Harlot Queen (26 page)

‘Madam, they came to the place of execution. He would have knelt to pray… but it was not allowed.’

Denying the dying man his last prayer! Of all vile things, this was surely the vilest! For the first time she was pricked with hatred for the King.

‘He has long and long enough to consider his sins!
the lord King cried out. And then the headsman—and God knows where he learned his trade!—made three false strokes or four and ended life and prayer together. And, Madam, as the axe fell, the lord King, so I am told, was heard to say,
The measure you yourself measure out shall be measured to you again.
’

Pray God it be so! Startled she heard her thought clear.

‘What, Madam, did my father mean?’ Young Edward plucked at her sleeve. She had forgotten he was there; now he stood staring with wondering eyes.

‘That, my son, is hard to say.’

‘And so my uncle of Lancaster is dead.’

‘He is; God rest his soul.’

‘Was he a bad man?’

‘Your father thinks so. But each must judge for himself. When you are older you, also, will judge.’

‘All that offend against the King, must die!’ he said.

She stared at him, so young and so certain. Years later she was to remember his words.

End of Thomas, royal Lancaster, earl of Lancaster, of Leicester, of Derby, of Lincoln and Salisbury. Dead in his middle years, honour and honours alike forfeit, his blood, only, saving him from the shameful rope.

The Queen wept; but not too much—he had failed her. Tears, were she one to weep, must be for herself condemned to enduring insult from the Despensers; tears, too, for Mortimer in the dark cell awaiting death. Lancaster’s death was Mortimer’s death; in the pressure of events she must keep her eyes clear of tears.

The Despensers were riding higher, higher; lords as well as commons heard the whistle of their whip. The King allowed it all—and not only because he was besotted with his sweetheart; those two gave him, the flattery, the assurance he longed to hear. They would make him absolute—they swore it; but it was not the weak and wilful King they meant to make absolute.

Maytime, in the year of grace thirteen hundred and twenty-two. Lancaster had been dead six weeks and already the country regretted him. Forgetful of his sullen selfishness, they remembered only his hatred of the Despensers and the way he had stood out against the King. From all over England men and women—simple folk for the most part—were making pilgrimages to his burying-place. They were offering prayers before the high altar at Pontefract where the monks had hurriedly buried him before the King could stop them; prayers and thanksgiving. They were spreading the legend of miracles worked at the tomb. To simple folk Thomas of Lancaster bade fair to become a saint. The King, for all his anger, could not stop it; and in her chamber the Queen smiled her secret smile. Uncle Thomas dead, looked to be more useful than Uncle Thomas alive. Alive he had stood out against the Despensers; he stood so still, with all the added moral force of the martyred dead. The people were discontented, discontented and disappointed. Had they hoped for anything? This new Parliament, she thought, must show how vain the hope…
It jumps to the crack of the Despensers’ whip. No single reform, no single thought for the welfare of the people. Nothing but obedience to the demands of the King, which are the demands of the Despensers…

Herself, she had expected little enough, God knew! But even she could scarce believe that Parliament had repudiated the Ordinances.

All things ordained by the Lords Ordainers shall henceforth and forever cease. The laws and statutes made by our lord the King and his ancestors shall remain in force.

The Ordinances cast aside! The thing for which the barons had fought and bled and died. The safeguard of the people.
The King digs his own grave!
She heard the thought as clear as though she spoke aloud.

The King’s death
. Again the thought; for the third time the thought. It shocked her no longer. As long as he kept the Despensers about him, so long he built up hatred against himself. And where might not such hatred end?

It was not, at first, the repeal of the Ordinances that angered the people; such news takes time to be fully understood. It was the immediate shock of the gallows springing up all over the land, hung with foul fruit—fruit the people could see for themselves, smell for themselves—obscene orchards to feed their bitter anger. For the King had shown himself merciless. His rebel lords he had hanged—as many as he could lay hands upon. But they, at least, had been the leaders, and they had escaped the full sentence—the drawing of their entrails while yet they lived. Common folk that must obey their betters did not escape so lightly; everywhere from tree and gallows men hung gutless.

