Matilda, the Empress, was as unprepared for her father’s death as anyone. When the news broke she proved how politically unreliable she was by being (a) far down in Normandy and (b) pregnant again.
Stephen of Blois was ready though. In the only completely perfected manoeuvre of his life he was across the Channel, hailed as king by the Londoners, had taken the royal treasury at Winchester and been crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury. All this before Henry’s body had even reached England for burial.
After they’d got to know him people were to wonder how he’d been so efficient. Then they realised he had acted on the advice of his two supreme allies, his brother and his wife. Stephen’s wife Matilda – it was confusing that there were so many important Matildas around then – was not only the best general in his army but Countess of Boulogne which gave Stephen access to the most useful Channel ports. His brother was Henry, Bishop of Winchester, who was responsible for the ease with which the treasury fell into Stephen’s hands, and the cleverest plotter of the age.
Matilda of Boulogne had thrown, as it were, and Henry of Blois had caught.
And what of the oaths everybody – including the Archbishop of Canterbury – had taken to uphold the succession of Matilda Empress?
Stephen’s supporters said they’d been forced on them and didn’t count. Besides, they said, at his last moment Henry the First had changed his mind and nominated Stephen his heir. Here their pièce de résistance – literally their crowning argument – was Hugh Bigod, Henry’s seneschal, who swore on oath before the archbishop that Henry on his deathbed had disinherited the Empress and designated Stephen. (As the Bishop of Angers, one of the Empress’ supporters, was to say later: “How did he know? He wasn’t there.”)
But it was good enough for the archbishop who allowed himself to believe Bigod and anointed and crowned Stephen at Westminster Abbey on Sunday, December 22, 1135, though he dropped dead before the end of the year, which may have been a judgment on him.
Henry was still not buried. His body was at Rouen where parts of it were interred, the rest being cut up and salted for the voyage. The man who cut him up worked with his head wrapped in napkins to avoid the smell. He’d demanded a large sum for the job but, the chronicler said, “he had poor reason for rejoicing at his bargain since he met his death therefore. He was the last of many slain by Henry.”
There were three disgusting weeks before there was a favourable wind for England… “liquid matter oozed through the hides to be caught in vessels placed beneath the bier and carried away by servants fainting with disgust.” He was finally buried in Reading Abbey on January 4, 1136.
By then his nephew, Stephen, was King of England whether Henry had wanted it or not, whoever liked it or didn’t like it, because the mystical ceremony of anointment made him king, wrongfully perhaps but irrevocably.
Many didn’t like it. The first to declare rebellion was Baldwin de Redvers who attacked and occupied the new king’s castle at Exeter.
The latrines were filled in and re-sited every week. Every week the dung carts came for the manure from the stables and horse lines. Nevertheless after three months of continuous heat the siege around Exeter Castle had become so smelly that the stink of glue being brewed by the crossbowmen to laminate new bows was almost acceptable.
Now there was a new smell, a tiny whiff, that came and went on the dawn not unpleasantly but faintly, a timid maiden of an aroma lifting up from the castle on a thermal from the River Exe far below. It reached the nose of the man with a bad back lying under an oak tree in the arbalists’ section.
Willem of Ghent was still half-asleep when the smell entered his dream, coming and going so subliminally fast that he was unable to grasp it, although he knew it was important. He sat up to sniff it again, cursed and lay back, forgetting everything in the pain that wrenched the left side of his lower back. This would have to be his last war.
“Bowman’s back” scourged the archer’s trade and none so much as the crossbowmen who lifted their own weight from a stoop every time they made ready to shoot. The priests said it was a curse on them for being crossbowmen in the first place.
Willem rolled sideways off his pile of bracken to ease on to all fours, the only way of getting off a bed without bending the spine. He looked round like a dog to see if he was being watched, but his company was asleep so, again without flexing his trunk, he walked his hands up the bark of the oak until he was upright. He spat. By the time the others were awake he had performed the morning’s requirements and could kneel with them without seeming difficulty to pray to St. Sebastian under the oak tree.
All over the camp mercenary sections, which were not allowed to cathedral services and to which no priest would administer, nevertheless prayed in their scores of languages. They communicated with each other in a form of dog Latin: to God they spoke in their own tongue.
“Et dimitte nobis debita nostris,” begged the clergy in the cathedral, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
“E pardune a nus les noz detes,” prayed the Normans.
“And forgif us our gultes,” said the English.
