QUEEN ISABELLA HAD been living in France for eight months; she had learnt what freedom meant and had found love. And she had forgotten her husband, King Edward. He no longer held a place in her thoughts, except in a rather abstract way, as if he were a tiresome legacy left by some older Isabella now defunct; he had passed into the dead zones of her memory. She could no longer remember, when she tried to do so to exacerbate her resentment, even the smell of her husband’s body or the exact colour of his eyes. She could recapture only the vague, fluid outline of his over-long chin and blond beard, and the disagreeable movement of his back. Though memory might be proving evasive, hatred on the other hand remained tenaciously present.
Bishop Stapledon’s hurried return to London confirmed all Edward’s fears and showed him how urgent it was that he should make his wife return to England. And yet he realized he must act cunningly and, as Hugh the Elder said, lull the she-wolf if he wanted her to return to her lair. For some weeks, therefore, Edward’s letters were those of a loving husband regretting his wife’s absence. The Despensers also played their part in this duplicity by addressing protestations of devotion to the Queen and joining their supplications to those of the King that she should afford them the joy of her early return. Edward also told the Bishop of Winchester to use his influence with the Queen.
But on December 1 everything changed. On that day Edward flew into one of his sudden, hysterical rages, which were so un-royal and yet afforded him the illusion of authority. The Bishop of Winchester had just given him the Queen’s answer; she refused to return to England for fear of Hugh the Younger and she had also informed the King of France, her brother, of the fear she had of him. No more was necessary. The letters Edward dictated at Westminster, during five continuous hours, were to cause the Courts of Europe considerable stupefaction.
But first he wrote to the Queen. There was no question of ‘sweetheart’ now.
‘Madame,’ wrote Edward, ‘we have often asked you, both before the homage and after, that for the great desire we have that you should be with us and the great unease we suffer due to your long absence, you should come to us as quickly as possible and without making any more excuses.
‘Before the homage you were excused by reason of the furtherance of the business; but since then you have informed us through the Honourable Father, the Bishop of Winchester, that you will not come, through fear and mistrust of Hugh the Despenser, which astonishes us greatly; for both you with regard to him and he with regard to you have always praised each other in my presence, and in particular on your departure, by special promises and other proofs of confident friendship, and also by your letters to him which he has shown us.
‘We know for a fact, and you must know it equally, Madame, that the said Hugh has always done all he could to maintain our honour; and you know too that he has never done you any harm since you have been my wife, except, and by chance, on one single occasion, and through your own fault, if you remember.
‘It would much displease us, now that the homage has been rendered to our very dear brother the King of France and we are in such friendly relations with him, that you, whom we sent for peace, should be the cause of any coldness between us and for false reasons.
‘That is why we ask you, and charge you, and order you, that you should cease making excuses and feigning pretexts, and should return to us with all haste.
‘As for your expenses, when you have returned as a wife should to her lord, we will order them in such manner that you will lack nothing and in no way be dishonoured.
‘We also wish and command that you make our very dear son Edward come to us as quickly as possible, for we have a great desire to see him and speak to him.
‘The Honourable Father in God Wautier, Bishop of Exeter,29 has told us that some of our banished enemies, who are with you, sought him out to do him bodily harm if they had had the time to do so, and that, to escape such perils, he hastened back to us because of the loyalty and allegiance he owes us. We tell you this so that you may understand that the said Bishop, when he left you so suddenly, did so for no other reason.
‘Given at Westminster the First Day of December, 1325.
‘Edward’
If his anger broke out in the first part of the letter, to be followed by lies, the venom was very cleverly placed at the end.
Another and shorter letter was addressed to the young Duke of Aquitaine.
‘Most dear son, though you are young and tender in age, remember well what we charged you with and ordered you to do on your departure from us at Dover, and what you then replied, for which we were most grateful to you, and do not go beyond or contravene in any way what we then said to you.
‘And since all is done and your homage is received, present yourself to our very dear brother, the King of France, your uncle, and take leave of him, and come to us in the company of our very dear wife, the Queen, your mother, if she comes at once.
‘But if she does not come, come yourself at once and do not remain longer; for we have a great desire to see you and talk with you; and do not in any circumstances fail to do this, either because of your mother or anyone else. With our blessing.’
The repetitions and the irritation manifest in the ill-constructed sentences showed that the writing of the letters had not been confided to the Chancellor or a secretary but was the work of the King himself. One could almost hear Edward’s voice dictating. Charles IV, the Fair, was not forgotten. The letter Edward sent him repeated almost phrase by phrase the points he had made in his letter to the Queen.
