The Traitor's Wife (60 page)

“The same way she must be gloating over our little girls. As trophies.”

“Yes, my lady.” He bent down over the sack. “It's not just cups. There's florins here, salt cellars, other jewels—all sorts of beautiful things.” He picked up a florin and turned it over and over. “I know nothing can make up for you what happened this morning. I know that what I'm saying doesn't make much sense. But I thought that if you took some of these things for yourself it might give you a little satisfaction at least. At least you would be keeping something from the queen she wanted.”

“You are right. It doesn't make much sense.” Eleanor picked up another cup, one with no heraldic designs on it. “But it does give me satisfaction. I shall take some.” Picking up a florin, she handed it to Tom.

“No, my lady. I would hang.”

“You could hang just for doing what you are doing now! Put them back, please.”

Tom stopped her as she began to place the cups back into the sack. “I'll take my chances; I know the right time to go and can avoid being seen. Those little girls—it makes me angry. But if you truly wish it, my lady, I will return the treasures from where I got them.”

Eleanor smiled grimly. “No. I'll take my chances too.”

William la Zouche had spent Christmas with his young son at Ashby-de-la-Zouche. When he arrived in London for Parliament in early January, he cast guilty looks at his right hand, which still bore Hugh le Despenser's ring, and at London Bridge, which now bore Hugh le Despenser's head, but could not bring himself, as one of Hugh le Despenser's captors, to meet Lady Despenser in the Tower of London just yet. Her grief, he argued to himself, would still be too raw. And Zouche believed from Hugh's face when he had pulled off the ring that there would be quite genuine grief. Still, Zouche, not a man given to fancies in general, could not help but fancy that the head on the bridge looked reproachful.

It turned out to be a Parliament not like any other, and there would come a day Zouche wished he had taken no part in it. Whether the king had refused to come, as Bishop Orleton announced, or whether it had never been intended that he come, Zouche never knew, but he was certainly not there. This was a good thing, the bishop announced solemnly, because Edward had threatened to kill the queen with a dagger if he ever saw her. In the general indignation this remark excited, it did not occur to Zouche, or to many others, that the queen had shown herself remarkably able to fend for herself.

“What have we come to when our king will not come to Parliament?” the bishop asked the members mournfully. “Do we want to continue under his rule? Or do we want to be ruled by the king's noble son?” He raised a hand as those assembled began to argue among themselves. “Consider this matter deeply,” he said solemnly, “and return with your decision the next morning.”

It was Roger Mortimer, who Zouche knew had lent his military expertise to the queen's noble cause, who led off the proceedings the next morning. The great men of the land, he declared, of whom he was merely a humble representative, were united in agreeing that the king should be deposed. The Londoners, he added, had all asked too that the members of Parliament swear an oath of fealty to their cause, which now included deposing the king as well as supporting the queen, her son, and the enemies of the Despensers. As Parliament collectively remembered what had happened to the Despensers and to those unfortunates in disfavor with the Londoners, Thomas Wake, son-in-law to Henry of Lancaster, sprang up. “As far as I am concerned,” he shouted, “Edward should no longer reign!”

Bishop Orleton took over. “The Lord tells us, 'A foolish king destroys his people.' Shall we let England be destroyed, good men? Or shall we save her, and ourselves, from certain destruction? For twenty years, since the death of the great first Edward, we have been teetering on its brink! Need I recall the signs the good Lord our God has sent us? Gaveston, the witch's son? The Bannock Burn? The famine? The wicked Hugh le Despenser? Will we heed them, once and for all, and save our beloved kingdom before it is too late?”

“Save England!” shouted the members. “Away with the king!”

“My head is sick,” the Bishop of Winchester said dolefully when the tumult died down. “The head of England is weak, and therefore sick, and the governance of all of England has suffered as a result. The king's evil counselors have preyed on this weakness, and bled England until it has oftentimes seemed there is no cure. But succor has come to her, in the form of a noble boy and his brave, devoted mother. Shall we crown that shining sun of a boy with the shining crown of England, or shall we let the shining crown of England continue to sit on this weak and festering head? You decide!”

“What will it be, sirs?” shouted Wake, arms extended and hands waving as if he were trying to put himself into flight. “What do the people say? Shall the son reign?”

“Yes!” cried Parliament as one.

Archbishop Reynolds, who owed his post to the second Edward, took his turn. “The voice of the people is the voice of God,” he said. “After years of oppression, you have spoken your will that the foolish king be deposed and that his son rule in his place, and your will is God's will.”

Wake, all but flying now, yelled, “Is this the will of the people? Do the people will that the second Edward be deposed and his son made king in his place?”

“
Fiat! Fiat!
Amen!”

A door swung open and fourteen-year-old Edward, magnificently dressed, came slowly in, followed by the queen, who for Parliament had resumed her black robes, albeit in velvet. Reynolds shouted, “Behold your king!”

