The Renegade: A Tale of Robert the Bruce (62 page)

In the week before the wedding the young pair had met twice with Edward, both times privately, and Bruce knew beyond a doubt that those privileges stemmed directly from the King’s touchingly spontaneous and surprising paternal affection for Isabella. On the first occasion, purely on impulse, he had invited them to share the meal that was being served for him, for he had been working alone and planning to eat while he continued working. The unplanned sharing of an intimate meal with the monarch was an unheard-of honour that had gone unnoticed by no one at the court of Westminster.

The second meeting, the very next afternoon, had been private in name only, for the King had been accompanied by several dignitaries, few, to be true, but among the most powerful in the realm. As Bruce discovered afterwards, the business with which they were dealing had concluded and Edward had begun telling them about the enjoyment he had gained “from young Bruce’s amazing wife,” as he himself put it. And then, presumably still filled with goodwill from
the previous evening, he had promptly summoned the young couple to come at once, as they were, and meet his ministers.

Foremost among them all, Bruce knew, was Master Walter Langton, Master of the Wardrobe until a few days previously and now newly appointed Lord High Treasurer of England. Bruce had met Langton several times over a period of years and liked the man, finding him refreshingly open and amiable despite the grave responsibilities he bore. As Master of the Wardrobe, Langton had controlled the privy accounts of the royal household for five years, including the so-called wardrobe treasure of gold and jewels that was funded by the treasury—but crucially free of the control of parliament—and used to fund the private and often urgent personal needs of the monarch, from secret diplomatic endeavours to waging war.

Now, as Lord High Treasurer, Langton would play another role, akin to but vastly different from his former one. Both involved the stewardship of vast amounts of money, but as Lord Treasurer, Langton was now nominally answerable to parliament for all monies disbursed by the exchequer. One of his duties would be to dispute and confound the wiles and wishes of his own successor, the new Master of the Wardrobe.

Bruce knew, without being told, that Langton’s advancement to the treasurer’s post had been a master stroke of policy on Edward’s part. Bruce had in fact met briefly with Langton, within days of their arrival in Westminster, merely to pay his respects to the friend of an old friend. Langton, now in his fifties, had been a protégé of Robert Burnell, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, and before Burnell died he had recommended Langton’s services to the King. Now, four years later, Langton had replaced his former mentor as one of the King’s few real friends and most trusted advisers. His advancement from Master of the Wardrobe to the post of Lord High Treasurer had been Edward’s political equivalent of deliberately setting a fox to watch the henhouse. By placing a trusted friend to safeguard his privy funds against the jealous interference of parliament and its tightfisted, fractious barons, Edward had ensured the safety of his own continued funding. Were Langton to carry out the task as skilfully as
Bruce was sure he would, he would be guaranteed a wealthy bishopric one day as his reward.

There were two other clerics with the King at that second meeting, one of them the newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Winchelsea. Bruce knew nothing about this man, and he suspected that Edward Plantagenet might know little more than he, for the King was uncommonly reticent when speaking to the archbishop, and Bruce sensed that might be born of not yet having gauged the fellow’s mettle. The mutual dislike between Winchelsea and Langton, however, was painfully obvious, communicated openly in the way they tended to sneer at each other, as though each was trying to outdo his rival—and rival for what? Bruce wondered— in superciliousness. Edward ignored their barely cloaked hostility, and Bruce knew the King had reasons for pretending blindness to it.

The third churchman there that evening was Walter de Wenlock, the Abbot of Westminster, a man incapable of posturing or pretense. This was the man who later officiated at the wedding, a plain, good-natured, and genuinely pious man, tall and stooped and elderly, without a trace of malice in his soul. Isabella delighted him by approaching him immediately and enthusing over his magnificent church, and he was her willing slave within moments, enchanted by her innocence and her complete lack of guile. Nor was he alone in being entranced by her; without exception, every man in the room fell quickly under Isabella’s spell, and she manipulated them all artlessly and with equal ease, even drawing laughter from the Archbishop of Canterbury with one of her quips. Edward, of course, had been completely under her control from their first meeting; now it looked as though the three most influential men at court would share his fascination.

