.
HISTORY OF FRANCE
BY M. GUIZOT
VOLUME II.
Contents:
| CHAPTER XVII. | THE CRUSADES, THEIR DECLINE AND END. |
| CHAPTER XVIII. | THE KINGSHIP IN FRANCE. |
| CHAPTER XIX. | THE COMMUNES AND THE THIRD ESTATE. |
| CHAPTER XX. | THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR.—PHILIP VI. AND JOHN II. |
| CHAPTER XXI. | THE STATES—GENERAL OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. |
| CHAPTER XXII. | THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR.—CHARLES V. |
List of Illustrations:
HISTORY OF FRANCE
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE CRUSADES, THEIR DECLINE AND END.
In the month of August, 1099, the Crusade, to judge by appearances, had attained its object. Jerusalem was in the hands of the Christians, and they had set up in it a king, the most pious and most disinterested of the crusaders. Close to this ancient kingdom were growing up likewise, in the two chief cities of Syria and Mesopotamia, Antioch and Edessa, two Christian principalities, in the possession of two crusader-chiefs, Bohemond and Baldwin. A third Christian principality was on the point of getting founded at the foot of Libanus, at Tripolis, for the advantage of another crusader, Bertrand, eldest son of Count Raymond of Toulouse. The conquest of Syria and Palestine seemed accomplished, in the name of the faith, and by the armies of Christian Europe; and the conquerors calculated so surely upon their fixture that, during his reign, short as it was (for he was elected king July 23, 1099, and died July 18, 1100, aged only forty years), Godfrey de Bouillon caused to be drawn up and published, under the title of Assizes of Jerusalem, a code of laws, which transferred to Asia the customs and traditions of the feudal system, just as they existed in France at the moment of his departure for the Holy Land.
Forty-six years afterwards, in 1145, the Mussulmans, under the leadership of Zanghi, sultan of Aleppo and of Mossoul, had retaken Edessa. Forty-two years after that, in 1187, Saladin (Salah-el-Eddyn), sultan of Egypt and of Syria, had put an end to the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem; and only seven years later, in 1194, Richard Coeur de Lion, king of England, after the most heroic exploits in Palestine, on arriving in sight of Jerusalem, retreated in despair, covering his eyes with his shield, and saying that he was not worthy to look upon the city which he was not in a condition to conquer. When he re-embarked at St. Jean d'Acre, casting a last glance and stretching out his arms towards the coast, he cried, "Most Holy Land, I commend thee to the care of the Almighty; and may He grant me long life enough to return hither and deliver thee from the yoke of the infidels!" A century had not yet rolled by since the triumph of the first crusaders, and the dominion they had acquired by conquest in the Holy Land had become, even in the eyes of their most valiant and most powerful successors, an impossibility.
Nevertheless, repeated efforts and glory, and even victories, were not then, and were not to be still later, unknown amongst the Christians in their struggle against the Mussulmans for the possession of the Holy Land. In the space of a hundred and seventy-one years from the coronation of Godfrey de Bouillon as king of Jerusalem, in 1099, to the death of St. Louis, wearing the cross before Tunis, in 1270, seven grand crusades were undertaken with the same design by the greatest sovereigns of Christian Europe; the Kings of France and England, the Emperors of Germany, the King of Denmark, and princes of Italy successively engaged therein. And they all failed. It were neither right nor desirable to make long pause over the recital of their attempts and their reverses, for it is the history of France, and not a general history of the crusades, which is here related; but it was in France, by the French people, and under French chiefs, that the crusades were begun; and it was with St. Louis, dying before Tunis beneath the banner of the cross, that they came to an end. They received in the history of Europe the glorious name of Gesta Dei per Francos (God's works by French hands); and they have a right to keep, in the history of France, the place they really occupied.
During a reign of twenty-nine years, Louis VI., called the Fat, son of Philip I., did not trouble himself about the East or the crusades, at that time in all their fame and renown. Being rather a man of sense than an enthusiast in the cause either of piety or glory, he gave all his attention to the establishment of some order, justice, and royal authority in his as yet far from extensive kingdom. A tragic incident, however, gave the crusade chief place in the thoughts and life of his son, Louis VII., called the Young, who succeeded him in 1137. He got himself rashly embroiled, in 1142, in a quarrel with Pope Innocent II., on the subject of the election of the Archbishop of Bourges. The pope and the king had each a different candidate for the see. "The king is a child," said the pope; "he must get schooling, and be kept from learning bad habits."
"Never, so long as I live," said the king, "shall Peter de la Chatre (the pope's candidate) enter the city of Bourges." The chapter of Bourges, thinking as the pope thought, elected Peter de la Chatre; and Theobald II., Count of Champagne, took sides for the archbishop elect. "Mind your own business," said the king to him; "your dominions are large enough to occupy you; and leave me to govern my own as I have a mind." Theobald persisted in backing the elect of pope and chapter. The pope excommunicated the king. The king declared war against the Count of Champagne; and went and besieged Vitry. Nearly all the town was built of wood, and the besiegers set fire to it. The besieged fled for refuge to a church, in which they were invested; and the fire reached the church, which was entirely consumed, together with the thirteen hundred inhabitants, men, women, and children, who had retreated thither. This disaster made a great stir. St. Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux and the leading ecclesiastical authority of the age, took the part of Count Theobald. King Louis felt a lively sorrow, and sincere repentance. Soon afterwards it became known in the West that the affairs of the Christians were going ill in the East; that the town of Edessa had been re-taken by the Turks, and all its inhabitants massacred. The kingdom of Jerusalem, too, was in danger. Great was the emotion in Europe; and the cry of the crusade was heard once more. Louis the Young, to appease his troubled conscience, and to get reconciled with the pope, to say nothing of sympathy for the national movement, assembled the grandees, laic and ecclesiastical, of the kingdom, to deliberate upon the matter.