‘You will have heard from people you can trust that our wife, the Queen of England, dare not come to us through fear for her life and the mistrust she has of Hugh the Despenser. Of course, beloved brother, she had no need to mistrust him nor any other man living in our kingdom; for, by God, neither Hugh nor any other living man in our territory wishes her ill, and, if we discovered such existed, we would punish him in such a way that he would be an example to others, which we have sufficient power to do, thank God.
‘That is why, very dear and beloved brother, we particularly pray you, for your honour and our own, and that of our said wife, that you should do everything in your power to see that she comes to us as quickly as possible; we are much chagrined to be deprived of her company, a thing which we would never have allowed had it not been for the great trust and confidence we have in you and in your good faith that she would return when we wished.’
Edward also demanded the return of his son and denounced the attempts at assassination made on the Bishop of Exeter which he attributed to ‘the enemies and outlaws over there’.
Undoubtedly, his anger on that first day of December must have been great and the vaults of Westminster have echoed long to his furious shouting. For Edward also wrote to the same purpose and in the same tone to the Archbishops of Rheims and Rouen, to Jean de Marigny, Bishop of Beauvais, to the Bishops of Langres and Laon, all peers spiritual, to the Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, as well as to the Counts of Valois and Flanders, peers temporal, to the Abbot of Saint-Denis, to Louis of Clermont-Bourbon, the Great Chamberlain, to Robert of Artois, to Mille de Noyers, Master of the Exchequer, and to the Constable Gaucher de Châtillon.
The fact that Mahaut was the only peer of France who was excepted from this correspondence was proof enough of her relations with Edward and that she already knew enough about the affair to make it unnecessary to write to her officially about it.30
When Robert opened his letter he was overjoyed, and went off laughing and slapping his thighs to his cousin of England. It was exactly the sort of situation that was calculated to delight him. So poor Edward was sending couriers to the four corners of the realm to tell everyone of his marital difficulties, defend his little catamite and announce publicly that he was unable to make his wife come home! How unfortunate the lords of England were, what a sorry King they had, and how weak were the hands that had inherited the sceptre of William the Conqueror! Nothing so ridiculous as this had occurred since the quarrels of Louis the Pious and Alienor of Aquitaine.
‘Turn him into a proper cuckold, Cousin,’ cried Robert, ‘and make no bones about it. Let your Edward’s horns grow so long that he has to bend double to get through the doors of his castles. Isn’t that what he deserves, Cousin Roger?’
And he gaily slapped Mortimer on the back.
Edward, in his fury, had also decided on reprisals, and had confiscated the property of his half-brother the Earl of Kent and that of Lord de Cromwell, the commander of Isabella’s escort. But he had done even worse than that: he had sealed a decree by which he made himself ‘Governor and Administrator’ of the fiefs of his son, the Duke of Aquitaine, and was demanding in his name the lost territory. It was tantamount to repudiating both the treaty negotiated by his wife and the homage rendered by his son.
‘Let him, let him!’ said Robert of Artois. ‘We’ll just go and take his duchy from him again, or rather what remains of it, for one can say that the half of it is only uncovered at low tide. And since two campaigns haven’t taught the wretched fellow his duty, we’ll mount a third against him. The cross-bows for the crusade are beginning to rust!’
But there was no need to raise an army or send the Constable, whose joints were becoming stiff with age; the two Marshals, at the head of the permanent garrisons, would be strong enough to deal with the Gascon lords in the Bordelais who were still weak or foolish enough to remain loyal to the King of England. It was becoming almost a habit. And each time there were fewer adversaries.
Edward’s letter was one of the last Charles of Valois read, one of the last echoes of the great affairs of the world that reached him.
Monseigneur Charles died in the middle of this month of December; his obsequies were as pompous as his life had been. The whole house of Valois, and seeing its members in procession one could the better realize how numerous and important it was, the whole family of France, all the dignitaries, most of the peers, the widowed Queens, Parliament, the Exchequer, the Constable, the doctors of the University, the Corporations of Paris, the vassals of the fiefs of appanage and the clergy of the churches and abbeys mentioned in the will accompanied the body, now very light by reason of illness and embalming, of the most turbulent man of his time to the Church of the Minorites so that he might lie between his first two wives.
It was his fate to have missed, by less than three years, becoming King of France, since Charles IV, his nephew, who had no son, and who was now following his coffin, had no more than that to live.
The entrails of the great Charles of Valois were taken to the Abbey of Chaâlis and his heart, enclosed in an urn, handed over to his third wife to await the time when she herself would have a tomb.
