The She Wolf of France (41 page)

'Oh, you brutes, you brutes!' he cried. `You shan't kill me!'

He struggled and fought, and Maltravers came over to lend, them a hand, but even the three of them were none too many. The giant Towurlee came forward to help them.

`No, Towurlee, the table!' cried Gournay.

Towurlee remembered what he had been told to do. He picked up the heavy plank and let it fall flat across the King's shoulders. Gournay pulled up the prisoner's robe, and lowered his breeches with a rending of worn cloth. A fundament so exposed was contemptibly grotesque; but the assassins had no heart for laughter now.

The King, who had been half-knocked-out by the blow and was suffocating under the table which was forcing him down into the mattress, fought and kicked. He was still surprisingly strong.

`Towurlee, hold his ankles! No, not like that, apart!' Gournay ordered.

The King managed to free his neck from the table and turned his face to one side to get a little air. Maltravers leaned on his head with both hands. Gournay seized the poker and said: `Ogle, insert the horn!'

King Edward started up with desperate strength as the red-hot iron entered his vitals. The scream he uttered
passed through walls and keep,
over the gravestones in the cemetery, and awakened the people sleeping in the houses in the town. And those who heard that long, grim and appalling cry knew on the instant that the King had been assassinated.

The next morning the inhabitants of Berkeley came up to the castle to find out what had happened. They were told that the King had died suddenly during the night with a loud cry.

`Come and see him. Yes, you can come in,' said Maltravers and Gournay to the notables and clergy. `He's being laid out now. Come in. Everyone can cone in.'

And the townspeople saw that there was no mark of a blow, no hurt or wound on the bod
y. For it was being washed and
care was taken to turn it over and over before their eyes. O
nly a
terrible grimace twisted the corpse's face.

Thomas Gournay and John Maltravers looked at each other;
it had been a brilliant idea to
introduce the poker through an oxhorn. In a period particul
arly inventive in methods of as
sassination, they had, discovered a really perfect means of committing murder without trace.

They were a little worried, however, by the fact that Thomas
de Berkeley had left the castle before dawn, having business, so he had said, at a neighbouring castle. And then Towurlee, the brainless giant, had taken to his bed and been weeping for some hours.

During the course of the, day Gournay left on horseback for Nottingham, where the Queen then was, to announce to her the death of her husband.

Thomas de Berkeley stayed away for a full week and declared that he had not been at home when the death occurred. On his return, he had the unpleasant surprise of discovering that the body was still in the house. No monastery in the neighbourhood would take charge of it. Berkeley had to keep his prisoner a whole month in a coffin, during which period he continued to receive his hundred shillings a day.

The whole kingdom
was now aware of the ex-King's
death; strange stories, which were not very far from the truth, were going the rounds concerning it, and it was whispered that his assassination would bring no luck either to those who had committed it, or to those, however highly placed they might be, who had given the order for it.

At last, a priest came to take delivery of the body in the name of the Bishop of Gloucester, who had agreed to receive it into his cathedral. The remains of King Edward II were placed on a wagon covered with black cloth. Thomas de Berkeley and his family accompanied it, and the people of the neighbourhood followed in procession. At every mile-halt the peasants planted an oak.

After the lapse of six hundred years, some of these oaks are still standing and they cast dark shadows across the road that runs from Berkeley to Gloucester.

Historical notes

1. In the fourteenth century the Tower of London was still the eastern limit of the City, and was even separated from the City proper by the gardens of monasteries. Tower Bridge did not exist; the Thames was spanned by London Bridge alone, upstream from the Tower.

If the central building, the White Tower, built about 1078 on the orders of William the Conqueror, by his architect, the monk Gandulf, looks to us, after nine hundred years, very much as it originally was - Wren's restoration, in spite of the enlarging of the windows, has altered it but little the general aspect of the fortifications was considerably different at the period of Edward II.

The present outer fortifications had not then been built, with the exception of St Thomas' Tower and the Middle Tower, which were due respectively to Henry III and Edward I. The outer walls were those which today form the second line of fortifications, shaped like, a pentagon with twelve towers built by Richard Coeur de Lion, and constantly altered by his successors.

