Read Online Isabella: Braveheart of France by Colin Falconer - Free Book Online

will take him first. The boar has no chance, there are too many of them, and they have him trapped.
    “We fight for every moment, even when we are doomed,” Gaveston says, and at that moment the boar appears, and the king’s arrow takes him in the throat. Four more bolts thud into him and he goes down. He dies, belly heaving.
    The king waits until summer to go down to London and meet his tormentors in the Parliament. She joins him later.
    It is a long journey and she has endured a week bumping along in the back of her horse-drawn charette with her ladies. But when she arrives, Edward is not there to greet her. He is busy with more important affairs.
    But Rosseletti is there, and she meets with him privately and he tells her all that others will not. The barons have presented Edward with a list of forty-one ordinances; if they have their way, Edward will not be allowed to grant land, go to war or even leave the realm without their consent. His bankers, the Frescobaldi, have been ruined and banished, thus cutting off his source of private funding.
    “What does this mean for me?” Isabella asks him.
    “Your fortunes are tied to his, and his prospects are fraught unless he bring his barons to heel. But unless he sends Gaveston away, they will continue their defiance of him.”
    “Because he favours him or because he loves him?”
    He blushed at the queen’s forthrightness. “That is not for me to say, your grace.”
    She speaks to the servants who say the king is much changed. He spends all his time gambling and drinking. He is in a fury most days. He beat one of the stable boys who was slow to fetch his saddle. It is not like Edward.
    That evening he storms into her quarters and sends the servants scurrying out. He reaches into his tunic and pulls out a crumpled parchment. He thrusts it at her, without greeting.
    “You have heard what they have done?”
    She takes the document and glances at it. “The king must not, the king must not...” The list of prohibitions is endless.
    “Forty-one clauses in all. They say I should live more wisely and avoid oppression of the people. Oppression of the people! Which people, Isabella?” She smells wine on his breath and his eyes are unnaturally bright. “They restrict my right to issue pardons. All royal incomes to be paid directly to the Exchequer.” He leans in. “Read Ordinance Twenty.”
    She does as he tells her to do. “Because Piers Gaveston has misled and ill-advised our Lord the King, and enticed him to do evil in various deceitful way ...” She pauses and looks at Edward, who is pacing the hall like a hungry lion. “ ...that he be exiled for all time and without hope of return as a public enemy of the King and his people.”
    “Public enemy! They say he led me to hostile lands - Scotland, where they urged me to go! That he put the king in danger - is a king not meant to lead his armies? And that he must be gone from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales by November. There is scarce a kingdom they do not exclude from their prohibition. I doubt there is a place left in the known world where Perro may now safely abide.”
    What can she say to him? Did he not anticipate this?
    “Before you celebrate his destruction, note that your good uncle has seen fit to attack you as well. He wants one of your ladies banished.”
    “Who?”
    “Isabelle de Vescy.”
    “But why?”
    “Because she’s French.”
    “She was born in England!”
    “Not good enough for Uncle Lancaster. She and her brother are back to Yorkshire and the sheep.”
    “What can you do?”
    “What might I do? If I do not sign it, they will make war on me, and who will stand for me then? Old Hugh Le Despenser is the only one who has not abandoned me.”
    “If today brings no hope we should plan for tomorrow.”
    “I cannot plan for tomorrow unless I give up Perro. And without Perro what use is tomorrow to me?”
    And then, unexpectedly, he throws himself at her feet and buries his head in her lap.