“Ende vergheef on onse sculden,” said Willem with his men to the image nailed on the tree. Jacopo had liberated it from some monks during the Sicilian campaign because they didn’t appreciate it. Really it was a bit of driftwood warped into the shape of agony and someone had exploited its lines and knots with paint to represent features and limbs. The quarrels which pierced the wooden body would each have caused fatal haemorrhaging and yet, as Willem knew, St. Sebastian hadn’t died of arrow wounds. He won a lot of money betting on how St. Sebastian died.
From the knoll where the trebuchet had been set up there came the first clatter and thud of the day as the business of lobbing boulders and decomposing animals into the castle bailey began.
Touching the knobbled feet of St. Sebastian for luck, Willem turned to face the castle which dominated his skyline and, at present, his life. The view still shocked him with its gaudiness. The red castle clashed with a forget-me-not sky; below, the Exe cut a winking, sapphire swathe through ochre sandbanks. Although he’d seen red earth before – iron in the soil around Ypres made it not dissimilar – he’d never seen it as it was here, splashed in squares between green and corn-yellow on the crazy Devon hills so steep that cattle grazed lopsided. Not that there were many cattle now.
As the camp woke up so did the flies, a more immediate enemy than the castle garrison, which within the hour would send every living thing into hand-slapping, ear-twitching, tail-swishing, skin-biting movement while only vegetation stood still. All day swallows flicked above the ground scooping them up, but their number remained limitless and unrelenting.
Willem’s men slouched into a line carrying their crossbows and ranged behind a straw wall which protected them from the castle’s fire. One or two slid their eyes, wondering why he didn’t join them, but Willem outstared them. He was the captain.
“At the loopholes.”
Each merlon on the castle’s crenellated top had a loophole and each of his men had a specific loophole to aim at; if he was on target his bolt went right through, with luck hitting a defender in the eye. If he missed the bolt hit the outside of the merlon and threw off a puff of red dust.
“Load.” Thirty backs stooped as thirty right feet went into the stirrup and sixty hands pulled back the hemp string until it could be slipped over the firing catch and thirty prods bent to breaking-point. Thirty crossbows lifted to an angle at the red-toothed pattern against the sky.
“Loose.” With a sound which reminded Willem of a man hawking and spitting, chwwt-pt, the bolts released at two hundred miles an hour and twenty-nine simultaneously disappeared. Only one bolt flirted in the still air with a tremor that widened into an irregular arc until it vacillated and, by pure mischance, hit something that moved across a crenel. Willem saw a barrel helm drop – a barrel helm, not the pot helmet of a man-at-arms.
Willem went down the line to a boy who was sucking the fingers of his left hand, moaning with pain and guilt. “Yes?”
The boy rocked back and forth but had the sense not to drop his bow. “I didn’t breathe properly, captain. I sucked in but I didn’t let it half out again.”
“And last night?”
“I was on the tiles last night, captain.”
“Was he,” muttered Jacopo on the boy’s right. “He invented it.”
“And?”
“And I was thinking of a woman, captain. You said the string always hits our fingers if we’re thinking of a woman when we shoot.”
“And?”
“And I’m sorry, captain.”
“And?”
“And you’re going to clout me, captain.”
It hurt Willem as much as the boy, who said: “Shall I try again, captain?”
“Stir the glue.” In this heat, with his hangover, the smell would be punishment. There was answering fire from the castle so Willem dismissed the men to cover. “But stay armed.” He and Jacopo ran for the oak tree and were sweating by the time they reached it.
“That boy’ll have to go back to being a page,” said Jacopo.
Willem quoted the bowman’s standby: “L’arc qui ne faut.” Death was the only archer who never missed.
“A good archer can go out whoring and still shoot next morning,” said Jacopo, who knew. “We have our reputation to consider.”
Willem grunted. They had a reputation and a contract with the king’s marshal to supply thirty crossbowmen for Stephen’s army. When old Paolo of Genoa had died they had been left with twenty-nine and Willem had promoted Alain of Arras from page to arbalist rather than take in an outsider.
The threat of demotion would be enough. Nobody in their senses would choose to return to that combination of body-servant, groom, cook and bolt-maker.
“I wonder how old Paolo is getting on,” said Jacopo. The old man had been a master-arbalist and loved by them all and they often wondered if he was still in Purgatory or now on his way to Paradise. They’d wanted him buried in the cathedral precincts, but the Exeter canons had refused to pollute their earth with a mercenary; eventually Henry of Blois had intervened and prevailed on his fellow-bishop to allow Paolo burial in the old cemetery against the Roman wall alongside the river.
