The Traitor's Wife (18 page)

He heard Pembroke out, but barely. Then he lifted his red head and said coolly, “We all agreed to capture him, did we not? The wrong done to you is not to be imputed to Warwick alone.”

“He was captured, Gloucester, and in my custody. And now that he has been taken out of my custody my goods and lands will be forfeit.”

“Then you must negotiate more carefully in the future.”

“The future! There is no future for me, nor for Gaveston I fear. Can nothing move you to pity? For God's sake, man, Gaveston is married to your sister!”

“It is that marriage that prevents me from going to Warwick now, and only that marriage. The man is bad for England, and it and my sister will be better off without him.”

Pembroke stared at Gloucester, who looked back at him with all of the arrogance of his twenty-one, largely untroubled years. “Then I curse you, you arrogant brat.”

Almost weeping, Pembroke rode away from Tewkesbury in a daze. Reaching Oxfordshire again, he decided to appeal to the clerks and burgesses of the town and university of Oxford. At the very least, he would be able to clear his name, he hoped, for he was beginning to realize that his foolishness in leaving Gaveston at Deddington might be regarded as treachery.

He was met with inaction at best, derision at worst. Did he expect the scholars at Oxford to raise an army? What made him think anyone would stir to help the sorcerer Piers Gaveston? And what would be the displeasure of the king to that of the mighty Lancaster?

Utterly dispirited, Pembroke returned to see his wife once more, this time as the one person in the world he knew would give him comfort and understanding. Then he would rejoin the king in the north and offer him his undivided allegiance. It was all he could do now.

Meanwhile, the Earls of Lancaster, Arundel, and Hereford journeyed to Warwick Castle, where the Earl of Cornwall was being held in chains. Warwick, having taken the bold step of seizing Gaveston, was beginning to have some doubts, but Lancaster silenced them. “With Gaveston alive, there will be no peace in England!”

“And there will be peace with him dead?” said Hereford glumly.

“Yes, there will. Why, the queen is with child, did you know that? That cannot but help matters. An heir may be what it takes to force the king to act as one.”

“If the king acts as one, we shall all die a traitor's death for this.”

“He will be in no position to act as one,” said Lancaster, illogically but with great force. He nodded toward a clerk, sitting glumly in a corner. “In any case, he is not a match for all of us acting in concert. We shall draw up letters patent in which each of us swears to save and defend the others from any loss they might incur from this.”

“Should he have a trial before he dies?” asked Arundel. He himself had no compunction about executing Gaveston, who had humiliated him several years before by trouncing him at a tournament, and he was tired of listening to Lancaster and Hereford debate over what was plainly a foregone conclusion.

“It would be best,” assented Lancaster. “We'll find suitable justices.”

The justices examined the evidence presented to them—an easy task as Gaveston himself had no chance to speak or call anyone to speak in his behalf—and sentenced the Gascon to death. Here Gilbert de Clare, though unwittingly, came to Gaveston's aid, for the earls deemed it unseemly that the brother-in-law of the Earl of Gloucester should die a traitor's death. Instead, he was granted the nobleman's death of beheading.

“They finally took him out of the dungeon, on June 19 it was,” said the Countess of Pembroke's laundress. She cleared her throat; it was not usual for her to speak in front of so many people, and certainly not in front of a group of people like this—the king, the queen, her lord Pembroke, the king's nieces, the Earl of Surrey, Lord Despenser and his son. Gaveston's young widow was in full mourning; most of the others were in black or at least in their drabbest robes. “Poor man, he was filthy and looked in need of a good meal—he'd been in there nine days—but still he bore himself proudly, like the fine knight that I had heard he was. The Earls of Lancaster, Arundel, and Hereford came to Kenilworth to watch it be done.”

“Only the three?” asked Hugh the elder. “Where was Warwick?”

“He was not there, sir, I'll swear it. They say he stayed in his castle at Warwick the whole day.”

“Then he is not only a scoundrel but a coward,” said the king's niece Eleanor. It was odd, the laundress thought, that it was she, not the queen, who had reached over and clasped the king's hand while the tale was being told, but the ways of the royal were inscrutable and the girl after all was the king's near relation.

“Aye, my lady, they say he wanted no part of the business once he started it. So they brought him to Kenilworth, as I said, to the Earl of Lancaster's land, I think. Then they took him to a place called Blacklow Hill—many a day I rolled down it as a girl, and no longer will anyone want to play there—”

“Was he shriven?” asked the king. “Do you know?”

“There was no priest there, but he prayed before he died, and many of the bystanders did too—although others laughed.”

The king was weeping, and so were his nieces. Strange, the laundress thought, the queen—the closest thing to an angel in looks she had ever seen—was dry-eyed. But if the rumors about the king and Gaveston had been true…

The second Edward wiped his eyes. “Go on.”

