William Marshal Guardian of England- The Complete Series

by Richard Woodman

  ‘But she is no more than a child!’ exclaimed FitzPeter, ‘ of what? Ten or twelve years of age?’

  ‘For the love of God, is this lechery or diplomacy?’ asked FitzWalter.

  ‘If it is true it is trouble, for I suspect the diplomacy is all Philippe’s’ added William. ‘The girl has been promised to Hugh de Lusignan and that hornet’s nest will not take the matter without reaction.’

  ‘Which is exactly what Philippe wants,’ snapped FitzWalter.

  ‘Should they marry,’ said William with an air of resignation, ‘we shall have been entrapped.’

  And upon William’s opinion the four men remaining in the Council chamber dispersed with an air of something like despair.

  ***

  William looked up at the young man before him in his lodgings in London. All about him were preparations for departure: packed chests of arms, clothing and money littered the inn-room and from the yard below came the shouts of William’s retinue and retainers, the clatter of movement and the quiet snickering of horses, palfreys and roncins, all making ready for the journey west. In the corner of the room, at a small table sat William’s confidential clerk, one Thomas; he was busy with pen and ink, possessed of an air of urgency. About the table, dressed in travelling clothes, their cloaks about their shoulders as if for imminent departure, sat the senior knights of William’s mesnie: William Waleran, Geoffrey FitzRobert, the young John Marshal and the ever-present John de Earley. All now regarded the latest recruit to their number, Jordan de Sauqueville.

  William smiled up at him. The younger man was unfamiliar with England and made no secret of his desire to return to Normandy whither William was sending him with his blessing.

  ‘You will proceed first to Longueville and then Meleurs. Ensure they are brought forward into a state of preparedness for war. I would this were accomplished with some discretion and a lack of show, but whatsoever of the defences need attention, put it in hand. Then you should repair to Arques, a place you know well and a place the significance you know well of too, for it stands guard over the valley of the Béthune and thus marks the frontier of my Norman lands.’ William spelt out the responsibility he was laying upon the young Norman knight, emphasising the personal importance of the castle of Arques to his Lord’s fortune.

  ‘I understand, my Lord,’ De Sauqueville acknowledged.

  ‘Have you the commission ready?’ William asked of his clerk and Thomas rose, bringing the document along with wax and candle. William fished for the small and modest seal he had had made when first a knight banneret and which he clung to out of sentimentality and superstition, fearing that to have a new and ostentatious seal bearing his title as Earl, might provoke fate and the King too much. Thomas dripped the hot wax and William pressed the seal into it, giving the sealed document to De Sauqueville.

  ‘Here is your authority, Sieur Jordan. God go with you,’ he said as his knights mumbled agreement and all there crossed themselves. De Sauqueville made his obeisance and left the room.

  When he had gone William addressed the remaining knights. ‘Well, messieurs, to Striguil. Then Pembroke and Leinster.’

  They rose as one and clattered down into the inn-yard as Thomas supervised the last of the chests secured to the pack-horses. The mesnie mounted up, leaving Thomas to settle affairs with the landlord, and led by De Earley they took the road to the west, towards the Welsh March and, beyond the Western Sea, Ireland.

  ***

  ‘Are you happy, husband?’ Isabelle asked as they walked, hand-in-hand through the woods above the Wye in a rare moment of marital peace.

  William blew his cheeks out and, after a moment replied. ‘It is not a question I feel I can ask myself, Isabelle. My life has too much of the uncertain in it to qualify for happiness, methinks. How is it with you?’

  She looked up at him. ‘I could have married worse,’ she said, her green eyes sparkling.

  Looking down at her upturned face, William stopped and said, ‘I think that I am happy now.’ They kissed, then continued their walk. He was thinking of his mother and her own husband, John, and the Marshal’s awful, scarred visage. For the first time in his life he wondered if the Lady Sybil had even been happy. Squeezing Isabelle’s hand he added, ‘yes, I am truly happy now.’

  Isabelle laughed. ‘And I am pleased we have my father’s lands back. There will be something better for the boys than empty lives in fear of the caprice of this dreadful King.’

