As for you, I have a small group of unruly lords of Gascony under guard in my camp. You will join them. The food is adequate, but far from lavish; by the look of your girth, that may be a blessing. When my campaign ends, you and they will travel with me to see the King, where you can pay homage to your liege lord.’
De Rancon knew he had got off lightly, so just meekly bowed his head and walked away under guard.
Duke Richard’s ruse had been a clever one – not without risk, in placing his army within range of anything hurled from Taillebourg’s walls – but he had achieved what no one had ever done before and humbled the most formidable fortress in western Europe. The celebratory repast that followed that night involved no bogus revelry; the feast was truly bacchanalian, enjoyed by the citizens of Taillebourg as much as by their conquerors. With his usual panache, the Duke had made the local people beneficiaries of de Rancon’s ransacked treasury and thus ensured that they had no regrets about the demise of one lord and his replacement by another.
As our army began to move on, the Duke ordered that the fortress of Taillebourg be dismantled stone by stone. We repeated the same destruction at several more castles until Vulgrin, the Count of Angouleme, the last of Aquitaine’s rebels, rode into our camp with the keys to all of his fortresses, including Angouleme and Montignac, and begged that they be spared being razed to the ground. The Lionheart accepted the keys with gratitude and spared the Count the humiliation of paying homage to King Henry. But he destroyed the castles all the same.
His mission in Aquitaine complete, the Duke stood down his army and his Grand Quintet went home to their estates. With his little coterie of Gascon aristocrats in tow, we arrived in Caen in October of 1179, only to find that the King was in Winchester. Although he made it clear that he dreaded the prospect of crossing the Channel with winter approaching and the likelihood of being buffeted by autumn gales, the Duke was energized by his success in the south and nothing would have prevented him from presenting his father with the trophies of his hunting trip. He had two counts, three viscounts, four lords of tenure and several castellan chevaliers in his bag, and he was determined to display them in front of his father and the English court.
On the journey across the Channel, I realized how limited was the Duke’s English. He asked me to help him, but he struggled with it, saying that he found its mix of Celtic and Scandinavian vocabulary confusing and its pronunciation baffling – especially when compared to the harmonic vowels of his native Occitan. To his even greater consternation, when we made landfall at Fareham, England had already donned its autumnal cloak of leaden skies and cool temperatures. Within an hour of beginning our ride to Winchester, it began to rain – not just the usual drizzle of an October day, but the squall of a south-westerly storm.
Although I tried to reassure the Duke that such downpours were the exception, rather than the rule, he was not convinced.
‘Why does everyone keep telling me that England is the jewel in the King’s crown? I remember always being cold and wet as a child, and it appears nothing has changed!’
As if to prove his point, England then did its worst. As we climbed up on to the Downs, the driving rain turned to hailstones and cut into our faces like the lash of a whip. A miserable Lionheart said no more, just looked at me from under his sodden hood with all the contempt he held for my homeland.
Then I remembered that he had been born in England, and I chanced my arm with a quip.
‘Welcome home, my Lord.’
‘Don’t remind me!’
Mercifully, by the time we reached Winchester, the weather and the Duke’s humour had improved. Not only that: the King had prepared a welcome fit for the conquering hero. He had sent a royal squadron, complete with heralds and horns, to escort us into the burgh, the streets of which were thronged with people, mostly four deep. Usually such receptions were encouraged by generous inducements to the crowd, including gifts of food and drink, but on this occasion the warmth seemed genuine for a famous son of the realm whose exploits were already being written about by the scribes and related by the storytellers.
The King was overjoyed by his son’s success and particularly pleased that Duke Richard had brought him so many Gascon rebels to humiliate – a task he undertook with great relish. In front of a large gathering outside his Great Hall at Winchester, after berating them at length for their insolence and making each of them fall to their knees and swear an oath of allegiance to him, the King immediately sent the miscreants to Fareham to begin the long journey back to Gascony. For all of them, unless they could find a benefactor, it would be to face a life of penury, shorn of their wealth, their fortresses and their lands. These were the risks of challenging the might of the Plantagenet Empire.
For Duke Richard, the Little Quintet, Father Alun and myself, our immediate future was much more auspicious. The King had arranged for the Lionheart to undertake a grand progress across the length and breadth of the kingdom; it was a journey that we faced with considerably more enthusiasm than did the Duke. For us it was a nostalgic homecoming, for him it would be several weeks of purgatory.
His only comment when he heard the news was, ‘If I have to endure England in the depths of winter, you must make sure that all our hosts provide fine wine, fresh game and game girls.’
The Duke refused to travel as far as Durham and, despite my pleading, refused to travel to my homeland of Lancaster. But he did travel to York and Chester in the north, and to all the major burghs of the south. It was a triumphant cavalcade, with rapturous greetings in every burgh and village we passed; everyone wanted to see the man called ‘Lionheart’.
Our hosts, England’s all-powerful earls and bishops who enjoyed significant autonomy on their island with a King who spent a major proportion of his time in Normandy, were generous with their hospitality. Each knew that their guest was a man of rare stature who might well be their King one day, and they were keen to impress him. Their wine was outstanding, they provided excellent hunting, and the finest young women of their earldoms were paraded for the Duke. He was spoilt for choice and made many conquests, but one of them had such an impact on him that he began to warm to England’s charms after all.
She was called Ida de Tosny, and she first caught his eye in Norwich. In truth, everyone’s eye was drawn to her when she walked into the impressive Great Hall of Norwich Castle, the home of Roger Bigod, Second Earl of Norfolk.
She was visiting him at the suggestion of the King, who thought they would be a good match. Roger had just succeeded his redoubtable father as Earl and needed a wife, and Ida needed a husband. She was from the Anglo-Norman gentry, but she had lost both her parents as a child and had been made a ward of the King. However, when she reached womanhood, she became much more than Henry’s ward. Petite and slim, with striking blue eyes and chestnut hair, her perfectly symmetrical figure made men gasp. More than aware of her charms, she used them to great effect. Her dresses always clung tightly to her and she walked in a sensuous, sinewy way that demanded attention. It was said that the King first seduced her when she was just fifteen and that he became infatuated with her. She had borne him a child, William, who was sent to the nuns in Lincoln to be cared for. Eventually, he tired of her and now a marriage to the Earl of Norfolk was an ideal solution for all three of them. The King would be rid of her, Ida would become the countess of one of the richest earldoms in England, and Bigod would acquire one of England’s most beautiful women.
However, that expedient plan was undermined when Ida’s curvaceous form glided towards the Lionheart. His eyes opened wide and he immediately got to his feet to greet her.
The Earl made the introductions.
‘My Lord Duke, Ida de Tosny. Her family’s domain is just to the south of Rouen, and her great-grandfather fought with the Conqueror at Senlac. She is now your father’s ward.’
With his usual flamboyance, the Duke bowed deeply and kissed her hand.
‘Madam, I am honoured to meet a woman of such rare beauty.’
Ida curtsied and smiled coyly. The attraction between them was apparent to everyone there, especially to Earl Roger – who must have known at that moment that his intended betrothal would either never happen, or have to wait.
As soon as he could, Father Alun took the Duke to one side.
‘Sire, she has had the King’s child and he intends her to marry the Earl. He will not be pleased if you upset his carefully laid plan.’
‘Don’t fuss, man. I’m only going to bed her. The Earl can have her when I’m done. He can hardly complain; she’s already been stretched by the King’s cock, a little more from mine won’t make any difference.’
There was nothing more Father Alun could say. He looked at me, but I just shrugged my shoulders; it was the only appropriate response.