Deliberation was more prolonged, more frequently repeated, and more indecisive than it had been at the time of the first crusade. Three grand assemblies met, the first in 1145, at Bourges; the second in 1146, at Vezelai, in Nivernais; and the third in 1147, at Etampes; all three being called to investigate the expediency of a new crusade, and of the king's participation in the enterprise. Not only was the question seriously discussed, but extremely diverse opinions were expressed, both amongst the rank and file of these assemblies, and amongst their most illustrious members. There were two men whose talents and fame made them conspicuous above all; Suger, Abbot of St. Denis, the intimate and able adviser of the wise king, Louis the Fat, and St. Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, the most eloquent, most influential, and most piously disinterested amongst the Christians of his age. Though both were ecclesiastics, these two great men were, touching the second crusade, of opposite opinions. "Let none suppose," says Suger's biographer and confidant, William, monk of St. Denis, "that it was at his instance or by his counsel that the king undertook the voyage to the Holy Land." Although the success of it was other than had been expected, this prince was influenced only by pious wishes and zeal for the service of God. As for Suger, ever far-seeing and only too well able to read the future, not only did he not suggest to the monarch any such design, but he disapproved of it so soon as it was mentioned to him. The truth of it is, that, after having vainly striven to nip it in the bud, and being unable to put a check upon the king's zeal, he thought it wise, either for fear of wounding the king's piety, or of uselessly incurring the wrath of the partisans of the enterprise, to yield to the times." As for St. Bernard, at the first of the three assemblies, viz., at Bourges, whether it were that his mind was not yet made up or that he desired to cover himself with greater glory, he advised the king to undertake nothing without having previously consulted the Holy See; but when Pope Eugenius III., so far from hesitating, had warmly solicited the aid of the Christians against the infidels, St. Bernard, at the second assembly, viz., at Vezelai, gave free vent to his feelings and his eloquence. After having read the pope's letters, "If ye were told," said he, "that an enemy had attacked your castles, your cities, and your lands, had ravished your wives and your daughters, and had profaned your temples, which of you would not fly to arms? Well, all those evils, and evils still greater, have come upon your brethren, upon the family of Christ, which is your own. Why tarry ye, then, to repair so many wrongs, to avenge so many insults? Christian warriors, He who gave His life for you to-day demandeth yours; illustrious knights, noble defenders of the cross, call to mind the example of your fathers, who conquered Jerusalem, and whose names are written in heaven! The living God hath charged me to tell unto you that He will punish those who shall not have defended Him against His enemies. Fly to arms, and let Christendom re-echo with the words of the prophet, 'Woe to him who dyeth not his sword with blood!'" At this fervent address the assembly rang with the shout of the first crusade, 'God willeth it! God willeth it!' The king, kneeling before St. Bernard, received from his hands the cross; the queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, assumed it, like her husband; nearly all the barons present followed their example; St. Bernard tore up his garments into crosses for distribution, and, on leaving the assembly, he scoured the country places, everywhere preaching and persuading the people. "The villages and castles are deserted," he wrote to the pope; "there is none to be seen save widows and orphans whose husbands and fathers are alive." Nor did he confine himself to France; he crossed into Germany, and preached the crusade all along the Rhine. The emperor, Conrad III., showed great hesitation; the empire was sorely troubled, he said, and had need of its head. "Be of good cheer," replied St. Bernard "so long as you defend His heritage, God himself will take the burden of defending yours." One day, in December, 1146, he was celebrating mass at Spire, in presence of the emperor and a great number of German princes. Suddenly he passed from the regular service to the subject of the crusade, and transported his audience to the last judgment, in the presence of all the nations of the earth summoned together, and Jesus Christ bearing his cross, and reproaching the emperor with ingratitude. Conrad was deeply moved, and interrupted the preacher by crying out, 'I know what I owe to Jesus Christ: and I swear to go whither it pleaseth Him to call me.'" The attraction became general; and Germany, like France, took up the cross.