One can appreciate the astonishing evolution of the medieval style during a single century by comparing the White Tower (end of the eleventh century) which, in spite of its huge mass, preserves in its general shape and proportions the tradition of the ancient GalloRoman villas, with the fortifications of Richard Coeur de Lion (end of the twelfth century) by which it is surrounded; these latter works have already the characteristics of the classical stronghold, of the type of Chateau Gaillard in France, which was in fact also built by Richard I, or the later Angevin buildings in Naples.

The White Tower is practically the only intact example that remains to us of the style of architecture of the year 1000, and which has been in continuous use throughout the centuries.

2. The title `Constable', which is a contracted form of the word connetable, and which today means a policeman, was the official title of the commander of the Tower. The Constable was assisted by a Lieutenant. These two appointments still exist, but they have become purely honorary and are given to famous soldiers towards the end of .their careers. The effective command of the Tower is nowadays exercised by the Major and Resident Governor.

The `Major' lives in the Tower, in the King's House, a Tudor building beside the Bell Tower; the first King's lodgings, which dated from the time of Henry I, were demolished by Cromwell. Incidentally,
at the period of this story, 1323, the Chapel of St Peter consisted only of the Norman part of the present building.

3. In 1054, against King Henry I of France. Roger Mortimer I was the nephew of Richard I, Sans Peur, third Duke of Normandy and grandfather of the Bastard Conqueror.

4. The `shilling' was at this period a unit of value, but not one of money as such. Simi
larly for the `livre' and the
`marc'. The silver `penny' was the highest coin in circulation.' It was not until the reign of Edward III that gold coins appeared with the `florin' and the `noble'. The silver shilling was first minted in the sixteenth century.

5. Very probably in the Beauchamp Tower, though it was not yet known by that name which came into use only after 1397, when Thomas de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, was imprisoned in it. It is a curious coincidence that he should have been the grandson of Roger Mortimer. This building had been erected, by Edward II and was, therefore, at the time of Roger Mortimer, quite new.

The apertures for latrines were often a weak point in fortified buildings. It was through an opening of this kind that the soldiers of Philip Augustus, after a siege that seemed hopeless, were enabled one night to enter Chateau Gaillard, the great French fortress built by Richard Coeur de Lion.

6. The term `Parliament', which strictly speaking means an assembly, was applied both in France and in England to institutions of common origin, that is to say in the first instance to an extension of the `curia regis', but which rapidly assumed forms and attributes utterly different to each other.

The French Parliament, which was at first peripatetic, then became fixed in Paris, while secondary parliaments were ultimately set up in the provinces, was a judicial assembly exercising legal powers on the orders and in the name of the sovereign. To begin with, the members were appointed by the King and for one judicial session only; from the end of the thirteenth century, however, and during the beginning of the fourteenth, that is to say during the reign of Philip the Fair, the masters of Parliament were appointed for life.

The French Parliament had to deal with important conflicts of private interest as well as cases brought by individuals against the Crown, criminal cases of importance to the existence of the State, questions arising out of the interpretation of custom, and, in fact, with everything that came under the heading of general legislation, including the Law of Accession to the throne, as for instance at the beginning of the reign of Philippe V. But, to repeat, the role and powers of Parliament were entirely juridical and judicial.

The only political power the French Parliament had was due to the
fact that no royal Act, ordinance, edict, pardon, etc, was valid unless it was registered and confirmed by Parliament, but it only began to use this power of veto towards the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth, when the monarchy had grown much weaker.

The English Parliament, on the other hand, was both a judicial assembly, since the great State trials were conducted before it, and a political assembly. No one sat in it by right; it was always a sort of enlarged council to which the sovereign summoned whom he wished, that is to say the members of his Privy Council, the great lords of the kingdom, both temporal and spiritual, and the representatives of counties and cities, generally chosen by the sheriffs.

