William Marshal Guardian of England- The Complete Series

by Richard Woodman

  In the meanwhile William, with the greater part of the war-host marched east and severed the Paris road, then turned west and approached the embattled city. However, as he had feared, word of the turning movement had reached Philippe who had thrown-up the siege and was in full and disorganised retreat to the south-east as fast as horse and legs could carry him and his men.

  Nevertheless, if Richard had failed to nail his enemy, he was in high good spirits when he met William and the bulk of the Angevin army as it neared Verneuil and encountered the scattered remnants of the Capetians.

  ‘Well, the fox has escaped, but we shall catch him next time,’ Richard said cheerfully but William was disappointed. A quick and conclusive victory was surely essential, but Richard seemed to glory in a perpetual struggle and William realised that conflict was meat-and-drink to him, a conclusion confirmed in the following days.

  After a triumphal entry into Verneuil when Richard ordered William to ride alongside him to the ringing cheers of the citizens, and Richard having dismounted and symbolically kissed as many of the garrison as were close-by, the King gave his orders for a further advance. The swift Angevin victory had persuaded many of the hesitant Barons to throw in their lot with Richard and the King’s war-host grew in size. Unfortunately, before they left Verneuil, news reached them that although Count John’s chevauchée had been equally successful in retaking Evreux, its accomplishment was already notorious.

  ‘He seeks to beat me at my own game, damn him,’ Richard remarked to his assembled Barons. His face darkened as he read the despatch borne to Verneuil by one of John’s knights who was clearly an informant for the King. ‘And in so doing brings my cause into disrepute.’ He flung the message aside.

  ‘How so, my Liege?’ someone asked.

  ‘It seems, my Lords,’ Richard said in clipped and furious tones, ‘that my brother approached Evreux with every appearance of amity and that the garrison, unacquainted with his reconciliation in our cause at Lisieux, and thinking that he arrived with reinforcements welcomed him and restored him to his place at the head of their board as they sat down to their meat. As they enjoyed their wine and discourse, my brother had his own knights rise and decapitate the very men he himself had commanded in Philippe’s name no more than a month since,’ Richard concluded with an air of disgust.

  The pronouncement was met with a silence. No-one there was unaware that Richard had employed such methods himself, though only when he deemed the utter destruction of the enemy was – in his eyes, politic, and rarely by such a deceit. He had exercised restraint at Nottingham, and it had paid off, but John’s conduct at Evreux was judged infamous not only by the treachery he employed in heartlessly killing men with whom he had broken bread a fortnight earlier, but that he then had had their severed heads paraded on poles and lances and paraded them through the streets.

  ‘This will damage our cause,’ growled Richard. ‘From the heart of such a man no good can come.’

  To assuage his anger and with an energy reminiscent of his father, Henry Curtmantle, Richard recalled John to his standard and again divided his forces. One column drove east to retake the castle at Montmirail which guarded the border of Angevin Maine, while Richard hurled his main body further south, towards Le Mans. The city swiftly capitulated without resistance, augmenting the King’s war-chest with twenty thousand marks as a proof of their repudiation of loyalty to Philippe. William, who rode with Richard, led the host into Tours as it passed into Touraine and, in a swift and brilliant chevauchée retook the castle of Loches in an assault that lasted a mere three hours.

  Such a swift return of Touraine to the Angevins drew down the might of French chivalry and Richard, secure in his mind that King Sancho of Navarre had crossed the Pyrenees and therefore covered Avquitaine, next turned north to meet Philippe on the borders of Angevin Maine and the Capetian Orléannais.

  ‘We have Philippe by his bollocks now,’ Richard remarked genially one evening in early July, indicating the French heralds that stood awkwardly beside their horses as Richard greeted William coming in from his rounds of the entrenched encampment at Vendôme. Drawing William into his pavilion the King ordered wine and explained.

  ‘Philippe is quartered at Fréteval and sends his heralds to issue challenges on behalf of his chief knights. What say you and I take them up, eh? When we have routed them, Philippe will be bound to submit for I would deliver him over to death or take him alive.’

