The Brothers of Gwynedd (52 page)

  And for our other proctor, Master Madoc ap Philip, he was elderly and a little crabbed with learning, but equally devoted to Llewelyn's cause, and very well able to chop legal arguments in any court, whether by Welsh, English or marcher law. Out of court he tended to be taciturn, and it surprised me to see him warm almost into loquacity with de Montfort, perhaps because that considerate man never touched upon law, but left it to the lawyers, and instead pointed out along the way whatever was notable, like the noble towers of Worcester cathedral soaring above the waters of Severn, placid and sunny now in their summer flow, or the great Benedictine abbey at Evesham, making a halt purposely for us to see this latter, since we did not intend a stay overnight. And both these I remember now by reason of what befell afterwards, and marvel that I did not then feel my heart either soar or sink in contemplating them, beyond what was due in admiration of pleasure.

  Thus briskly but without haste we came to Woodstock, where once Llewelyn had attended King Henry's court and done homage to him for a shrunken princedom, since gloriously restored to its old bounds. Thence in the early evening of a fine day we reached Oxford.

  The king's hall lay outside the north gate of the city, a very spacious and noble dwelling, well fitted for large assemblies. But we were accommodated at the Dominican priory, among the backwaters of the Thames. And a very busy and teeming city I found it, this Oxford, crowded as it was with all the king's chief tenants and their knights, for they had come in force and in arms, as though King Henry's intent of moving against Wales still held good. Yet it seemed rather to me, when I had walked among the people in the streets and the retainers in the stables and halls, that every lord came ready in harness and brought his muster with him for fear of needing them in defence of his own head. I would not say they truly felt fear. But they did not intend to be taken by surprise.

  Castle, friaries and halls were filled, and one or two of the schools had sent their scholars and masters home, partly in expectation of an air too disturbed for fruitful study while the parliament lasted, partly to make room for those flooding in. But the streets were still full of the schoolmen, of whom, as I was told, there must have been at this time some thirteen to fifteen hundred enrolled there. It was told to me also, though I cannot vouch for its truth, that the king's hall was built outside the gate because St. Frideswide, whose tomb in her great church was a place of pilgrimage and still is so, had no wish to be visited by kings, and it was bad fortune for any crowned monarch either to enter her town or approach her grave. Yet in spite of this prohibition I believe King Henry had done so, with proper reverence, and come away none the worse for it.

  Peter de Montfort made himself responsible for presenting the Welsh proctors to the king on the third day after our arrival, when all the council and parliament were fully assembled. Then for a few days I was required, for the proper justification of my presence if for no other good reason, to attend the meetings held with the English representatives, at first with King Henry himself present, though that was but a royal gesture, perhaps not even his own, but prompted by his advisers. These meetings were held in a chamber in his great lodging outside the gate, and there I saw, at one time or another, many of those fabled figures who had been until now merely names to me.

  King Henry at this time was fifty years old, his face unlined, his features fair, his person very elegant and well tended. He had that willowy youthfulness of pliable people, that kept him somehow from breaking even in tempests, while stronger trees crashed to ground. His image had long faded in my mind, yet when I saw him again it arose fresh as of old, and scarcely changed. He had a certain strangely appealing honesty even in his side-steppings, that disarmed his opponents and expunged his offences. I could well understand that those lords of his old enough to have witnessed his coming to the throne, a child of nine, pretty and trusting, might still feel the old emotion, and the same helpless need to take responsibility for him, and help him out of all the pits he dug for himself by his simple cunning and cunning simplicity. And in spite of all that followed, I do believe that was how this enterprise began, that ended in civil war and tragedy. But not for Henry. In all tempests the willow is a born survivor, and springs erect after the wind has passed, none the worse for a few shed leaves. It is the oaks and cedars that fail for ever.

