The Last Plantagenets (27 page)

“Robert,” said this strange visitor from above, with uplifted hand and speaking in a tongue which the pilgrim did not recognize though he had no difficulty in understanding the words, “thou shalt escape this danger. Thou and all with thee for thy sake.” The voice went on to explain what he must do. He must seek out the King of France and lay an injunction on him to bring about a peace with England. “This war,” continued the heavenly visitor, “has raged too long—–Woe unto such as will not hear thee.”

As soon as the apparition dissolved from sight, the winds ceased and a gentle breeze took the vessel to Genoa. Robert went to Avignon and saw the Pope, who instructed him to reach the King of France at once. The French royal uncles scoffed at the pilgrim and his story, so Robert had left France and made his way to England. Richard listened attentively to the hermit’s tale. He and John of Gaunt seemed ready to accept it as true, but Thomas of Woodstock, echoed by the Earl of Arundel, refused to believe a word of it. The two war leaders called the story the ravings of a madman and demanded that no credence be placed in it.

For once they were right. Robert the Hermit returned to his home in Normandy and was never heard of again. Fortunately for the cause of peace, however, there were better reasons for pursuing a pacific policy than the visions of a half-crazed pilgrim.

Thomas of Woodstock might rage and rail, but his wings were clipped by the fact that the 50,000 nobles promised him had not yet been paid; and he wanted the money very much. As for Arundel, his brother Thomas was soon to receive the pall as primate of all England, and the earl had to be careful lest this great boon be withheld. Richard had carefully laid his plans before the hermit brought his story to the English court.

To those who objected to the tender age of the French princess, Richard had a reply which silenced them. “Every day will help to remedy this deficiency of age. Her youth is one of my reasons for preferring her, because she can be educated here and brought up in the manners and customs of the English. As for myself, I am young enough to wait for her.”

It so happened that Jean Froissart, the French historian and romanticist, was in England when the issue was being debated. He stayed with the royal household at Eltham and received his information at second hand from Sir Richard Stury, who apparently had been restored to royal favor. Froissart got the impression that the determination of the king to marry the French princess as a means to peace was so strong that nothing would be allowed to stand in the way. It was while he was at Eltham that the decision to send a deputation to Paris was passed in the House of Commons.

Froissart’s impression of the king himself was gained at first hand. Because he had been so well regarded by the late Queen Philippa, Richard received him with open favor.

The Frenchman had brought with him a presentation copy of his own writings, beautifully illuminated and bound in crimson velvet with ten silver gilt studs and roses in the middle. The Sunday after the deputation left for France, Froissart received a summons to take the book to the king in person.

Richard was still in bed but his beard had been freshly clipped and trimmed and he appeared handsome and in high spirits. He took the volume into his hands with every evidence of pleasure and started to leaf through it.

“Of what does it treat, Sir Knight?” he asked.

“Of love, Your Majesty,” replied the donor. Later he described it as full of “all matters of amours and moralytees.”

This stimulated the interest of the king and he began to read aloud from some of the pages. Froissart records that Richard “read and spoke French in perfection.” After this tasting of the contents, the king handed the volume to one of the knights who stood at attention in the spacious and sumptuously furnished apartment, Sir Richard Creedon, with instructions to take it to the royal oratory.

Everything about the court, as seen by the French visitor, bore witness to the truth of the stories circulated at the time of the magnificence with which the king lived and the extravagance he displayed in rewarding those about him. As a return for the book, he gave Froissart a chased silver goblet containing one hundred nobles, a most handsome sum for one who lived by his pen.

The embassy sent to Paris consisted of three members, including the Earl of Nottingham, who was marshal of England. They arrived with 500 mounted attendants and were lodged on the Croix du Tiroir. The King of France was enjoying one of his sane intervals and he received them warmly, making them a grant of 200 crowns a day for their expenses.

Queen Isabeau had not yet begun on the intrigues and amours which would make her notorious and was still considered the most beautiful woman in Europe. She lived with her rapidly increasing family in the Hôtel de St. Pol. She was an extravagant chatelaine and a careless mother, for her two youngest daughters, Michelle and Katherine, were later brought up in the most neglectful way. Nothing was too good for Isabella, however, who seems to have been the favorite of the family. She resembled the queen in having the fresh Bavarian complexion and
the black eyes of the Italian side of the house, but, whereas her mother had the smoldering challenge of a courtesan in her dusky eyes, those of the little princess were sweet and warm.

At first the French council refused the English envoys the right to see the princess, thinking no doubt that the terms on which the mother had come to France should not be repeated. “She is but a child of seven,” was the reason they gave. The ambassadors insisted and finally were granted permission to pay a visit at the Hôtel de St. Pol.

Their first impression of Isabella was that she seemed small even for her years. When they arrived, she was seated on a low stool, while the queen and her ladies remained watchfully in the background. As the tailors of the day had not yet conceived it possible to design clothes especially for children, Isabella was a petite replica of her mother: a thin gold chaplet about her dark hair, her slender neck showing white and pure above her bell-shaped gown, her sleeves embroidered in the delicate shades of butterfly’s wings, her skirts spread out demurely around her.

The three Englishmen stood in silence for a moment, each thinking the same thing, no doubt: “This miniature of a great lady will grow up into a beautiful queen.”

The English marshal then dropped on one knee beside her and said, “Madame, if it please God, you will be our lady and queen.”

There was a nervous tension among the women grouped about the queen, for this form of greeting had not been anticipated. How would the child conduct herself? But their fears were wholly unnecessary.

The small princess answered promptly: “Sir, if it please God and my lord and king that I be queen of England, I shall be well pleased thereat. For I have been told I shall then be a great lady.”

