Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [296]
He was a member of the merchant guild; he grew powerful in the town; he even grew a little stout. His blue eyes missed nothing concerning the mill or the weaving business and it was clear that the fortunes of the family were in good hands. There was only one problem: he did not marry.
“It isn’t as if he didn’t like women,” old Edward complained sadly. On more than one occasion he had been obliged discreetly to pacify the fathers of girls in the town with whom his son had had relations; and with one it had been necessary to make a considerable payment to an outraged husband.
But whenever he broached the question with his son, Peter just laughed and told him: “I’ll get married, father, when I’m ready. I’m not so old yet.”
Indeed, it seemed that Peter might continue indefinitely in his single life in the thriving new city.
But in 1264, everything was changed.
The stage for the extraordinary events of that year was set some time before, and again, it was King Henry’s foreign entanglements that led to the trouble. On this occasion it was the pope who lured him into an extravagant disaster.
The prize this time was the rich southern kingdom of Sicily which the pope, in one of the many shifting alliances of the time, had offered Henry for his son Edmund if he would lead a holy war there. Sicily was far away and the Hohenstaufen dynasty whom the pope was trying to oust by this means, was well entrenched. Henry’s own brother Richard of Cornwall, who was a far wiser statesman than the king, warned that the scheme was preposterous. But Henry, as usual, was dazzled, and when soon afterwards Richard of Cornwall himself was offered the throne of Germany, Henry began to dream of a magnificent new alliance between himself, the equally pious King Louis of France and the new German monarch his brother – a Christian confederacy unlike anything that Europe had seen in centuries. With the same enthusiasm with which he might have planned a splendid new court ceremony, he plunged into a fantastic series of diplomatic manoeuvres. He made a peace with Louis by which he finally renounced all the claims he had been making for so many years in France; he even, for good measure, married the daughter of the crusading King of Castile; and he made extravagant promises to the pope to help in the Sicilian affair – promises involving sums of money he could never hope to pay.
It was typical of his schemes. It was everything that any sensible English magnate or gentleman most dreaded – a foreign entanglement with an almost unlimited budget, and absolutely no prospect of success.
“Another lunatic venture,” Godefroi stormed to his family. “The Welsh are making trouble; the kingdom’s badly administered, the king’s already head over heels in debt – God knows there’s enough for him to do here.”
The situation soon got worse. For Henry had now made such tremendous promises to the pope to conduct this holy war, that if he did not keep his word, the pope had threatened to excommunicate him and place the whole country under an interdict again.
It had long been clear to the magnates that poor Henry was unfit to reign. Lesser men like Godefroi would not have disagreed. But this last venture was the last straw. The king’s hopeless position also gave them their opportunity; and so in 1258 they produced the Provisions of Oxford – a new charter of liberties which was a huge extension of the Magna Carta of the reign before. And they told Henry that if he wanted their support in the Sicilian venture, in which he was now ensnared as in a net, he must agree to its terms. The terms were humiliating. There was to be a standing council which must include English magnates as well as his own close friends, most of whom were the suspected foreigners from his mother’s Lusignan connections. This council would appoint the chief officers of state – in effect,