Free The Magnificent Century by Thomas B. Costain

John seems to have taken a liking to the landless pair. When he went to Ireland in 1185 he took William and settled large estates on him. William remained in Ireland and established the family of Bourke, or Burke, which was destined through the centuries to play a prominent part in Irish history. Hubert went into John’s service androse to the post of seneschal of Poitou. Later John appointed him chief justiciar. This was the most important position in the kingdom after the Archbishop of Canterbury, followed by the constable, the marshal, the steward, the chamberlain, and the chancellor.
    The matrimonial record of the poor young man from East Anglia makes a truly fantastic story. He was married four times, his first three wives being rich widows, his fourth a princess of Scotland, and each marriage not only left him richer than before but marked a step upward. The first wife was Joan, daughter of William, Earl of Devon, and widow of William de Brewiere the younger. The second was Beatrice, daughter of William de Warenne, the great lord of the east, to whom no doubt the family of De Burgh submitted as their feudal head. Beatrice was the widow of Lord Bardulf. Her first husband had probably been chosen for her; her second she chose for herself, and she brought to young Hubert a very fine estate indeed. Her preference for a knight of comparatively low degree, whose sword was his fortune, is proof enough that he was a man of good address. When she died in 1214 he took as his third wife a former queen of England.
    When John, the youngest of the Plantagenets, had been called Lackland because all his father’s possessions had been promised to his older brothers, it was arranged to improve his lot by a rich marriage. Avisa, the heiress of the Earl of Gloucester and granddaughter of the great Robert of Gloucester who had been Stephen’s chief opponent in the years of the anarchy, was the greatest catch in England. She was a handsome young woman with huge estates in the West, extending into Glamorgan. John had no financial worries after his marriage to Avisa, but when suddenly and unexpectedly he became King of England and saw by an unhappy mischance the radiantly lovely Isabella of Angoulême, he put pressure on the high churchmen of the kingdom and secured a divorce on the grounds of consanguinity, Robert of Gloucester having been an illegitimate son of Henry I. It is perhaps needless to state that King John kept a large part of the Gloucester estates for himself. With what was left, however, Avisa made her second husband, Geoffrey de Mandeville, the richest peer in England; a match which John arranged himself and for which he collected from the bridegroom a fee of eighteen thousand marks. Avisa was a widow again when Hubert de Burgh’s wife Beatrice died, and she was no longer young. Certainly she hadreached the stage where continual childbearing had played havoc with the figure and the usual trouble with teeth had begun. All medieval ladies seemed to suffer from bad teeth and were much concerned with ways of holding handkerchiefs in front of the face to conceal the fact, being much addicted also to mulled wine as a means of improving the breath. By the most favorable reckoning Avisa was in her middle forties and older than Hubert de Burgh. It is said that she was still attractive; and certainly she was the possessor of broad acres and fine manors and large herds of cattle.
    Hubert’s willingness to wed the aging Avisa was a further proof to the critical baronage of his ambitious nature. When he brought his matrimonial record to a climactic high point by wedding the Princess Margaret, sister of the King of Scotland, in 1221, four years after the one-time queen’s death, the indignation of the nobility reached a high peak of bitterness. But Princess Margaret, fourth of the great ladies to love and wed this remarkable soldier of fortune, remained devoted to him for the rest of his life. No rough, uncouth soldier, this: a man,