The earls deployed their army, concentrating on the lower reaches of the castle. Against both our right and left flanks siege engines were set up. Behind these came the carts, rattling with stones, slingshots and barrels of tar, ready to be lit. By early evening we were encircled. Our lookouts on the coastal side brought even grimmer news: three cogs of war, high-sterned, well armed and thronged with fighting men, had slipped into the harbour, flying the pennants of the leading guilds of London. These would seal the port, cutting off help from the king’s ships as well as any possible escape. The trap had snapped shut. The noose was tightening. The earls had brought Gaveston to the ring to dance, and dance he would. I recall that night vividly. The darkness fiercely lit by fire. The air polluted by the sickly burning smell of tar as the besiegers prepared in earnest.
The following morning, just after dawn, the earls sent their defiance. An envoy carrying a leafy green bough, escorted by a priest holding a cross, and a herald with a trumpet and Pembroke’s standard, rode to the edge of the narrow moat before the gatehouse of the castle. The strident blast of the trumpet brought us back to the walls. The ensuing ceremony was empty and pointless. The envoys demanded the immediate surrender of the castle and that Lord Gaveston give himself up into the power of ‘the Community of the Realm’. The constable, on behalf of Gaveston, rejected the call, claiming he held the castle for the king. The envoy dropped his bough, turned his horse and galloped back with his escort. Two hours later the earls attacked. They concentrated on the lower stretches of the castle to both right and left, well aware of our difficulties, our inability to fortify and defend two places at the same time. The garrison was split. The constable had to hold even more men back in reserve lest these attacks were mere feints and the main assault might emerge elsewhere.
The succeeding days became a time of terror. The sky torched and seared with stones and other missiles coated with burning pitch. The air was riven by the screech of rope, the whir of wheels and the harsh crack as the engines of war launched a blizzard of fire. The earls tried to clear the battlements of our archers as the clumsy ox-hide-covered siege towers edged ever so slowly but threateningly towards us. The earls’ strategy was simple and stark: to attack and overrun the low-lying flanks of the castle and push us back to the inner bailey and the bleak fastness of the keep. Everyone was mustered to arms. Even I had to crouch, clammy cold with fear, on the battlements with an arbalest and a quiver of bolts. Dunheved joined me, refusing to hide behind his cloth. He could often be seen edging along the parapet with what he called his ‘miraculous wineskin’ so he could provide both physical and spiritual comfort. The ominous whistle of missiles, the crack of rope, the crash of stones, the fiery bundles hurled against the wall or down into the bailey became commonplace. Great clouds of smoke plumed up above the castle, billowing out in a miasma of offensive stench. The assaults continued late into the evening, the machines of war singing out in their own horrid way a deadly Vespers to close the day.
Men were killed, heads and bodies smashed. Others were grievously wounded or badly burnt. I became busy in the infirmary, fortunate enough to be away from the heart-rending clatter of battle. Because of the heat, the dead were buried quickly, Rosselin and Middleton included, in a long gaping trench cut through that lovely garden. A broad, deep furrow for the dead that became crammed with the corpses of those killed in the murderous, fiery storm of missiles. I remembered my promise to Rosselin. I had him sheeted in a proper shroud, a wooden cross clasped between his dead fingers with an absolution pinned to his breast. I gave gold to the castle chaplain and he swore the most solemn oath to sing six chantry masses for the repose of Rosselin’s soul and those of his comrades. The siege castles continued to edge their cumbersome way across the narrow moat and up to the flattest place before the walls. Already archers, packed in the various storeys, could loose dense clouds of longbow arrows. The constable retaliated with his own mangonels and slings; pots of fire, burning tar and boulders were hurled back, but the siege towers were draped in ox hide saturated in vinegar. Sallies and forays were attempted. Rumours that two of the earls had withdrawn their levies gave us little respite as the blazing fury returned. Our garrison began to weaken, due not so much to death and wounds but to the very reason for our resistance. Gaveston was now reduced to a drunken sot. No, he was not a coward; he was never that. He just accepted that salvation was not imminent. The king would not come. The raging battle became our lives. I could do little to resolve the murderous mysteries that had dogged our souls like lurchers on the scent. Such problems were overridden by the need to survive. Morning gave way to evening, and still the sky rained terrors.
The end came swiftly, unexpectedly, not from without but from the enemy within. One afternoon I was summoned from the infirmary to the inner bailey, where a crowd had gathered round the deep well, our main source of water. Women were screaming about the water being polluted. An archer volunteered to go down the foot holes in the walls of the well to investigate. He returned grim-faced, carrying a dead rat bloated with water. The bottom of the well, he reported, brimmed with such corpses. God knows how it was done. Were the rats poisoned and thrown into the well, or were they fed some noxious substance that gave them a raging thirst so that, true to their rapacious nature, they turned and twisted in the runnels beneath the castle searching for water. I was about to leave, to hurry to the other well in the outer bailey, when screams and shouts rose from the keep. Flames and smoke were licking at the half-windows just above ground. The great cellars of the keep, holding most of the castle’s provisions, had been fired. Cavern after cavern, cellar after cellar, was ravaged by hungry flames, which destroyed the wooden lintels and doors, scarred the stone and reduced most of the stock to grey, shifting ash. No one could be accused, no evidence produced, except that the fire had been started quickly with some oil and a torch. Was it the assassin? I wondered. There again, it could have been any member of our garrison, tired, heart-sick and desperate for relief. Indeed, we were not so much concerned about who had done it but the effect. At a stroke the garrison had been gravely weakened, depleted of both food and water.
Gaveston’s chamber council was in no mood to mollify the drunken, unshaven royal favourite when we met in the great hall of the keep later that evening.
‘We must seek terms,’ Warde declared defiantly. ‘Our water and food stocks are no more. The enemy have tightened their noose around us. Talk of desertion amongst my men is common chatter. If the earls storm the castle they can, according to the usages and rules of war-’
‘The usages and rules!’ Gaveston screamed back. ‘What are those?’
‘Protection against being put to the sword if this castle is stormed and taken,’ Warde shouted back.
‘The king. .’ Gaveston yelled.
‘His grace,’ Warde retorted, ‘has not come. He will not come. My lord, the castle is surrounded. The harbour sealed. Within three days those siege towers will reach our walls. I must now look after everyone here, including you. We must dispatch peace envoys. .’
Our murmur of assent brought Gaveston to his senses. He blinked and gazed fearfully around.