The Three Edwards (54 page)

Nothing did any good. The lovely and generous princess, like her handsome and outgiving father, always spent a great deal more than she had. To give her more only increased her difficulties.

Edward had no success in making brilliant matches for his daughters. This was regarded as very strange, for the star of England was in the ascendant and the girls were beautiful, gay, and pleasant of disposition. The fault probably lay in Edward’s method. In diplomacy he was devious, and the reigning heads of Europe had come to know that he could not be trusted. If he sought a husband for one of his lovely daughters in Spain, it could be taken for granted that he was also negotiating in other quarters.

Isabella was first affianced to Louis, the son of the Count of Flanders, to cement the alliance with the Low Countries. She was jilted by the young man, whose sympathies lay entirely with France, particularly as he had seen his father slain on the field of Crécy. He ran away to the French court and later was married to Margaret of Brabant. Isabella did not seem at all disturbed because she had in the meantime conceived a liking for one Bernard Ezi, son of the lord of Albret in Gascony. She was even ready to go to Gascony for the ceremony and had a wedding gown prepared of rich India silk, trimmed with ermine and embroidered with seven ounces of gold thread. Perhaps some quarrel developed between the young couple before the time came for the ships to leave; at any rate, the match was broken off, at the solicitation of the bride. The poor bridegroom-elect was so stricken with grief that he relinquished all his property rights to his younger brother and retired into a monastery. He had been sincerely in love with the gay princess.

Finally, when the charming but capricious Isabella had reached the age of thirty-three, she fell deeply, completely, irrevocably in love with a handsome French nobleman of twenty-four, Ingelram de Coucy, who was
in England as a hostage. Although he belonged to the lesser Gallic nobility, the young man regarded himself as of the first importance, a trait which had persisted in his family for generations. The motto of the family, in fact, was an open demonstration of their pride:

Fortunately, or unfortunately as things turned out for the fair Isabella, the young man was as much in love with her as she was with him; and with much persistence they succeeded in winning the consent of the royal parents. They were married at Windsor Castle and the king, characteristically, gave his daughter as brilliant a marriage as though she were wedding the most exalted monarch in the world. On the morning of the ceremony Isabella was presented with jewelry to the value of £2,370. At the wedding feast her father assembled all the best minstrels he could summon and with a lordly gesture paid them a truly colossal figure for their services, one hundred pounds.

Isabella was pleased to find that the lords of Coucy lived in a feudal state quite in keeping with their inordinate pride. The castle of Coucy had a grand staircase twenty-two feet in width, which led to many galleries where the family had their living apartments. There were double walls about the structure with ten ramparts and four bastions, and a donjon tower 176 feet high and 305 feet in circumference. They lived with all the pomp of kings.

The marriage was a success at first. Isabella, who had retained most of her good looks and slender proportions, presented her youthful bridegroom with two daughters, Mary and Philippa. In course of time, however, the pride of the lord of Coucy, who had been given the title of Count of Bedford in England and very extensive estates, rebelled at serving a foreign monarch. As a substitute measure he thought of joining the great Hawkwood in Italy, but this did not accomplish his purpose. The couple parted, to enable him to renew his homage to the King of France. Isabella returned to England and died, it was believed, of a broken heart. Extravagant to the end, she left debts which had to be paid by the crown.

When the second daughter, Joanna, was two years old, Edward arranged to marry her to Frederick, the eldest son of Duke Otho of Austria, and at the age of five she was taken to the Austrian court to be raised.

The poor little princess was caught in a difficult position at the Austrian court, for Duke Otho died and his brother, Albert, who became guardian, was favorably disposed to France. The child, who was now six years old, had the good sense and courage to send secret messages to her father, telling him that she was practically a prisoner. Edward had to make three
formal demands before the child was returned to her own family. A journey of fifty days brought her to Ghent, where her mother was staying, and she arrived just in time to help celebrate the arrival of another son in the family. The boy was named John and became the famous and controversial John of Gaunt.

Joanna was thirteen when it was finally decided that she was to marry Pedro, the heir to the throne of Castile. A Spanish ambassador was sent to England to see her and decide whether she would make a suitable bride for the Castilian heir. The princess had her full share of the Plantagenet beauty and was, moreover, the favorite of the royal parents, so the report was an affirmative one. On January 9, a time of rough weather and stormy seas, the nuptial party set sail. When they reached Gascony, the Black Death was raging there and the princess was hurriedly removed to the small village of Loremo, where it was believed she would be safe from contagion. The plague spread, however, and the princess was the first victim.

She was deeply mourned by her parents, but it may have been that her early death saved her much grief and suffering. The prince she was to have married developed into the most depraved of men and won for himself the name in history of Pedro the Cruel.

The young claimant to the dukedom of Brittany, John de Montfort, was raised at the English court while the struggle over the succession raged in his homeland. It was understood from the beginning that he was to marry Mary, the fourth English princess (the third, Blanche, had died in infancy), and fortunately they became sincerely attached. Edward was trying a new policy with his family at this stage, one of austerity, and the little Mary was allowed no more than twenty marks a year as her allowance. This did not disturb her at all, for she was a quiet and gentle child and did not like to travel around as her older sisters had done.

John de Montfort was a handsome and vigorous fellow and in due course became duke, but not in time for Mary to share the honor with him. They were married at Woodstock before the issue of the succession was settled, and after seven happy months the bride died of a form of sleeping sickness.

The fifth daughter, Margaret, was married to a commoner, John, the son and heir of Lawrence Hastings, Earl of Pembroke. It was a love match and she was very happy for the brief time it lasted. The princess died after two years of married life at the English court.