And then a great cold fell over the kingdom, as if the bones of this prince, from the mere fact of being placed in the earth, had suddenly made the whole of France freeze. People of those times would have no difficulty in recollecting the year of his death; they would merely have to say: ‘It was at the time of the great frost.’
The Seine was entirely covered with ice; you could cross its minor tributaries, such as the stream of the Grange Batelière, on foot; the wells were frozen, and water had to be drawn from the cisterns not with buckets but with axes. The bark of the trees cracked in the gardens; there were elms split to the heart. The gates of Paris suffered much damage, for the cold fissured even the stone. Birds of all kinds, such as jays and magpies, which were never normally seen in towns, were searching for food in the cobbled streets. The price of peat doubled and there were no furs left in the shops, not a moleskin nor a miniver, nor even a mere sheepskin. In the poorer districts many old people and children died. Travellers’ feet froze in their boots; the couriers’ hands were blue when they delivered their dispatches. All river traffic had ceased. The troops sent to Guyenne, if unwise enough to remove their gloves, peeled the skin from their hands off on their weapons. Urchins amused themselves by persuading village idiots to put their tongues on to the blade of an axe. But what was to remain most impressed on people’s memories was the extraordinary sense of silence because life seemed to have come to a stop.
At Court the New Year was celebrated rather quietly, partly because of mourning and partly because of the frost. Nevertheless, there was mistletoe and the usual presents were exchanged. On the accounts of the past year the Treasury would show a surplus of seventy-three thousand livres31 – sixty thousand being derived from the Treaty of Aquitaine – of which Robert of Artois persuaded the King to credit him with eight thousand livres. It was indeed only fair, since Robert had been ruling the kingdom on behalf of his cousin for the last six months. He mounted an expedition in Guyenne, where the French arms scored a rapid victory since they found practically no English opposition. The local lords, at the mercy once again of the anger of the suzerain in Paris against his vassal in London, began to regret having been born Gascons. God would have done better by them had he given them lands in some other duchy.
Edward, ruined, in debt and unable to get any more credit, had been unable to send troops to defend his fief; but he sent ships to bring back his wife. She had written to the Bishop of Winchester, so that he might communicate her letter to the whole English clergy:
‘Neither you nor others of good understanding must believe that we have left the company of our lord without grave and reasonable cause and without our being in bodily peril from the said Hugh, who has our said lord under his dominion as well as all our kingdom and who wishes to dishonour us, of which we are most certain from having suffered it. So long as Hugh remains as at present, with our husband under his sway, we cannot return to the Kingdom of England without exposing our life and that of our very dear son to the danger of death.’
This letter crossed the new orders Edward sent the sheriffs of the coastal counties at the beginning of February. He informed them that the Queen and his son, the Duke of Aquitaine, whom he had sent to France to establish peace, had, under the influence of the traitor and rebel Mortimer, made alliance with the enemies of the King and the kingdom, and that should the Queen or the Duke of Aquitaine disembark from such ships as he, the King, had sent to France, his will was that they should be courteously received, but only if they arrived with good intentions; should they, however, disembark from foreign ships and show that they were bent on a course contrary to his wishes, the order was to spare only the Queen and Prince Edward, and to treat everyone else who landed as a rebel.
To gain time, Isabella got her son to write to the King that she was ill and in no condition to travel.
But in the month of March, when King Edward had learnt that his wife was enjoying herself going about in Paris, he had another attack of epistolatory fury. It seemed to be a cyclic disease that attacked him every three months.
Edward II wrote to the young Duke of Aquitaine as follows:
‘On false pretexts our wife, your mother, has withdrawn herself from us because of our dear and faithful Hugh the Despenser, who had always served us so well and so loyally; but you can see, and everyone else can see, that she has openly and notoriously, departing from her duty and to the prejudice of our Crown, taken to herself Mortimer, the traitor and our mortal enemy, as he has been proved, attested and judged in full Parliament, and keeps company with him at home and abroad, in despite of us, our Crown and the rights of our realm. And she does even worse, if it be possible, by keeping you in company of our said enemy before the whole world, in very great dishonour and villainy, and in prejudice of the laws and usages of the Realm of England which it is your sovereign duty to safeguard and uphold.’
At the same time, he wrote to Charles IV:
‘If your sister loved and desired to be in our company, as she lyingly told you, if your Grace will excuse the expression, she would not have left us on the pretext of furthering peace and friendship between us and you, which I believed in all good faith when I sent her to you. But really, very dear brother, we perceive clearly enough that she does not love us, and the reason she gives, concerning our dear kinsman Hugh the Despenser, is feigned. We think she must be out of her mind when, so overtly and notoriously, she retains in her counsels the traitor and our mortal enemy Mortimer, and is in company with this wicked man both at home and abroad. You might also see, very dear brother, that she corrects her behaviour and conducts herself as she should for the honour of all her relations. Have the goodness to let us know what you intend to do, in accordance with God, good sense and good faith, and without regard to the caprices of women or other desires.’
