In another part of the Palais de la Cité, King Charles IV of France was drinking spiced wine of rather better quality than Mortimer’s.
He studied the various maps scattered about the table before him. He may have been a fat king, but never a neglectful one, unlike his rival across the Channel.
He kneaded his brows and tried to think through the fog of alcohol and exhaustion. The situation was complex. Two years previously his uncle, Charles de Valois, upon whom he much relied, had successfully invaded the Aquitaine and wrested it from English control. The conquest had been an easy one, since the English garrisons were few and far between, and in some places non-existent.
Not long after, Edward of England had sent his wife, Isabella, to negotiate with her brother for the return of the lost territory. A compromise had eventually been reached, whereby France retained her conquest but England resumed administration of their remaining lands in France, but that wasn’t the interesting bit. The interesting bit was that Isabella, under the pretext of acting as a diplomat, had abandoned her husband and fled to the shelter of her brother’s court. She had brought her son with her, and soon after arriving embarked on a passionate affair with another exile, Roger Mortimer. Charles had at first been surprised at his sister’s shocking infidelity, then amused, and finally bent his mind to a way of twisting the situation to his advantage.
The table before him was littered with a mass of bread and cheese crumbs, the remains of a late meal. He blearily pushed the crumbs about, imagining them to be towns, castles, and people. Shifting his weight in his chair, Charles reflected that he ate and drank too much, and exercised too little. The people called him Charles the Fair, after the fleshy good looks he had inherited from his father, but he feared that he was well on the way to being Charles the Fat.
England, he knew, was in a dire mess. King Edward’s hapless dependence on his awful favourites, the Despensers, his inability to defend the north against the Scots, to maintain law and order, to control his finances, to behave with the slightest degree of common sense, had pushed his kingdom to the brink of another civil war. All it needed was a spark to set off the blaze, and an invasion of an army led by Isabella and Mortimer could be that spark. Mortimer was keen enough, God knew, and Isabella was constantly badgering Charles for money and men.
There were two problems. First, Charles didn’t have any money, though he had gone to great lengths to get it, including manipulating the coinage, selling offices and benefices like cows, illegally confiscating estates, and screwing down hard on the Jews. Despite his best efforts, the stuff just seemed to flow through his fingers like water. Second, he wasn’t convinced that his sister and her unsettling paramour had enough support. Two fugitive English nobles had declared for her, Edmund of Woodstock and John of Brittany, but they were a couple of broken reeds, incompetent and lacking in resources.
Charles picked up the bit of bread that represented King Edward, dipped it in some wine and pushed it into his mouth. There was time enough to eat the English, he reflected, without risking French lives and spending money he didn’t have to supply Mortimer and Isabella with an army. No, if they wanted cash and troops, they would have to go elsewhere. All he had to do was sit and wait for these useful idiots to destroy each other.
Having come to a decision on that, Charles turned his busy mind to the possibility of French intervention in Byzantium. He was having trouble convincing a wary Pope that his proposed Crusade wasn’t just another money-grubbing exercise.
He sighed. The work of a king was never done.