To Defy a King (60 page)

Prince Louis had agreed his peace treaty at Kingston, his undergarments concealed by a rich mantle, and, the ceremony concluded, had sailed for France on the next tide, leaving those who had been under oath to him free to give their allegiance to the young king and his protector. Framlingham had been returned forthwith, and her father had immediately drafted Hugh into helping with the legal issues of government and matters concerned with finalising the peace.

She heaved a soft sigh that was part contentment and part letting go of the old and taking on the new.

'Profound thoughts?' Hugh asked and she felt rather than saw him smile, but could see in her mind's eye the way the laughter lines had deepened at the side of his eyes. He slipped his arm around her waist and tucked his thumb inside the belt she was wearing, the one they had part-woven together in blended tones of blue when their firstborn son was in swaddling. 'Ne vus sanz mei, ne mei sanz vus
.
'

She answered his smile with the warmth of her voice, and leaned against him. 'I was thinking that it is a beautiful evening and it is going to be a fine day tomorrow - and tomorrow after that. I shall take the best fleece from the sheep you gifted to me. I shall spin the wool, and dye it, and we'll weave another braid together, you at one end, me at the other, until we meet in the middle. And then we shall each have a belt, so that whatever happens, one will always be part of the other.'

'That sounds like a fine notion to me,' Hugh said, and by mutual agreement they descended the wall walk and strolled towards the narrow wedge of light spilling through the open hall door.

Author's Note

This is the part where I take the readers behind the scenes and come clean on the historical background to the novel. If readers come across occasional anomalies between
To Defy a King
and earlier titles concerned with the Marshal family, I apologise. My research is ongoing and sometimes I come across material in the historical record of which I was unaware at an earlier time, but which I feel needs to be incorporated now. For example, towards the end of
The Scarlet Lion
, I have a scene where Mahelt is heavily pregnant in 1217, but I have since discovered that her third son was born the following year and
To Defy a King
reflects this. Again, when writing
The
Scarlet Lion
, I was unaware of the siege of Framlingham, and this detail does add a new element to the history. I always strive for historical accuracy, but acknowledge that I am fallible, and that I am writing fiction, not a reference work. What I have tried to do is stay true to the characters and their life and times.

Mahelt Marshal does not have the fame or resonance in history that falls to her illustrious father the great William Marshal, but it has not made her any less fascinating to study. She is little mentioned in the narrative historical record. However, there are a few charters and documents that give pointers to her personality and her life - scattered bones that when collected together and assembled offer a glimpse of her character and illuminate the path even eight hundred years later.

She doesn't have a known birth date. In
The Greatest Knight
I've given a date of 1194, but I've revised this now and think she was most likely born some time in 1193. My excuse is that deeper research into previously peripheral characters brings new things to light that make for slight tweaks further down the line.

Mahelt was the third child and firstborn daughter of William Marshal and Isabelle de Clare. Their first two children were boys: William Junior and Richard. In charters and sources she is variously called Matilda, Maheut and Mahelt, and I have chosen the latter, borrowing it from her father's biography, the
Histoire de Guillaume le Mareschal.
Following Mahelt's birth, two more brothers were born, Gilbert and Walter, and it wasn't until around 1200 that the next girl, Isabelle, came along. For seven years Mahelt was the only girl in her family and in that sense she had her father to herself and there seems to have been a special bond between them. The
Histoire
says of Mahelt that she had the gifts of 'wisdom, generosity, beauty, nobility of heart, graciousness, and I can tell you in truth, all the good qualities which a noble lady should possess'. These are stock phrases, formal and fairly common in such descriptions, and I take them with a pinch of salt. However, the
Histoire
also adds that 'her worthy father . . . loved her dearly'. This is interesting because following on from this remark, the other daughters and their qualities are mentioned, but there is no more of the 'loved dearly'

business
.
Mahelt is the only daughter who receives this accolade.

