The King’s Assassin (49 page)

‘You understand nothing, Alan Dale,’ hissed Tilda, her eyes blazing now. ‘You have never understood a single thing – about me, about Anna, even about Kirklees.’

‘I understand that you are my enemy, that you have always been my enemy, and that you posed as my friend in order to beguile me and open me to your revenge. I also understand that you pose a danger to my son. But you should understand this, Matilda Giffard: if Robert comes to any harm through you or through your agents, if a single hair on his head is touched, I shall come to Kirklees and burn the place to the ground with you inside it. Do you hear me? You touch my son, and you die in flames.’

There was nothing more to say. I turned on my heel and left, following the sounds of Benedict’s cries as he was carried helpless on Boot’s shoulder down the corridor and towards the stairs.

I wanted to gut Benedict there and then, to sink my blade in his belly, rip out his intestines and watch him bleed to death before my eyes. I wanted to do it as a payment for his threats to Robert. I wanted to do it for his treatment of me in that castle cell. If I am honest, I also wanted to do it because Tilda was his lover, and had been for many years, and although I no longer wanted her myself, I still hated the sweaty pig for debauching her perfect body. However, it was Robin who dissuaded me from taking my vengeance there and then.

‘We fought for the rule of law, Alan,’ he said, as we stood over the weeping, shivering, naked lump in the main hall of Nottingham Castle that night. Indeed, I actually had my misericorde unsheathed in my hand, ready to strike.

‘We fought for the principle of freedom under the law. We fought long and hard for an end to the arbitrary violence and the rule of the strongest man’s whim,’ said my lord. ‘Now we have Benedict in our power, we cannot abandon that principle, can we, Alan? Can we? Think about it. It must be legal or all our struggles have been for naught. He must be tried for his crimes in a proper court of law and have a fair and appropriate sentence passed on him by a duly empowered royal official.’

Eventually I agreed.

‘Good,’ said Robin. ‘I know just the right man for the task.’

Sir Benedict Malet stood trial for his crimes the next day before a court convened by the newly appointed High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and the Royal Forests, the noble lord of Lowdham. Benedict stood accused of misappropriation of royal funds, namely a goodly quantity of tax silver that had never found its way to the King. He was also accused of the murder of eighty-six men and women from the county of Nottinghamshire, executed for failing to pay trumped-up tax demands.

No one spoke up for Benedict except himself; he made a quavering, mumbling, tear-splashed speech about merely obeying orders that was almost an admission of his guilt – I had half-expected Tilda to speak for him, and was dreading seeing her again, but there was no sign of her either at the trial or anywhere in the castle.

She had vanished.

I gave evidence against Sir Benedict, along with a dozen or so townsfolk whose relatives had suffered under his and Philip Marc’s regime, but it was Boot’s eloquent testimony that sealed his fate. The big man spoke for nearly an hour about the men he had executed, naming as many as he could remember and attesting to their innocence of any crime save failure to pay over the outrageous sums demanded by the sheriff. Benedict was found guilty by a jury of twelve good men of the county, a unanimous verdict, and it fell to Lowdham to pass sentence.

I happened to be standing by his bench when the new sheriff was ready to pronounce. He leaned over to me and whispered: ‘Do you think, Sir Alan, that I should show some leniency in this case – I really do not want the people to think I am a cruel fellow. He
was
merely following the orders of Philip Marc and the King, after all. Perhaps a stiff fine, or banishment…’

‘I don’t think so, my lord,’ I whispered. ‘I think it would be wise to set an example in this case. It must be death, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh very well, if you really think so, my dear fellow…’

They hanged Benedict Malet in the courtyard of Nottingham Castle the next day at dawn. I came out to watch, as did Boot. The big man had offered to perform his old grisly duty one last time but I told him no.

‘Those days are over, my friend,’ I said. ‘I hope you may never have to kill again. I very much hope the same for myself.’

But as I saw Benedict slowly strangling in a hempen noose, his fat, white, urine-drenched legs kicking and jerking in the empty air, I felt pity well up in my heart. I do not like a hanging, I never have. And so, after a few moments, when Benedict’s face was purple as a plum, and his tongue was sticking out like some grotesque red snake, as he twitched in his death throes, I gave him mercy.