  ‘And if you failed, my Lord King?’ William cautioned.

  Richard sighed. ‘You are right, though ’twould have been fine sport, eh? We shall assault them in a general mêlée tomorrow but I shall send back that I will meet him in combat at the head of his host.’ William nodded his agreement. ‘Send them back with such a message then, Marshal.’

  The following morning the Angevin camp was astir early, broke its fast and was marching towards Fréteval before the sun had burnt the dew off the grass. Word of its coming had preceded it but the French forces, rather than drawing up their array, was in full and disorderly retreat. The Angevin war-host, consisting of two bodies, the main force under Richard, and the reserve under William, deployed for the attack.

  As they did so Richard himself rode back to William, drawing up his magnificent destrier, sword in hand. ‘Do you hold you men in check, Marshal. I shall press the pursuit, but for fear that the fox Philippe had prepared a grand ambush or that my own division get out of hand in the chase, I would have you follow in support!’ He tugged his charger’s head round, then threw back over his shoulder, ‘Be sure to restrain your men!’ Then he was gone.

  Richard urged his mounted troops - knights, sergeants-at-arms and routiers – to the charge, covered by archers and backed-up by foot-soldiers with their murderous knives. William slowed his own advance until, just before dusk, word came back that Richard had caught-up with what was left of Philippe’s shaky rear-guard.

  As Richard’s division pressed the remnants of the Capetian host to a rout, William’s men followed, advancing over the wreckage of men and horses slaughtered by the fury of Richard’s onslaught. The reek of blood was everywhere, causing the horses to champ on their bits, while the cries of the dying and wounded was piteous enough to invite their off-hand butchery by the passing men of William’s reserve as it moved along the line of march.

  From time-to-time a little group wearing Angevin colours pinned-down or held a French nobleman, captured for ransom. Others stripped dead destriers or looted and despatched dying knights.

  ‘By God, they fall away like pigeons before the hawk,’ John de Earley remarked incredulously as William’s reserve rode over the scene of wholesale slaughter. Richard turned back at midnight, it having become apparent that Philippe had deserted his army and escaped, a circumstance that had almost immediately caused a collapse in morale among his followers. When, about midnight, Richard rode back to Fréteval having lost the French King in the pursuit, he was furious at having been deceived.

  ‘A bastard of a Brabantine mercenary set me on the wrong road and the fox escaped by another,’ he roared, greeting William at a tavern in the town around which the victors billeted themselves for the night.

  Bawling for wine and meat, Richard received the reports from his senior Barons. Despite the escape of the King’s chief quarry, the loot and booty were immense; apart from the flower of French chivalry and their chargers, the Angevins had taken treasure, tents, silken banners, palfreys, roncins, arms and supplies, all of which could either be turned into money or subsumed into the Angevin army. Even Philippe’s seal and his private papers had fallen into Richard’s hands, revealing those who, with Count John, had betrayed him.

  Loud were the boasts and claims of prowess made by the Barons and knights who had served in Richard’s force, most of whom guyed those in William’s whose part in the battle had been merely supportive.

  At one point this became intolerable, for one knight asked ‘where were you?’ and provoked a general roar upbraiding William’s men w
ith cowardice. In the highly charged and intoxicated atmosphere, swords were drawn, whereupon Richard stood and bellowed for silence.

  ‘I shall not have this day’s work further spoiled!’ he thundered. ‘The escape of the bastard Capetian is enough. The Marshal and his gentlemen did as they had been bid and obeyed my orders. They are beyond reproach. Suppose that Philippe’s retreat had been but a ruse and he had turned about and fallen upon our flank, or rear. What would many of you have done when down on your knees stripping the harness off a dead chevalier, eh? Whoever has a good rear-guard need fear no enemy. Come Marshal, take wine with me for I esteem thy skill in holding these blackguards in check that we might better haze the Capetian pigs!’

  ***

  But though victorious at Fréteval, the Angevin forces were not left to enjoy the fruits of their triumph, nor was Richard allowed to bag the fox.

