William Marshal Guardian of England- The Complete Series

by Richard Woodman

  ‘And there is yet the maid Joan…’ William beckoned his youngest and only unmarried daughter towards his bed-side. ‘Wipe away your tears, my chick, I go but on a journey better than a crusade, for my earthly body is shattered and we must make some provision for my little one, eh?’ He paused, mastering his own emotions as Isabelle, sitting beside him, wept as uncontrollably as Joan. ‘Until Will shall find a husband worthy of you, you shall have land worth thirty pounds a year and two hundred marks to keep you…’ William paused. ‘There are other bequests besides, Thomas knows of them and they are to those among my mesnie, the most loyal of whom has been John D’Earley… Come hither John, for I have a commission for you.’

  D’Earley fell on his knees, took William’s extended hand and, weeping, kissed it.

  ‘You shall take horse within the hour. Ride like the wind to Goodrich and leave orders to be sent west to all my castles that it is my last instruction to my castellans that they hold the Southern March in the King’s name and check any insolence that may be shown by the Welsh Princes when they learn of my death. Go then to Chepstow; take with you a key which my Lady Isabelle will give you. In our chamber at Chepstow there is a locked chest. It contains cloth with which I would have my body draped at my funeral. Bring it hither and hasten back. Go now!’

  John D’Earley rose and, wracked by sobs, stumbled out of the chamber.

  William closed his eyes and, once again, he was left to his women. The hours passed and night came on. After dark William called for food and drink. He partook of a little watered wine, and a dish of mushrooms and dried bread, the only thing he could hold down.

  Isabelle was sitting with him at dawn, when he rallied and called for more pillows. She summoned help from the ante-chamber. Will and John Marshal, who had been dozing fitfully, rolled in their cloaks like soldiers on campaign, rushed in, thinking the hour had come.

  ‘Pray help my Lord,’ Isabelle pleaded, ‘he wishes to sit up.’

  They got William into a sitting position, aware that despite his malady and the waste to which it had laid his body, he remained a powerful man. It was some moments before he spoke.

  ‘Pray send to Aimery St Maur and request that in all humility I ask his presence here, not being able to come to him.’

  ‘What means this?’ asked John Marshal of young Will, his voice low. The younger Marshal looked at his mother, over whose face an expression of pained sadness had swept; it was a profound contrast to the expression of stoic acceptance of God’s will that had borne-up her spirit during the preceding days.

  Will shrugged. ‘I do not know, but I think my mother does…’

  As they withdrew again, they heard William ask that Isabelle woke all his daughters and brought them to him. When they had assembled and sat about his bed, he spoke to them individually until Will re-entered the chamber with the news that Aimery St Maur had arrived, whereupon William turned to Isabelle.

  ‘Go, Belle, get it for me now…’

  Isabelle’s appearance in the ante-chamber again raised the alarm that William’s last moments had come, but with a pale, composed face, she swept past them, returning some moments later with a bundle wrapped in linen.

  As the door closed behind her John Marshal once again asked what was going on and, once again, Will shrugged his ignorance, at which point Aimery St Maur entered the ante-chamber and they made their respective salutations. St Maur wore a large crucifix about his neck, the cloak of his Order and was girded with his sword. Another came with him, bearing a small, golden box and a Holy Bible.

  ‘Pray tell him that I am come,’ said St Maur and Will did as he was bid. William nodded and asking that St Maur be admitted. Will and John Marshal followed the Grand Master of the English Chapter of the Order of Knights Templar into William’s presence as he spoke his last words to his wife who was again kneeling at his bed-side.

  ‘Fair Lady, kiss me now, for our lips may never touch again in this world.’

  Isabelle bent forward in floods of tears, her reserve broken. As they enjoyed their final moment of intimacy William was sobbing and as Isabelle lifted her face, William touched her cheek one last time. ‘Belle, Belle, my beautiful friend,’ he murmured. Then raising his voice he said, ‘God bless you and all my chickens…’ he gestured at his girls and made the sign of the cross above them as they fell to their knees, genuflecting themselves.

  ‘Now go, my sweet, for you know what must be done and that I must now forswear the company of women…’

  Unable to speak, Isabelle nodded and rose, shepherding their uncomprehending daughters before her as she left the room. As the women departed, Will came forward.

  ‘Father?’

  ‘Bring forward my Lord Aimery and then assist me into these robes…’ William whispered. Beside the bed, where Isabelle had lately sat, the linen bundle lay open. Both Will and John Marshal knew immediately what it was and, coupled with William’s dismissal of Isabelle and their daughters, guessed what the Marshal had arranged in total secret.

  When they had wrapped William in the white cloak with the red cross of the risen Christ upon its shoulder, Aimery St Maur ordered them to withdraw.

  What transpired next was known only to William, St Maur, his assistant, and God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit as Aimery inducted the dying man into the Order of Knights Templar.

  Afterwards William’s heirs were informed of the fact by Aimery and when Will asked his father where he wished to be laid to rest, William indicated Aimery St Maur.

  ‘It is your father’s wish that he lies in the Church of the Temple in London, for he is both Knight and Monk now, and will die thus when his time comes.’

