The Kingdom in the Sun (54 page)

But Matthew of Ajello was growing anxious. The building, he knew, was strong—stronger than most of its would-be assailants seemed to think. Stephen and his friends would have carried provisions with them from the palace; once settled in, they might easily be able to hold out for a week or more—a good deal longer, probably, than the mob's enthusiasm. The King, also, presented a problem. He was showing signs of unexpected spirit. Already he had demanded to be allowed to ride out and face his subjects, calling upon them to lay down their arms and return to their homes; and Matthew, strong as his position was, had had a hard time restraining him. The boy's popularity in the city was as great as ever; once he managed to make his true sympathies known, support for the rebellion would dwindle rapidly.

And so Matthew and his associates decided to offer the Chancellor terms. Emissaries were sent to the tower with their offer. Stephen and all those of his compatriots who wished to accompany him would be taken in Sicilian galleys to Palestine; the rest would be given free passage back to France. As for those Sicilians who had supported him, there would be no reprisals taken against either their persons or their property. Such mercenaries as he had employed would be allowed to continue in service with the King if they so wished; otherwise they might leave the country unhindered. The agreement would be guaranteed by Richard Palmer, Bishop John of Malta, Romuald of Salerno and Matthew himself. In the circumstances, they could hardly have been more generous. Stephen accepted.

It remained only to get the Chancellor and his friends out of Sicily as soon as possible. A suitable vessel was found, and all that night the loading and provisioning went on until, by the following morning, it was ready to sail. To avoid incident, the party was embarked a little distance from the capital, near the modern suburb of Mondello; but just as the ship was about to weigh anchor, a commotion broke out on the quay. The canons of the cathedral had suddenly remembered that they had failed to obtain from Stephen an instrument of resignation from his archbishopric; without such a document they would be unable to elect his successor. At first Stephen—whose mood by now cannot have been of the best— refused to give it; only when he heard the mutterings of those present and saw their hands tightening on their swords did he understand how they had interpreted his refusal—as a sign that he secretly intended to return to Sicily and seize power once more. Then he relented—probably in genuine horror that anyone should think him willing, in any circumstances, to set foot again in a land which he had sincerely tried to serve and by which he had been so shamefully repaid.

Poor Stephen: he was to do so sooner than he knew. Hardly was his galley out of the harbour than it proved totally unseaworthy. Whether it had been sabotaged or not we shall never know; but by the time it reached Licata, half-way along the south-west coast of the island, it could go no further. The local population was openly hostile; it was only with the utmost reluctance that Stephen was allowed to land at all, and then for a period not exceeding three days. In so short a time repairs were out of the question; it was in another vessel, bought at his own expense from some Genoese merchants he found in the harbour, that he finally reached the Holy Land.

Into the two years since he had left France, Stephen du Perche had packed a lifetime of experience. He had attained the highest ranks, both civil and ecclesiastical, in one of the three greatest kingdoms of Europe, he had risen from layman to metropolitan archbishop, he had won the respect of some, the detestation of many—and, probably, the love of a queen. He had learned much—about power and the abuses of power, about the art of government; about loyalty, friendship and fear. But about Sicily he had learned nothing. He never understood that the nation's strength, if not its very survival, depended upon the maintenance of its unity; and that since it was by nature heterogeneous and fissile, that unity must be imposed from above. Because of this incomprehension, he failed; and the fact that in the end he accidentally and involuntarily united his enemies against him in no way diminishes his failure.

It might be said that he was unlucky, and perhaps he was; unlucky in that he came to Sicily at a moment when the island was more demoralised than it had been at any time since the Normans first landed on its soil; unlucky in his companions, for whose arrogance and boorishness he was inevitably blamed; unlucky, even, in his age and inexperience—for it is all too easy to forget that at the time of his inglorious departure he was still in his early or middle twenties. Yet even at the end Fortune had cast on him one thin, watery smile; if the ship's captain had elected, on setting sail, to head east instead of west, taking the more direct route through the straits rather than the longer one via Trapani, his vessel might have been forced to put in not at Licata but at Messina instead. Had it done so, the Sicilian adventure of Stephen du Perche might have had a different and still unhappier end.

Of the thirty-seven Frenchmen who had accompanied Stephen to Sicily, two only were still alive when the time came to depart. One was a certain Roger, 'learned, industrious and modest', who now makes his first and last appearance in our story. The other was Peter of Blois, one of the foremost scholars of his day. Peter had studied the humanities at Tours, theology at Paris, and law at Bologna; soon after his return to France, he had been selected by Rothrud of Rouen to go to Sicily as tutor—with Walter of the Mill—to the young King. It was a position that was bound to excite the envy of the court, and his enemies had never stopped trying to get rid of him, twice offering him the see of Rossano and once even the archbishopric of Naples; but he had always refused. Despite a highly-developed sense of his own importance, he was neither grasping nor ambitious; and though intellectuals no longer enjoyed the same pre-eminence as in the two previous reigns, learning was still respected in Palermo more than in any other contemporary court of Europe. He had had no desire to leave.

