At this moment the pages, falconers, and demoiselles who formed the hunting party came gradually up; and, as means were taken to restore the fainting fair one to consciousness, Oliver, with much curiosity, asked a falconer--
“Why, young gentleman,” replied the falconer, looking rather suspiciously at his questioner, “I could have sworn that was a question which thou hadst no occasion to ask. Marry, I’ll scarce credit but that thy comrade knew better when he put his life so freely in peril to save hers. Would he have done as much to save a milkmaid, thinkest thou?”
“Mayhap the knight would, and mayhap he does know somewhat of the lady he has rescued,” remarked Oliver, not without exhibiting impatience that he, albeit a young warrior who had fought in Castile and Flanders, should thus be played with. “I can answer only for myself and my own knowledge, sir falconer; and I tell thee, on my faith, that I, on my part, am ignorant who the lady is.”
“Why, then, I will tell thee, sir squire,” said the falconer, eyeing Oliver with an air of good-humoured superiority; “she is no less a person than our Lady the Queen.”
It was not, as has been mentioned, under the very happiest auspices that King John, in the autumn of 1200, celebrated his marriage with Isabel of Angoulême, at Bordeaux, when he was rather more than double her age, and with a reputation and temper decidedly the worse for the wear.
Isabel, however, had just the kind of imagination to be dazzled by the brilliancy of her position as wife of a man on whose head had been placed, not only the crown of England, but the coronal of golden roses which formed the ducal diadem of Normandy, and who, moreover, was heir to the provinces over which the old Counts of Anjou and the old Dukes of Guienne had reigned with power and authority. At first, therefore, she was highly gratified with the fortunate accident which had thrown her in King John’s way, and substituted him, as a husband, in the place of the Count de la Marche; and, after the royal pair came to England, matters went pleasantly enough for years, so far as could be judged by appearances, and Isabel became the mother of two sons and three daughters--Henry, the eldest of her children, being a native of Winchester, where he first saw the light in 1207, while his father was pursued by the enmity of the Pope, and threatened by the hostility of the French king and the Anglo-Norman barons.