Letters to the same effect were sent out once again in all directions, to peers, dignitaries, prelates, even to the Pope himself. The English sovereigns were each denouncing the other’s lover in public, and this double affair of two couples consisting of three men and one woman vastly entertained the courts of Europe.
Discretion was now no longer possible to the lovers in Paris. Rather than seek to conceal things, Isabella and Mortimer lived openly together, and appeared on every occasion in each other’s company. That the Earl of Kent and his wife, who had joined him, were on intimate terms with the adulterous couple seemed to constitute a sort of guarantee. Why should anyone be more concerned for the honour of the King of England than his own half-brother seemed to be? Indeed, Edward’s letters had done no more than confirm the evidence of a liaison which everyone accepted as an accomplished and immutable fact. And all the unfaithful wives thought there must be some special forgiveness for queens and that Isabella was very lucky to have a bugger for a husband.
But there was a shortage of money. No funds now reached the emigrants, whose property had all been confiscated. And the little English Court in Paris lived entirely on loans from the Lombards.
At the end of March they had to summon old Tolomei once again. He came to see Queen Isabella, accompanied by Signor Boccaccio, who had on him her account with the Bardi. The Queen and Mortimer received him most affably and explained their need for more money. With equal affability, and many expressions of regret, Messer Spinello Tolomei refused. He had good arguments to support his case; he opened his big black book and showed them the figures. Messire de Alspaye, Lord de Cromwell, Queen Isabella – as he turned the page, Tolomei bowed low – the Earl of Kent and the Countess – another bow – Lord Maltravers, Mortimer … And then, on four consecutive pages, the debts of King Edward himself …
Roger Mortimer protested: King Edward’s account was no concern of theirs.
‘But my lord,’ said Tolomei, ‘as far as we’re concerned all the English debts are lumped together. I am grieved to have to refuse you, greatly grieved, and to have to disappoint so beautiful a lady as Madame the Queen; but it is really asking too much of me to expect from me what I no longer possess and you have had. This great fortune we are supposed to own is made up of nothing but debts. My whole wealth, my lord, consists of your debts. Consider, Madame,’ he went on, turning to the Queen, ‘consider, Madame, the situation of us poor Lombards, who are always being threatened, and always having to pay each new king the dues customary on a happy accession. And, alas, how many we have had to pay in the last twelve years! And then under every king our right of citizenship is withdrawn so that we must repurchase it at a high fee, and sometimes even twice over if the reign be a long one. Yet, look at what we do for the kingdoms! England has cost our companies a hundred and seventy thousand livres, the expenses of her coronations, her wars and her rebellions, Madame. Think of my age. I should have retired long ago, had I not to be ceaselessly going to and fro recovering these debts which we need to assist other purposes. We are called avaricious, greedy for what is due to us, yet no one considers the risks we take in lending everyone money and enabling the princes of this world to carry on their affairs. Priests are concerned with the lower classes, with giving alms to beggars and opening hospitals for the unfortunate; but we are concerned with the difficulties of the great.’
His age gave him the right to express himself in this way, and the gentleness of his tone was such that it was impossible to take offence at what he said. And all the time he was talking, his half-open eye was fixed on a jewel shining at the Queen’s neck and which his book showed Mortimer had bought on credit.
‘How did our business begin? Why do we exist? No one remembers it now,’ he went on. ‘Our Italian banks were created during the crusades because lords and travellers disliked carrying gold on the unsafe roads, where people were always being robbed, or even in the camps which were not peopled only by honest men. And there were also ransoms to pay. So that we should transport the gold on their account and at our risk, the lords, and particularly those of England, pledged the revenues of their fiefs to us. But when we presented ourselves in these fiefs with our accounts, thinking that the seal of a great baron was a sufficient guarantee, we were not paid. So then we appealed to the kings, who were prepared to guarantee their vassals’ debts provided we lent money to them too; and this is how our resources came to be laid out among the kingdoms. No, Madame, to my great sorrow and regret, this time I cannot.’
The Earl of Kent who was present at the conversation said: ‘All right, Messer Tolomei. We shall have to go to one of the other companies.’
Tolomei smiled. Did this fair young man, sitting there with his legs crossed and casually stroking a greyhound’s head, really think he could take his custom elsewhere? In his long career Tolomei had heard that phrase a thousand times and more. What a terrible threat!
