Warlord (Outlaw 4) (56 page)

‘I did,’ I replied, ‘but not at this time.’

‘And what of that ill-born dog Mercadier? Surely you did not suffer him to live and prosper in peace?’

‘Oh, he certainly died,’ I said. ‘He did not prosper, and he died quite soon after the King.’

‘But how did he die, Grandpa? What were the circumstances of his death? Did you kill him in battle? Did you fight him in a duel? Did you kill the Master, too? The “man you cannot refuse”? And the Grail – what became of that? Did you ever find it? Was it really the blessed vessel that once held Our Saviour’s blood?’

‘Hush now, my boy,’ I said. ‘Too many questions for this time of night. All that passed after Richard’s death is a story for another day.’ And I dismissed him to his bed. But his questions stayed with me: my dead memories called to me silently from the dark corners of the hall, and in my half-waking dreams at dawn they danced through my mind. So perhaps my aching hand will, with rest, recover its suppleness in a few days, and perhaps I will pick up my quill once more and write one last tale of Robin and myself, of our friends and enemies, of Nur and Prince John, of Mercadier and the Master – and our quest for that most wondrous, tantalizing, blood-tainted object, the Holy Grail.

Historical Note

At my parents’ house the other day, I was sorting through some childhood possessions when I came across a slim, hardback book, written by Lawrence Du Garde Peach, illustrated by John Kenney and published in 1965 by Wills & Hepworth Ltd of Loughborough. On the cover is a tall, commanding medieval knight in a full suit of mail with a white crusader’s surcoat over the top. His domed helmet is adorned with a golden crown; a red shield is slung across his broad back; his left hand rests casually on the pommel of the scabbarded sword at his waist; he gazes into the distance at an unfolding but unseen battle. On the cover of the book are the words:
Richard the Lion Heart
– A Ladybird Book – An Adventure from History. Holding it in my hand, I experienced a great flood of half-forgotten happy memories. This little book, which I must have read some forty years ago is, I believe, responsible for my lifelong interest in Richard the Lionheart. In language suitable for a six-year-old child, it encapsulated his aristocratic arrogance, his love of battle and his generosity of spirit; and while I have done a good deal of grown-up reading about the subject since then, my mental image of Richard remains that of the imperious knight on the cover of that slim volume.

Most people are familiar, from novels, films and plays, with the highlights of Richard’s career – the warrior king who led the Third Crusade, and was then captured, imprisoned and held for ransom on his way home – but storytellers seldom focus on the last five years of his life. I think this is because, to modern eyes, the half-decade before his death in April 1199 was rather a confused period – it was a time of intermittent warfare against Philip of France, with few clear victories or defeats and very little glory. Bands of knights and mercenaries ravaged the lands from Boulogne to Bordeaux, thousands of peasants perished from hunger, towns were burned, castles were captured, retaken, destroyed, rebuilt – and there were frequent truces between the warring sides while everyone wielding a sword and wearing armour took a breath and planned their next move. And that is partly why I wanted to write about this chapter of history – I felt that few other novelists had explored it and I wanted to get across a sense of the destructiveness of medieval war, and the appalling impact it had on the landscape and on people’s livelihoods – as well as on the minds of the combatants. But I also discovered why this period of the Lionheart’s life is seldom written about: it is rather difficult to shape into a recognizably heroic narrative structure – it ends without any significant military triumphs and with King Richard’s almost random death at the hands of a nobody in a minor battle at an obscure castle. Such is real life; even great heroes sometimes die pointlessly.

At the time, or shortly afterwards, many of the chroniclers of the Lionheart’s exploits were also slightly bemused and deflated by his anticlimactic demise and various attempts were made to give the facts of his death more meaning. To the medieval mind, the lives of great men must have a pattern; they must demonstrate God’s purpose in some way, as chaotic chance was surely the work of the Devil. Accordingly, some historians of the day happily used their imagination when describing Richard’s end: they claimed that the Lionheart had been seeking a valuable treasure at Château
Châlus-Chabrol, which had been discovered by the Viscount of Limoges, and which Richard wished to lay his hands on. This turned the hero’s death into a parable about greed – the mighty lion slain by an insignificant ant as a punishment for avarice.