St. Bernard returned to France. The ardor there had cooled a little during his absence; the results of his trip in Germany were being waited for; and it was known that, on being eagerly pressed to put himself at the head of the crusaders, and take the command of the whole expedition, he had formally refused. His enthusiasm and his devotion, sincere and deep as they were, did not, in his case, extinguish common sense; and he had not forgotten the melancholy experiences of Peter the Hermit. In support of his refusal he claimed the intervention of Pope Eugenius III. "Who am I," he wrote to him, "that I should form a camp, and march at the head of an army? What can be more alien to my calling, even if I lacked not the strength and the ability? I need not tell you all this, for you know it perfectly. I conjure you by the charity you owe me, deliver me not over, thus, to the humors of men." The pope came to France; and the third grand assembly met at Etampes, in February, 1147. The presence of St. Bernard rekindled zeal; but foresight began to penetrate men's minds. Instead of insisting upon his being the chief of the crusade, attention was given to preparations for the expedition; the points were indicated at which the crusaders should form a junction, and the directions in which they would have to move; and inquiry was made as to what measures should be taken, and what persons should be selected for the government of France during the king's absence. "Sir," said St. Bernard, after having come to an understanding upon the subject with the principal members of the assembly, at the same time pointing to Suger and the Count de Nevers, "here be two swords, and it sufficeth." The Count de Nevers peremptorily refused the honor done him; he was resolved, he said, to enter the order of St. Bruno, as indeed he did. Suger also refused at first, "considering the dignity offered him a burden, rather than an honor." Wise and clear-sighted by nature, he had learned in the reign of Louis the Fat, to know the requirements and the difficulties of government. "He consented to accept," says his biographer, "only when he was at last forced to it by Pope Eugenius, who was present at the king's departure, and whom it was neither permissible nor possible for him to resist." It was agreed that the French crusaders should form a junction at Metz, under the command of King Louis, and the Germans at Ratisbonne, under that of the Emperor Conrad, and that the two armies should successively repair by land to Constantinople, whence they would cross into Asia.
Having each a strength, it is said, of one hundred thousand men, they marched by Germany and the Lower Danube, at an interval of two months between them, without committing irregularities and without meeting obstacles so serious as those of the first crusade, but still much incommoded, and subjected to great hardships in the countries they traversed. The Emperor Conrad and the Germans first, and then King Louis and the French, arrived at Constantinople in the course of the summer of 1117. Manuel Comnenus, grandson of Alexis Comnenus, was reigning there; and he behaved towards the crusaders with the same mixture of caresses and malevolence, promises and perfidy, as had distinguished his grandfather. "There is no ill turn he did not do them," says the historian Nicetas, himself a Greek. Conrad was the first to cross into Asia Minor, and, whether it were unskilfulness or treason, the guides with whom he had been supplied by Manuel Comnenus led him so badly that, on the 28th of October, 1147, he was surprised and shockingly beaten by the Turks near Iconium. An utter distrust of Greeks grew up amongst the French, who had not yet left Constantinople; and some of their chiefs, and even one of their prelates, the Bishop of Langres, proposed to make, without further delay, an end of it with this emperor and empire, so treacherously hostile, and to take Constantinople in order to march more securely upon Jerusalem. But King Louis and the majority of his knights turned a deaf ear: "We be come forth," said they, "to expiate our own sins, not to punish the crimes of the Greeks; when we took up the cross, God did not put into our hands the sword of His justice;" and they, in their turn, crossed over into Asia Minor. There they found the Germans beaten and dispersed, and Conrad himself wounded and so discouraged that, instead of pursuing his way by land with the French, he returned to Constantinople to go thence by sea to Palestine. Louis and his army continued their march across Asia Minor, and gained in Phrygia, at the passage of the river Meander, so brilliant a victory over the Turks that, "if such men," says the historian Nicetas, "abstained from taking Constantinople, one cannot but admire their moderation and forbearance."
But the success was short, and, ere long, dearly paid for. On entering Pisidia, the French army split up into two, and afterwards into several divisions, which scattered and lost themselves in the defiles of the mountains. The Turks waited for them, and attacked them at the mouths and from the tops of the passes; before long there was nothing but disorder and carnage; the little band which surrounded the king was cut to pieces at his side; and Louis himself, with his back against a rock, defended himself, alone, for some minutes, against several Turks, till they, not knowing who he was, drew off, whereupon he, suddenly throwing himself upon a stray horse, rejoined his advanced guard, who believed him dead. The army continued their march pell-mell, king, barons, knights, soldiers, and pilgrims, uncertain day by day what would become of them on the morrow. The Turks harassed them afield; the towns in which there were Greek governors residing refused to receive them; provisions fell short; arms and baggage were abandoned on the road. On arriving in Pamphylia, at Satalia, a little port on the Mediterranean, the impossibility of thus proceeding became evident; they were still, by land, forty days' march from Antioch, whereas it required but three to get there by sea. The governor of Satalia proposed to the king to embark the crusaders; but, when the vessels arrived, they were quite inadequate for such an operation; hardly could the king, the barons, and the knights find room in them; and it would be necessary to abandon and expose to the perils of the land-march the majority of the infantry and all the mere pilgrims who had followed the army. Louis, disconsolate, fluctuated between the most diverse resolutions, at one time demanding to have everybody embarked at any risk, at another determining to march by land himself with all who could not be embarked; distributing whatever money and provisions he had left, being as generous and sympathetic as he was improvident and incapable, and "never letting a day pass," says Odo of Deuil, who accompanied him, "without hearing mass and crying unto the God of the Christians." At last he embarked with his queen, Eleanor, and his principal knights; and towards the end of March, 1148, he arrived at Antioch, having lost more than three quarters of his army.