The Earl of Carrick and his new countess returned to Writtle two weeks after they were married, glad to leave the glittering but exhausting world of Edward’s Westminster safely behind them at a distance of some twenty miles, and to have an opportunity now to set about establishing their own home in Essex during the long, mild
autumn that must surely follow such a glorious summer. In the serenity of the countryside surrounding their home, they wrought miracles in the four months that followed, transforming the old Writtle House that had seen little change in the previous hundred years.

Thanks to the munificence of the royal wedding gift, they could afford to hire stonemasons and fine carpenters, and so with the help of the King’s seneschal, Sir Robert FitzHugh, and the agreement of the King himself, they had temporarily hired the young Jeffrey of Canterbury from the currently suspended work of reconstructing St. Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster. It had been an inspired choice on Isabella’s part, because under the enthusiastic young mason’s guiding hand, the ancient house was quickly rebuilt into a thing of beauty, with wide, soaring windows of leaded glass through which the light poured in to illuminate rooms, staircases, and even nooks and corners that had known nothing but darkness before then. The outer buildings were rebuilt as well, in keeping with the functional strength and rugged solidity of the newly resurrected stables, and as the new outbuildings rose, so did the crops that had survived the flooding, maturing into a finer, healthier crop than anyone could remember ever having seen.

In the neighbouring village and the surrounding lands, peace and prosperity were all-pervading, the people showing their contentment and ease on market days, when visiting merchants made sure to include the village on their rounds and the stalls were laden with a bewildering array of goods and produce that sold quickly and profitably.

In all that time, only two matters arose to ruffle the placid surface of life in Writtle. Bruce of Annandale had renewed his oath of fealty to King Edward at the time of his son’s wedding in Westminster, as indeed had the Earl of Carrick himself, and the official proclamation of the elder Bruce’s appointment to the governorship of Carlisle had come soon after that, at the beginning of August. Lord Bruce was gone within days of the announcement, riding at the head of a specially raised contingent of reinforcements for the Carlisle
garrison and accompanied by Isabella’s father, with his own escorting bodyguard, who rode with him as far as his new posting before continuing across the border and returning to his home in Mar.

Then, towards the end of that same month, Sir John de Bigod stopped briefly at Writtle on his way north to Suffolk and Norfolk, carrying messages from the King to the barons there. His visit lasted no more than an hour, sufficient time for him to feed his men and rest their horses, but his tidings caused Bruce some concern, because the royal summons he was carrying was a call to arms, the signal to begin assembling a fresh army to reinforce the faltering, poorly led one already in France. Edward would lead this expedition in person, to settle the question of the mutinous Gascon Duchy once and for all. The message being what it was, Bigod had no compunction in discussing it with Bruce, since it would soon be common knowledge, but it was a sharp reminder to the Scots earl of his recently renewed oath of fealty to Edward and the obligations it entailed. He might be called upon to join the armies, and the thought of leaving Isabella so soon after their wedding distressed him. He did not really believe Edward would call upon him for military service—the following he might levy from his few English holdings would be tiny—but the possibility was there and it nagged at him, though the threat of it grew dimmer as the time passed by without a personal summons.

The latter part of September and the first two weeks of October brought a flurry of communications, the most important of which was delivered in person by a special courier come all the way from Scotland. John Comyn, the young Lord of Badenoch, son of the Earl of Buchan, the senior Guardian of the new Scots council, arrived unannounced at Bruce’s gates in late September. He came dressed as a royal herald, in a thickly padded, extravagantly decorated tabard bearing the royal arms of Scotland stiffly embroidered in silver and gold wire. He had been charged with conveying a formal summons from Scotland’s King to Robert Bruce VII, living in England. The heavy parchment scroll was encased in a polished cylinder of thick
bull hide stamped with the royal crest, and the missive itself was encrusted and festooned with seals and ribbons. Cumbersome to open, it was none the less quickly read, once stripped of its fulsomely convoluted flourishes: Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, was commanded forthwith, upon pain of forfeiture of all he held in Scotland, to conscript all the fighting men at his disposal as aforesaid earl and present them, with himself, for duty in the assembled host of his royal grace, John I, God’s anointed King of Scotland.