The balance of the audience proceeded, no doubt, along the lines which had been planned. It passed off smoothly and well. The princess asked the marshal to rise and then led him by the hand to pay his respects to the queen. The latter received them graciously. Her desire to charm all men, even members of the hated English breed, was displayed in the brief talk which followed.

The members of the embassy had been quite carried away by the loveliness and intelligence of the child and so no time was lost in arranging the terms of the marriage contract. It was signed on March 9, 1396, and at the same time the truce between the two countries was tentatively extended for twenty-eight years. It was arranged that the marriage would be held at once, with the marshal acting as proxy for Richard.

The English king was to cross to France later when the terms would be ratified finally. He would then take his little bride back to England where she would be educated in a household of her own.

Richard decided that the ceremonies in France were to be conducted on the most lavish scale. He notified John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock that they were to accompany him, with their wives, and similar instructions went out to the higher-ranking members of the aristocracy. They all crossed over to Calais together, including the wives who had openly declared their intention of refusing to acknowledge the fair Katharine, Gaunt’s wife. Apparently the rancorous ladies were brought to realize there must be no open evidences of ill feeling, for the party arrived at Calais and then proceeded as a unit to a place between Guisnes and Ardres, where a century later another King of England would meet another King of France with an absurdity of extravagance at the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

The two courts met on the vigil of the feast of St. Simon and St. Jude, on October 27, 1396. There was an open space between the two camps and this was guarded by 400 knights from each country, on foot and with drawn swords. The royal parties met in a lane formed by the armed knights, the King of France conducted by the Dukes of Lancaster and Gloucester (Gaunt and Woodstock), and Richard walking between two of the French royal uncles, the Dukes of Berry and Burgundy. When the two kings met, “the eight hundred knights,” according to Froissart, “fell on their knees and wept for joy.” This sounds like one of the typical high-flown exaggerations in which the French historian indulged, and yet it is probable that some of the knights wept. In the Middle Ages men were intensely emotional and tears poured forth on the least provocation. It was true, also, that many of the nobility of both countries were thoroughly weary of the interminable fighting.

The two monarchs then went hand in hand into the pavilion of the French king, where they conversed privately, sipping wine and dipping into comfit boxes. Richard did not see his bride until the next day, however, when dinner was served in the French tent, with the kings seated alone at different ends of the table. The royal uncles waited on them and it was reported later that Thomas of Woodstock cast a rolling eye on the elaborate gold and silver service and whispered to one of the others that “France was still a very rich country, and that peace ought not to
be made,” a remark which befitted a burglar staring through a window at the table appointments he planned to steal that night.

After the feasting was over, the bride was brought into the tent, attended by a train of French ladies. Her father, who felt so deeply about losing her that the parting brought about a partial return of his mental malady, took one of her hands and placed it in that of Richard. Isabella looked up into the handsome face of the English king and felt as much fluttering of the heart as was possible in one so young. Apparently he impressed her as the prince charming of her dreams, for she never ceased thereafter to speak of him in any terms but of open admiration.

Richard smiled and whispered a compliment. In accordance with the prearranged etiquette, he shook the hand of his father-in-law and withdrew from the tent.

During these various meetings the English king had appeared in a magnificent variety of costumes which no mythical bird from the East could have equaled. King Charles, in contrast, had worn at the start a cloak of white and gold velvet with a single plume in his hat. This had sufficed also for all of the other events.

It was estimated later that the marriage had cost England £200,000, of which £7000 had been spent in presents lavished by the king on the French nobility. By the terms arranged in advance, Richard had renounced all claims to the throne of France in right of Isabella or the children she might bear. The queen came handsomely endowed, however, in the sum of 800,000 francs, which were to be paid in a series of installments.

The seven-year-old Isabella, who was already being called by everyone the Little Queen, was taken in charge by her ladies and escorted outside to the litter in which she was to travel. Richard had insisted that she was to be raised in the best English traditions, and so none of her ladies would accompany the lonely child to the land of her adoption. The only familiar face in her entourage would be that of Philippa, the first wife of Robert de Vere, who had returned to the English court after the death of her husband and was now called officially the Duchess of Dublin. The records do not say whether or not Launcecrona, the second wife, had accompanied de Vere into exile, but the likelihood was that she had returned finally to Bohemia. Philippa was half French, the second daughter of the Lord of Coucy, and as she was a woman of charm and warmth, her choice was a happy one.

Nevertheless, it must have been with a sinking heart that the Little Queen found herself leaving home in the company of foreigners, the
people who had always been referred to at the French court in terms of hatred and contempt—the Go-dams, as they were universally called. She had been pleased by the looks of the man she was to marry and she liked the lady Philippa, but she would have been less than human had she not shed a tear when the movement of her golden draped conveyance told her she was on her way. Soon she would be married, she knew, on soil which was legally considered English and none of her family would be present.

In spite of this, the start of the marriage had been auspicious. The guests who had accompanied the king from England had been won over by the beauty and charm of the child bride. There would be no weeping fits on the part of Isabella, no imploring cries to be taken home. She seems to have been determined to accept the conditions she must now face in this land where she was to be “a very great lady.”

The official marriage took place at Calais on November 4, with the expected magnificence. There is no record of the gown worn by the queen but among the finest robes listed in her wardrobe was one of red velvet, embroidered in gold, with strange birds perching on boughs made of emeralds and pearls. This may have been the selection for the ceremony. The French dressmakers had gone to excessive pains to save their princess from being outshone by her resplendent bridegroom. No finer wardrobe had ever been assembled and it was estimated that her jewelry was worth 500,000 crowns. According to the custom of the age, she brought her own chamber appointments. Her bed was as dainty as its occupant, having light hangings of white and red satin.