Of course even a doting father in the Middle Ages couldn't let such affection get in the way of politics and William approached Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, and 'asked him graciously, being the wise man he was, to arrange a handsome marriage between his own daughter and his son Hugh. The boy was worthy, mild-mannered, and noble-hearted and the young lady was a very young thing and both noble and beautiful. The marriage was a most suitable one and pleased both families involved
.
' Roger Bigod was rich and powerful. His lands in East Anglia, where he dominated, were almost a kingdom in themselves, and he had sizeable estates in Yorkshire too. The family also had a royal kinship tie in that Ida, Countess of Norfolk, was the mother of William Longespee, Earl of Salisbury, King John's bastard half-brother. Longespee was also kin to the Marshal family through marriage, his wife Ela being William Marshal's cousin once removed.

When Hugh and Mahelt married in early 1207, Hugh would have been about twenty-four years old to Mahelt's approximately fourteen. The age difference, the arranged match, and the youth of the bride may seem shocking to a modern mindset, but to a medieval society this was business as usual. The age of consent was twelve for a girl and fourteen for a boy. It was judged that at this age, a person was capable of fulfilling a responsible adult role in society. Although girls were often married very young in aristocratic circles, consummation did not always automatically follow. There are written contracts in existence where families agreed on an age before which consummation was not to take place and I have mentioned such an agreement in
To Defy a King
. History tells us Mahelt Marshal and Hugh Bigod married early in 1207. Their first child was born some time before the end of 1209. The youngest Mahelt could possibly have been at the birth of their first son, Roger, was fourteen, and at the oldest she was seventeen. Her next child, Hugh (Hugo), was born three years later in 1212, and then there is another three-year gap to Isabelle in 1215 and Ralph in 1218. It's interesting to speculate that although contraceptive practices were banned by the Church, Hugh and Mahelt may well have exercised them in one form or another.

The lines of the poem that feature in a few scenes are an excerpt from the
lais
of a female writer called Marie de France living and working in the twelfth century and come from the poem 'Chevrefoil'.

Mahelt's husband, Hugh, was given his first taste of government around the age of seventeen, when his father handed over to him ten knights' fees in Yorkshire for his own. By the time Hugh married at twenty-four, he was an accomplished landlord, soldier and lawyer. He frequently accompanied his father on battle campaigns and in 1210 he deputised for him on the Irish campaign. Indeed, it seems likely that as Roger Bigod grew older, he delegated much of the active work of the earldom to Hugh. Both Roger and Hugh rebelled in the lead-up to the Magna Carta and it is likely that both of them had a hand in its drafting. Roger was an experienced lawyer and Hugh had followed in his footsteps. The reason for their rebellion is not known, but once they committed themselves to ousting John and accepting Louis of France, they remained staunch to that cause until Louis absolved them of their allegiance and returned to France. From that point onwards they remained in loyal service to the regent and the young king Henry III.

A thirteenth tax was indeed demanded in 1207 and was highly unpopular.

People did scramble around trying to find hiding places for their goods and chattels - often in monasteries, which were searched. The constable of Richmond Castle really did have his keep taken away in punishment for trying to hide his possessions from the taxman! Churches and abbeys were routinely searched. Swineshead Abbey had its building fund confiscated because the seneschal of the Countess of Aumale had hidden his money there. During the interdict, when the clergy in effect went on strike on orders from Rome, King John ordered that their 'wives' and children be arrested and sold back for ransom. Marriage amongst the clergy, once tolerated, had recently been banned and it was a cunning (if malicious) ploy on John's behalf to squeeze more money out of the Church.

Framlingham was besieged in March 1216 by King John and fell almost immediately, i.e. no resistance was put up. The defending constable William Lenveise surrendered to King John. From what can be gleaned, neither Earl Roger nor Hugh were present in the castle, but little Roger, Mahelt's son, was taken hostage and sent first to Norwich, then to Sandwich with Faulkes de Breaute. From there, he seems to have been kept in the household of William Longespee, Earl of Salisbury. There is no record of when he was returned to his family, but certainly he would have been home by the autumn of 1217 and probably before this.

No death date or burial site is recorded for Ida, Countess of Norfolk, although we know she predeceased her husband who died in 1221, because no arrangements were made for her during the settling of his estate. If I have misburied her bones at Thetford, then I apologise, but I think from my research that she would have been content to rest there with her husband.