Bruce stood silent after he had read the thing, bowed head-down over the table on which he had spread it with its corners heavily weighted. Across from him, tapping his foot, Comyn waited for a reaction, but Bruce allowed no trace of emotion to show on his face; nor did he raise his eyes to meet the condescending sneer that had not left the Comyn’s face since the moment he arrived. There were others present, member’s of Comyn’s escort and a few of Bruce’s own retainers, but both principals were aware only of each other.

Beyond the gates, Bruce knew, the men of Comyn’s escort yet sat their horses, eyeing the heavily armed and armoured household guard that Thomas Beg had turned out as soon as the newcomers were seen in the distance. They were less than thirty strong and tired after a long ride, and the Bruce guards outnumbered them even without the vigilant cadre of longbow archers who watched them suspiciously from the tower roof, arrows already nocked.

Bruce understood all too well the motive underlying this delivery—what had prompted it and what it was meant to achieve. His father would already have received a similar dispatch, in Carlisle, and would respond appropriately, Bruce knew. His own sole cause of hesitation was the contempt he felt towards the messenger, and even that, he knew, had been predesigned, the Comyn selected purely on the grounds of that dislike. His mind made up, he stepped back from the table and looked Comyn straight in the eye.

“This is … unexpected,” he drawled, careful to keep his voice flat. “It is also impossible. There can be no sane response to such an insult, and well you know it. Now you have done your duty as
charged. Return to your King with this answer. I am Earl of Carrick in name only since he himself confiscated my lands and holdings. As such, I hold no sway among my former people and I command no men eligible to fight in Scotland’s armies. The men I command here are all English, duty bound to England’s King as am I myself, by oath, by free will, and by natural loyalty. I swore no such oath to Balliol or Scotland and for that I stand dispossessed.” He flicked a hand dismissively towards the ornate scroll. “This is a nonsense, buffoonery trumped up for the sake of appearance and the needs of the moment. I reject it as invalid and unjust. And that is all my answer. Tell it to your King.”

“You will write in response, as befitting to the dignity of the King’s grace. Write it. I will await your answer.”

Bruce had to turn away to conceal the fury that swept over him at the loutish arrogance of the words, more intolerable even than the disdainful look on the speaker’s face, but with his back squarely presented to his would-be tormentor he controlled his anger quickly, gazing at his sheathed sword leaning in a corner formed by the wall and a finely carved, head-high armoire of burnished oak that held his papers and writing materials. He unclenched his fists and turned back.

“My lord of Comyn,” he said quietly, half turning again to point at the armoire at his back. “Look you at this cupboard. I find it soothing to look at it. It is made of English oak. So, too, is the floor upon which you stand, and every wooden item within sight here.”

“I care nothing for your furnishings, Bruce.”

“I know that. I was but pointing out that they are all of English construction. So is everything about you. This house itself is English and the laws that prevail within it and outside it are all English, too. You are in
England
, man. And you are in
my house
. What kind of fool would think to command Bruce in his own house, even in Scotland? Do I make myself clear? You have no status here. I need do nothing at your self-presumed command. Nor will I suffer your ill manners or your ill temper herein. You are here on sufferance—
my
sufferance—and on my goodwill, and both have expired. Your
duty here is done and you have my answer to you and to your King. Go you now and deliver it like a faithful messenger.”

“Christ God! I’ll have—” Comyn’s eyes glared in fury and his hand swept into the gap of the heavy tabard, exposing the briefest glimpse of a dagger hilt there.

Bruce sprang away, but even as he moved the blade was drawn, though its withdrawal was hampered by the stiff bulk of the tabard itself. He continued his spin, snatched the sword from the corner at his back and pivoted again, whipping the sheathed weapon around towards Comyn. Such was the controlled fury of his two-handed swing that the scabbard dislodged itself and flew across the room with a metallic hiss before the point of Bruce’s long blade came to a sudden halt, then pushed forward to press against the base of Comyn’s throat, the Scots lord still tugging to free his weapon beneath his tabard.