eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307778994 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 02/09/2011 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Sales rank: | 687,556 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
1
The Earl can bear no more. The burden is too great for him now. Three years ago, when he was urged to assume the regency, when he reluctantly agreed, becoming “master and guardian” of the boy king and of the whole realm of England, he had said and said again, “I am too old, too weak, too out of joint.” Over eighty, he had claimed, exaggerating a little, not really knowing how old he was. Who knew such things in those days? Other dates in life mattered more than when you were born. You could forget that one. And grand old men were so rare that you made them out even older than they reckoned themselves. Moreover, we ourselves don’t know just when William Marshal was born. The historians have worked it out; they propose around 1145. No more specific than that. His birth is too low for the archives to be much help. Whereas I the year we are now speaking of—1219—fortune has raised him so high that we can follow, almost day by day, his final deeds, his last exploits.
Robust he had remained—a very long time. He had been seen fighting the French at Lincoln on May 20, 1217, like a youth among his peers. Three months later, his men had still had to hold him back—did he not try to join the sailors Sandwich and board the French fleet? But all of a sudden, on Candlemas on 1219, he gave way. He had felt it coming, and for some time, without speaking of it, had been preparing for his last campaign. He returned for a spell to Marlborough Castle, probably his own birthplace. On March 7 he is at Westminster, and from there, “riding down his pain,” he reaches the Tower of London, as if to huddle behind the walls of the old royal stronghold. He takes to his bed. It is the beginning of Lent. What better time to suffer, to accept your suffering, to endure it in remission of your sins, and to purify yourself slowly, calmly, before the great journey? His countess is beside him, as always. When he weakens, when the doctors admit they can do no more, William Marshal summons those who have accompanied him ever since he quit private life. Naturally. Necessarily. Had he ever been alone? Who is ever alone at the beginning of the thirteenth century but the mad, the possessed—marginal figures who are hunted down? An orderly world requires that each man remain swathed in a fabric of solidarities, of friendship, in a corps. William summons those who constitute the body of which he is the head. A group of men. His men: the knights of his house; and then his eldest son. He requires this numerous retinue for the great ceremony about to begin—that of a princely death. Once everyone is there to firm the cortege, he fives orders that he be borne away. At home, he says, he will suffer more comfortably. Best to die in your own house. Bear him to Caversham, to his own manor. He owns many, but this is the one he chooses, for in the country of his birth it is the closest, the most accessibly. Mounting a horse is out of the question now; the Thames will bear him to it. So on March 16, William, Earl of Pembroke, is “arrayed” by his people in one boat, his wife following in another, and gently, without great exertion, the little convoy is rowed upstream.
On arrival, his first concern is to free himself from the burdens that weighs on him. The man whose end is approaching must gradually rid himself of everything, and before all else, the honors of this world. First act, first rite of renunciation. Ostentatious, like all the acts to follow, for good deaths in this age are festivities, they are performed as on a stage before many spectators, many auditors attentive to every gesture, to every work, eager for the dying man to show what he is worth, to speak, to act according to his rank, to bequeath a final example of virtue to those who will follow. Each man, in this fashion, as he leaves the world is obliged, one last time, to shore up that morality which holds the social body together, which allows each generation to succeed the next in the order pleasing to God. And we, who no longer know the meaning of a sumptuous death, we who hide death away, who hush it up, who get rid of it as fast as we can—an embarrassing business—we for whom a good death must be swift, discreet, solitary, let us take advantage of the fact that the greatness to which the earl has acceded puts him, for our eyes, in an exceptionally brilliant light. Let us follow step by step, in all the details of its unfolding, the ritual of death in the old style, which was not an evasion, a furtive exit, but a slow, orderly approach, a careful prelude, a solemn transfer from one condition to another, to a higher state, a transition as public as the wedding of the period, as majestic as the entrances of kings into their fine cities. The death that we have lost and that, it may well be, we miss.
The office that still invests the dying earl is of such weight that every man of consequence within the state must see with his own eyes how William leaves it, and what he will do with it. The king, of course, and the papal legate as well—since Rome, in this first quarter of the thirteenth century, regards the kingdom of England as under its protection and control—the capital justiciar, but also all the higher barony. A great crowd, which has gathered for this purpose and cannot be contained within the manor house of Caversham. It encamps across the river, at Reading, in the great royal monastery and its grounds. William cannot leave his bed. Therefore, the great men of the realm cross the river to stand at his bedside. On April 8 or 9 they come into his chamber, accompanying a boy of twelve, young King Henry. It is this child whom the earl begins by lecturing from his bed, apologizing that he can serve him no longer and elaborating that sermon which, according to the rules, all fathers must make on their deathbed to their eldest son and heir. William admonishes the boy, commends him to a proper life, and prays god, he says to bring him to immediate ruin should he become, by some mischance, a traitor in the unfortunate fashion of some of his forebears. And the entire company replies, Amen. Then the earl dismisses them. He is not ready. He needs the night to determine who shall succeed him as guardian. He decides to pass over the bishop of Winchester, an ambitious man who just now had held the boy fast, presuming he had control over him because in 1216 the earl had entrusted to his “vice-regency” a child too young to accompany the regent’s incessant expeditions; and now the bishop was trying to get the boy into his power. Williams needs time to think, to seek advice—from his son, his people, his intimates. In his own family, in private, he makes up his mind: there are too many rivalries in the country today. Were he to entrust Henry, third of the name, to one faction, others would thereby be roused, and once again there would be war. Of all the barons, William alone had the necessary authority. Who could take his place? God, quite simply. God and the pope. To them, therefore, he will entrust the king—that is, to the legate who stands for the former, and in England for the latter.
This he does the following day, still in bed but propped up as high as he can bear, summoning the king, first taking the royal hand in his, then joining the legate’s with it, lastly commanding his own son to cross the Thames to Reading where the whole court remains, so that in his own name before all, and repudiating the bishop of Winchester who maintains his claim and still hugs the crowned child, he will repeat the gesture of joined hands that has just been made—that very simple, very visible sign, the rite of renunciation and of investiture whereby the transfer of power is effected.
Whereby, too, he is relieved. That evening, he speaks once again, saying the words that must be said. Here they are, at least as they were recalled in the household after his death, words considered worthy of his fame: “I am already delivered, Yet it is well that I go further, that I take care for my soul, since my body is in peril, that in your hearing I complete my release from all earthly things, in order to think only of celestial ones.” Such indeed is the prescribed order: one’s body must be gradually discarded, a useless castoff, like all that relates to the flesh, to the world. The dying man must do his upmost, at the last, to lighten himself, to ascend the sooner and the higher. It is this detachment, indeed this ascent, that is in question. A man who dies must, at the moment of his exitus, present himself naked as he emerged from his mother’s womb. For a rebirth—to a new life, and a better one. And this second birth, this death, matters much more than the first one. Its date, in each biography of the earl’s contemporaries, was of all dates the one most solidly fixed in men’s memories.