I
T was not called the Black Death at the time but it was feared as the worst scourge ever to visit the earth. The symptoms mentioned in the scanty records make it clear that it was the bubonic plague or a very close variation. To the terror-stricken people who heard of its appearance, vaguely at first, it was a visitation of God, perhaps even the first manifestation of the end of the world. Men in these days lived in dread of many things, but it was the fear of the second coming which gripped them most firmly; a state of mind which was intensified by the paintings on the walls of so many churches depicting the tortures of the damned.

Rumors reached England first from the Far East. It was said that it started in India and that the visitation had been heralded by strange occurrences on three successive days. On the first day there was a rain of frogs, serpents, and lizards. The second brought thunder and lightning and sheets of fire from the heavens. On the third day there was more fire and a great cloud of heavy, stinking smoke which moved across the earth and blotted out everything. On the fourth day came the plague.

From that time on the people of Europe talked of little else, although there was not as yet any fear that it would reach them. It was conjectured that the terrible visitation was due to an earthquake which opened up graves and filled the air with infection from the uncovered corpses. The tales which white-faced men exchanged in the taverns were all of natural catastrophies. Great winds straight from heaven or hell were sweeping over Asia and carrying the disease with them. There were floods which converted lowlands into swamps from which noxious odors arose.

Then the conjectures, which had been casual before, turned into panic. The plague had come to Europe. Could anything stop it? Would it loose all its wild terrors on country after country?

It first appeared at a port called Caffa on the Black Sea in 1346. This
was a busy shipping center and the vessels there hurriedly spread their sails to escape from this terrible visitation which filled the inns and the crowded houses with bodies carrying the black sign. They spread the disease to every port on the Mediterranean. It manifested itself in an earthquake of unexampled fury which shook Greece and Italy. The air became so heavy and noxious that wine spoiled in tight casks, becoming sour and undrinkable. Then the “thick, stinking mist,” which had been described before, advanced over the land and sea and mountain, obscuring everything—the sun, the moon, and the stars. It spread over Italy and the crops wilted and died and the fruit rotted on the trees. There was no food for the poor until in Florence large bake ovens were built from which as many as ninety-four thousand loaves of bread were distributed daily to the starving people.

All of western Europe waited and trembled while this supernatural visitor came closer and closer. A pillar of fire appeared for an hour at sunset over the Palace of the Popes at Avignon. Large meteors were seen in the skies in many countries. A ball of fire was seen over Paris one August evening.

When the plague reached France, the people of England became aware for the first time that it was universal. Word of strange and fearful things came over the water to the island. At Avignon the churchyards could not hold the dead and the Pope consecrated the Rhone so that bodies might be committed to the waters. The French people were said to be adopting strange methods to escape the contagion. Some were wearing small lions carved out of gold. The gates of Paris were erupting with people seeking escape. Only in houses with windows opening to the north could there be safety. The doctors, who were completely in the dark, were advising people to avoid the sun and warm winds. Stay inside, they were saying, and fill the air with the scent of burning juniper and ash and young oak.

But even with France in the grip of this monstrous visitor from the East, the people of England lived in hope. At its narrowest point, the Channel was twenty miles wide, filled with fast and turbulent water and bringing winds which swept strongly westward. How could the contagion spread over this natural barrier, this clean rampart of wind and water?

But not the fast-flowing waves of the Channel nor the winds which swept all before them could prevail in the end. There was no cessation of shipping between the island and the mainland, because there was no hint of the strange truth: that there were always rats in the holds of ships and that on the bodies of the rats were black flies which carried the contagion.
It might have been a reasonable precaution for the government to stop all shipping from the mainland, and this might have saved England from the Black Death. But of course nothing of the kind was done.

The first indication of trouble came from the port of Melcombe on the Dorsetshire coast in August 1348. A sailor died there after three days of intense suffering, pitching and moaning in a high fever and spitting blood. People who had been near him came down with the disease at once, the foul symptoms repeating themselves and their faces wearing a black mask of death. Sometimes the agony was prolonged to five days, with tumors appearing outwardly on the groin and under the armpits.

There could be no doubt about it. This was the plague. The people of Melcombe began to die by the hundreds. The terror spread with amazing speed, sweeping over Dorset, Devon, and Somerset, reaching Bristol by the middle of the month. Efforts were made to cut the great western port off from adjoining districts, but nothing could check a wave of death carried, seemingly, on the wind. It spread quickly to Oxford. On All Saints’ Day it reached London.

London, of course, was ripe for it. The sanitary conditions there could not have been worse, with people jammed together in little wooden tenements, the streets rank with offal, and swine roaming about at will. The death list mounted so fast that the victims died untended. Those who could get away did so with a haste which filled the roads with galloping horses, and women on couches swung from saddle to saddle. The poor tramped with furious haste, their belongings on their backs. Even members of the priesthood were fleeing, for every report had spoken of the mortality among the clergy. Master Gaddesden, the royal physician, got away with the king’s family to the cool seclusion of Eltham Castle. He would not have remained in London at any cost, for this disease was the most disagreeable of all and the one which could profit a man of medicine nothing. A meeting of Parliament had been set for the summer, but the officials at Westminster, prior to packing up themselves, issued a hasty notice of prorogation.

Before leaving London it became the custom to visit Westminster and go to the south transept, where a painting of St. Christopher, the kindly patron saint of travelers, occupied one wall. Here they would pause and study a promise printed under the painting,
Non Morte mala Morietur
. With this assurance of immunity from an evil death they would then depart in a less agitated frame of mind. The greatest dread inspired by the plague was the threat of a death so sudden that the last rites could not be administered.