“Will they be as reluctant to bury me? And where will it be?” Jacopo was suddenly overcome by Latin misery and fell down at the feet of St. Sebastian.
“Does it matter?”
“It didn’t,” said Jacopo, sitting up. “It’s beginning to.”
They heard the sound they’d been expecting. A horseman was cantering up the hill; as they’d also expected he was angry and his voice reached them before his horse. “Which of you filth shot that quarrel?”
Willem sat down beside Jacopo and the two arbalists leaned back in the scalloped camouflage of the oak’s shade, seeming to close their eyes as if bored – as indeed they were – by well-born knights who couldn’t tell the difference between a quarrel and a practice bolt. Their indifference was an aggressive gesture across the chasm of class. The knight hated the mercenaries because they fought for pay and not feudal duty. They hated him back because he was an amateur and when his forty days’ customary service were up he could, and probably would, go back to his manor and forget the war.
So Willem and Jacopo watched the prancing horse and rider under their lids and prepared to keep him simmering while behind him crossbows levelled at his cloak.
“What were we doing?” Jacopo was his most Calabrian. “Were we shooting at the enemy? Yes, we were. Mea culpa.”
“Not knights,” screamed the knight. “Men-at-arms only. You’re not to shoot knights at this stage.”
Jacopo nodded. “Men-at-arms only. We understand that now. Thank you for pointing it out.”
“But you’ve killed a knight.” He was young and they hadn’t seen him before; a new arrival. But they knew his type and temper. He could attack at any moment.
Willem opened his eyes. “Your father-in-law, was it?” That was the matter with the lad, with all the knights. They were so interrelated with the enemy they didn’t know which side they were on.
“What father-in-law? My father-in-law’s not in the castle.”
“Then what are you worrying about?”
But now Willem smelled again the trickle of smell from the castle and knew what it was. He stood up. “Piss off and play. We’ve got business.”
As the knight reached for his sword Jacopo coughed politely and shifted his gaze. The knight looked round and saw the crossbows. Self-preservation struggled with the need to save face and won, just. He yelled the knight’s eternal complaint against bowmen. “Cursed was the first archer; he was afraid and dared not approach.” The mercenaries had heard it before. He spurred his horse and, as he galloped off, swerved it so that its right shoulder hit the tripod over the fire and sent the glue in a hissing, translucent mess into the flames.
“Shall I shoot, captain?” yelled Alain and for a moment Willem was tempted. The knight had taken a better revenge than he knew; to make that glue they’d had to buy an ox at prohibitive price, slaughter it, cut out its heel tendons and soak them in lime and water for days. Hours had then been spent beating the tendons and pulling them into silky shreds to add to boiling fish glue until they had a fixative strong enough to hold together the laminated wood of the prod under drawing stress. He drew in a deep breath. “No.” Sooner or later there would be trouble between the barons’ men and the mercenaries, but he wouldn’t start it.
He told Jacopo: “Keep them on alert in case. I’m going to the cathedral. And tell the pages to get another ox.”
On the other side of the city from the castle, the cathedral precincts were royal headquarters. Flustered canons tried to drive away the market stalls set up on their lawns but failed. Stephen was favourable to the townspeople – it was they who had warned him a rebellious garrison had taken over the castle – and was compensating them for their wrecked and burned houses by allowing them to grow rich on trade.
The young knight who’d knocked over the glue was complaining to a crowd of silk-cloaked barons. A figure detached itself from the group and came towards Willem. “You are a wicked Flemish mercenary, Willem,” said William of Ypres, “a disgrace to chivalry. Come and have a drink.”
Willem jerked his head towards the castle. “They’re cooking with wine in there. I’ve smelled it. Twice now.”
A knight of inexperience would have questioned his sanity but Ypres was a good practical mercenary, the commander of all Stephen’s mercenaries. “Not just flavouring the gravy?”
Willem shook his head. “They’re cooking beans in it.”
“And you don’t waste wine on beans.”
“Only if you’ve run out of water.”
Ypres shouted to his squire: “The marksman.” He turned to Willem. “We’ll test it out. I thought it was an everlasting spring they had there.”
“Not in this drought.”
“We’ll have that drink while we’re waiting.”
