The Conquering Family (40 page)

Braose was married to a most remarkable woman. She had been Maud de Valeri, although in some versions her name is given as Maud de Hay. At any rate, she was a great heiress and had brought her husband many castles along the Welsh Marches, in the valley of the Usk and along the Nedd and the Wye, Castles Radnor, Hay, Brecon, and Bradwardine. She was a handsome woman of the heroic type, a Lady Macbeth in many respects,
bold and unscrupulous and intensely ambitious. When her husband was away she took charge and thought nothing of donning armor and leading troops into battle. In fact, she was as quick to string up a prisoner as her violent lord and master. She is said to have been the original of Moll Walbee, the heroine of several old Breconshire romances.

William de Braose and his amazonian spouse were in such high favor during the first years of John’s reign that they married their eldest son to a daughter of the house of Gloucester and their own daughter to the sixth Baron de Lacey, who was also the lord of Trim in Ireland. They were growing wealthy rapidly and, as it was a rare thing for anyone around the King to accumulate money, whispers began to circulate. Braose was believed to have some power over the King. This continued for ten years, an exceptional length of time for anyone to retain the favor of the capricious John.

An end always comes, however, to the tenure of favorites. Perhaps a distaste was growing in the King for this man who was waxing so fat beside him. At any rate, the time came when he needed money himself and he made a bargain with De Braose by which the latter was to buy certain lands in Leinster which belonged to the King. At least the King said they did. It developed immediately that there was some question as to his ownership of the lands in question. Two churchmen, the Bishop of Worcester and a brother of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, claimed ownership of part and they refused, naturally enough, to allow the transfer of title to the prospective purchaser. The price John had set was five thousand marks, a large sum indeed in those days, and the King had no intention of letting it slip through his fingers. Not being able to do anything with the two stubborn churchmen, John brusquely ordered his favorite to pay over the five thousand marks and settle things himself with the other claimants.

De Braose must have been very sure of his position, or of the power he had over the King. At any rate, he refused to do anything about it.

By this time John was experiencing the bitter opposition of the barons. To compel a more complaisant attitude on their part, he had demanded that each member of the nobility place a child in his care as hostage for future behavior. The children were kept at Windsor and Winchester and they waited on the Queen. None of the Braose children had been included, but when the difficulty arose over the five thousand marks, John ordered them to send a son to serve as a royal page. Braose and his wife now sensed that their day of favor was over. In spite of this, the haughty Maud was foolish enough to refuse the royal demand. In the hearing of the King’s officers she declared that “she would not deliver her children to a king who had murdered his own nephew.”

Many people had said the same thing, of course, but never as openly. The statement, coming from the wife of the man who had been the custodian
of the Rouen citadel, was almost like a confession. Maud de Braose knew the enormity of her mistake as soon as she had spoken and she hastened to make amends as best she could. She sent to the Queen a herd of four hundred beautiful cattle, all of them pure white except their ears, which were a reddish brown, hoping that this would be accepted as a peace offering. The cattle were kept, but the gift did the outspoken donor no good at all.

The King declared war. If he had been showing favor to De Braose because of what the latter knew, he now went to the other extreme and persecuted him because of it. Orders were given to seize the castle of Bramber. When this home of the once favored companion was found to be an empty shell, the owner having been warned in time to remove everything of value, the King led a force himself to the border marches and took possession of all the castles there which had been part of the dower of the Lady Maud. The now thoroughly frightened and repentant De Braose waited on the King at Hereford and begged for terms. The King demanded that the purchase price for the lands in Leinster be paid in full and that in addition the castles of Radnor, Hay, and Brecon be thrown in. The lord of Bramber agreed to this, having no alternative. However, in a sudden fit of spleen, he set fire to property of the King and fled to Ireland with his family. Later he made another effort to patch things up, keeping at a safe distance, and was told that the price of peace had risen. Never had terms risen more sharply! He was informed that now he would have to pay forty thousand marks, almost a third of the ransom money for Richard, a sum completely beyond the means of any private man.

