the Holy Land and in the second of this trilogy, The King’s Knight, I take a slightly different view to several of his modern biographers who lay understandable emphasis on some sort of spiritual awakening. On his return to the Court of Henry II in 1186 we certainly see a different William. He was, by medieval standards, approaching old age and his mission to Jerusalem was an obligation contracted at the death-bed of his patron, liege-lord and friend, the so-called ‘Young King’. I suggest, however, that the change in William was more complex than a mere morbid contemplation of mortality, though that undoubtedly played its part. Although I do not go into details, which lie in the margins of my tale, the consequences of this transformation are played out in this second book.
It is in the period covered by the third book, Guardian of the Realm, that it seems to me that William more justifiably established a name for greatness in the sense history understands and this too marks a shift in his values. He had the good fortune to live a long life and his political outlook changed with the years. Perhaps he could see that those to whom he left his fortune might not sustain it but, whatever his motives, it is from these perceived alterations in his conduct that the process of imaginative recreation has derived.
CHAPTER ONE: THE IMP OF SATAN, 1146
‘What is wrong?’
The Lady Sybil raised her head from the pillow. Her brow was still gleaming with perspiration, curls of her dark hair stuck to her pallid skin and her fine brown eyes were sunk in sockets dark with sleeplessness and fatigue. She stared at the lying-in woman at the end of the bed who was startled at the vehemence of the question.
The lying-in woman had assumed her charge had fallen asleep; indeed but a moment before she had been asleep, her eyes closed and her breast rising and falling regularly, exhausted with the business of giving-birth. She had been relieved that the baby had been a boy and had cried for a few moments as the lying-in woman wrapped the infant in a linen cloth. Then the child had fallen silent and in that briefly blissful moment the lady had closed her own eyes.
‘What is wrong?’ her Ladyship asked again, her voice strained with tiredness but taut with a sudden expectation of obedient answer.
The lying-in woman seemed caught-out and flustered. Her Ladyship must have sensed all was not well, for instead of bending to place the boy in the prepared cot, the lying-in-woman had been peeling back the swaddling cloth to show the mark to the Lady’s handmaid. Perhaps the sound of the sharply indrawn breath of the maid had woken her, but whatever had revived her did not matter now. She was awake and aware of something amiss.
‘Why, ’tis nothing my Lady,’ the lying-in woman temporised foolishly, provoking a second indrawn breath, this time from the maid who anticipated her mistress’s reaction.
It came quickly, with a flash of fire from the pain-ringed eyes. ‘Something cannot be nothing,’ her Ladyship snapped, betraying, besides her frustration at being brooked, the keenness of her intelligence.
‘ ’Tis but a little mark, Madam,’ put in the lady’s handmaid with a clumsy attempt at mediation.
‘Mark! What mark! Show me!’ The Lady Sybil was struggling to sit up. ‘Show me…’ She was gasping for air and perspiring again from the effort. ‘I shall…not tell you…again,’ she managed. The lying-in woman came nervously forward, bent over the bed and showed the boy-child’s exposed right shoulder. A red naevus of raised and granular tissue disfigured the perfection of the soft pink skin just beside the shoulder-blade.
‘ ’Tis nothing, my Lady, but a birth-mark g…given by God to…’ she began, but was cut short.
‘Holy Christ!’ exclaimed the Lady Sybil, her pale features drawn into a rictus of horror. ‘ ’Tis no mark of God! ’Tis that of the Devil!’ She crossed herself and, waving the child away fell back on her pillow. ‘Look to it, confound you, do you not see it has the very form of Satan, tail and all!’
The lying-in woman, her face a mixture of fear and credulity, turned to the maid for help. The maid motioned her aside and came forward to her mistress who was now wracked with deep and tearless sobs of anger and despair.
‘My Lady, ’tis not so, not so at all. I do not see the Devil, my lady, but,’ and here she hesitated for a moment, casting about for some placatory image before hurrying on. ‘I see nothing more than the shape of a noble lion.’ She tried a smile as she laid a tentative hand upon the arm of the Lady Sybil.
Her Ladyship did not open her eyes but withdrew her arm sharply. ‘Do not presume to console me Angharad! When did you ever know the shape of a noble lion? You have beguiled me in the past with your faerie notions. Understand the Devil comes in disguises, even that of a lion, to deceive eyes that cannot see the truth…’
‘Madam, it is a fancy… your condition and long labour…’
The Lady Sybil opened her eyes and withered Angharad with a baleful stare. ‘You have not had the child within you these nine months, girl! You know not of what you speak.’ Then she lowered her voice and, speaking more calmly, terminated the horrid intimacy of the incident. ‘I know the Devil’s work when I see it. Go tell my lord that he has a son who bears an image of Satan’.
‘Madam…’ the handmaid Angharad drew back uncertainly, exchanging glances with the now trembling lying-in woman.
‘Go!’ The Lady Sybil had closed her eyes again and lay back upon the damp pillow.
‘Wait here,’ the maid Angharad ap Gwyn commanded the lying-in woman and, opening the door, ran from the chamber.
Shoving aside the waiting priest she descended the ladder to the bottom of the wooden tower, emerging into the great hall of the motte-and-bailey castle of Hamstead Marshal, seat of John, the King’s Marshal and his wife, Sybil of Salisbury. Here Angharad found her master sitting at a trestle-table with his steward, Geoffrey du Bois, standing alongside him, a glass of wine and an open book before him. Further down the hall, beside a fire in a brazier, two men half-clad in mail sat on a low bench; one desultorily sharpened a long and wicked knife, the other fondled the soft ears of a boar-hound.
Angharad’s entry drew all eyes and the man all called ‘the Marshal’ rose expectantly to his feet, followed by the three other men in the hall. The boar-hound also stood with a low growl. Angharad met her master’s one eye and felt – as she always did – the sharp, intuitive tug of disgust and pity for the severely disfigured face th
at looked at her expectantly.
‘Well?’
‘My Lord, will you come? Her Ladyship…’
‘Is it born?’
‘Aye, my lord…’
‘Well, is it a boy?’
‘Aye, my lord…’
‘Jesu Christ be praised,’ the Marshall said piously, crossing himself before throwing out a joyous laugh. ‘I knew it!’ Then he assumed a serious mien, asking, ‘is the priest here?’
‘Aye, my lord he waits, but her Ladyship wishes you first to come…’
‘Is something amiss?’ the Marshal asked, perceiving for the first time that the maid was flustered and she wore an anxious expression. Her silence and downward glance told their own story. ‘By the bones of Christ,’ the Marshal muttered, drawing his right hand down over the scar-tissue of his face and moving towards the tower stairs with such abruptness that he upset the upholstered stool upon which he had been sitting. As he disappeared his steward bent and restored the stool to its upright position and looked at the half-armed men.
‘What means this?’ the younger asked.
‘ ’Tis a birth, and a birth among the great is always to be fossicked over until all is known,’ the man who had been fondling the hound remarked, reseating himself. ‘Perhaps her Ladyship has not come well through it’.
‘That would go very ill with the master,’ Geoffrey du Bois muttered half to himself before they all fell silent, listening for any noises from above.
The Marshal entered his wife’s chamber and, pushing the insistent priest back into the tiny ante-chamber, closed the oak door behind him and took in the scene before him. The chamber was the only room in the castle finished to John Marshal’s satisfaction. Besides the two iron-bound chests, the spread furs and an arras of strange working, it was dominated by a French bed.
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