But the events of the summer of
1168
changed all that. When the crisis came, Peter was lucky enough to be ill in bed, under the expert care of Romuald of Salerno; but when, on his recovery, the King explained that the expulsion of all Frenchmen did not apply to him and pleaded with him to remain, Peter showed himself as firmly determined to depart as he had previously been to stay. As he wrote later to his brother, he 'would not be persuaded by gifts, or promises, or rewards'. A Genoese ship was about to leave for France with the last forty of Stephen's friends on board; Peter insisted on taking
it;
and before long he was congratulating himself on having exchanged the bitter wines of Sicily for the rich and mellow vintages of his native Loire. Three or four years later his old friend Richard Palmer wrote to him suggesting that he might like to revisit his old friends. Peter's reply speaks for itself:

Sicily drags us down by her very air; she drags us down too
by
the malice of her people, so that to me she seems odious and scarcely habitable. The distempers of her climate render her abominable to me, as does the frequent and poisonous dissemination by whose immense power our people in their heedless simplicity are constantly endangered. Who, I ask, can live in safety in a place where, leaving aside all other afflictions, the very mountains continually vomit infernal flame and fetid sulphur ? For there beyond doubt is the gate of hell . . . where men are taken from the earth and descend living into the regions of Satan.

Your people err in the meagreness of their diets; for they live on so much celery and fennel that it constitutes almost all their sustenance; and this generates a humour which putrefies the body and brings it to the extremes of sickness and even death.

To this I would add that, just as it is written in books of science that all island peoples are in general unworthy of trust, so the inhabitants of Sicily are false friends and, in secret, the most abandoned betrayers. . . .

To you in Sicily, most beloved father, I shall not return. England shall cherish me, an old man, as she cherished you, a child.
¹
Rather

¹
She did so rather well, and for some forty years. Peter became Archdeacon, first of Bath and then of London, before he died early in the following century.

is it for you to leave that mountainous, monstrous land and return to the sweetness of your native air. . . . Flee, father, from those flammivomitous mountains, and look on the land of Etna with suspicion, lest the infernal regions greet you on your death.

As the ships disappeared over the horizon, bearing first Stephen du Perche and his reluctant fellow-pilgrims and then Peter of Blois with his home-bound compatriots, Queen Margaret must have been near despair. She had staked everything on these Frenchmen, and she had lost. With her son William still only fifteen, her own regency had another three years to run; but her reputation, both political and moral, was ruined. The last sad champion of the departed order, the 'Spanish woman' was now neither feared nor resented; she was simply ignored.

No longer, even, could she choose her own advisers. All three principal factions—the nobles, the Church and the palace—had had enough of her friends and relations, and were resolved that neither she nor they should have any more say in the conduct of affairs. Scarcely had she recovered from the shock of the revolution when she found a self-styled and self-constituted council of
familiares
already in existence—a coalition of the three groups that would have been unthinkable only two years before. The aristocracy was represented by Richard of Molise and Roger of Geraci, the first baron to join the Messinan revolt; from the Church there were Archbishop Romuald, Bishops John of Malta, Richard Palmer of Syracuse, Gentile of Agrigento (now released from prison) and Walter of the Mill; while palace interests were assured by Caid Richard and, of course, Matthew of Ajello. For a short time this Council also included Flenry of Montescaglioso, who had returned from Messina in quite unnecessary pomp with a fleet of twenty-four ships, doubtless taking full credit for the success of the revolution and infuriating everyone by his smugness. But Henry was the one issue on which Margaret and the council found themselves in agreement. The absence of his name from any subsequent documents suggests that he soon accepted his sister's bribes and returned, at long last, to Spain.

One only of the Queen's family now remained to be dealt with; and among the council's first pronouncements was a sentence of banishment on Gilbert of Gravina. He, his wife and his son, Bertrand of Andria, dispossessed of their lands but promised safe conduct from the Kingdom, followed Stephen du Perche to the Holy Land; and Sicily, with an almost audible sign of relief, settled down to govern herself alone once more.

For Margaret, Gilbert's removal must have been the ultimate humiliation. She had had her differences with him in the past, but he had shown himself a good friend to Stephen and, in the last resort, to herself as well. Now that it was his turn to face expulsion, and by a government of which she remained the titular head, she was powerless to help him. Meanwhile the whole Kingdom saw her impotence, and rejoiced. In her anger and frustration, however, Margaret gave continued proof of her total unfitness to govern. After the events of the past few months she might have been expected to have learnt some sort of a lesson. Had she collaborated with the council, she might even have managed to regain some of her lost influence. Instead, she sought to obstruct them at every turn. They had been the enemies of Stephen; for this reason alone, she could never be a friend of theirs. More than ever one suspects that between the Queen and her Chancellor there had existed something more than a working partnership and a family tie.

And still, unbelievably, Margaret seems to have cherished a hope that Stephen might one day return. His departure had left the archbishopric of Palermo once again vacant, and after the usual intrigues the choice of the canons had at last been forcibly directed towards Walter of the Mill.
¹
From Margaret's point of view it would not have been a bad appointment. Walter had served as her son's tutor for several years. He was less hidebound than Romuald, less overbearing than Richard Palmer, less disreputable than Gentile and younger, probably, than any of them. But he was not Stephen; and so she turned her face against him, protesting that her cousin was still the rightful archbishop—his renunciation having been extracted only under duress—and sending an appeal to Pope Alexander, persuasively backed with seven hundred ounces of gold, that he should refuse to ratify Walter's election.

¹
The circumstances of his elevation are not recorded. Falcandus, however, refers to Walter as having succeeded to the archbishopric 'less by election than by violent intrusion', so we may fear the worst.