The sequel to this is one of the grimmest stories in history. Maud de Braose and her eldest son William were captured while trying to leave Ireland for the Scottish coast and were brought to the King. He had them thrown into a single cell in the keep at Windsor with a sheaf of wheat and a flitch of uncooked bacon. The door of the cell was closed upon them.

John seems to have been a believer in the starvation method of getting rid of prisoners. He had employed it with the unfortunate knights captured at Mirabeau, he was to use it on later occasions, but there was something peculiarly repellent in his treatment of the wife and son of the man he now hated so thoroughly.

After eleven days had passed the cell was opened. The two occupants were found dead, each lying in a propped-up position against the wall. It was apparent that the son had succumbed first, for one of his cheeks had been gnawed.

William de Braose fled to France, where he published a statement on what had happened to Arthur. No copy was ever found, unfortunately, of this report of the only surviving eyewitness. A year later the fugitive died at Corbeil.

The death of the unfortunate prince could not have been due to natural causes. In that event the body would have been produced promptly to clear the King of the charge of violence. The young contender was killed, then, and by his uncle’s orders.

Although the story that the murder was committed in a boat on the Seine is a highly improbable version, it may have had some bearing on the truth. It may have been that the prince was removed from the citadel for a prison somewhere else and the opportunity was used to kill him on the way. It seems more reasonable, however, that the killing occurred within the citadel and that the body was taken in a boat and thrown into the water of the Seine. The exaggerated form the story took later was due, no doubt, to the additions achieved in the course of endless repetition.

W
ILLIAM MARSHAL
and the leaders of the mercenaries, for whom a new name was being used, routiers, sat in enforced idleness at Rouen and knew that the war was being lost. Philip was concentrating his forces for a drive on Normandy up the Seine, the path his father had followed so often and so badly. This time, clearly, it would be different. John, agitated, angry, his neck weighed down with the relics hanging around it (a sure sign that he had a guilty conscience), was running about with feverish activity from castle to castle and accomplishing nothing. At intervals he would give up trying to be a leader and devote himself to the enjoyment of life with his beautiful young wife. It would have been hard for his harassed lieutenants to decide which aspect of the King they liked least.

That the Angevin ship was foundering was clear from the stream of desertions. The King’s own seneschal, Guerin de Chapion, was the first to go over to the enemy. Every day after that there were reports of men who had left the banner of the much-hated King.

A new symptom of weakness was revealed when the French army invested the castle of Vaudreuil. The garrison was commanded jointly by Richard Fitz-Walter and the Sieur de Quincy. To the amazement of all, the two captains surrendered without striking a blow. William Marshal’s handsome face went white with rage when he heard the news, and in London men sang ribald ballads on the streets about the knights who had disgraced their country; for the common people did not like the taste of defeat, although it seemed to sit easily enough on the stomachs of the baronage. It was at this point that the King was first called John Softsword.

It was not entirely the fault of the King. All he had to use in opposing the French and the disloyalty in his own dominions were the few thousands of men scattered in garrisons along the borders of Normandy or gnawing their fingers in idleness about Rouen. No help could be expected from England.

Aware that his hands were tied, John gave up. Isabella, nearing the end of her teens, had blossomed into a woman of ravishing beauty, and he seemed to find in her all the solace he needed for the way the Angevin empire was falling to pieces about him. Nothing his advisers could say roused him from his uxorious stupor.

Once, in a fit of petulance, he answered the urgings of William Marshal by crying out, “Let be, Marshal, let be!” Then in a tone of confidence which carried some small hint of his father, he added, “One day, mark you, I shall take back all that he has won.”

With calamity ringing them about, this was an idle boast, as both King and marshal knew. Gradually John was forced to the conclusion that peace must be made with the French. Better to concede something now than to let things drift until everything was lost. Accordingly he instructed the Archbishop of Rouen and William Marshal to go to the French King and discuss terms.