However, I was quite delighted to discover this fantastic tale of a hidden treasure when I was researching King Richard’s death – even though it was unlikely to have any basis in fact: it made my job a little easier. I had been wanting to include the story of the Holy Grail – a hugely influential contemporary legend made popular by the
trouvère
Chretien de Troyes and others – as an element in my Robin Hood stories for some time, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. And so, in my novel, my fictional heroes Robin and Alan persuade Richard to come south to punish Viscount Aimar with the lure of a wondrous treasure, the Holy Grail. The Grail storyline continues in the next book in this series – indeed, it is the main theme – and I will say more about that fabulous object then. But the point of this note is to help the reader understand which parts of my books are based on historical fact, and which parts are not. So, there was no Holy Grail at Château Châlus-Chabrol when Richard died there on 6 April 1199, and probably no hidden treasure either – but there are many other parts of my story that might sound equally incredible but which do happen to be true.

The episode with Alan at Verneuil at the beginning of the book is based on a real battle. The Castle of Verneuil was being besieged by King Philip with a huge army and, on Richard’s arrival in Normandy in May 1194, he sent a small contingent of men to break through the French lines and stiffen the resolve of the defenders. This they did, bravely holding off their attackers until King Philip and more than half his force suddenly departed to take revenge for the massacre of the civilians by Prince John at Évreux. Verneuil was saved, and when Richard arrived with his army a day or so later, he captured the King of France’s siege train from his
fleeing enemies. Richard was so delighted by the successful defence of Verneuil that he kissed all the surviving defenders and rewarded them generously. History does not record what the King thought of the mocking chalk drawing on the front of the castle gate of a mace-bearing Philip – although that weapon was probably in his hands, not ‘springing from his loins’, which is an exercise of literary licence by me designed to make the insulting cartoon more comprehensible to modern eyes. Jokes don’t travel well over the centuries.

After Verneuil, on his way south to pacify Aquitaine, King Richard’s army terrified the citizens of Tours – who had been involved in disloyal negotiations with the French – into handing over a ‘gift’ of two thousand marks to appease the royal anger; but Robin’s involvement in the arrangement of this bribe is, of course, my own invention. The taking of Loches was a notable victory for Richard – the castle was widely seen as impregnable, but the Lionheart captured it in a single day (13 June 1194) in one fierce and prolonged assault. Outside Vendôme, a couple of weeks later, Richard prepared for a pitched battle with Philip, but after one skirmish the French retreated towards Chateâudun; the Lionheart’s cavalry, in hot pursuit, caught up with the rearguard and captured their entire wagon train. The haul of booty was enormous, including much of Philip’s treasure and the royal archives, which provided the names of those of Richard’s knightly subjects who had made plans to defect to the enemy.

The Truce of Tillières (23 July 1194) was the first of several accords that were signed during the period before Richard’s death. It was intended to last until 1 November 1195, and like all truces was based on the status quo – which meant that Alan’s fictional manor of Clermont-sur-Andelle would remain in the hands of its French usurpers. This brief window of peace made Alan’s visit to Paris possible, and the city was indeed in the midst of a building boom in the summer and autumn of 1194, as I have described. King Philip was busy surrounding Paris with a great defensive wall,
which was at that time only half-completed, but which was meant to protect his capital from the depredations of Richard’s marauders. Bishop Maurice de Sully – a powerful but beloved prelate who had nothing to do with the Holy Grail or my fictional Master’s gangs of bandits, and who died at the Abbey of St Victor in 1196 – was building the magnificent Notre-Dame cathedral for the glory of God and the Virgin Mary. The cathedral, which was not completed until the middle of the thirteenth century, still summons pilgrims from the far corners of Christendom.

The Knights Templar were also busily engaged in the construction of a formidable new base to the north-east of the city. Incidentally, Sir Gilbert Horal, 12th Grand Master of the Knights Templar, did indeed fight against the Moors of Spain, and his personal device was a blue cross, but he never formed a separate sub-order of Templar knights dedicated to the Queen of Heaven. He was, though, as Sir Aymeric de St Maur (a real Anglo-Norman Templar) comments, genuinely in favour of making peace with the Muslims in the Holy Land.