  Having seen Richard turn away to the northward after the retaking of Loches, the Barons of Aquitaine had sought to further their own interests, calculating that Richard and Philippe would ruin or exhaust themselves in their private, dynastic war while King Sancho would venture no further north than the line of the River Adour. But what amounted to a rebellion in Aquitaine was more than Richard could stomach; of all the lands to which Richard laid claim, Aquitaine was his, he felt, by birth-right of his mother. Once again his army reversed its line of march, striking deep into the Duchy, his forces deployed hither and yon, in sieges and chevauchées in which his senior knights, William among them, wrought havoc. But such warfare, whilst it had its impact upon the attacked and in its successes refilled the war-chest of the attackers, could ultimately only have one result, the inevitable if slow depletion of the victor’s resources and man-power. Besides a gradual leeching of treasure, disease, wounds, desertion and death, the sight of two Christian Kings ravaging the fair lands of Christendom excited the ecclesiastical authorities to combine and a truce was arranged by the churchmen on both sides.

  Although unratified by King Richard and not destined to last, he acquiesced, the breathing space allowing him to replenish his coffers. Sending to England for men and money the Angevins sat down and awaited the next move.

  ‘Read me this,’ William asked De Earley one day in September, handing his friend a letter from the Lady Isabelle. William’s illiteracy troubled him, but the faithful De Earley had proved the soul of discretion and read of the doings of William’s growing sons, to which William listened with pleasure. The letter ended, however, on a less happy note, for Isabelle kept her husband informed of not merely the finances of his estates, and the reports of his seneschals, castellans and stewards, but of the state of things in England.

  ‘ “Know you, therefore, husband”,’ De Earley read in his halting manner which nevertheless impressed his master, ‘ “that the City of London hath been plagued by a fellow of rude manners who hath set himself up as the King of the Poor. One William FitzOsbert hath lately been among those complaining of the taxes being levied in support of Our Lord King, Richard, and his desire to make war against King Philippe. He was raised up by the citizens who called him Longbeard and a rebellion was feared until he was betrayed and mewed himself in a church tower. This being set on fire he was driven out, taken and stabbed in the bowels. Not being killed thereby, he was dragged at a horse’s tail to the Tower where Walter FitzHubert tried and condemned him. Taken to West Smithfield he was hanged, whereupon the citizens who had revered him but allowed him to be taken, claimed him for a martyr. Coming so hard upon the taxes required for the King’s ransom, such additional moneys as are required for this war against Philippe are causing deep resentment throughout the Kingdom…’

  ‘My Lady is bold,’ remarked De Earley, concluding the letter some few moments later.

  ‘Destroy it,’ William ordered brusquely, nodding at the letter. He shook his head. The circumstances of Longbeard’s being burnt-out of a church reminded him of his own father’s escape when, seeking sanctuary in an abbey, his pursuers had sought to evict him by setting fire to the place. Afterwards, finding him charred, left him for dead. His father had come-to and walked several miles to safety, but his face had thereafter been a scarred mess, possessing only one eye. The hideous mask was a mark of John Marshal’s loyalty to the Empress Matilda, who had escaped while her body-guard had immolated himself in her name.

  William shuddered. There was in Longbeard’s death that other coincidence, a sudden and appealing martyrdom that, like the end of Henry, the Young King, enjoyed a brief and rapturous enthusiasm, reputedly working miracles among the credulous. William intensely disliked these ‘connections’ for they resurrected others, more personal. As the truce with Philippe broke down and William was sucked into a long and desultory war with periods of strenuous activity interspersed with short-lived respites, he also crossed back into England and spent time in his wife’s bed where, one night in October 1194, Isabelle unintentionally and uncharacteristically struck a raw nerve.

  Lightly touching the raised and granulated flesh of her husband’s naevus, she ran her finger over it. Neither made any comment, for their love-making had rendered them tired, but William could not sleep for thinking of the mark. His dead brother John had last spoken of it, he recalled. ‘Perhaps our mother was right regarding your marking,’ he had said, for the shape of the bloody birth-mark had reminded the Lady Sybil of the shape of Satan. Although others, Henry Curtmantle and his nurse Angharad ap Gwyn chief among them, dismissed this as nonsense, saying the mark more closely resembled a rampant red lion – the device William in due course adopted as his own – he could never quite let his mother’s fears go.