  William’s time came some few hours later, around noon on that Tuesday, 14th May. He died, shriven of his sins, his head in Will’s hands, surrounded by his attending knights and Aimery St Maur, Isabelle and their daughters waiting in the ante-chamber. The casement windows were already open to allow his great soul to escape the trammels of this earthly life and fly upwards to heaven.

  *

  John D’Earley rode into Caversham the following evening having ruined three horses in his headlong ride. He was mortified not to have attended his old master in his last hours, but had the consolation of knowing he had been the last knight to carry out William’s ultimate order.

  He had brought with him ten ells of silk cloth that, many years earlier, William had brought back from the Holy Land, after travelling thither at the behest of the dying Henry, the so-called Young King, who had never ruled but had spent his entire life in his father’s unhappy shadow. When the bundle was unrolled the silk was faded until, some turns into it, the dark lustre of its sheen revealed itself, unaffected by time and storage.

  It proved a magnificent covering of William’s body as it was taken first to Reading Abbey, to lie in a side chapel. Here Henry’s waiting Court did it due reverence at a High Mass before it was placed on a wagon and taken to Westminster by way of Staines at the head of a cavalcade with the banners of William’s large mesnie and affinity following. Immediately behind the wagon rode Thomas and Edgar, confidential clerk and secret courier; Isabelle, her ladies and daughters, followed with their own escort. Ahead of the wagon upon which lay William’s mortal remains with the dark naevus upon its right shoulder blade, rode John D’Earley, one of William’s executors and his most loyal and trusted knight. He bore William’s green and gold standard with its red lion rampant, which lifted languidly in the spring breeze.

  Mass was sung again at Staines and at Westminster, in St Peter’s great abbey-church, and, on 20 May 1219, the second anniversary of the Battle of Lincoln, William’s body was escorted to the Temple Church on the Thames’s Strand in London. Here had gathered most of the chivalry of England under the Royal Standard of King Henry III. The rites, obsequies and eulogy were led by Stephen Langton, William’s old friend, newly returned from Rome and reinstalled as Archbishop of Canterbury.

  Above the tomb opened in the chancel, as grown men who had
fought each other wept openly, and the King blubbered like the frightened boy he was, Langton pronounced the interment, raising his voice to declare that: ‘Here lies the greatest knight of all the world that has lived in our time’.

  AFTERWORD

  Among William’s many bequests, he left land and revenue to the Templars. He had, it may be recalled, founded an Augustinian Priory at Cartmel around 1189 and the Cistercian houses of Duiske and Tintern Parva in Leinster early in the 1200s. He had established a lighthouse at Hook Head in Ireland that ships may have safe passage from Milford Haven to Waterford. But at his death William, despite his piety and his submissions to Holy Church, still technically lay under the excommunication of Bishop Ailbe Ómáelmuaid of Ferns, whose enmity he had incurred years earlier in Leinster. King Henry brought the Bishop to the Temple Church to lift the sentence, but Ailbe refused, causing a public outcry.

  William’s enemies afterwards pointed to the further manifestation of God’s displeasure when, by 1245, the Marshal’s line was extinct, but much was owed to another Bishop, that friend turned enemy, Peter des Roches of Winchester, who was implicated in the death of William’s second son, Richard.

  The Lady Isabelle survived her husband less than a year, dying in February 1220. She lies buried in Tintern Abbey, Gwent, above the lovely River Wye, not far from Chepstow/Striguil.

  As for the boy-King, Henry III, his reign seemed set fair under the administration of Peter Des Roches and Hubert de Burgh, but the two quarrelled and De Burgh ousted Des Roches, who went on crusade. In 1232 he returned to England and turned the tables on De Burgh, wresting the government from him. Ever headstrong, Des Roches foolishly applied arbitrary powers reminiscent of King John and fell from power two short years later.

  De Burgh’s early administration seemed to follow many of William’s principles, but the continuing presence of troublesome routiers, most notably Falkes de Bréauté, who continued to regard his tenure of castles placed in his hands by William as fiefdoms of his own, plus the growing opportunism of Peter des Roches, caused him immense problems, leading to his procuring Des Roches’ dismissal from the King. However, the return of that troublesome priest from Outremer in 1232 and his persuading Henry to exchange De Burgh for himself, led to the eclipse of his political career. Nevertheless, De Burgh had by this time married - as his third wife - the sister of King Alexander of Scotland and had been made Earl of Kent. He died in 1243, four years after his former colleague and later enemy, Des Roches.

  Although Henry declared himself of age in 1227, it was not until after his marriage to Eleanor of Provence in 1236 that he took control of his government. Thereafter he failed to heed William’s advice and became his father’s son, vacillating and too embedded in the House of Anjou’s preoccupations with their hereditary lands and overseas adventures. This worked against him and, yet again, fomented opposition from the English Barony who were increasingly conscious of their difference from their Anglo-Norman forbears, imbibing a palpable sense of being English. The upshot of all this was another Baronial revolt, Henry being effectively deprived of his throne after the Battle of Lewes, by Simon de Montfort in 1264.

  However, he was rescued from this ignominy the next year when his son Edward (afterwards Edward I, much, much later denominated ‘the Hammer of the Scots’), defeated De Montfort and ended the Barons’ War on the field of Evesham in August 1265.

  Henry, though nominally King again, concentrated his efforts on rebuilding Westminster Abbey. He died in 1272.