Mons, Hainault, Winter 1424
Mons, Hainault, Winter
WE MARCH INTO Mons behind the standards of Jacqueline of Hainault, Humphrey of Gloucester, the Earl Marshal and Dowager Duchess Margaret – enough banners to satisfy everyone.
Three hundred cavalry ride with us, but they are the old duchess’ guard.
Our own army is left outside the town and guards posted to keep them out, as if they were an enemy.
Mons is named for the steep hill rising out of the rolling plains, surrounded by a deep moat crossed by drawbridges and hemmed with tall sandstone walls.
We clatter through the town between tall houses, crowned with pointed roofs and ornamental gables, all jammed side by side inside the high walls.
There is a cobbled town square and a grand h?tel de ville, where the townspeople hold their meetings, as if to show that their power equals that of the ruler, whose castle is perched on the top of the hill.
We ride through the cramped lanes, up and up to the castle, the horses slipping on the frosty cobblestones, through a stone guardhouse with a chapel above it, all set into the defensive castle wall.
Through the gate, houses and barracks line the inside of the fortress walls, and at the highest point, a great bell tower reaches up into the grey sky.
We take up residence at the Naasterhof, and my lady announces that her doors are open to the three estates: the churchmen, the nobles, and the townsmen.
With Dowager Duchess Margaret to give us authority, we send out messengers to all the towns of Hainault to say that the Count and Countess of Hainault have taken up their rightful position in their capital city, but Dowager Duchess Margaret is quick to observe that many great men refuse to attend.
‘Holland and Zeeland stay faithful to John of Brabant,’ the old lady tells Humphrey. There is a twinkle in her dark eyes, as if she finds this amusing. ‘You’re going to have to march your army through Holland and Zeeland if you want to win them back. They won’t come to you.’
‘I will do,’ he tells her. ‘I am not a man for half measures!’
He gets half measure, whatever sort of man he is, for the oaths of loyalty name him as Count and Regent of Hainault, in Jacqueline’s name, as her husband. They give him the title, but they do not acknowledge him as the owner of these wide, fertile lands.
‘I can do nothing about it,’ Jacqueline says impatiently. ‘My own rights depend upon my being the heir of my father, of course your rights can only come through me.’
‘You didn’t make that clear to me in England!’ he exclaims.
She looks at him as if she sees straight through his irritable bluster.
‘I was always clear that I wanted to reclaim my lands, and you said that you would serve as my knight – without reward. Then you promised to serve me as my husband – without reward. At no time did I say you would have my lands for yourself.’
‘You deny the very principle of holy matrimony!’ he exclaims. ‘You are my wife; everything you own is mine by right of marriage. By the laws of chivalry, I serve you as a knight and you are my lady, but as your husband, everything you own is mine.’
‘Yes,’ she agrees with him, ‘and so you rule Hainault, in my name. But you’re not a king here any more than you’ll ever be a king in England. There, you’re a younger son; here, you’re a husband.’
He has a trick of widening his eyes so that they bulge when he is angry. He does it now, and even she flinches at his grimace. ‘Nobody was talking about me being king,’ he spits. ‘Why drag that up?’
She shoots one bewildered look at me.
‘Your Grace, don’t be angry,’ I intercede. ‘These are the first difficulties of a brilliant campaign.You have won without a shot being fired. And Zeeland and Holland lie before you.’
He nods grudgingly. Jacqueline throws me a nod of thanks. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘We should be happy. Let’s walk in the archery garden.’
‘Is this the greatest delight that Mons offers?’ he asks unpleasantly.
She does not blink at the contempt in his voice. ‘The gardens are very fine, and the abbey is a great building,’ she says steadily. ‘And tomorrow, we’ll go to my palace at Le Quesnoy.’
‘I shall march, while the weather stays cold and clear,’ he tells her. ‘I shall take the acknowledgement of the other towns. I shall take the acknowledgement on my own, as Count of Hainault.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘The army can’t stay in camp – it’s too cold, and they’ll just get unruly. March them round.’
I intervene before she reveals that she is trying to get rid of him. ‘But you will come back in time for Christmas?’ I plead. ‘You will come back for Christmas?’
He looks past me to his wife. ‘D’you even celebrate Christmas?’ he asks, as if he thinks they might be all pagans here.
‘Of course,’ she says with dignity. ‘And I am ordering a service of thanksgiving for my safe return to my home, and for your company and your army. I hope you will attend as the bishop gives thanks for you.’
WHILE THE DUKE is away, wresting a reluctant oath of loyalty from the market towns and cities, we ladies go to Jacqueline’s childhood home of Le Quesnoy.
We need no guards against beggars; the country is so wealthy, and there is so much work in coal mines, farms, or shipping on the rivers, and so much trade in the cloth towns and the vineyards, that everyone can work for a good living or retire to a good fireside if they are old or sick.
My lady’s hometown is ringed in great sandstone walls, pierced by arrow slits and topped with conical slate roofs.
Towering over the walls, reaching up to the sky, are bell towers and church spires, and above them, even higher than the rest, the conical towers of the palace.