  ‘Have a care what you say about John, my Lady,’ William growled. ‘Whatever you think of him, think it privily and remember that though you consider the lands I now hold as having been your father’s, he held them from Henry and, just as Henry had taken them back, the son can do the same again.’

  ‘I know. But what about the lands in Ireland? The King would have trouble wresting them from you should you decide to hold them…’

  ‘What? In defiance of him?’ William asked with mild astonishment.

  ‘Yes, should it become necessary,’ Isabelle retorted quickly.

  ‘I forget sometimes that you are Strongbow’s daughter,’ he chuckled.

  ‘And that my mother was Aoife, daughter of Dermot MacMurrough, King of Leinster,’ she added sharply, stepping slightly aside, so that, hands clasped, their arms swung between them.

  ‘Well, my love, we shall shortly see what effect the name of the daughter of King Dermot has upon the unruly inhabitants of Leinster,’ William bantered, ‘for I would that you accompany me thither when I go thence.’

  ‘I had no intention of allowing you to go without me,’ Isabelle riposted with a smile.

  William laughed. ‘I knew that,’ he said, then lowered his voice and drew her close to his side ‘but to a more serious matter, Isabelle. If, as you surmise, life under John becomes intolerable, a retreat into Leinster may become indispensible. Since neither you nor I can stay there for long until at least such a moment occurs, whom do you think we should appoint our seneschal?’

  ‘Geoffrey FitzRobert, William,’ Isabelle replied without a moment’s hesitation. ‘He has been loyal to you and I think he would find my half-sister Basilia warmed his bed to a nicety.’

  ‘God’s blood, Isabelle, you plot like the most seasoned courtier!’ William said admiringly. ‘But it is a good and expedient notion; would the lady oblige?’

  Isabelle laughed ironically. ‘A lord’s male bastards can usually find some useful matter with which to occupy their lives. Their female equivalents,’ she explained, ‘find such things less easy. Besides, she lies in your gift.’

  ‘Neither fact had ever occurred to me,’ William said ruminatively.

  ‘No,’ said Isabelle with more than a hint of sarcasm, ‘more’s the pity such thoughts rarely occupy a man’s mind.’

  ‘Isabelle, you chide me!’

  ‘Aye my Lord, I most certainly do.’

  ‘Well then, it shall be so, if Geoffrey will have her.’

  ‘Huh, she is not ill-looking. He would be a fool to turn her away.’

  ***

  ‘I am at a loss to know whether this land is blessed or cursed,’ William remarked as he sat his horse and looked down upon the shallow valley below him. His horse chinked at its bit and snorted its agreement.

  Beside him Geoffrey FitzRobert grunted agreement.

  ‘Methinks we are still at sea,’ William grumbled on as the drenching rain fell unremittingly, reminding those with him of the fearfully stormy passage they had endured in crossing from Pembroke to Waterford.

  The voyage had seemed interminable. Several of the horses had fallen and broken their legs, only to be killed of necessity thereafter. One of their men-at-arms had been washed overboard one dark night and all but the seamen and mariners had been prostrated by sea-sickness. The cold and the damp had affected William’s people too, and several had remarked on the contrast with a storm in the Mediterranean, which those who had been to Outremer knew better.

  With no experience of warmer seas, the master of the chartered ship in
which William had embarked had explained that it was one thing to cross the Channel between Normandy and England where a westerly wind blew upon the beam of one’s ship, and thus aided its passage. A voyage from Wales to Ireland was, the fellow said, a very different matter, for the wind, prevailing as it was from the west, was a headwind, necessitating delays and a prolonged journey as they struggled to windward, casting first this way, and then that, hoping for a slight shift to give them an advantage. In fact, the ship-master had declared, with a good deal of satisfaction that William and his knights found hard to comprehend, they had done well to fetch Waterford!

  ‘My Lord,’ the man had almost laughed in William’s face at one stage in the passage, when William had enquired how long the agony of vomiting upon an empty belly would go on and when they might expect to find some shelter from the land, ‘If your Lordship chooses to venture afloat in the season of the spring gales, I fear you cannot escape such weather. However, I vow you will forget this discomfort soon. They say that upon putting to sea, you first fear dying but after a few days you long for it. Pity the poor mariner who must endure it for his life-long.’