The time has come to tell something of this remarkable man, William Marshal. A younger son of a powerful Norman family, he had been given as a hostage to Stephen at a stage of the civil war in which his father fought on the side of the Empress Matilda. When the father’s conduct had been such that Stephen was reported to be ready to hang the six-year-old boy in reprisal, the unnatural father had one comment only to make, “I have the anvil still and the hammer to make more sons.”

The boy had nothing to hope for from a father of this stamp. Being spared by Stephen, who for all his faults was not a cruel man, young William was sent to Normandy to be reared at the castle of an uncle named Tancarville. Lacking all prospects, he was trained to be a soldier and grew into a tall, handsome, and immensely strong youth with a knack in the use of all weapons. As soon as he had been admitted to knighthood, which was at an unusually early age, he began to cut an amazing swath in the tournaments which, in times of peace, filled the days and thoughts of all proper men. The word tournament had not at that period become limited to the kind of jousting which is most familiar, the formal breaking of lances in the lists, varied by an occasional mêlée in which the contestants took sides and hammered away at each other with sword and mace and battle-ax. The kind of contest in which young William won his spurs was a day of actual warfare, fought in the open and without any blunting of points. It was every man for himself. In the dusk, after ten hours of charge and countercharge, of ambush and sally, of hacking and hewing, in the course of which there would inevitably be some fatalities
and a great deal of bloodletting, the judges would get together and decide who had been the winner.

The winner was always William Marshal. The men who rank highest in history—Richard Coeur de Lion, the Black Prince, Bertrand du Guesclin, Jacques de Lalain, the Chevalier Bayard—could not in point of achievement compare with this almost forgotten English knight. In his declining years the old lion would often fall into reminiscence. One day he did some reckoning and found that he had fought in five hundred tournaments, or in single combat bouts, and that he had been the winner on each occasion, taking his opponent’s horse and armor as his prize.

When he was sixty-six years old and was charged by John with a treasonable utterance, the old man threw down his gauge and offered to settle the matter by the arbitrament of battle. There were plenty of knights about the King who were in the prime of life, but they looked askance at the unbeaten champion and none picked up the iron glove.

His success on the field of honor provided him at first with a certain competence. He could live on the sale of his prizes, particularly as a ransom came his way occasionally. He was in due course assigned by Henry II to serve in the train of the heir of England, the Prince Henry who was later known as
Li Reys Josnes
. The young Henry had a keen appetite for everything pertaining to chivalry and he received with delight the Englishman who had already won such a resounding reputation. William proceeded to teach his royal master all the tricks of the tournament: the angle at which to hold the heaume in order to deflect a lance thrust, the use of the new ball-and-spike spur, how to sit most securely in the saddle, how to conserve his strength in a mêlée and then strike at exactly the right moment.

When
Li Reys Josnes
died, the King took William back into his service and promised him, among other things, the hand of the young heiress of Pembroke and Striguil, one of the wealthiest as well as the most attractive wards in the gift of the monarchy. The death of Henry II occurred before this particular agreement could be carried out. As William had unhorsed Richard in the pursuit from Le Mans, he did not expect anything in the way of favors from the new King. Richard had an eye for martial valor, however, and he not only carried out his father’s wishes but appointed him marshal of England as well.

Marriage with the pretty heiress brought William Marshal into the overlordship of that thumb of land which protrudes out from Wales into the South Channel and points directly at Ireland. Pembroke Castle, with its seventy-five-foot tower, stood like a mighty sentinel on the inlet of Milford Haven. All about it clustered Norman castles which had been raised to hold this important stretch of water: the keep of Haverford, Tenby, Castle Martin, Lewhaden, Narberth, Stackpole. There were large land grants also in Ireland, and so the once landless knight came into an
inheritance which promised him comfort and dignity for the rest of his days. Fortunately the heiress of Pembroke was well pleased with her very much older but justly famous husband and they lived happily together.