Warlord(2)

I was watching this strange performance in the solar of the old manor house of Lisieux, in northern Normandy, some thirty miles east of Caen. I was in the small, crowded room off the main hall, standing with a score of knights a pace or two behind King Richard, and I must admit that I was thoroughly enjoying the spectacle. Prince John, once titled Lord of Ireland and Count of Mortain, who had until recently enjoyed the enormous revenues of the plump English counties of Gloucestershire, Nottinghamshire, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, was once again John Lackland, a man without a clod of earth to his name. Yet his fall was richly deserved, for John had a list of black crimes to his credit as long as my lance: when King Richard had been captured and imprisoned in Germany the year before, this snivelling prince had made an attempt to snatch the throne of England – and he had very nearly succeeded. He had schemed with Richard’s enemy, King Philip Augustus of France, to keep the Lionheart imprisoned, hampering the collection of the enormous sum in silver that Richard’s captor, the Holy Roman Emperor, had demanded – and even going so far as to join the French King in making a counter-offer to the Emperor if he would hold his brother in chains for another year. But he had failed, God be praised: the ransom had been painfully gathered from an already tax-racked English populace and paid over, and Richard had been freed.

On his release, the Lionheart had crushed the rebellion in England in a matter of weeks. Then, just a few days prior to this painful scene, he had crossed to Normandy with a large, well-provisioned army of seasoned fighting men. His avowed aim was to push King Philip and his French troops out of the eastern part of his duchy, which they had annexed during his long imprisonment, and contain them in the Île de France, the traditional land-locked fief of the French kings. And Prince John, who had so treacherously sided with Philip, was now on his knees before his brother, weeping and begging for forgiveness.



Truly, John had been a bad brother; disloyal, duplicitous and treasonous, and all of this despite Richard’s great kindness to him before his departure for the Holy Land. I despised the man – and not only for his underhand actions against my King; I hated him on my own account, too. The previous year I had found myself, unwillingly, in John’s service – and I had seen, at close quarters, his evil deeds, his callousness towards the people of England and his unholy delight in wanton cruelty. He had, in fact, ordered my death on two occasions, and it was only by the grace of God and the help of my friend and comrade, my lord Robert, Earl of Locksley, that I had escaped with my life.

I found that I was actually grinning while watching John’s kneeling discomfort. King Richard was quite capable of inflicting a terrible vengeance: in the Holy Land, victorious after the fall of Acre, he had ordered the public beheading of thousands of helpless Muslim captives; and while he was retaking the fortress of Nottingham on his return to England, he had casually hanged half a dozen English prisoners of war, just to make a point to the occupants of the castle about his very serious intent. So there was no doubt that Richard was equal to the task of punishing his brother in a fitting manner; but I also knew deep in my heart that he would not. Richard would forgive John, and almost every man in that small overcrowded chamber knew it. For the King loved to show mercy, whenever and wherever he could; it pleased him to display a magnificent clemency as much as to demonstrate his wrathful vengeance. More to the point, he had very a strong sense of family duty. Whatever his crimes, the fellow now snuffling wetly on the floor before him was his own flesh and blood. How could he tell his mother, the venerable Queen Eleanor, that he had executed her youngest son?

John continued to babble and sob at the feet of the King – who remained stern and silent – when a voice from the far side of the chamber, a dry, cold voice, with a hint of the nasal twang of Gascony, called out: ‘Sire, give him to me, I beseech you. Give him into my hands and I will strip every inch of skin from his living body and leave him in raw, screaming agony, begging for the sweet mercy of death.’

Prince John’s whimpering stopped as if his mouth had been plugged; his bowed red head whipped round to the right and he stared into the gloom on the far side of the chamber from whence the voice had come, seeking its owner. I knew that voice. It belonged to Mercadier, King Richard’s long-time captain of mercenaries, a grim and merciless man. Mercadier had been fighting on Richard’s behalf in Normandy longer than any of us and, as a warrior and leader of several hundred battle-hardened paid fighters, he was worthy of respect – yet he had the most unsavoury reputation of any man in Richard’s army. His men, while fanatically loyal to the King, were, when unleashed to ravage an enemy’s territory, capable of a savagery that was certainly bestial and very nearly demonic. There were tales of nuns raped and crucified, churches looted and burnt to their foundations, of babies tossed into the air and caught on his laughing men’s spear-points; the streets of towns captured by these men quite literally ran with hot, fresh blood. A ghastly foretaste of the Hell they would doubtless one day inhabit followed these soldiers of fortune, these routiers, as they were sometimes called, wherever they plied their ungodly trade.