The political role of the English Parliament was originally limited to a two-way process of information, by which the king informed the representatives of his people, whom he had selected, of the general policy he intended pursuing, while the representatives informed the sovereign, by means of petitions and speeches, of the wishes of either the classes or the administrative districts to which they belonged.

In theory, the King of England was sole master of his Parliament, which was in fact a sort of privileged audience from which he demanded no more than symbolic and passive adherence to his political policies. But as soon as the Kings of England found themselves in serious difficulty, or showed themselves weak or bad rulers, their Parliaments tended to become more exacting, to adopt a frankly deliberative attitude and to impose their will on the sovereign at least to the extent that the sovereign had to take into account the wishes Parliament had expressed.

The precedent of the Magna Carta of 1215, which was imposed on King John by his barons and contained the basis of English liberties, was always present to the minds of Parliaments. That held in 1311 forced Edward II to accept a charter which imposed on the King a committee of great barons elected by Parliament who drew up the Ordinances and really exercised power in the name of the sovereign.

Edward II struggled all his life against this arrangement; refusing to accept it at first, he submitted after his defeat by the Scots in 1314. He succeeded in ridding himself of this tutelage, to his own ultimate disadvantage, only in 1322 when the struggle for influence divided the members of the Committee, and he was able to crush the Lancaster-Mortimer party, who had taken up arms against him, at the Battles of Shrewsbury and Boroughbridge.

Finally, it must be remembered that the English Parliament had no fixed meeting-place, but that Parliament could be summoned by the

sovereign, or could, demand to be summoned, in any town in the kingdom where the King happened to be.

7. In 1318, five years before, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, appointed Justiciar and Lieutenant of the King of England in Ireland, had de
f
eated, at the head of an army consisting of the barons of the Marches; Edward Bruce, King of Ireland and brother of Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland. The taking and executing of Edward Bruce marked the end of the Kingdom of Ireland, though the authority of the King of England was far from established for a long time to come.

8. The obscure and complicated affair of the County of Gloucester was born of the fantastic pretensions of Hugh Despenser the Younger to that county. His claim would have had no chance of success had he not been the King's favourite.

Hugh the Younger, not content with having acquired the whole of Glamorgan as his wife's inheritance, demanded from all his brothersin-law, and in particular from Maurice de Berkeley, the entire possessions of the late Earl, his father-in-law. All the nobility of the South and West of England had become alarmed at this and Thomas of Lancaster had headed the opposition. His determination had been all the greater because his worst enemy, the Earl of Warenne, who had stolen his wife, the fair Alice, was a member of the other party.

The Despensers, who, for a time, had been exiled by a decree of Parliament, promulgated under the pressure of the Lancastrians in arms, had soon been recalled, for Edward found life intolerable without his lover and under the tutelage of his Cousin Thomas.

The return of the Despensers to power had been the signal for a renewal of the rebellion, but Thomas of Lancaster, as unfortunate in war as he was in his marriage, had led the coalition extremely badly. Having failed to go to the assistance of the barons of the Welsh Marches in time, they had been defeated at Shrewsbury, in January 1332, where the two Mortimers had been taken prisoner, while he himself, waiting vainly for Scottish reinforcements in Yorkshire, had been defeated two months later at Boroughbridge and condemned to death immediately afterwards.

9. The commission given the Bishop of Exeter, according to the Calendar of Close Rolls, is dated August 6th, 1323. Further orders were dispatched concerning Mortimer, notably on August loth to the sheriffs of Kent, and on the 26th to the Earl of Kent himself. It does not appear that King Edward knew of the fugitive's destination before October 1st.

10. Marie of France, the earliest of all French poetesses, lived in the second half of the twelfth century at the Court of Henry III Plantagenet, to which she had been taken, or summoned, by Alienor of Aquitaine, an unfaithful princess, at least to her first husband, the King of France, but certainly extremely beautiful, and who, in England, had created about her a true centre of art and poetry. Alienor was the granddaughter of Duke William IX, himself a poet.
The works of Marie of France were extremely popular, not only
during the author's lifetime, but also during the thirteenth and the early part of the fourteenth centuries.