I stepped forward, slipped the misericorde from its sheath, plunged the keen blade deep into his belly, then sliced sideways through the thick rolls of skin and fat, tumbling his bluish-white guts to the castle courtyard floor in a spew of hot blood.

I did not stay to watch him die.

Instead, I gathered my people, stepped up into the saddle and pointed my horse towards Westbury, towards home.

My back is bloody but my heart is full of joy. On the eve of our expulsion from Newstead, Brother Alan and I were saved almost, it seems, by a miracle. I took my beating like a man, I like to think, although I am not used to such overwhelming pain. I tried to show as much courage as Brother Alan would have shown in his prime. And a few hours later, as I was nursing my lacerated back and slowly gathering my meagre possessions, God showed his mercy. A cavalcade of knights, all gaudy plumes, bright flags and huge snorting horses, clattered into the priory courtyard. It was Lord Westbury himself, the grandson of Brother Alan, son of his dead son Robert, and a dozen of his followers. A tall, muscular blond man in glittering silver-chased mail and with a fine long sword at his waist leapt off his horse and insisted on seeing the prior immediately. I had not known this, and I am certain that Prior William was equally ignorant, but Alan Dale the younger, the newly ennobled Lord Westbury, has risen high in the service of our beloved Henry of Winchester in recent years, he has the King’s ear in all things – not least the appointment of bishops.

After a private audience lasting less than an hour, the news was announced. Prior William is to take up the vacant see of Durham – he is to be a bishop at last, and I – oh, I can barely inscribe these words for my joy – I am to be the next prior of Newstead. Brother Alan, of course, is to remain with us for as long as he is spared.

My happiness is tempered by the knowledge that this cannot be for long. I told my friend the good news and he rejoiced with me. And Lord Westbury came to his cell soon afterwards and they spent a happy hour together discussing the fortunes of the realm and the doings at Westbury. But seeing his grandson completely exhausted him. And Brother Alan is now so reduced in strength that I fear he will not last out the week. Perhaps even the night.

As I write these words, sitting quietly at the table in his cell, Brother Alan is asleep. He gave me a nasty shock just now: he gave a hard gasp, his eyes closed and he fell so utterly still that I confess that I pressed my ear to his slack mouth to check that there was still breath in him. There is, praise God, but very little. He is pitifully weak and I believe I will lay down my quill now and tiptoe away. But I shall return in the morning, if my friend lives through the night, and take this goose-feather in my hand once more. For there is one more story to tell, the ancient warrior told me fiercely just before his eyes closed this evening.

‘Do not think your task is finished yet, young Anthony,’ he whispered. ‘The tale of the great charter and the rebellion of the barons is not quite done. There is one more adventure involving my lord of Locksley that I must recount, and I cannot rest easy in my grave until it is told. It is the most terrible tale of all, a tale of blood, betrayal and pain; a tale of good men slaughtered and bad men triumphant. It is the tale of the death of Robin Hood…’

And that was when he closed his eyes.

On the third page of
Outlaw
, the first novel in this series, I had Alan Dale recalling his deeds as a young man and setting down these words about his friend Robin Hood: ‘I will write his story, my story, and set before the world the truth about … the great magnate who brought a King of England to a table at Runnymede and made him submit to the will of the people…’

When I wrote those words more than a decade ago, I knew roughly where my heroes Robin and Alan were headed, that King John would be their long-term enemy, and that Magna Carta would feature in one of the books towards the end of the series. But I have a confession to make: when I typed those words, I had only the vaguest idea of what Magna Carta actually was. I hadn’t read it, nor had I read much about it except in passing. In fact, I thought that the Great Charter that King John was forced to set his seal to in June 1215 would be rather like the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address, a document filled with ringing oratory, brimming with fine and noble sentiments, that it would be no less than a pledge of proto-democracy from a beleaguered absolute monarch to the ordinary people of England for ever.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Magna Carta is actually quite dull to read. It’s repetitive, full of medieval legal jargon and often rather awkwardly phrased (at least the English translation of it is – I never got much beyond
amo
,
amas
,
amat
in my Latin classes at school). It has little in the way of structure or even a theme. It reads, in fact, like a bucket list; as if a group of exuberant and slightly drunken lads had got together and all told the scribes what they wanted in no particular order, all shouting at the same time:

‘Hey, how about we get rid of those bloody fish weirs in the Medway!’

‘I want a free pardon and my hostage sons back home – now!’