Scarcely had he taken a few days' rest when messengers came to him on behalf of Baldwin III., king of Jerusalem, begging him to repair without delay to the Holy City. Louis was as eager to go thither as the king and people of Jerusalem were to see him there; but his speedy departure encountered unforeseen hinderances. Raymond, of Poitiers, at that time Prince of Antioch by his marriage with Constance, granddaughter of the great Bohemond of the first crusade, was uncle to the Queen of France, Eleanor of Aquitaine. He was, says William of Tyre, "a lord of noble descent, of tall and elegant figure, the handsomest of the princes of the earth, a man of charming affability and conversation, open-handed and magnificent beyond measure," and, moreover, ambitious and eager to extend his small dominion. He had at heart, beyond everything, the conquest of Aleppo and Caesarea. In this design the King of France and the crusaders who were still about him might be of real service; and he attempted to win them over. Louis answered that he would engage in no enterprise until he had visited the holy places. Raymond was impetuous, irritable, and as unreasonable in his desires as unfortunate in his undertakings. He had quickly acquired great influence over his niece, Queen Eleanor, and he had no difficulty in winning her over to his plans. "She," says William of Tyre, "was a very inconsiderate woman, caring little for royal dignity or conjugal fidelity; she took great pleasure in the court of Antioch, where she also conferred much pleasure, even upon Mussulmans, whom, as some chronicles say, she did not repulse; and, when the king, her husband, spoke to her of approaching departure, she emphatically refused, and, to justify her opposition, she declared that they could no longer live together, as there was, she asserted, a prohibited degree of consanguinity between them." Louis, "who loved her with an almost excessive love," says William of Nangis, was at the same time angered and grieved. He was austere in morals, easily jealous, and religiously scrupulous, and for a moment he was on the point of separating from his wife; but the counsels of his chief barons dissuaded him, and, thereupon, taking a sudden resolution, he set out from Antioch secretly, by night, carrying off the queen almost by force. "They both hid their wrath as much as possible," says the chronicler; "but at heart they had ever this outrage." We shall see, before long, what were the consequences. No history can offer so striking an example of the importance of well-assorted unions amongst the highest as well as the lowest, and of the prolonged woes which may be brought upon a nation by the domestic evils of royalty.
On approaching Jerusalem, in the month of April, 1148, Louis VII. saw coming to meet him King Baldwin III., and the patriarch and the people, singing, "Blessed be he that cometh in the name of the Lord!" So soon as he had entered the city, his pious wishes were fulfilled by his being taken to pay a solemn visit to all the holy places. At the same time arrived from Constantinople the Emperor Conrad, almost alone and in the guise of a simple pilgrim. All the remnant of the crusaders, French and German, hurried to join them. Impatient to exhibit their power on the theatre of their creed, and to render to the kingdom of Jerusalem some striking service, the two Western sovereigns, and Baldwin, and their principal barons assembled at Ptolemais (St. Jean d'Acre) to determine the direction to be taken by their enterprise. They decided upon the siege of Damascus, the most important and the nearest of the Mussulman princedoms in Syria, and in the early part of June they moved thither with forces incomplete and ill united. Neither the Prince of Antioch nor the Counts of Edessa and Tripolis had been summoned to St. Jean d'Acre; and Queen Eleanor had not appeared. At the first attack, the ardor of the assailants and the brilliant personal prowess of their chiefs, of the Emperor Conrad amongst others, struck surprise and consternation into the besieged, who, foreseeing the necessity of abandoning their city, laid across the streets beams, chains, and heaps of stones, to stop the progress of the conquerors and give themselves time for flying, with their families and their wealth, by the northern and southern gates. But personal interest and secret negotiations before long brought into the Christian camp weakness, together with discord. Many of the barons were already disputing amongst themselves, at the very elbows of the sovereigns, for the future government of Damascus; others were not inaccessible to the rich offers which came to them from the city; and it is maintained that King Baldwin himself suffered himself to be bribed by a sum of two hundred thousand pieces of gold which were sent to him by Modjer-Eddyn, Emir of Damascus, and which turned out to be only pieces of copper, covered with gold leaf. News came that the Emirs of Aleppo and Mossoul were coming, with considerable forces, to the relief of the place. Whatever may have been the cause of retreat, the crusader- sovereigns decided upon it, and, raising the siege, returned to Jerusalem. The Emperor Conrad, in indignation and confusion, set out precipitately to return to Germany. King Louis could not make up his mind thus to quit the Holy Land in disgrace, and without doing anything for its deliverance. He prolonged his stay there for more than a year without anything to show for his time and zeal. His barons and his knights nearly all left him, and, by sea or land, made their way back to France. But the king still lingered. "I am under a bond," he wrote to Suger, "not to leave the Holy Land, save with glory, and after doing somewhat for the cause of God and the kingdom of France." At last, after many fruitless entreaties, Suger wrote to him, "Dear king and lord, I must cause thee to hear the voice of thy whole kingdom. Why dost thou fly from us? After having toiled so hard in the East, after having endured so many almost unendurable evils, by what harshness or what cruelty comes it that, now when the barons and grandees of the kingdom have returned, thou persistest in abiding with the barbarians? The disturbers of the kingdom have entered into it again; and thou, who shouldst defend it, remainest in exile as if thou wert a prisoner; thou givest over the lamb to the wolf, thy dominions to the ravishers. We conjure thy majesty, we invoke thy piety, we adjure thy goodness, we summon thee in the name of the fealty we owe thee; tarry not at all, or only a little while, beyond Easter; else thou wilt appear, in the eyes of God, guilty of a breach of that oath which thou didst take at the same time as the crown." At length Louis made up his mind and embarked at St. Jean d'Acre at the commencement of July, 1149; and he disembarked in the month of October at the port of St. Gilles, at the mouth of the Rhone, whence he wrote to Suger, "We be hastening unto you safe and sound, and we command you not to defer paying us a visit, on a given day and before all our other friends. Many rumors reach us touching our kingdom, and knowing nought for certain, we be desirous to learn from you how we should bear ourselves or hold our peace, in every case. And let none but yourself know what I say to you at this present writing."
