The Brothers of Gwynedd (57 page)

  It was not any part of Llewelyn's plan, when we rode out from Aber, to attack the castle of Builth, or to go beyond the violated territories. And thus far we had not set a foot outside our rights, or infringed any part of the agreements to which we were sworn. Whether we were entitled to do so at this point is a delicate question. I know whose hand set this tide in motion, and it was not ours. But to stay it, once launched, was not so simple a matter. Tides must run their course before they turn, and so did ours. Llewelyn swept by Builth on an impetus that could not be stayed, dropped, as it were a calf ripe for birth, a third of his following to encircle the castle, and surged westwards into Dyfed, halting only when the town of Tenby was in flames. Then we withdrew homewards, without haste, consolidating as we passed. But the noose about the castle of Builth remained close and deadly behind us, twined by the men of the cantref, who had their own revenges to take, and drawing ever softly and tenderly tighter as the year wore into spring.

  Now, though we did not know it until many weeks later, this action of Llewelyn's, like a fire in the underbrush, ran unseen and broke out in distant places long after we were already satisfied with our expedition and on the way home, intending nothing further against the peace, and believing the flames already put out. As we pieced together the story from Meurig's messages, and from certain word-of-mouth reports gathered from Cynan himself at the ford of Montgomery in August, when in spite of all the trace was again renewed, this was the way of it:

  King Henry in his shivering convalescence at St. Omer received the news of the Welsh attack upon Builth and Dyfed, doubtless omitting or glossing over the reason for it, and was greatly alarmed. He was obliged by the Provisions, which laid down the dates of the three parliaments, to be back in England for the second day of February, when the Candlemas session should begin, but he was held in France not only by his sickness, but also until he could get from home the money necessary to pay his temporary debts in France. In his fright over Builth he wrote to Hugh Bigod, the justiciar, and ordered him to postpone the Candlemas parliament until he came home, and in the meantime to put aside everything else, and turn all his resources to relieving Builth and guarding the marches. There was to be no parliament without the monarch.

  To do him justice, no doubt he expected to delay the proceedings no more than a week or two, but in the end the delay was longer, and its effects more serious. For the earl of Leicester, also on his way home from that prolonged and courtly convocation in Paris, reached England at the end of January, and took fire when he heard of King Henry's order. The dates of the three parliaments were a sacred part of the agreement to which king, prince and nobles had voluntarily set their seals and given their oaths, and here was the king, after his old arbitrary fashion, countermanding parliament on no authority but his own, and trampling his oath underfoot.

  It seems a somewhat small infringement, but in truth I think it was not so. For what was dismaying was that the king should feel perfectly at liberty to take back power into his own hands without a word, almost without a thought, never even considering that any man might object, so lightly his oath lay upon him, and always would. And the force of the earl's reaction showed that in his heart, whether known to himself or not, he had never trusted that oath to be heavier than thistledown, and knew that if its breach was passed over now in a little thing, it would be useless to attempt to enforce it later in many great things. At any rate, he took a high and angry line in the meetings of the council, protesting that the king had no right to interfere with the proper calling of parliament, and refusing to countenance the despatch of a money aid to him until it could be done in the proper manner, through parliament.

  Thus Henry in St. Omer sat and fretted over ever more frightening reports from home, that Dyfed was in flames, that the earl of Leicester was at odds with the count of Savoy and in defiance of the royal orders, and that Edward was much in Earl Simon's company and much under his influence. Which was certainly true, but the king saw in it more than I think was there to be seen. Other and worse rumours haunted him in his convalescence: that ships bearing armed men and barded horses had set sail for England without royal licence, that the Lusignan brothers were collecting mercenaries in Brittany, that Simon himself had sent for foreign troops. Which last was certainly untrue. It seems that Henry's tormented mind went in terror of civil war in England, and was even inclined to believe that his son, under the guidance of the earl of Leicester, was about to make a bid for the throne, and depose his own father. The king was a sick man, and very easily frightened when he felt himself threatened or forsaken.

  Forced still to sit biting his nails for want of the money to pay his debts and leave, even when he felt well enough to make the crossing, he wrote to the justiciar again, sending him secret orders to summon a picked force of lords with their armed followings to London by a day late in April. The order came just before Easter, and Cynan said afterwards that the chancery clerks worked day and night to get the writs out in time, all the more desperately because they had to cease all their labours for Good Friday. And what was most marked was that the name of the earl of Leicester was not upon the list of those summoned. Henry had heard by then that Edward was with Earl Simon, and that in protest against the rupture of the parliamentary order they intended to hold a parliament in London in the teeth of Gloucester and the more timorous or orthodox of the council. In a frenzy of suspicion King Henry ordered that the city of London should be closed against his son and his brother-in-law, and strong forces recruited to keep the peace. And the minute he could clear his debts and redeem the jewels he had pledged for money meantime (doubtless he had King Louis' help in that matter) he sailed for home and rushed to Westminster.

  As soon as he knew the king was come, Prince Edward hurried to him to pay his respects and make his peace, whether in truly injured innocence or having thought better of a folly I should hesitate to say, but that his associate in the affair was Earl Simon, and of him I could not believe that he nursed any intent against the crown, or would ever have encouraged it in the young man who followed and worshipped him. So I hold Edward innocent of anything more than standing fast on the absolute observance of the Provisions concerning parliament.