“There's little left to tell, your grace. They bade him to kneel down, and he did, as graceful as though he was here in court. He had just time to commend his spirit to God. Then one man—a Welshman he was—ran him through the heart, then another Welshman cut off his head. Oh, but he did ask before, joking-like, that they leave him his head so as not to spoil his beauty so much.”

The younger Despenser's mouth twitched upward.

“The Earl of Lancaster did not go up the hill for some reason, so they had to bring the head down to him, to show him that the deed had been done. Some friars came and got the body later, as you now know, your grace, and took him to Oxford.” She paused awkwardly, then remembered that she had been asked to tell everything she knew. “I heard—but do not know for sure—that his head was sewn back on.”

“God bless the friars,” said Edward. “They shall be well rewarded. And so shall you.” He nodded at his steward, standing nearby, who approached the laundress with a purse.

“It was the countess's doing, your grace. She sent me to visit my family near Warwick Castle, knowing that I would keep my ears and eyes open and report on what had happened.”

“And it was you, Pembroke, who asked the countess to provide those eyes and ears. Thank you.”

“It was the least I could do, your grace.”

I
N SEPTEMBER 1312, ELEANOR GAVE BIRTH TO A DAUGHTER, NAMED AFTER either Hugh's mother or the queen, depending on which parent one asked. Either way, Eleanor adored little Isabel, who within a few weeks showed every sign that her hair would be as flaming as that of Eleanor's father, who had not been called Gilbert the Red for naught.

She was grateful to be away from court; it had become too sad there. Edward went through the motions of daily life, hearing petitions, issuing orders, meeting with his council, but something of him had died at Blacklow Hill. Not infrequently, he would stop whatever he was doing and leave the room, and every person around him knew that he was going to his chamber to weep for Gaveston anew.

For a time that summer, the country in fact had seemed on the verge of civil war. Days after Gaveston's death, his killers—including Warwick, who had ventured out of his castle at last—gathered at Worcester, while the king and his council traveled to Westminster, having summoned Parliament to meet there in August. Both were debating what to do next; both were preparing for war. When Lancaster, Warwick, and Hereford arrived in London, days after Parliament had begun, they were accompanied by hundreds of men.

Gloucester had become a mediator between the factions. His encounter with Pembroke had left him shaken, for all that he hid it at the time, and he had felt more than a little guilt upon seeing the grief of his uncle, who had always treated him well and kindly. Worse was the anger of his sisters. Margaret, meeting him for the first time since her husband's death, had simply slammed him across the face and run out of the room. Eleanor he had not seen, as she had gone from York to Loughborough to await her child's birth, but she had sent him a letter so uncharacteristically contemptuous that Gilbert shuddered when he remembered it, even though he'd read it only once before putting the fire to it. She didn't accuse him of bringing about Gaveston's death, and neither did Margaret; they suspected, as did Gilbert himself, that there was nothing he could have done to prevent it. But at least he could have tried, for the name of Clare was not one without power in the realm, and he had done nothing.

So in some small attempt to expiate his sins, he set about the tedious business of negotiating between the king and the group of men of whom Lancaster had become the leader. He was not without help, for the Earl of Richmond shared in his efforts, as did papal envoys and Isabella's uncle Louis d'Evreux.

The accusations went back and forth. The goods Gaveston had left behind at Newcastle—jewels, horses, and robes—were rich, and they were in the hands of Lancaster, whom the king accused of being little more than a common thief. Lancaster protested that he had seized the goods for the crown and had even inventoried them with that noble purpose in mind, but he made no move to return them.

Edward said that the earls had killed a peer of the realm and would depose the king himself if they could. The earls protested that Gaveston was an outlaw under the Ordinances and that he had been punished accordingly. They wanted to brand Gaveston as a traitor; Edward would accept many of the demands made upon him, would even pardon the earls, but never would he declare the person he had loved best in the world to be a traitor.

London, never far from ferment, was also tense; when Pembroke, Hugh le Despenser the elder, and several others met with city officials to discuss the Londoners' own grievances, they ended up running for their lives.

In the midst of all of this anxiety, Isabella lay comfortably ensconced at Windsor in November 1312, awaiting the birth of her first child. Eleanor, churched only a month before, joined her there, for who would want to miss such an occasion? On November 13, Isabella gave birth to a boy, who was soon created Earl of Chester.

The pleasure Eleanor took in seeing the queen's happiness was trebled by seeing that of the king. The look of brooding misery at last left Edward's face; he spent hours in the nursery with young Edward and heaped presents upon Isabella. For the first time in months, he was heard to make a joke. The birth of the third Edward did much to ease the nation's tension, for a short time anyway. If few loved the king, the birth of a healthy heir at least made him less disliked, and the absence of Gaveston removed a vital source of dissatisfaction. Even the Londoners turned their thoughts to a happier direction, preparing a grand ceremony to welcome the heir. A treaty was made in December 1312, and Gaveston's valuables were finally turned over to the crown several months later, but Lancaster and Warwick refused to confirm it.