  Now, with Isabelle breathing softly in his arms, her glorious hair magically silvered by the light of a full moon that penetrated the imperfect shutters of her chamber, it seemed to haunt him. Somehow Henry Curtmantle’s assertion that it was a lion seemed now a specious deception, for he had, as Richard had reminded him, in full compact with the Devil’s brood, and rode at Richard’s side, for better or worse.

  Nor did it escape William in such a lonely moment of self-assessment as only a sleepless night can provide that he had grown a great dissembler and that while Richard trusted him for his military skills, he yet withheld the Earldom that William knew he had earned many times over. That this was because, despite everything odious about the Count of Mortain and Anjou, William remained punctilious in his loyalty to John for his Irish lands. From time-to-time Richard would guy him about it, making of something deeper an open jest, reminding William that, high though he stood in the King’s favour, his conduct at Winchester and several protestations since, had not yet wiped away William’s apparent defiance of King Richard.

  In this and subsequent visits in the spring of 1196 and the fall of the leaf two years later, William left Isabelle with child. However, although William enjoyed the prospect of his growing family and marvelled at the precocious skills of his older two boys in the tilt-yard, the chief purpose of his forays into England were to refill his coffers and oversee the administration of his estates. These lay largely in the able hands of Isabelle herself, assisted by the officers of William’s household, such as Nicholas Avenal and Master Joscelin, and provided him with a generous income.

  Elsewhere among the peasantry and mercantile classes the protracted war was bleeding England white. William agreed to take his dead brother’s bastard son John into his mesnie and supported Richard’s lifting of his father’s ban on tourneying in England, since that raised a number of new warriors with incomes to support their bearing of arms in Normandy. This was necessary for Richard, for all his skills, had failed to bag his fox and the wily Philippe still held the Norman Vexin which threatened the Richard’s ducal capital of Rouen where he held his Court..

  Here he was visited by the Papal Legate Pietro di Capua. Sent by Pope Celestine III to make peace between Richard and Philippe in order that they would combine and lead a forth crusade to recover Jerusalem for Christ, Pietro had preached peace and cited numerous brea
ches of faith by Richard, not the least that he held in captivity the Bishop of Beauvais, caught, fully armoured in the field, contrary to the accepted practice of the day.

  The King had – in the presence of his Barons - roared his defiance at the Legate.

  ‘Where, in the name of Almighty God, was Papal authority when I was in the Holy Land bleeding in the name of Christ blood while the Capetian ravaged my lands in defiance of the Papal interdiction on war against a Christian Prince on crusade, eh?’ he stormed. ‘Did the Holy Father excommunicate his friend the King of France? No, by the Rood, he did not! Neither did the Holy Father lift a single fat finger to ease my confinement in the hands of Austria or the Emperor! Now I am told that I ill-use a Bishop caught in rebellion!’ Richard was incandescent with a rage reminiscent to those who remembered them, of his father’s tempestuous furies.

  ‘By the Christ Legate, I swear I shall bite the bollocks off your fat body should you accuse me of bad faith. Go tell your Holy Master to…’ but the King got no further and seemed to choke upon his own words as he was assisted to his private chambers to recover.

  As a terrified Pietro hurried away, William was called by an equally frightened body-servant to Richard to attend the King.

  ‘My Lord, I fear for his life. He has discharged me and will see no-one. If he should have an apoplexy…’ the man left the sentence unfinished and William entered the darkened apartment to find the King on his knees, clenched fists before his face, his whole body shaking with rage.

  ‘Get out,’ Richard gasped, his breathing uneasy and barely able to speak, such was his anger.

  ‘My Liege…’ William said tentatively, advancing cautiously, for Richard was dangerous in such a mood. ‘The man has fled,’ he said, ‘fearing the loss of his balls…’