Читать книгу The Magnificient Century: The Pageant of England - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 21

Table of Contents

The importance of Hubert de Burgh continued to increase during the last years of the minority. He was the first of a long succession of commoners who rose to posts of almost supreme power and lived in some, at least, of the magnificence of royalty. Lacking their stature, he was still the forerunner of such great and fascinating figures as Jacques Coeur, Cardinal Wolsey, Cardinal Richelieu, Fouquet. He had been created Earl of Kent and was firmly establishing himself in Wales, being castellan of the three fortresses of Montgomery, Carmarthen, and Cardigan. The Tower of London had come back into his hands, and he resided there a large part of the time although he had set up a palatial residence of his own on a piece of land which later became Whitehall. The royal castles of Dover, Canterbury, Rochester, and Norwich were in his hands, to mention the most important only.

He was the sheriff of seven counties. The sheriff is today a relatively unimportant local officer; in these early days he was the King’s representative and the embodiment of the law in his county, the lineal descendant of the Norman viscount. He lived in a royal castle in the county seat and, although he had to call the knights of the shire to pass judgment on cases tried in the shire courts which met for a day every four weeks, he presided at the shire moots with powers which could be made arbitrary, and the hundred-moots were called at his will. He was the manipulator of scotale and the controller of scot and lot; he conducted inquests, collected taxes, and managed the machinery of law enforcement.

Needless to state, Hubert de Burgh did not fulfill the duties of his seven shrievalties himself. He engaged deputies for that. But a large part of the revenue of each came to him and stayed in his heaping purse.

His marriage with the Scottish princess had been highly successful. They seem to have been a devoted couple, and certainly Margaret remained loyal to him through thick and thin. One daughter had been born to them who was named for her mother but was always called affectionately Meggotta. Henry had not yet acquired the interest in architecture which earned him later the name of Henry the Builder, and so the Tower lacked at this time the additions which are linked to him, the Water Gate, the Cradle Tower, the Lantern, in the latter of which the King would one day have his bedroom because of the view it allowed of the river. The resplendent justiciar, filled with a sense of his importance and so drunk with power that he paid little heed to the growing resentment of the nobility, resided with his princess wife and his dearly beloved Meggotta in the White Tower. He took his meals, undoubtedly, in the Banqueting Hall, the only apartment in this gloomy pile of masonry (where even the gray partitions were ten feet thick) which had a fireplace. The flames jumped and roared on the huge hearth, lighting up the long table where Hubert and his company sat down to meat well basted with sauces fragrant with spices from the East and washed down with wines from Gascony. At the far end the musicians played the pure and rather haunting airs of the day, blowing softly on the tibia (the grandfather of the flute) and twanging the harp, while the flames lighted up the pictures of the history of Antiochus which covered the walls.

Kings could travel about the lands they ruled in simplicity and without fear. The boy who would soon become the King of France and be known as St. Louis developed the habit of sitting under a tree by the side of the road and talking to all who passed or attending services in churches so humble that they lacked seats. Much later Louis XI of France would fall into the habit of disguising himself in menial attire and issuing out to discover for himself what people were thinking and saying. But when men of common birth ruled, they found it necessary to travel in state. Hubert de Burgh, borrowing from Thomas à Becket when the latter was chancellor and William de Longchamp, the hobgoblin who governed England when Richard went to the Crusades, rode out, accompanied by a long train: knights, men-at-arms, archers, scriveners, confessors, almoners, body servants, cooks, barbers, jugglers, acrobats. He took pains to cut an imposing figure himself in polished chain mail, a scarf dyed bright with madder knotted about his steel-encased neck, the quillons of his sword sparkling with jewels. No matter where he might ride, it was not necessary for him to seek the hospitality of other men. He owned so many castles and manors that wherever he went he could always repair by nightfall to lodgings of his own. The roll call of Hubert’s possessions has a fantastic sound, tall castles of dark stone perched above traveled roads or guarding strategic fords, crenelated houses behind spiked palisades and guarded by stagnant moats. When Meggotta attained her fifth birthday she was given three manors in widely separated parts of the country, Sussex, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire. It has been estimated that the justiciar owned estates in fifteen counties.

The possession of so many tenements or freeholds entailed the employment of great armies of men: stewards and seneschals to handle the accounts, men-at-arms, yeomen of the eweries and of this and that, larderers and pastry cooks and kitchen knaves, grooms and blacksmiths and carpenters, villeins to till the soil, all wearing the iron badge of Burgh around the neck or stamped in color on the sleeve. Conceive of the work of the armorers in covering the backs of the men-at-arms who would ride behind their master to war and in making ailettes for the shoulders and chausses of steel for the thighs and covering kneecaps with water-hardened leather! How the forges must have blazed and roared in making the shields which had changed from kite shape to flatiron, the prick spurs, the two-edged swords!

The administration was honeycombed with men of his own choosing. Ralph Nevil, Bishop of Chichester, owed his rise to the chancellorship to the influence of Hubert and worked hand and glove with him. Ranulf the Breton, treasurer of the royal household, was another appointee of the all-powerful justiciar. Stephen Segrave, who was Hubert’s chief colleague in all matters of importance and who later would play Thomas Cromwell to his benefactor’s Wolsey, was a man of his exact stamp, able, ambitious, not too scrupulous. It was the same all down through the lower reaches of officialdom, men of ability and an eye to the main chance holding posts to which they had been appointed by Hubert and considering that their prosperity depended on his good will.

The landless youth from Norfolk had come a long way up in the world.