This preference and this confidence were no more than Louis VII. owed to Suger. The Abbot of St. Denis, after having opposed the crusade with a freedom of spirit and a far-sightedness unique, perhaps, in his times, had, during the king's absence, borne the weight of government with a political tact, a firmness, and a disinterestedness rare in any times. He had upheld the authority of absent royalty, kept down the pretensions of vassals, and established some degree of order wherever his influence could reach; he had provided for the king's expenses in Palestine by good administration of the domains and revenues of the crown; and, lastly, he had acquired such renown in Europe, that men came from Italy and from England to view the salutary effects of his government, and that the name of Solomon of his age was conferred upon him by strangers his contemporaries. With the exception of great sovereigns, such as Charlemagne or William the Conqueror, only great bishops or learned theologians, and that by their influence in the Church or by their writings, had obtained this European reputation; from the ninth to the twelfth century, Suger was the first man who attained to it by the sole merit of his political conduct, and who offered an example of a minister justly admired, for his ability and wisdom, beyond the circle in which he lived. When he saw that the king's return drew near, he wrote to him, saying, "You will, I think, have ground to be satisfied with our conduct. We have remitted to the knights of the Temple the money we had resolved to send you. We have, besides, reimbursed the Count of Vermandois the three thousand livres he had lent us for your service. Your land and your people are in the enjoyment, for the present, of a happy peace. You will find your houses and your palaces in good condition through the care we have taken to have them repaired. Behold me now in the decline of age: and I dare to say that the occupations in which I have engaged for the love of God and through attachment to your person have added many to my years. In respect of the queen, your consort, I am of opinion that you should conceal the displeasure she causes you, until, restored to your dominions, you can calmly deliberate upon that and upon other subjects."
On once more entering his kingdom, Louis, who, at a distance, had sometimes lent a credulous ear to the complaints of the discontented or to the calumnies of Suger's enemies, did him full justice and was the first to give him the name of Father of the country. The ill success of the crusade and the remembrance of all that France had risked and lost for nothing, made a deep impression upon the public; and they honored Suger for his far-sightedness whilst they blamed St. Bernard for the infatuation which he had fostered and for the disasters which had followed it. St. Bernard accepted their reproaches in a pious spirit: "If," said he, "there must be murmuring against God or against me, I prefer to see the murmurs of men falling upon me rather than upon the Lord. To me it is a blessed thing that God should deign to use me as a buckler to shield Himself. I shrink not from humiliation, provided that His glory be unassailed." But at the same time St. Bernard himself was troubled, and he permitted himself to give expression to his troubled feelings in a singularly free and bold strain of piety. "We be fallen upon very grievous times," he wrote to Pope Eugenius III.; "the Lord, provoked by our sins, seemeth in some sort to have determined to judge the world before the time, and to judge it, doubtless, according to His equity, but not remembering His mercy. Do not the heathen say, 'Where is now their God?' And who can wonder? The children of the Church, those who be called Christian, lie stretched upon the desert, smitten with the sword or dead of famine. Did we undertake the work rashly? Did we behave ourselves lightly? How patiently God heareth the sacrilegious voices and the blasphemies of these Egyptians! Assuredly His judgments be righteous; who doth not know it? But in the present judgment there is so profound a depth, that I hesitate not to call him blessed whosoever is not surprised and offended by it."
The soul of man, no less than the shifting scene of the world, is often a great subject of surprise. King Louis, on his way back to France, had staid some days at Rome; and there, in a conversation with the pope, he had almost promised him a new crusade to repair the disasters of that from which he had found it so difficult to get out. Suger, when he became acquainted with this project, opposed it as he had opposed the former; but, at the same time, as he, in common with all his age, considered the deliverance of the Holy Land to be the bounden duty of Christians, he conceived the idea of dedicating the large fortune and great influence he had acquired to the cause of a new crusade, to be undertaken by himself and at his own expense, without compromising either king or state. He unfolded his views to a meeting of bishops assembled at Chartres; and he went to Tours, and paid a visit to the tomb of St. Martin to implore his protection. Already more than ten thousand pilgrims were in arms at his call, and already he had himself chosen a warrior, of ability and renown, to command them, when he fell ill, and died at the end of four months, in 1152, aged seventy, and "thanking the Almighty," says his biographer, "for having taken him to Him, not suddenly, but little by little, in order to bring him step by step to the rest needful for the weary man." It is said that, in his last days and when St. Bernard was exhorting him not to think any more save only of the heavenly Jerusalem, Suger still expressed to him his regret at dying without having succored the city which was so dear to them both.