William Longespee, Earl of Salisbury, did lead the English fleet to a great victory in the harbour at Damme, where he captured the French fleet, sacked the ships and burned several to the water. He seems to have been an adventurous soul and to have lived his life writ large. His tomb can still be visited to this day in Salisbury Cathedral, and a very stylish gentleman he is too. At the disastrous battle of Bouvines, he was taken hostage and a prison tally from this time lists among the prisoners one Ralph Bigod, whom Longespee calls his brother. This list has been a vital piece of information in tracking down the link between Bigod and Salisbury. A letter still exists from Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, to the justiciar Hubert de Burgh, asking for the return of the ten marks he owes him so he can put it towards paying Ralph's ransom.

King John's assault on Ela Longespee is mentioned in just one source: William of Armorica. Some historians discount it, saying that Longespee's likely reason for deserting John was that his small fortified palace at Salisbury could not have withstood a battering from the French. Personally, I think that it was a combination of the two - a moment when personal grudge and politics came together. John had a reputation for meddling with the wives and daughters of his barons; some of it unsubstantiated rumour and some of it hard fact. My own opinion is that John probably sexually harassed Ela; Longespee found out; the French invaded, and it was the last straw.

On a lighter note, I have to say Roland le Pettour really did exist. He held his lands in Langham, Norfolk, for the service of performing a 'leap, a whistle and a fart each Christmastide before the King'. The Latin amusingly describes the deed as '
unum saltum et siffletum et unum bumbulum
'.

I have paused the novel at a time in Mahelt and Hugh's lives when they were looking forward to the future, having won through the crisis of King John's reign. However, there were further difficult times to come. Mahelt lost her beloved father in 1219, her mother in 1220, and Hugh's father died in 1221.

Hugh himself died in 1225 at only forty-three years of age. It was sudden.

One minute he was very much alive and attending a council at Westminster.

A week later he was dead, leaving Mahelt a widow with four, possibly five children, the eldest of whom was an adolescent of sixteen years old. Mahelt moved swiftly, or those around her did, and within three months, she married William de Warenne, Earl of Surrey. He was the Bigods' neighbour with lands in Norfolk and Yorkshire and castles at Castle Acre and Conisburgh. He was considerably older than her - by my reckoning he was at least sixty years old. Mahelt bore him a son and a daughter: John and Isabelle. I find it very interesting that in all of her charters from this time, she calls herself 'Matildis la Bigot', never 'Matildis de Warenne', or only as an afterthought. For example: a charter dated between 1241 and 1245, following the death of her second husband, has the salutation '. . . ego Matilda Bigot comitissa Norf et Warenn'. The 'Warenn' is an official title like the 'Norf '. The 'Bigot' is her personal name. She did revert to her birth name again in 1246 when she was granted the Marshal's rod by King Henry III. All of her brothers and sisters were dead and thus the hereditary marshalship of England came into her hands. She became in her charters

'Matill Marescalla Angliae, comitissa Norfolciae et Warennae'. I somehow sense a militant gleam in her eyes, and a taking-up of tradition that encompassed her ancestors, including her beloved father. She would be a Bigod, she would be a Marshal, but she would not be a de Warenne except in official capacity.

Mahelt Marshal was a strong woman who survived and learned wisdom through much adversity. I think she was greatly loved but not necessarily lucky in love. She died in 1248 and was buried at Tintern Abbey beside her mother, her bier carried by four of her sons.

Although the name of Marshal died out of the history books with the childless demise of William's five sons, Mahelt was a matriarch whose children went on to forge weighty links across the history of the thirteenth century and beyond. It is down Mahelt's line that the Stuart kings of Scotland claim part of their descent.

As in my other novels about the Marshal family, I have made use of the Akashic Records - a belief that the past is there in the ether to be witnessed by those who can access it. More details can be found about this strand of my research on my website. These records are responsible for, among many other things in the novel, the 'over the wall' incident, the 'return from Ireland bath' incident (Alison King who reads these records for me is still recovering from that one!) and the Ela and John 'egg' incident.