The mercenary captains had chosen an evacuated stone house just out of castle range as their tavern and put in it one of their own veterans, Rotrou, to run it. Its most salubrious period was now, in the morning, when it had been swept and fresh rushes laid, when the grooves of the whitewood tables were still damp from scrubbing, when sunshine came through the open shutters on to empty stools and benches and it smelled, not unpleasantly, of stale wine and basting chickens.
Its only customer at the moment was Fenchel, the siege engineer, who sat at a table in the corner, drawing plans on a slate and crooning one of his interminable, and filthy, songs.
Ypres ordered wine and installed himself in the window seat to watch for his archer. Willem carefully dragged up a high stool on which he could sit with his back straight.
“Back bad?”
“It’s all right.” His commander didn’t press the question, but neither did he believe the answer.
“It’s my last war, Willem. And you?”
“You can afford it. I’ll have to see.”
Their lives formed a sort of St. Andrew’s cross, now meeting in the peculiar democracy of their trade, but starting from opposite beginnings and continuing to different ends. William of Ypres had used mercenary life as a means to an end. Willem of Ghent had grabbed it for a lifeline. Neither belonged to the third category of mercenary made up of men who liked killing and being paid for it.
The morning light bleached the tan on the commander’s face, emphasising the grey among the bluish stubble on his chin, which, like his body, was thickening. He looked ruthless, but respectably ruthless, like a merchant. He’d been born near enough to great wealth to smell it; he was a bastard by a former Count of Flanders and a wool-carder. He’d missed the title by a whisker after his father died and had tried to grab it by force, missing again and being forced into exile to avoid reprisals. Stephen had given him refuge – one of the reasons Ypres fought for him – the other reason being that Stephen had made him Earl of Kent in all but title. And Ypres wasn’t a man to quibble over Kent’s title when he was receiving Kent’s revenues.
The man perched opposite him was thinner, taller, younger and poorer; his had been a lower birth than Ypres’. In fact, in Flanders there was no lower condition than that of itinerant weaver, which was what Willem’s father had been, a “blue nail”, one of the hundreds who starved at the gates of the rich wool merchants waiting for the chance to work a sixteen-hour day for subsistence.
Clogs scraped through the rushes and Rotrou loomed up with two mugs of wine slopping in his enormous and only hand – the other had been sliced off by a Saracen. They drank suspiciously.
“Why don’t you keep this sheepwash in the cellar?” grumbled Willem.
“You think that’s bad you should taste the ale,” said Rotrou. He paid no concession to the fact that he owed his living to their charity and they didn’t expect any; nobody could look after a mercenary except mercenaries, nobody but a mercenary understood mercenaries. They were only really comfortable in each other’s company.
“I’ve had hot wars,” said Willem. “A cool war Stephen promised me. Two estates in Normandy and a moist, green war with cold wine.”
“Is that why you joined him? I heard the Angevins had offered for you.”
“They did, but it seemed to me Stephen was the only ruler who understands towns.”
Ypres was puzzled. “You like towns?”
“No.” He hated them. His mother and sister had died of malnutrition in a garret of one. He and his father had chased rats away from their corpses all night before they could be taken to the communal grave and nobody at all had noticed their passing. But Willem, who fitted into no social structure, had recognised a new force. Successful trading was giving towns an economic power which had nothing to do with the power of the lords who owned the countryside. Their traders and craftsmen were becoming rich and forming themselves into guilds so rigidly and democratically organised they could ensure security for their members and their members’ widows and orphans. They were demanding liberties and charters to conduct their own affairs. Stephen – and Willem had no other regard for the king – recognised this new liberty and fostered it, which was why the towns loved him.
Willem liked new things. He liked Fenchel over in the corner designing a better and more powerful trebuchet, who wanted to build a cathedral with flying buttresses to support the spans.
“I seen it, I seen it,” crooned Fenchel, licking his chalk, “I been in betwe-e-en it.”
“Towns are the coming thing,” he said. “Stephen understands that.”
Ypres did not; the only power he could envisage came from owning vassals and land and collecting rent and tithes. “You’d better tell me your side,” he said. “Was it a knight you killed?”
“When this is over I shall invest in town trade,” said Willem. If his back continued as bad as this he was finished. This war had got to pay. Ypres could pay for the next round. “This morning? It was a knight, a mistake and a practice bolt. Untipped. Whoever it hit has a headache. But if he was dead, so what?”
“Bad feeling. The garrison must sue for terms soon and certain quarters think at this stage there’s no need to shed noble blood.”