  After the first few meetings, which were concerned with the ceremonies and courtesies, all those learned men tucked up their gowns and set to work on the real tussle, Abbot Anian and Master Madoc bent on procuring not mere truce but, if they could, a permanent peace, and the king's men, as far as I could see, not themselves absolutely opposed to this course, but quite unable to get King Henry's agreement. For like all pliable men, he could also, on occasion, be immovably obstinate. Then everyone was banished from the sessions until there should be a point of agreement ready to be recorded, and I was set free to make my way about the streets and schools and markets of Oxford, and listen and observe.

  I was standing just within the gate, one among a crowd of people watching the lords of parliament ride out to the session at the king's hail on the fifteenth day of June, when one standing close at my back said into my ear in good Welsh: "As fitting a place to meet as any, Master Samson!" And seeing that I stood sturdily and made no start he commended me in English, mentioning Meurig's name freely, for there were Welsh scholars in Oxford as well as English, and we were surrounded by so many other loud conversations, and so little to be distinguished from those about us, that openness was the safest method. He moved forward a little to be at my side, and so for the first time I saw that chancery clerk whom Meurig had encountered at Shrewsbury.

  He was younger than I, and very well found, in a good gown, and his hands ringed. It was a sharp, clever, smiling face, shaven smooth as an egg, and lit by wideopen but guarded grey eyes.

  "I have been following you," he said, "for a day and a half, to make sure no one else was following you. To be honest, I think they are so intent on their own business they have no further interest in ours. At least no one has shown any in you. We may walk together, two clerks with minor business about the court."

  His name was Cynan, and he was in very good repute with his masters. We walked together as he had said, elbowed by the Oxford crowds, among which we were anonymous and invisible, and I told him how far the discussions had progressed, and he told me what went on in parliament itself, for momentous things were happening, there in the king's great hall.

  "Behind the scenes," he said, "the council of twenty-four, the king's twelve and the barons' twelve, are hard at work on plans for a new establishment to replace their own temporary power. What form it will take I cannot yet tell you, but before you leave it must come to a head. For the present, I can tell you that the envoys are back from Paris, with the terms of the French peace settled and agreed, but for a lot of complicated details, no doubt most concerned with money. It's a family quarrel and a family peace, and that means not one of them is going to part with a grievance or a claim without getting paid for it. But since they all want it, so it will be. You may tell your prince there will be a treaty with France within the year."

  I asked what had been said in parliament concerning the Welsh truce, for I knew it could not be pleasing to those marcher lords who had lost land to us. He hoisted his shoulders and smiled.

  "You may say so! There are those who came to this town armed and ready, believing still in the king's writ and pointing their noses towards Chester. Now they find that is a dead issue. If there ever was union in this land, as some truly believed, Wales may be one factor that breaks it apart. Come," he said, suddenly quickening his stride and drawing me towards the gate, "I will show you one enemy at least, inveterate and venomous."

  So I went with him, and we joined the gapers about the precinct of the royal hall, watched the lordly arrivals, saw the horses led away by grooms, and the nobles of the land striding into the hall one after another, the rulers of this realm of England.

  Cynan said: "That one, the burly man with the frown and the measured stride and the harassed air—no, he's no enemy to any man, he wills well to all, too well! That is the new justiciar, Hugh Bigod, brother to the earl of Norfolk. Yes, they already have the first thing they demanded, a justiciar. And this one following, this is Gloucester."

  Earl Richard de Clare was a debonair person in his middle thirties, handsome and fair. And I had thought of the earl of Gloucester as a looming thundercloud over the southern march of Wales. Surely men are magnified and diminished by the circumstance into which they are born, and I wonder if they themselves are not malformed and even broken by that accident of birth, being forced into forms for which their hearts and minds have no desire. I looked upon this man and was drawn to him. He had a proud but not a vicious face, rather troubled and open to wounds.

  "He is here!" said Cynan in my ear. "Observe him!"

  It was a man of much the same age as de Clare who came stalking into the doorway, dropping his bridle into the groom's hand without a glance, and discarding the retinue of three or four squires and valets who rode behind him. He was of middle height, slender and sudden of movement, with a narrow, fierce, arrogant face, made to look still more elongated by a trimmed and pointed beard and a thin, high-bridged nose, and the sweeping glance of his black eyes was like the circling of a sword, so that I hardly wondered that men made haste to step back out of its range.