  But so did not King Henry. They say he refused to see him at first, afraid of weakening out of love once he set eyes on him. Later he relented and, if he did not altogether believe the young man's protestations of loyalty and love, he forebore from saying so, and they were reconciled. But the King, still suspicious, thought best to send his son out of the kingdom for a while, to busy himself in running the affairs of Gascony.

  Much of this we did not learn until the middle of the summer, by which time we ourselves had added one more anxiety to the king's troubles. For in July the castle of Builth, round which the men of the cantref were still squatting happily like hounds round an earth, was taken by night, and almost without a blow. There were some among the guards there who hated their overseers far more than they hated the Welsh and, though they gave out that the gate had been stormed by a surprise assault while a foraging party was being let in, the truth is that they opened to our men wilfully, and stood by to see the fortress taken. Rhys Fychan came in haste with his forces from Carreg Cennen, and razed the place to the ground.

  Yet in spite of this offence, the royal muster, called as usual about the time of the ending of the truce, was again countermanded, and late in August Bishop Richard of Bangor and Abbot Anian of Aberconway met the English commissioners again at the ford of Montgomery, and this time procured a truce for two years instead of one. If we could not get a full peace, we managed with the next best thing, peace by stages, a year or two gained at a time.

  It was while the commissioners were conferring, in a camp in the summer meadows on our side of the ford, that I got the greater part of the true story of that Easter alarm from Cynan, who was there in attendance. On our side of the river the ground rises gradually in many folds, on the English side somewhat more steeply into the wooded hills that hide the rock and castle and town of Montgomery, a mile or so distant. There are plenty of quiet thickets there where men may talk privately, as we did.

  "I tell you this," said Cynan, "the king has a feeling for the shifts of other men's minds, and though he may be too easily hopeful, yet he is often right. This clash has shaken a great many of those who felt themselves touched with suspicion by contagion, and they are busy withdrawing silently, every day another inch or two away from their sworn devotion to the reform. The balance swings gradually King Henry's way. Some were affrighted, a few were truly shocked, none of them want to risk such a tussle again. The king feels the bit between his teeth, and when his confidence is high he can be desperately bold."

  "He swore to the Provisions himself," I said, "he cannot say any man forced his hand."

  "He swore in order to get his way over Sicily, and now that he has lost Sicily he feels himself released from his oath. The bargain's broken. It makes no difference that they did their best for him, however reluctantly, even if he believed that, and he does not believe it. Did I tell you he wanted to put the earl of Leicester on trial for acts of treason? But for King Louis he might even have done it, but Louis has far more sense than ever King Henry will have, and sent the archbishop of Rouen over to intervene, of course on some other excuse, but that was the reason for it. So it all passed off into a private clerical enquiry, and they found Earl Simon innocent of any wrong act or intent. Just as well, for he made a strong and calm defence. Strange, that man can take fire at a private quarrel over anything, even money, but when he is under grave public attack he turns quiet, reasonable and patient as any saint. So the quarrel's dropped. By Earl Simon, no doubt, for ever, with no look behind. But the king never forgets. Now he feels himself strong enough to rid himself of this chain of the reform round his neck, soon he'll be bringing back all the Poitevins, elbowing the new sheriffs out of office one by one, and putting back his own men in their places. I'll tell you a thing not everyone even among his own counsellors knows! He has applied to Pope Alexander for formal absolution from his vow to support the Provisions. His best clerk, John Mansel, has gone to Rome on his behalf, to plead for it. And he will get it," said Cynan.

  I said: "He will still find all the lesser folk of England in the other camp. They have had a taste of getting brisk and impartial justice, through the knights of the shires and the justiciar's perambulations, of seeing malpractices hunted out and punished, even of seeing right done to the lesser man against the greater. Will they give that up easily?"

  "It will be done slowly and gently," he said, "and by one who believes in his absolute right. But more important, it will be done by a power very well backed in arms."

  "If it rests with the feudal forces of England," I reasoned, "they may well be very evenly divided. Supposing, of course, that it ever comes to arms, of which at present I see no sign. Surely this Easter affair was a false alarm bred in the mind of a sick man, and one easily frightened."

  He acknowledged that it was so. Sitting there with me among the bushes, deep in the woods upstream from the ford, he made a strange figure, that smooth, well-combed man in his brushed gown, and yet he was as much at home as in his own office. There was but one change in him, that here, so near to Wales, the rounded softness of his face had sharpened to show the strong Welsh bone beneath the flesh, and his eyes had lengthened their look, and had the narrowed brightness of the mountaineer.

  "Keep fast hold of your truce," he said earnestly. "Keep fast hold of it and draw it out as long as you can, for it will not always be the feudal host you have to face. The old order grows stiff in the joints, like an old man. The feudal host serves so many days, and goes home, and gladly. Earl Simon may not have brought any French mercenaries into the country, as he was rumoured to have done.
But King Henry
did!
And so he will again, Gascons, Poitevins, whatever offers. It is a living, like any other; there are plenty of men who have skills to sell. A paid army does not go home in the winter, or put down its bows and lances to get in the harvest. Times are changing very quickly. So a king who feels he has the pope, and half the nobility, and enough of the paid soldiers of Europe on his side may not greatly care if the common folk of England are against him." He dropped his white, ringed hands into his lap, and there they knotted suddenly into a grip as still and as hard as stone. "Or the common folk of Wales!" he said.