‘Yeah, and how about those dirty mercenaries – send them back where they came from!’

Nowhere is there any mention of anything truly democratic. It is, actually, pretty much all about money. It’s about reliefs and dues and scutage and inheritance, about widow’s rights and debts owed to the Jews. It is mostly about restricting the King’s right to mulct cash from his barons whenever he wished in the form of taxes of one kind or another. And yet the group of bellicose aristocrats who got together and forced the King to stop continually ripping them off did something extraordinary. They created a precedent: a document that curbed the actions of the richest and most powerful man in the land and made him submit to the law, just like anyone else. That is sort of democratic, in the loosest sense of the word; the idea that no one is above the law, even a king anointed by God to rule over his subjects.

It also re-introduced the old Saxon idea of a council of men who would advise (and implicitly control) the King and make sure that he behaved himself. It wasn’t a parliament, not even close, and the great council of twenty-five barons never actually came into being, but the ‘democratic’ – if you want to call it that – genie was out of the bottle. Finally, the idea that no free man should be taken and imprisoned without a trial by his peers warms my heart, too. Even though it leaves the unfree serfs out in the cold. It’s a fine principle and in these terror-ridden times, as the power of the state swells alarmingly, I think it is a principle that we should all vigorously defend.

The true importance of Magna Carta, however, is as a symbol. The document itself, close-written Latin in fading black ink, full of complaints and grudges, arcane bickering over rights, duties and taxes, is not the point – it is the idea that it represents that has endured these past eight centuries. Magna Carta is a talisman against the overweening power of princes, a shield against tyranny, a bulwark against absolutism – even if it was compiled by a group of self-serving and privileged professional warriors. Without Magna Carta there would be no Bill of Rights and perhaps no general concept of human rights either. Magna Carta symbolises freedom under the law, the idea that the individual should have as great a degree of liberty as is consistent with a well-run state in which all can safely live and prosper, and that magnificent idea, I think, is worth celebrating in this year of its eight hundredth anniversary.

I should also confess, at this point, that I played a little fast and loose with the historicity of the Magna Carta ceremony. I have King John himself petulantly sealing the document with his personal seal before the assembled barons, and this is most unlikely to have happened. In fact, there was a special machine, rather like a small press, which was used for affixing the official royal seal on to important documents and this mundane task may have happened anywhere from Windsor Castle, John’s headquarters in those weeks, to the Priory of St Mary’s at Ankerwycke on the other side of the Thames from Runnymede. The affixing of the great seal to the charter would have been done by John’s clerks. The meeting at Runnymede was not about the sealing of Magna Carta but its proclamation and the subsequent act of homage by the barons. The document – or rather the many copies of the charter – would have been sealed and sent out to royal castles in the four corners of the country at some point between mid-June and mid-July by John’s efficient bureaucrats. The King himself may never have even handled the final version of the charter, he may never even have laid eyes on it. For this small but deliberate deception, I plead guilty and offer as my defence the novelist’s privilege to make a scene as dramatic as possible.

Magna Carta might never have come about at all were it not for the military disaster at Bouvines at the end of July 1214. The battle occurred much as I have described it except, obviously, without my fictional heroes – Robin, Alan, Little John, Robert, Thomas and the rest – playing their parts.

The allied army coming up from the south through the woods of Cysoing caught the French in the middle of crossing the bridge at the hamlet of Bouvines and if they had attacked them at that time with all their strength they might well have won the day. Instead, they lined up their troops in three battles in the traditional formation opposite the French and gave Philip the time to get his men back over the bridge. The French King did burn the bridge once his men were across and, if the allies’ performance was lacklustre, Philip Augustus played his weaker hand remarkably well. He was slightly outnumbered and caught in an awkward situation but he managed to turn the tables on his disorganised foes and win the day. The Count of Flanders’ forces in the south were destroyed by the French cavalry and the Count was captured, Emperor Otto in the centre ran away, and in the north of the field the Count of Boulogne and the Earl of Salisbury did indeed form a sort of forerunner of the nineteenth-century redcoats’ square, or the Scottish schiltron, an impenetrable hedge of infantry steel surrounding their cavalry, although it did not do them much good. They too were ultimately destroyed and Boulogne and Salisbury were captured. The non-noble prisoners, many of them Flemish mercenaries, were butchered by the French.