The queen was both weeping and smiling, evidently torn between grief that her husband had sunk so low and joy that her son was soaring to the country's rescue. Zouche's own eyes, and those of many others, were streaming tears; it was all Zouche could do to croak out the words to “Glory, Laud, and Honor.” Only a few dissenters stood silent, not even humming, and for several days afterward, they would be nursing the bruises they subsequently received at the hands of the watchful Londoners.

With Bishop Orleton to London had come Robert Baldock, formerly the Chancellor of England. As a member of the clergy, after his capture he had been spared the humiliation meted out to Despenser and Simon de Reading, but instead had been allowed to ride inconspicuously from Llantrisant to Hereford with the troops' servants. Once in Hereford, he had been turned over to the bishop to be tried by his fellow men of the Church.

In London, his luck ran out. Bishop Orleton took him to his manor to stay while awaiting trial, but the Londoners, learning of his presence there, prized him out on the pretext that the bishop had no right to keep him out of their own prison. Hence, he was dragged off to Newgate, where by May he would be dead of maltreatment. Though Orleton would later claim to have done nothing to harm him, he had also done nothing to save him.

Edward had no complaints to make of his own jailer, Henry of Lancaster. The king had a set of rooms to himself, comfortable furnishings, warm clothes, blazing fires, good food and wine, and a staff to take care of his needs. He could go for long walks within the castle grounds and was allowed to attend the entertainments by Henry's minstrels. But since he had heard the news of Hugh's execution—and like Eleanor, he had been given all the details—his days had become things to be endured.

They were long days, for he had no visitors to break them up, and expected none. Eleanor, he knew, was a prisoner in the Tower; she could help him no more than he could help her. Still, the memory of her red hair cascading to her bare hips was a pleasant one; memories of her, and his memories of Gaveston and Despenser and Lucy, were all that made life bearable now. Who else was there? Certainly not his children; that his whore of a wife would never allow. Mary, his only sister left in England? The days when she could leave her convent on a whim had ended, he knew, the day he had been captured at Llantrisant. His brothers? Not those faithless knaves. If they ever turned up, he'd refuse to see them.

He was wrong, however, to have expected no visitors, for on January 20, an entire crowd of them came. A delegation, he was told, from Parliament.

A make-believe, play Parliament it would be without him, he thought, but as under the circumstances he could hardly refuse to receive the delegation, he let himself be led into the great hall. He was dressed from head to toe in black. Henry had frowned a bit when Edward insisted on having mourning clothes for Hugh le Despenser, but as Henry himself had donned black for Thomas of Lancaster, a man he had never liked much for all of his dutiful avenging of him, he hadn't belabored the point.

Edward recognized many of the men in the great hall. Orleton, who only eight weeks ago had taken the Great Seal from him. The Bishop of Winchester. The Earl of Surrey. Lancaster, of course. Barons, abbots, priors, justices, monks, knights—who was the knight staring so arrogantly at him?

Sir William Trussell. The man who had pronounced sentence on Hugh and his father. His cruel face was one of the last things they had seen in this world—

Edward's feet slid from under him, and the world went black. “Hugh?” he whispered gratefully as someone took him by the arm. “Hugh, is it you?”

“Cousin, you were faint. This room is too hot, and you ate but little this morning. Do you need to rest a while first?”

On one side of him was Henry of Lancaster, on the other the Bishop of Winchester. Edward sighed. “No. Have them say whatever they have come to say.”

After Edward had been helped into the great hall's chair of state, Orleton was only too glad to proceed. The king, he pronounced dolorously, had been controlled and governed by others who had given him evil counsel. He had given himself up to unseemly works and occupations, neglecting the realm in the process. He had lost the realm of Scotland, and territories in Gascony and Ireland that the first Edward had left in peace. He had destroyed the Holy Church. (Edward, looking at Orleton's rich vestments, thought for his part that the Church, or at least Orleton's share of it, looked quite healthy.) He had also put many great and noble men of the land to a shameful death or imprisoned, exiled, and disinherited them. He had broken his coronation oath. He had stripped the realm and done all that he could do to ruin it. In doing all of these evils he had shown himself incorrigible without hope of amendment. These things were so notorious, Orleton concluded, that they could not be denied.

“But I do deny them.”

“It matters not whether you do or not, because the people, as one, have demanded that you resign your rule to your son.”

“And if I do not?”

“Then the people will choose someone more suitable, someone more experienced. A grown man, perhaps, not one necessarily of royal blood.”

A long silence ensued as all present stared at Edward. Mortimer? Was that whom they had in mind? Madness! His sons, his brothers, his cousin Henry, his nephews all stood closer to the crown than Mortimer; none of them would consent to have that upstart reign over them. There would be civil war. Did he want to subject his sons to that? To risk destroying his royal line? He shook his head, unaware of the tears falling down his face, and said, “I will not see my own son disinherited. If the people are that dissatisfied with me, I will resign the crown to him, and only him.”

The stares turned to smiles or at least looks of relief. As Henry of Lancaster ushered the king respectfully out of the room, Edward's sobs began to mix with wild laughter. For the first time in his reign, he had done something that met with the wholehearted approval of the land.