The Prophecy of Death: (Knights Templar 25) Read Online Free Page B

his companions all his life, and he admired them,
     all of them. Everyone did. They were the pinnacle of nobility.
    Many great men lived in his own private household: Damory, Audley, Macauley – they were the men he could look up to. Other
     than the King, they were the men he respected most in the world.
    But his world was about to collapse about him.
    It was no sudden shock. He knew that now, but to a lad of only nine and a half years it had come with the vast speed of a
     river in spate, washing away all before it. He had listened in horror to the tales of death and torture with utter incomprehension.
     In truth, the catastrophe was a long time building, hadhe but known it. But he was so young when the civil war began, he couldn’t see that this was a ponderous disaster that had
     been constructed on the foundations of hatred over ten years – before his birth. It was the result of the King’s capricious
     nature. King Edward II had long resented the attitude of the men who thwarted his whims. To the King’s mind, he had the inalienable
     right of the Crown. God had made him King. None other. So no man had the right to overrule him. There was no one with the
     right to stand against him, and yet many tried.
    The first rebellion, so the King said, was when his close friend Piers Gaveston was captured and murdered by the earls of
     Hereford, Lancaster and Warwick. Gaveston had been the recipient of too much of the King’s largesse, and the earls resented
     royal generosity at the expense of others who had more noble birth. So they took the King’s adviser and killed him.
    When Gaveston was removed, the King seemed to settle and willingly spend his time with his other friends and his family. The
     birth of his first son gave him enormous pleasure and pride, so they said. But the King was not content. And soon he found
     a new favourite – a man of such rapacious greed that he set all the land against himself and the King: Sir Hugh le Despenser.
     It was his fault that there was a fresh civil war.
    The Lords Marcher allied themselves with the lords of the far north and rampaged over the territories owned by the Despenser.
     They burned and looted all the vast Despenser estates, and then marched upon London, forcing humiliating terms on the King,
     demanding that he exile his friend and agree to rule within limitations set by them. It was degrading for a man of pride;
     shameful for a King. So, at the first opportunity, the King took action, and the war was finally concluded when he encircled
     the rebels at Boroughbridge.
    If only he had shown tolerance and demonstrated that magnanimity which was the mark of a great man … but King Edward II
     was driven by baser motives. Instead of accepting apologies and forgiving those who had shown him such disregard, the King
     launched a ferocious attack on all those who had set their standards against him.
    His own cousin, Earl Thomas of Lancaster, was led to a field on a donkey, and there beheaded. The Lords Clifford and Mowbray
     were executed at York, and up and down the country lords, knights and squires were hanged. The tarred bodies were left there
     on the gibbets, pecked over and desiccated, for two years and more, proof of the vindictiveness of the man who ruled the nation.
    Except he didn’t. Not alone. He had left his wife, and it was he and Despenser who controlled the management of the realm
     together, for all the world as close as lovers. Both of them feared by his subjects; both of them hated.
    No king could be universally loved, of course. The boy may be just twelve years old, but he knew this; he had been well tutored,
     and he had read enough of the lives of Arthur, Alexander and others to know that a powerful leader would always have his enemies.
     But this was taking matters too far. It was one thing to alienate certain members of the nobility, but another entirely to
     turn even a wife against him. And her children.
    Especially, Edward of Windsor, the Earl