  "That is William de Valence," said Cynan, "the eldest of King Henry's Lusignan half-brothers, and the most dangerous. And the hottest enemy of your prince in this land, if words be any guide. It seems he has been the latest to feel the goad—the men of Cemais have plundered and raided his earldom of Pembroke, that he holds through his wife, and he blames the example and encouragement of the prince of Wales for all his trials. He came here all whetted and ready for the muster and his revenge, to be told the Welsh war is already a dead issue, and a truce in the making. He got up in a fury and told parliament it had no business to be baring off after domestic reforms that could well wait a better day, that its proper work was to march into Wales and avenge his wrongs on Llewelyn. And when he found but lukewarm backing, he turned on the new council and the prime movers of the new order, and denounced them as little better than traitors. That went down badly with many, but it was the earl of Leicester who answered him, and it ended in a burning quarrel. Valence is well hated, by English and Welsh alike."

  "And yet," I said, "when they cry out against the foreigners, are they not striking at Earl Simon no less than at Valence?"

  He shook his head. "Never look for logic, at least among crowds, you shall not find it. Aliens, they say, but it means more than being born in France. The earl of Leicester after his fashion is as French as King Louis himself, but when he came here to take up his earldom—and it came to him through an Englishwoman, fairly and honestly—he took up the burden of Englishness without undue self-seeking, and put down roots he meant and means to send deep. Count Peter of Savoy has not even that degree of native blood, but no man rails at him. He puts into this land more than he takes from it, and gives honest counsel to the king. But the Lusignans came to make their fortunes when their house fell into some disfavour in France, they marry land, they accept church office, wherever there's money and advantage, there are they, and all their Poitevin hangers-on come flooding in after them. They see themselves somewhat at risk now, since King Henry feels them to be a liability to him at this pass. But they will cling tooth and nail to what they have, and if they feel it threatened they will not hesitate to break apart this present consent and unity. For what is being said and thought and hoped concerning the earl of Leicester, you may bear it around you."

  And so I did, after we had parted, going about the streets and keeping my ears open. Surely those I heard talking had but a hazy idea yet of what the reform of the realm could mean, or how it was to be brought about, since the makers of the new England were even then only beginning their own consideration of ends and means. But they had suffered for want of a just order, or so they felt, and they had grasped the promise of it now that it was mooted, and their hope was real and urgent and would not be easily satisfied, or easily quenched. Oxford, perhaps, was peculiarly alive to such issues, by reason of the schools, but even in the countryside it impressed me greatly that the simple were following with fierce intelligence the turmoil in the state, and from this troubling of the waters looked for a miraculous cure.

  Thus far I had seen many of the great men engaged upon the enterprise, bishops, barons and knights, and those great clerks—for truly some I think were most able men—who served the king. Once I caught a glimpse of Henry de Montfort riding out from the town gate, and with him a younger boy, by the likeness his brother. But I had not yet set eyes on their sire, whose name I heard ever more frequently and ardently on the lips of the people.

  It was two days after this first encounter with Cynan that Abbot Anian again took me with him into the final meeting with the English negotiators, for they had secured the best terms they could get, and the agreement was ready to be copied, sealed and exchanged. Peace we could not persuade them to, Ring Henry stubbornly resisting, but a truce was ours, to run until the first day of August of the following year, thirteen months of grace for Llewelyn to consolidate without hindrance all his gains. And a mere one hundred marks to pay for it! Not one foot of the ground won were we called upon to surrender. The only concession was that the king's officers in Chester should have unhindered access to the Lord Edward's isolated castles of Diserth and Degannwy, to provision and maintain the garrisons, and that we took for granted. For if the truce prohibited us from taking them by storm, then someone had to feed them meantime, and better at the king's expense than at ours. Such were the terms the abbot was taking back to Llewelyn.