Almost at the very moment when Suger was dying, a French council, assembled at Beaugency, was annulling on the ground of prohibited consanguinity, and with the tacit consent of the two persons most concerned, the marriage of Louis VII. and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Some months afterwards, at Whitsuntide in the same year, Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, espoused Eleanor, thus adding to his already great possessions Poitou and Aquitaine, and becoming, in France, a vassal more powerful than the king his suzerain. Twenty months later, in 1154, at the death of King Stephen, Henry Plantagenet became King of England; and thus there was a recurrence, in an aggravated form, of the position which had been filled by William the Conqueror, and which was the first cause of rivalry between France and England and of the consequent struggles of considerably more than a century's duration.
Little more than a year after Suger, on the 20th of April, 1153, St. Bernard died also. The two great men, of whom one had excited and the other opposed the second crusade, disappeared together from the theatre of the world. The crusade had completely failed. After a lapse of scarce forty years, a third crusade began. When a great idea is firmly fixed in men's minds with the twofold sanction of duty and feeling, many generations live and die in its service before efforts are exhausted and the end reached or abandoned.
During this forty years' interval between the end of the second and beginning of the third crusade, the relative positions of West and East, Christian Europe and Mussulman Asia, remained the same outwardly and according to the general aspect of affairs; but in Syria and in Palestine there was a continuance of the struggle between Christendom and Islamry, with various fortunes on either side. The Christian kingdom of Jerusalem still stood; and after Godfrey de Bouillon, from 1100 to 1180, there had been a succession of eight kings; some energetic and bold, aspiring to extend their young dominion, others indolent and weak upon a tottering throne. The rivalries and often the defections and treasons of the petty Christian princes and lords who were set up at different points in Palestine and Syria endangered their common cause. Fortunately similar rivalries, dissensions, and treasons prevailed amongst the Mussulman emirs, some of them Turks and others Persians or Arabs, and at one time foes, at another dependants, of the Khalifs of Bagdad or of Egypt. Anarchy and civil war harassed both races and both religions with almost equal impartiality. But, beneath this surface of simultaneous agitation and monotony, great changes were being accomplished or preparing for accomplishment in the West. The principal sovereigns of the preceding generation, Louis VII., King of France, Conrad III., Emperor of Germany, and Henry II., King of England, were dying; and princes more juvenile and more enterprising, or simply less wearied out,—Philip Augustus, Frederick Barbarossa, and Richard Coeur de Lion,—were taking their places. In the East the theatre of policy and events was being enlarged; Egypt was becoming the goal of ambition with the chiefs, Christian or Mussulman, of Eastern Asia; and Damietta, the key of Egypt, was the object of their enterprises, those of Amaury I., the boldest of the kings of Jerusalem, as well as those of the Sultans of Damascus and Aleppo. Noureddin and Saladin (Nour-Eddyn and Sala-Eddyn), Turks by origin, had commenced their fortunes in Syria; but it was in Egypt that they culminated, and, when Saladin became the most illustrious as well as the most powerful of Mussulman sovereigns, it was with the title of Sultan of Egypt and of Syria that he took his place in history.
In the course of the year 1187, Europe suddenly heard tale upon tale about the repeated disasters of the Christians in Asia. On the 1st of May, the two religious and warlike orders which had been founded in the East for the defence of Christendom—the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem and the Templars—lost, at a brush in Galilee, five hundred of their bravest knights. On the 3d and 4th of July, near Tiberias, a Christian army was surrounded by the Saracens, and also, ere long, by the fire which Saladin had ordered to be set to the dry grass which covered the plain. The flames made their way and spread beneath the feet of men and horses. "There," say the Oriental chroniclers, "the sons of Paradise and the children of fire settled their terrible quarrel. Arrows hurtled in the air like a noisy flight of sparrows, and the blood of warriors dripped upon the ground like rain-water." "I saw," adds one of them who was present at the battle, "hill, plain, and valley covered with their dead; I saw their banners stained with dust and blood; I saw their heads laid low, their limbs scattered, their carcasses piled on a heap like stones." Four days after the battle of Tiberias, on the 8th of July, 1187, Saladin took possession of St. Jean d'Acre, and, on the 4th of September following, of Ascalon. Finally, on the 18th of September, he laid siege to Jerusalem, wherein refuge had been sought by a multitude of Christian families driven from their homes by the ravages of the infidels throughout Palestine; and the Holy City contained at this time, it is said, nearly one hundred thousand Christians. On approaching its walls, Saladin sent for the principal inhabitants, and said to them, "I know as well as you that Jerusalem is the house of God; and I will not have it assaulted if I can get it by peace and love. I will give you thirty thousand byzants of gold if you promise me Jerusalem, and you shall have liberty to go whither you will and do your tillage, to a distance of five miles from the city. And I will have you sup-plied with such plenty of provisions that in no place on earth shall they be so cheap. You shall have a truce from now to Whitsuntide, and when this time comes, if you see that you may have aid, then hold on. But if not, you shall give up the city, and I will have you conveyed in safety to Christian territory, yourselves and your substance." "We may not yield up to you a city where died our God," answered the envoys: "and still less may we sell you." The siege lasted fourteen days. After having repulsed several assaults, the inhabitants saw that effectual resistance