  ‘I fear that I am fast approaching that second state of mind, Master,’ a pallid William had gulped, shouting the words above the shriek of the wind in the rigging supporting the vessel’s solitary mast. Only a shred of sail appeared to be exposed from the heavy yard that crossed it, scare enough, in William’s opinion, to wipe his arse upon. He had straightened up from the lee rail; at least they had all learned to spew downwind. ‘Can you not ease my concerns as to how long we must yet tolerate this great upheaval?’

  The ship-master had shrugged. ‘My Lord, out here we are in the hands of God!’

  William had drawn his cloak about him and hunkered down in the shelter of the bulwarks, vowing to thank God for all his mercies if they ever reached land again.

  And now, a week after landing, this valley suddenly spoke to his soul. He had no idea why this green place beckoned with such a fierce compulsion, but it did and he could no more deny it than he could deny the birth-mark on his shoulder. As he sat hunched upon his palfrey a great curtain of rain swept across the landscape to suddenly ease and then cease. Through the dark and scudding clouds a sudden shaft of sunlight thrust itself, moving across an extended flood-plain, to set a sparkle upon a distant river before gradually fading. Then the rain began to fall again. Touched by superstition as he was, William realised that he must make good his vow and here seemed as good a place as any. If he had founded the religious house at Cartmel to intercede for the soul of his father, there must be yet one more, established here, on this spot, to thank God not only for his deliverance from the perils of the sea, but for his Earldom. And where better than here, where the numinous had suddenly over-whelmed him? Surely, if he endowed a religious house here, Almighty God would grant him security in the tenure of his great possessions? To act upon the impulse of faith was a good and knightly thing to do, he felt sure. And if it were to be a bulwark against the malice of King John, had he not given more years than most to the faithful service of the House of Anjou? He almost sensed old Nicholas de Sarum telling him so, whispering through the hissing of the downpour and the distance of the years.

  He was growing used to the voices of ghosts these days; past fifty summers. life could not hold out many more years to him and it was seemly that here he might leave some mark of his true devotion. William had grown a fondness for the Wales of his old nurse, Angharad ap Gwyn, which he had come into as his just inheritance through Isabelle. There was something strangely compelling about these Celtic lands that he could not fathom, but he was touched by a singular appropriateness in his coming to Leinster to inspect his lands in Ireland. He was not a man of sufficient intellectual accomplishment to analyse this sentiment, but its power and its rightness was overwhelming. To William, who had spent most of his adult life in the Angevin provinces over the sea, where his military skills had been exclusively at the service of the faithless Angevins, the otherness of Leinster had a powerful and visceral appeal. He did not trouble himself to rationalise it, but it would be a fitting marker of his sojourn in Ireland to set-up a house of prayer and spiritual observance here, at the extremity of Christendom. If the country was blessed, then a new religious house could only add to its lustre; if cursed, it could only redeem it. Here too he might be buried, or remembered and prayed for after death.

  ‘Here, I think,’ he said, turning to Geoffrey FitzRobert.

  ‘My Lord?’ FitzRobert asked, uncomprehending.

  ‘Here you will establish a religious house for me.’

  FitzRobert said nothing. He nodded obediently, but showed no obvious enthusiasm for the task, far less than he had shown when being sworn-in as William’s Seneschal for his lands in Leinster a few days earlier, and that had been little enough. The spring weather of April 1202 would have been pleasant in Striguil, FitzRobert thought; but here, under this lowering sky and pouring rain, it seemed as like being afloat as his master had jested. The prospect of being left in such a wet hell did not enchant Geoffrey FitzRobert. As for his being employed to build a church… He blew the rain off the extremity of his nose with a sudden despair.

  ‘We shall name it Tintern Parva, Geoffrey,’ William said firmly. ‘I was much taken by the great Mother House above the Wye,’ he added, having asked for God’s blessing on his forthcoming voyage to Ireland at Tintern Abbey, going there with his Countess, Isabelle and their children, then walking through the hanging woods with his lady.

  ‘Very well, my Lord,’ FitzRobert acknowledged.