“Stuff their terms,” said Willem of Ghent. He believed in unconditional surrender, especially from a castle low on water.
“Sir,” said a voice through the window.
“Fenchel,” called Ypres, “come and show this bowman of mine whereabouts in the castle we can start a fire.”
Fenchel spat into the rushes and lumbered over. “Destruction,” he said, “that’s all I ever get, destruction. Giants built that castle and you bloody pygmies want to burn it down.” If they’d asked him to shore it up, he’d have complained.
“We don’t want to burn it down, Fenchel,” said his commander, patiently. “We want to start a fire to see what they put it out with.”
Fenchel spat on to his slate and wiped a section clean with his sleeve. In a few strokes he had drawn a plan of the castle; it was his business to form a clear picture of it from spies and guesswork. “We reckon we dropped a rock through their stable roof last Thursday,” he said, “and we reckon they’ve put their horses under thatch there.” He drew a cross in the south-east corner of a square.
Peering in through the window the marksman said: “Range?”
Fenchel pursed his lips. “Ninety-five paces, ninety-seven?”
“There you are, then. Put a fire arrow in that and we’ll smell what we shall smell.”
“Consider it done,” said the archer, and they did; a bowman didn’t earn the title “marksman” for missing what he aimed at even when he couldn’t see his target and had to work out a trajectory which would take the arrow up over the castle wall and drop down to an exact point behind it. They didn’t even go and watch him but stayed at Rotrou’s and had another drink, only emerging when, from beyond the houses which hid the castle, came a mixture of neighing and of filling buckets. They sniffed and smelled burning with a fruity, alcoholic depth to it. They were putting out the fire with wine.
To celebrate they went back in and had another drink. Then they bought the marksman a drink and Fenchel another, after which they began to sing. They were still singing when one of Ypres’ men put his head through the window and said: “The buggers are coming out to parley.”
The parley took place in the cathedral. Though the emissaries from the rebel castle were so desiccated by thirst they had trouble in enunciating, their words had juice. They would surrender on condition that their men keep their arms and that there should be no sack, no looting and no reprisals by Stephen’s army.
Briefed by Willem and Ypres that the castle was out of water, Stephen’s brother, the fat, cultivated Henry, Bishop of Winchester, advised the king to hang them.
The emissaries were sent back to think again and come back with an unconditional surrender. They did not return; instead they sent out more persuasive emissaries, the goldenhaired wife and sons of the rebel Baldwin de Redvers. They were in better condition than the original parleyers, but they drooped prettily and pleaded for their lives and property in sweet, cracking voices.
Watching the proceedings, Willem saw the king look towards the altar and wonder what God and His Son would think of him if he hanged the rebels as his advisers were telling him to do.
Stephen’s father had been one of the rare cowards of the First Crusade. He had escaped from an Antioch besieged by Saracens – he slid down a rope forever earning himself the nickname of “funambulus”, rope-trick man – and came home to the reproaches of his wife, Henry of England’s sister, and everyone else in Europe. Eventually he was persuaded to return and get himself decently killed but the disgrace had stained his family. Perhaps it was then that Stephen became self-conscious and lost the all-of-a-oneness of other princelings and began to wonder, and care, what God and his fellow-men thought of him.
Somebody else in the cathedral was watching the king – Robert, Earl of Gloucester, the best of Henry the First’s many bastards. He stepped forward. “My lord,” he said, “can it justly be said that these people are traitors? They owed their fealty to their lord, Baldwin de Redvers, and should not be held responsible for his rebellion.”
There was a silence. It was an argument which struck at the king’s authority. A long time ago, in the stormy years of Henry’s reign, two rebels had stood before him and his barons had put a similar argument on their behalf. Henry had said, “Rubbish.” All English and Normans were his lawful men, he’d said. “Let their eyes be put out,” he’d said. And their eyes had been put out and England had gained long years of peace through it.
Willem, who respected Earl Robert as a commander, began to wonder whose side he was on. The earl had absented himself from Stephen’s coronation and people had wondered if he was going to stand out for the Empress, his half-sister, or even himself. When he’d finally turned up at the siege of Exeter to support Stephen, the king had received him with honour and relief. Maybe, thought Willem, the relief was premature.
However, Stephen’s face cleared. He shrugged off Henry of Blois’ restraining hand. “My lord, they shall have God’s mercy and mine. Let them go free without punishment.”
For the first time in their alliance, he had disregarded his brother’s advice. More important, he had allowed rebels to get away with it.
It was his first mistake.