The imposing gate on the Valenciennes road is thrown wide open to welcome the countess back to her childhood home, and Jacqueline throws a quick delighted smile at me as we clatter across the drawbridge over the frozen moat and through the thick gateway.
We ride through the town square, Jacqueline waving to the citizens, who hang from their windows or run from their shop doorways to cheer her, and then into her palace at the far end of the town square.
It is like a fairy-tale castle, set in a richly planted forest and garden, a chapel on one side, a round tower for the treasury on the other, broad steps up to the doorway of the great hall, the doors flung open to show a blaze of colour, painted beams, tapestries on the walls and expensive, bright-blue painted ceilings.
Jacqueline dismounts and goes to her mother’s litter. She helps the old lady up the steps of the palace, swept of snow. ‘Now I know I’m home,’ she says.
For the first time, I see the old lady’s pride and love for her daughter. ‘Now you are home. God grant you never leave again.’
Mother and daughter link arms and go up the steps.
I give my horse’s reins to a groom and follow them.
God be praised! Inside are the first handsome men I have seen in weeks and women in beautiful gowns.
At last, I have found the court that I dreamed of; at last, I am entering the life that I want.
I wish Owen ap Maredudd could see me now, chief lady-in-waiting to a lady as grand as a queen.
The first of the company is a brown-haired man, bowing low to the dowager duchess and then turning with a familiar grin to Jacqueline.
She exclaims at the sight of him and throws her arms around him and hugs him like a brother, kissing him on both cheeks.
‘Ah, Gilles! Gilles!’ she says. ‘Such a long time it’s been!
’ Still in his arms, she turns to me. ‘This is my friend, my dear friend Gilles de Potelle,’ she says.
‘Gilles, this is Mistress Eleanor Cobham, who has come with me all the way from England.’
He bows to me and then takes her hand and introduces the other lords and ladies.
I follow behind, dazzled by the richness of their gowns and robes.
These last two months, on the road from Calais to Mons, I have been starved of elegance; for months before, at the baby king’s court, I was starved of company.
At once, I am conscious that my gown is creased from travel and my headdress very small.
These women are wearing gowns from a fabric that I don’t even recognise – thick and warm like wool but with a sheen on it like satin.
They wear headdresses, beautifully shaped, with wire of real gold or tall hennin with veils of best silk.
While the war has been raging across Europe for generations, beggaring English families, these north-eastern towns have managed to keep peace and make great profits.
The burghers, townsmen, and traders have grown as wealthy as lords; a merchant is as grand as a nobleman, and now the wives of burghers and lords make a court for Jacqueline that is dazzling with diamonds and radiant in velvets and silks.
Jacqueline greets two ladies with especial warmth: Madame de Warigny, wife to Lord Henry, and Madame de Sante, a widow.
They were Jacqueline’s companions when she was a girl here and played with her and Gilles in the deep arched cellars, and the gardens and park.
I curtsey politely, but I note them as potential rivals.
I have not come through all this to take second place.
But they are more like friends than ladies-in-waiting.
They remind Jacqueline of the childhood games, teasing the strange animals that her father kept in pens in the garden.
‘We even had a camel!’ Jacqueline remembers. ‘We had an elephant!’
‘It’s still here!’ Madame de Warigny laughs. ‘He will remember you for sure – he will bow as your father taught him to do. What a great man your father was!’
They take out napkins from their sleeves – the new fashion from Burgundy – and dab at their wet eyes as they speak fondly of old times, her childhood betrothed, her first husband, who died at the age of eighteen, just two years into their blissful marriage.
If he had lived, he would have been King of France, and Jacqueline would be Queen of France today, and not a countess depending on the army of a second son, an English second son at that.
The old duchess calls for food and wine – the castle has its own vineyard inside the walls, which makes wine only for the royal family. She announces that she is going to rest, but she will join us for dinner. Jacqueline says she will show me around, and Madame de Warigny and Gilles come too.
Jacqueline leads the way into the knot gardens; the hedges like white turrets capped with snow.
There are fruit and flowerbeds under white frost and a snowy meadow with barns for cows and sheep.
Beyond that are deep green pine woods, where herds of deer filter through the trees and disappear in the shadows.
There are fields for grain crops, and strips lying fallow in the frost. Half hidden by the straight rows of the vineyard, is the zoo stocked by Jacqueline’s father.
I can hear the raucous cry of a peacock, and Jacqueline warns me that at night I will hear the grumbling yawn of lions.
The palace grounds stretch for acres, the walls far in the distance.
It is as if the Hainault family have recreated an Eden at Le Quesnoy, a fabulous garden with wild animals living at peace with one another.
The castle can hold out for six months on the stores in the famous cellars, which run the entire width and length of the chateau and go down three storeys to a well of the purest water, deep below in the foundations.
As we walk past the great hall, the peasants are barrowing in the first ice of the winter season, quarried in great slabs from the lake, sliding it down a stone chute to the ice cellar below.
Jacqueline throws one proud glance at me to see that I am impressed. Of course I am; nobody could fail to admire such wealth and such an exquisite building, the towers so round and tall and the whole thing like a pastry cook’s dream of an almond paste castle in creamy yellow sandstone.
‘Now you see what I’m fighting for,’ she says to me.
‘I do,’ I agree.