was impossible; and the commandant of the place, a knight named Dalian d'Ibelin, an old warrior, who had been at the battle of Tiberias, returned to Saladin, and asked for the conditions back again which had at first been rejected. Saladin, pointing to his own banner already planted upon several parts of the battlements, answered, "It is too late; you surely see that the city is mine." "Very well, my lord," replied the knight: "we will ourselves destroy our city, and the mosque of Omar, and the stone of Jacob: and when it is nothing but a heap of ruins, we will sally forth with sword and fire in hand, and not one of us will go to Paradise without having sent ten Mussulmans to hell." Saladin understood enthusiasm, and respected it; and to have had the destruction of Jerusalem connected with his name would' have caused him deep displeasure. He therefore consented to the terms of capitulation demanded of him. The fighting men were permitted to retreat to Tyre or Tripolis, the last cities of any importance, besides Antioch, in the power of the Christians; and the simple inhabitants of Jerusalem had their lives preserved, and permission given them to purchase their freedom on certain conditions; but, as many amongst them could not find the means, Malek-Adhel, the sultan's brother, and Saladin himself paid the ransom of several thousands of captives. All Christians, however, with the exception of Greeks and Syrians, had orders to leave Jerusalem within four days. When the day came, all the gates were closed, except that of David by which the people were to go forth; and Saladin, seated upon a throne, saw the Christians defile before him. First came the patriarch, followed by the clergy, carrying the sacred vessels, and the ornaments of the church of the Holy Sepulchre. After him came Sibylla, Queen of Jerusalem, who had remained in the city, whilst her husband, Guy de Lusignan, had been a prisoner at Nablous since the battle of Tiberias. Saladin saluted her respectfully, and spoke to her kindly. He had too great a soul to take pleasure in the humiliation of greatness.
The news, spreading through Europe, caused amongst all classes there, high and low, a deep feeling of sorrow, anger, disquietude, and shame. Jerusalem was a very different thing from Edessa. The fall of the kingdom of Jerusalem meant the sepulchre of Jesus Christ fallen once more into the hands of the infidels, and, at the same time, the destruction of what had been wrought by Christian Europe in the East, the loss of the only striking and permanent gage of her victories. Christian pride was as much wounded as Christian piety. A new fact, moreover, was conspicuous in this series of reverses and in the accounts received of them; after all its defeats and in the midst of its discord, Islamry had found a chieftain and a hero. Saladin was one of those strange and superior beings who, by their qualities and by their very defects, make a strong impression upon the imaginations of men, whether friends or foes. His Mussulman fanaticism was quite as impassioned as the Christian fanaticism of the most ardent crusaders. When he heard that Reginald of Chatillon, Lord of Karat, on the confines of Palestine and Arabia, had all but succeeded in an attempt to go and pillage the Caaba and the tomb of Mahomet, he wrote to his brother Malek-Adhel, at that time governor of Egypt, "The infidels have violated the home and the cradle of Islamism; they have profaned our sanctuary. Did we not prevent a like insult (which God forbid!) we should render ourselves guilty in the eyes of God and the eyes of men. Purge we, therefore, our land from these men who dishonor it; purge we the very air from the air they breathe." He commanded that all the Christians who could possibly be captured on this occasion should be put to death; and many were taken to Mecca, where the Mussulman pilgrims immolated them instead of the sheep and lambs they were accustomed to sacrifice. The expulsion of the Christians from Palestine was Saladin's great idea and unwavering passion; and he severely chid the Mussulmans for their soft-heartedness in the struggle. "Behold these Christians," he wrote to the Khalif of Bagdad, "how they come crowding in! How emulously they press on! They are continually receiving fresh re-enforcements more numerous than the waves of the sea, and to us more bitter than its brackish waters. Where one dies by land, a thousand come by sea. . . . The crop is more abundant than the harvest; the tree puts forth more branches than the axe can lop off. It is true that great numbers have already perished, insomuch that the edge of our swords is blunted; but our comrades are beginning to grow weary of so long a war. Haste we, therefore, to implore the help of the Lord." Nor needed he the excuse of passion in order to be cruel and sanguinary when he considered it would serve his cause; for human lives and deaths he had that barbaric indifference which Christianity alone has rooted out from the communities of men, whilst it has remained familiar to the Mussulman. When he found himself, either during or after a battle, confronted by enemies whom he really dreaded, such as the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem or the Templars, he had them massacred, and sometimes gave them their death-blow himself, with cool satisfaction. But, apart from open war and the hatred inspired by passion or cold calculation, he was moderate and generous, gentle towards the vanquished and the weak, just and compassionate towards his subjects, faithful to his engagements, and capable of feeling sympathetic admiration for men, even his enemies, in whom he recognized superior qualities, courage, loyalty, and loftiness of mind. For Christian knighthood, its precepts and the noble character it stamped upon its professors, he felt so much respect and even inclination that the wish of his heart, it is said, was to receive the title of knight, and that he did, in fact, receive it with the approval of Richard Coeur de Lion. By reason of all these facts and on all these grounds he acquired, even amongst the Christians, that popularity which attaches itself to greatness justified by personal deeds and living proofs, in spite of the fear and even the hatred inspired thereby. Christian Europe saw in him the able and potent chief of Mussulman Asia, and, whilst detesting, admired him.
