The She Wolf of France (43 page)

34. Four hundred and sixty-seven years later Louis XVI was to come out of this very same door in the tower of the Temple on his way to the scaffold. One cannot help feeling that the curse of the Templars took some effect on the Capet family.

35. Chaalis, in the Forest of Ermenonville, was one of the, earliest Gothic buildings in the Ile-de-France. On the foundations of the ancient priory, which was a dependency of the monks of Vezelay, King Louis the Fat, founded in 1136, a year before his death, a huge monastery of which there remain, owing to its being demolished during the Revolution, only some impressive ruins. Saint Louis often stayed there. Charles IV stayed there briefly in May and again in June 1322, and once again on the present occasion, in June 1326. Philippe VI was there at the beginning of March 1329, and later Charles V. At the Renaissance, when Hyppolyte d'Este, Cardinal of Ferrara, was the titular Abbot, Tasso spent two months there.

`The frequency of royal stays in abbeys and monasteries, both in France and England, cannot be accounted for by the piety of the sovereigns concerned but rather by the fact that in the Middle Ages the monks, had a sort of monopoly of the hotel industry. There was no monastery of any importance without its `guest-house', which was considerably more comfortable than most of the neighbouring castles. Sovereigns therefore stayed in them on their journeys with their travelling Courts, rather as today they reserve for themselves and their suites a whole floor in a hotel in a capital, a seaside resort or a watering-place.

36
. By a letter of June 19th, 1326: `And also, my dear son, we charge you that you should not get married before you come back to us, nor without our assent and command . . . And listen to no counsel contrary to the wishes of your father, which is what the wise King Solomon teaches - '

37. Harwich had received its charter as a municipal borough from Edward II in 1318. The port was soon to become the headquarters of trade with Holland and the place from which kings took ship for the Continent during the Hundred Years War. Edward III, fourteen years after landing at Harwich with his mother as we tell here, sailed from its port for the Battle of Ecluse, the first of a long series of defeats inflicted on the French fleet by England. In the sixteenth century Sir F
rancis Drake and the explorer, S
ir Martin Frobisher, met here after the former had destroyed Philip V's Armada. It was also at
Harwich that the famous passengers of the Mayflower, commanded by Captain Christopher Jones, embarked for America. Nelson also stayed there.

38. Jean de Hainaut, as a foreigner, did not attend this Council; but it is interesting to note the presence of Henry de Beaumont, the grandson of Jean de Brienne - King of Jerusalem and Emperor of Constantinople - who had been excluded from the English Parliament on the pretext of his foreign origins, and had, because of this, rallied to Mortimer's party.

39. The functions of the Marshal of England, which post was held by the Earl of Norfolk, must not be confused with that of a Marshal of the Army.

The Marshal of England was' the equivalent of the Constable of France (we would today say Commander-in-Chief). Edward II's frivolity is evident in the appointment to this office of his half-brother Norfolk, a very young man with but little character or authority. -

The Marshals of the Army (the French army had two, the English army only one) corresponded more or less to our present Chiefs of Staff.

40. It is more than probable that Despenser the Elder threw the blame, in particular, for the defeat of Bannockburn, in 1314, on to the barons and attributed it to the reluctance with which they had fought on that occasion. For, indeed, the barons had asked the King to give the army a day's rest. But Edward, in one of those tempers which *ere habitual with him, ordered them to attack at once; exhausted and discontented, they had offered little resistance to the enemy and were very soon put to flight.

41. The map painted by Richard de Bello, and still preserved in Hereford Cathedral, antedates by several years the provision of Adam Orleton to the see. It was, however, during Orleton's episcopate that the map revealed its miraculous properties.

It is one of the most extraordinary documents extant concerning the medieval conception of the world and a curious graphic synthesis of the knowledge of the times. The map is painted on a parchment of considerable dimensions; the earth is shown as a circle of which Jerusalem is the centre; Asia is placed above and Africa below; the location of the Garden of Eden is marked as well as that of the Ganges. The world seems to be arranged about the Mediterranean basin, with all kinds of illustrations and notes on fauna, ethnology and history, in accordance with information drawn from the Bible, Pliny the naturalist, the Fathers of the Church, the pagan philosophers,
the medieval bestiaries and the romances of chivalry.

The map is surrounded by the following circular inscription: `The measurement of the round world was begun by Julius Caesar.'
An element of magic formed part at least of the map's inspiration.

The library of Hereford Cathedral is the largest, so far as we know, of the chained libraries still in existence today, since it has one thousand four hundred volumes.

It is both strange and unjust that the name' of Adam Orleton should be so little mentioned- in historical works on Hereford, considering that this prelate built the most important of the town's monuments, namely the cathedral tower.

42. These Norman castles, which date originally from the eleventh century, and whose architectural type lasted till the beginning of the sixteenth, had either square keeps, in the buildings of the earlier period, or round keeps from the twelfth century onwards. They could stand up to anything, both to weather and assault. Their surrender was more often due to political circumstances than to military enterprise, and they would still be standing today, more or less intact, if Cromwell had not had them all, with the exception of three or four, dismantled and partially destroyed. Kenilworth is twelve miles north of Stratford-on-Avon.

43. The Chroniclers, and many historians after them, who have seen in the journeys inflicted on Edward II towards the end of his life nothing but gratuitous cruelty, do not seem to have grasped the connexion between these journeys and the Scottish war. It was on the very day Robert the Bruce's defiance arrived that the order was given for Edward II to be moved from Kenilworth; and it was at the precise moment the war ended that his residence was changed once again.

44. Berkeley Castle is one of the four Norman fortresses which escaped the general dismantling ordered by Cromwell and is probably the oldest inhabited house in England. The owners are still Berkeleys, descendants of Thomas of Berkeley and Marguerite Mortimer.

A note for English readers

Each of my historical novels has brought me a number of letters asking for sources and references.

Since I am well aware how concerned the English reader is about the history of his country, particularly when it is treated by a foreign writer, I would like to attempt in advance some reply to his questions and objections. I assure him that I have taken as much care over the facts of English history as I have over those of French.

In particular, for that part of my book which deals with the pursuit, abdication and death of King Edward II, I have compared the various versions of the events, among others those of the
Dictionary of National Biography,
of James Mackinnon, and of Sir James Ramsay
(The Genesis of Lancaster),
who does not, as do so many historians, confuse Thomas de Berkeley with his father, Maurice.

I have naturally consulted the primary sources and compared them: the Chronicles of Murimuth, Thomas de la More, the Monk of Malmesbury, and Holinshed. The last is famous for having been used by Marlowe for his play,
Edward II.
But a thesis recently put forward at the Sorbonne (by M. Christian Pons) goes to show that Marlowe drew also on the Chronicles of Thomas de la More and on those of Stow.

I have also used Froissart, though with some reservations, for he used the narratives of Jean le Bel in this part of his work, and is as uncertain as his predecessor over dates and places.

The royal journeys, the dates of
sojourns in
various places, and the extracts from official documents have been, wherever possible, checked with the
Calendar of Close
Rolls,

And if, after all that, I have still committed errors, which indeed can always occur, either from lack of information or by too audacious an interpretation, I crave your forgiveness. This book claims to be nothing but a novel, yet one that keeps as closely as it can to the truth about the actions of human beings.