  ‘You will do me great service here, Geoffrey,’ William said quietly, crossing himself. FitzRobert nodded, unconvinced. He had other things on his mind and thought the Marshal should have too, not be diverting himself with Holy intentions; such things were for other men, men who could read and write, and sang songs of futile love to unattainable women who were usually no better than whores. FitzRobert had – at least until now - a healthy respect for the Marshal who disdained such foppish occupations. The Marshal was a man fitted for war and there had been disquieting rumours following them out of Wales for some days now. It was said that a ship had arrived in Cork from Brittany with news that King Philippe had invited Prince Arthur and his mother, the Lady Constance, to Paris where Philippe had knighted the young Prince. No-one aware that Arthur of Brittany owed his first allegiance to King John could be anything but troubled by the story, but it was unconfirmed and did not appear to originate from any source other than the waterfront at Brest.

  William smiled at FitzRobert. ‘We must go back to Waterford, Geoffrey. My Lady has there someone she intends to make you happy.’

  ‘My Lord?’ Two puzzles in one day was a little oppressive, but the drift of the Marshal’s argument was not incomprehensible. ‘You mean…?’

  ‘Aye, Robert, ’tis time you were married and the Lady Basilia is half-sister to my wife.’

  Laughing at FitzRobert, William kicked his horse into a canter, his half-pleased, half-annoyed Seneschal following.

  Then, two days after William had decided to establish and endow a religious house at Tintern Parva and told FitzRobert of his future, a message came from the Castellan of Manorbier, in Pembrokeshire, one of William’s new vassal Lords and a man who also held lands in Leinster. William lay at Waterford Castle, no great distance from the proposed site of his abbey and it was John De Earley who accompanied the messenger, tactfully on hand to read William the message.

  ‘The King has married Isabelle de Angoulême, my Lord,’ De Earley said, mouthing the words. ‘My Lord of Essex is seeking your presence in London.’

  ‘It seems marriage is much in the air these days,’ remarked William. ‘Very well, pass word that we shall remove shortly and do you find us a ship.’

  De Earley grinned. ‘Have you plans for me, my Lord?’ he asked impudently.

  ‘You’ll know in good time,’ William growled good-naturedly.

  CHAPTER TWELVE: EARL OF PEMBRO
KE 1202

  ‘Truly the man is spawned of the Devil!’ Geoffrey FitzPeter, Earl of Essex, was furious. ‘He marries Alice of France, then Isabella of Gloucester, throws both over leaving a festering sore with Pope Innocent as regards Alice, then snatches this poor wench, who can scarcely yet be bleeding, from the clutches of Hugh de Lusignan who promptly runs bleating to Philippe about betrayal and treachery – and a good man to do that, by God, for his family stinks in that regard…’

  ‘By the Rood they do,’ put in William contemptuously. His long-standing hatred of Hugh’s uncle, Geoffrey de Lusignan, extended back many years to the death of his own uncle, Patrick, Earl of Salisbury, father of Longsword’s betrothed.

  ‘Well, of course,’ FitzPeter went on, ‘Philippe seizes upon the pretext to summon our great and glorious King to conference with him. John vacillates and finally refuses, leaving Philippe clear to declare John disobedient, taking away all right John has to any lands south of the Channel Sea. Philippe and Baldwin of Flanders are already on the move.’

  William blew out his cheeks. ‘This is the second time the bastard has lost everything,’ William snarled, ‘but now we have no Richard to recover them.’

  FitzPeter looked at William. ‘I fear you are our Richard now, William.’

  William stared at FitzPeter. ‘God’s blood, Geoffrey, I am too old for campaigning!’

  ‘There is no other, though there are those to support you: ‘Longsword, for example, and I shall pay scutage to put men in the field under your standard…’

  ‘And what of the King?’

  ‘A hundred knights and their retinues to follow you into Normandy.’

  ‘Those are his orders?’

  ‘Aye, William. Those are his orders. And he goes thither himself.’

  ‘Well that is something, I suppose. ‘ William paused, wondering if some well-directed quarrel might strike John as it had his brother and terminate the King’s life only to realise that John’s death, unlikely as it was in such circumstances, would cause more problems than it would solve. ‘So I have no choice…’