‘My lord, when it is a question of such great borrowers as you royal personages, you must realize that all our companies are informed, and that the credit which I must regretfully refuse you will not be granted you by any other company. Messer Boccaccio, whom you see here with me, represents the Bardi interests. Ask him. For, Madame’ – and Tolomei turned back to the Queen – ‘this total of indebtedness has become very vexatious owing to the fact that none of it is covered by any guarantee. In the circumstances of your present relations with the King of England, he will most certainly not guarantee your debts. Nor you his, I imagine. Unless, of course, you do intend taking them over? If that were the case, then I think we might still perhaps be able to help you.’
And he closed his left eye completely, clasped his hands over his stomach and waited.
Isabella understood very little about finance. She looked at Roger Mortimer. What did the banker intend by these last words? After all the talk, what did this sudden overture mean?
‘Make yourself a little clearer, Messer Tolomei,’ she said.
‘Madame,’ went on the banker, ‘your cause is good and your husband’s far from pretty. The whole of Christendom knows of his wicked treatment of you, of the morals that blacken his life and of the bad government he inflicts on his subjects through his detestable counsellors. On the other hand, Madame, you are loved for your kindness, and I guarantee that there is no lack of good knights in France and elsewhere who would be ready to raise their banners for you and restore you to your place in your kingdom, even if it meant turning your husband, the King of England, off his throne.’
‘Messer Tolomei,’ cried the Earl of Kent, ‘does it mean nothing to you that my brother, detestable though he may be, has been crowned?’
‘My lord, my lord,’ replied Tolomei, ‘kings are really only such by the consent of their subjects. And you have at hand another king to give to the people of England, the young Duke of Aquitaine, who seems to show great sense for his age. I have seen too much of human passions not to recognize those that cannot be altered and lead the most powerful princes to disaster. King Edward will not rid himself of Despenser; but, on the other hand, England is perfectly prepared to acclaim any sovereign presented to her in exchange for the bad king she has and the wicked men who surround him. No doubt you will argue, Madame, that the knights who come forward to fight for your cause will be expensive to pay; they will have to be furnished with harness, food and their pleasures. But we Lombards, who can no longer face the prospect of supporting your exile, could still face the prospect of supporting your army, if Lord Mortimer, whose valour is known to all, would undertake to lead it, and if, of course, we had your guarantee that you would take over Messire Edward’s debts and liquidate them on your success.’
The proposal could not have been more clearly put. The Lombard Companies were offering to back the wife against the husband, the son against the father, the lover against the legitimate husband. Mortimer was not so surprised as might have been expected, nor indeed did he pretend to be when he replied: ‘The difficulty, Messer Tolomei, is to assemble these banners. You can’t do it in a cellar. Where can we muster a thousand knights in our pay? In what country? We cannot ask King Charles, however well disposed he may be towards his sister, Madame the Queen, to allow us to assemble them in France.’
There was a certain connivance between the old Sienese and Edward’s former prisoner.
‘Has not the young Duke of Aquitaine,’ said Tolomei, ‘received as his personal property the county of Ponthieu, which came to him from Madame the Queen, and is not Ponthieu opposite England, and next to the county of Artois where Monseigneur Robert, though he is not its present holder, has many partisans, as you well know, my lord, since you took refuge there after your escape?’
‘Ponthieu …’ repeated the Queen thoughtfully. ‘What is your opinion, dear Mortimer?’
Though there was only a verbal agreement, it was nevertheless a bond. Tolomei was prepared to give the Queen and her lover a small credit at once so that they might deal with immediate necessities and leave straightway for Ponthieu to organize the expedition. And then, in May, he would supply the major part of the funds. Why May? Could he not make it an earlier date?
Tolomei was planning things in his mind. He was thinking that, together with the Bardi, he had a debt to recover from the Pope, and that he would ask Guccio, who was in Siena, to go to Avignon, since the Pope had happened to let him know, through a Bardi traveller, that he would like to see the young man again. And advantage must be taken of the Pope’s benevolence. It would also be an opportunity, and perhaps the last, for Tolomei to see once again the nephew he missed so much.
And there was a flicker of amusement in the banker’s thoughts. For, like Valois over the crusade and Robert of Artois over Aquitaine, the Lombard was thinking: ‘It’s the Pope who’ll pay for England.’ But when he had calculated the time it would take Boccaccio, who was about to set out for Italy, to reach Siena, and the time it would take Guccio to travel from Siena to Avignon, do his business there, and come on to Paris, he said: ‘In May, Madame, in May; and may God prosper your affairs.’
And thus began the war of incompatible loves which was to make the destiny of nations totter.