‘Cruelty grows in the King like a sickness,’ Isabella told Madam de St. Pierre. ‘I sicken at the sight of men dangling. In one hanging alone I take my pleasure. Badlesmere dangles from his rope; would to God that his shrew dangled with him!’

Her own fierce demand for punishment of those that had offended against her, Théophania thought, should warn the Queen of that same cruelty like a sickness within herself.

‘But God be praised, many have escaped to France!’ and Isabella sighed to think of the prisoner that had not escaped. ‘France where I would give much to be! Would God I might escape, awhile, from my own griefs and those of this unhappy land!’

And unhappy the land was! Cruel in punishment the King was madly lavish in reward; the Despensers, indeed, did not wait for reward—they rewarded themselves. Their estates and revenues were swollen with wealth sequestered from their victims; their strong rooms could not hold the half of their ever-growing treasure, nor their dungeons the half of their prisoners. The elder Despenser was my lord earl of Winchester now; but the younger, though he had honours enough, was not earl of Gloucester.

‘The King covets the title for his paramour,’ Isabella said; she spoke beneath her breath for Eleanor Despenser was back, forced upon an unwilling Queen. ‘So far he has not dared. But there are no more Ordainers. Will he not dare it now? They’ll not rest, those Despensers, until best part of England is in their hands. Already they’ve got Lancaster’s stronghold of Denbigh, they’ve got Swansea, town and castle. They own between them, the whole of South Wales. They’ve got all the Bigod lands beyond the Severn. They’ve got the ransom of half-a-dozen kings salted down with foreign bankers and they know well where to put their hand on more. No money comes amiss, not though it be slippery with blood. Will there never be an end to their wickedness?

Their latest wickedness she had yet to learn.

They had sent a secret embassy to the Pope praying him to dissolve her marriage. It was not so secret but that my lord bishop of Hereford had got wind of it—that same bishop the King had publicly rebuked. Orleton had his friends in Rome; he knew that same embassy to urge the Queen’s divorce, urged also his own removal. He did not believe the Pope would grant either petition—his friends had the Pope’s ear. It did not make him love the King or the Despensers more. His own future, it was clear, lay with the Queen. She had shown him some kindness since that public reproval; a man smarting under humiliation and devoted to the house of Mortimer might prove useful. A devious man she found him; shrewd and discreet.

When he told her of the embassy, anger and fear battled with disbelief. For her husband she cared little; for her position and her honour, very much. The loss of her crown, disgrace and the smearing of her name, herself shut within a convent or worse; or else crawling back dishonoured to France! The frightful possibilities battered at her frightened heart. It could not be!Yet with glib tongues and sufficient bribes—who knew what might not happen?

‘The charge, my lord bishop, the
charge
?’

‘Their lies will serve them—so they think. But the lord Pope is no man’s fool; he knows how to value these Despensers! Besides, Madam, I have my friends; they have his ear—and tongues to speak into that ear.’

She turned her lovely, troubled eyes upon him—even in this moment of fear she knew how to use them. ‘If I am unhappy in all else, I am happy, my lord, in your friendship. Never in this world shall I forget it!’ She bent and kissed the sapphire ring of his office. He was a man—she knew him—to feed upon praise, greedy for honours and place. Reminder of her sad state with promise of reward in happier condition was salutary.

She said, ‘I must go at once to the King; I must demand the reason of his request.’ She had no intention, subtle as she was, of any such thing; it was the bishop’s own subtlety she tested.

‘Madam, under your pardon, no! Much harm could come of it! Silence is best; ignorance in the matter your strong weapon. The lord King, of himself, is not willing; he fears to offend your brother of France. It is the Despensers that want it; and the lord Pope is no man’s servant to obey an idle whim. The lord Pope knows—Madam, I have sent to tell him—the people of England would not endure it. It would cost the King his crown. The people love you, Madam—the Queen without fault. Say nothing; show no disquiet. You are safe leaving all to me.’

But for all that she trembled; it was long before she could calm herself; thereafter she set her set wits to work. This bishop was shrewd and cunning; he was a man of influence. He had the ear of the Pope, he had lost no time championing her cause. A cautious man that for all his anger had not criticised the King by so much as a lifted brow. What better helper could she find? This was a man to use!

Her mind gave a sudden leap so that for a moment she forgot her own troubles.