Paris, then as now, was a magnet for students from all over Europe – and the war between Richard and Philip did not prevent clever Englishmen from flocking there to take part in the intellectual flowering of the city. My fictional character, the malodorous Master Fulk, is partly based on a famous English teacher called Adam du Petit-Pont who lived and taught his students on the smaller bridge over the Seine to the south of the Île de la Cité.

The plot twist at the end of the second part of the book, when Alan apparently gets stabbed in the heart and lives is, I’m reliably informed, quite possible medically. One person in ten thousand – so 700,000 people alive in the world at the moment – is believed to have the condition called
situs inversus viscerum
, in which their heart and other organs are on the wrong side of the body. However, to be fair, in medieval times Alan would have been extraordinarily lucky to survive that strike as it might well have severed one or
many crucial blood vessels in that part of his chest, and, failing that, the risk of fatal infection would have been high: mercifully, Reuben, with his near-miraculous medical skills, was at hand to save his life.

Paris was not the only hive of building activity in northern France: Château-Gaillard, the saucy castle, was another extraordinarily energetic feat of construction that took place during this period. It was completed in just two years (1196–1198) and may have cost as much as £20,000 – a staggering sum for the time. In comparison, Dover Castle, which was built between 1179 and 1191 – taking more than a decade to build – cost £7,000. King Richard clearly loved his ‘fair’ castle in Normandy, referring to it as his ‘one-year-old daughter’ on one occasion and remarking that he could defend its walls if they were made of butter.

My descriptions of his campaigns against the occupied part of the duchy are reasonably accurate, although much simplified: Prince John presided over the capture of Milly, and William the Marshal was the first man over the wall after the initial attack faltered. That ageing warrior knocked out the constable of the castle and then sat on his unconscious body to rest his weary limbs. Or, perhaps, to make sure that no one else claimed him as a valuable prisoner of war.

The battle of Gisors (27 September 1198) took place much as I have described it, except that William the Marshal’s charge is my own invention. In fact, some scholars think the Earl of Striguil was not present at the battle at all. Richard, while out scouting with a small group of knights, came across a large French army, some three hundred knights and a similar number of men-at-arms and militia spread out in the line of march, which was advancing north-west towards Courcelles. The Lionheart, with characteristic decisiveness, immediately attacked the French, despite being massively outnumbered, and put them to flight. Richard is said to have used ‘God and my right!’ (
Dieu et mon droit
), a public denial
of his fealty to King Philip, as his battle cry at Gisors, which subsequently became the motto of the British Monarchy. The collapse of the bridge over the River Epte was a notable feature of the battle, and Philip was mocked by his enemies afterwards for being ‘forced to take a drink from the river’. Many prisoners were taken after the battle – Mercadier himself took thirty knights prisoner – and such was the hatred between the two sides at this point in the war that a good many atrocities were committed on the POWs, including blinding. The historian John Gillingham writes in his definitive book on the subject,
Richard I
: ‘It may be that Howden’s [a contemporary chronicler] comments on the war of 1198, that it was waged more fiercely than ever, with Philip blinding prisoners and Richard, unwillingly, retaliating in kind, applies to the aftermath of the French King’s dip in the river Epte.’

I have no direct evidence that Mercadier did actually blind any of his knightly prisoners after Gisors, but it might have been in keeping with his character – or rather the way his character was perceived by the chroniclers of the day, who usually depict him as a merciless villain. The frying-pan-wielding crossbowman who fatally wounded the King at Châlus-Chabrol, named variously as Bertrand de Gurdon, Peter Basil and Dudo in different accounts of the siege, was said to have been brought to Richard’s deathbed after the castle had fallen. And the Lionheart, knowing he was doomed, repented of his sins and forgave the crossbowman and ordered that he be set free. However, once outside the royal pavilion, Mercadier had the unfortunate man taken up by his men, flayed alive and then hanged.