He hates the Despensers and he loves the Mortimers.

In that moment, without a shadow of reason Mortimer’s fate became linked with her own. If he were free, the ugly threat of divorce would pass her by; if he died that unspeakable calamity would fall upon her. She must save him to save herself.

The Mortimers had been in the Tower six months. Mortimer of Chirk was no longer there. He was dead. The rigours of his prison had killed him as surely as axe or rope. The King laughed when he heard the news. ‘He saves me some trouble! The other, though, shall die the traitor’s death. That is a trouble I shall relish!’

The death of the elder Mortimer troubled the Queen little save as a pointer to prison conditions. Mortimer of Chirk had been hale enough; now he was dead. How long before the younger man followed him to the grave? Now Mortimer of Wigmore was forever in her thoughts; she was obsessed with desire to save him and the sense of her own guilt. Had she not urged the King to arms Mortimer would not be languishing in prison. The sense of guilt possessed her utterly, strengthening beyond any reason her certainty that upon his fate hung her own. They stood or fell together.

The country was growing ever more restless. Impossible to set foot out of doors without remembering the King’s cruelty; every chance wind brough the stench of it. And, resenting their poverty that fed the bottomless greed of the favourites, men sickened yet more at the pitiless arrogance of the Despensers. And this resentment was sharpened further by rumours—set afoot by my lord bishop of Hereford—that those two urged the Queen’s divorce; their good Queen!

But most of all they resented the casting-aside of the Ordinances; now they had had time to understand what it meant. The Ordinances had stood between them and the King’s excesses; now between them and those excesses—nothing.

For the Despensers were ruling like Kings; no curbing them. Many of those that had worked for the Ordinances were dead or fled. Henry of Lancaster, had he been man enough, might have taken his brother’s place—leader of the barons. But he had been granted Thomas’s lesser titles—he was my lord earl of Leicester and Derby—and hoped for the rest; above all the great name of Lancaster. Moreover he remembered his brother’s death and was not minded to die the same way; he was not likely to make much trouble. Pembroke, the one man to be trusted, had died in France; de Warenne no man was foolish enough to trust. Richmond was a foreigner and in the King’s pocket. Thomas of Norfolk and Edmund of Kent were too young, and too-lately forgiven for their part in the later revolt.

No-one to stand between oppressor and oppressed.

In the north, the people were, as usual, in worse plight; besides the trouble they shared with the whole country, they had troubles of their own. Border-raids were savage and without respite; those that escaped slaughter by the Scots died more slowly by famine, poverty and pestilence. Worn with constant suffering, weary of a King that left them to their suffering, encouraged by their own archbishop of York, they declared their willingness to acknowledge the Bruce King of Scotland.

England, it was clear, could no longer hold Scotland. The Despensers, able men when not blinded by greed, advised the King to let it go.

Edward flew into a Plantagenet rage. ‘Scotland is mine and I will keep it.’

‘Move now—and you lose it forever. In our own good time when least he expects it, we shall take it again. You have nothing to do but sit quiet.’

The King nodded; he saw the point of that!

Peace on the border at last. And, for the first time in his life, the King of England free of the burden of the Scottish wars. But the country did not take the loss lightly.
We have lost Scotland
, men told each other puzzled and amazed.
Scotland is lost
…
we have lost it
. And cursed the Despensers that had made the truce.

‘We have lost Scotland!’ the Queen cried out and wrung her hands. Shame she felt and anger; and it was not all patriotism. She could never endure to let go anything she considered her own. ‘I am ashamed. I am
ashamed
.’

‘Madam, under pardon, Despenser’s wife is in the anteroom,’ Théophania said. ‘She is all ears!’

‘Then let her hear; she can do me no more harm! They would have had my marriage dissolved, but God’s Mouthpiece is not their mouthpiece to set a scandal on foot to shake all Christendom! Since he’ll not serve their turn they set their spies to scavenge some tit-bit. Well, let them try! For all their spying they’ll find no fault. My life is barren and desolate, God knows; but still they’ll find no fault. Yet were I to take comfort from any man who should blame me? Who husbanded me, ever, who cherished me? The life I lead is bitter, bitter!’