After the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin, the Christians of the East, in their distress, sent to the West their most eloquent prelate and gravest historian William, Archbishop of Tyre, who, fifteen years before, in the reign of Baldwin IV., had been Chancellor of the kingdom of Jerusalem. He, accompanied by a legate of Pope Gregory VIII., scoured Italy, France, and Germany, recounting everywhere the miseries of the Holy Land, and imploring the aid of all Christian princes and peoples, whatever might be their own position of affairs and their own quarrels in Europe. At a parliament assembled at Gisors, on the 21st of January, 1188, and at a diet convoked at Mayence on the 27th of March following, he so powerfully affected the knighthood of France, England, and Germany, that the three sovereigns of these three states, Philip Augustus, Richard Coeur de Lion, and Frederick Barbarossa, engaged with acclamation in a new crusade. They were princes of very different ages and degrees of merit, but all three distinguished for their personal qualities as well as their puissance. Frederick Barbarossa was sixty-seven, and for the last thirty-six years had been leading, in Germany and Italy, as politician and soldier, a very active and stormy existence. Richard Coeur de Lion was thirty-one, and had but just ascended the throne where he was to shine as the most valiant and adventurous of knights rather than as a king. Philip Augustus, though only twenty-three, had already shown signs, beneath the vivacious sallies of youth, of the reflective and steady ability characteristic of riper age. Of these three sovereigns, the eldest, Frederick Barbarossa, was first ready to plunge amongst the perils of the crusade. Starting from Ratisbonne about Christmas, 1189, with an army of one hundred and fifty thousand men, he traversed the Greek empire and Asia Minor, defeated the Sultan of Iconium, passed the first defiles of Taurus, and seemed to be approaching the object of his voyage, when, on the 10th of June, 1190, having arrived at the borders of the Selef, a small river which throws itself into the Mediterranean close to Seleucia, he determined to cross it by fording, was seized with a chill, and, according to some, drowned before his people's eyes, but, according to others, carried dying to Seleucia, where he expired. His young son Conrad, Duke of Suabia, was not equal to taking the command of such an army; and it broke up.
The majority of the German princes returned to Europe: and "there remained beneath the banner of Christ only a weak band of warriors faithful to their vow, a boy-chief, and a bier. When the crusaders of the other nations, assembled before St. Jean d'Acre, saw the remnant of that grand German army arrive, not a soul could restrain his tears. Three thousand men, all but stark naked, and harassed to death, marched sorrowfully along, with the dried bones of their emperor carried in a coffin. For, in the twelfth century, the art of embalming the dead was unknown. Barbarossa, before leaving Europe, had asked that, if he should die in the crusade, he might be buried in the church of the Resurrection at Jerusalem; but this wish could not be accomplished, as the Christians did not recover the Holy City, and the mortal remains of the emperor were carried, as some say, to Tyre, and, as others, to Antioch, Where his tomb has not been discovered." (Histoire de la Lutte des Papes et des Empereurs de la Maison de Souabe, by M. de Cherrier, Member of the Institute, t. i., p. 222.)
Frederick Barbarossa was already dead in Asia Minor, and the German army was already broken up, when, on the 24th of June, 1190, Philip Augustus went and took the oriflamme at St. Denis, on his way to Vezelai, where he had appointed to meet Richard, and whence the two kings, in fact, set out, on the 4th of July, to embark with their troops, Philip at Genoa, and Richard at Marseilles. They had agreed to touch nowhere until they reached Sicily, where Philip was the first to arrive, on the 16th of September; and Richard was eight days later. But, instead of simply touching, they passed at Messina all the autumn of 1190, and all the winter of 1190-91, no longer seeming to think of anything but quarrelling and amusing themselves. Nor were grounds for quarrel or opportunities for amusements to seek. Richard, in spite of his promise, was unwilling to marry the Princess Alice, Philip's sister; and Philip, after lively discussion, would not agree to give him back his word, save "in consideration of a sum of ten thousand silver marks, whereof he shall pay us three thousand at the feast of All Saints, and year by year in succession, at this same feast." Some of their amusements were not more refined than their family arrangements, and ruffianly contests and violent enmities sprang up amidst the feasts and the games in which kings and knights nearly every evening indulged in the plains round about Messina. One day there came amongst the crusaders thus assembled a peasant driving an ass, laden with those long and strong reeds known by the name of canes. English and French, with Richard at their head, bought them of him; and, mounting on horseback, ran tilt at one another, armed with these reeds by way of lances. Richard found himself opposite to a French knight, named William des Barres, of whose strength and valor he had already, not without displeasure, had experience in Normandy. The two champions met with so rude a shock that their reeds broke, and the king's cloak was torn. Richard, in pique, urged his horse violently against the French knight, in order to make him lose his stirrups; but William kept a firm seat, whilst the king fell under his horse, which came down in his impetuosity. Richard, more and more exasperated, had another horse brought, and charged a second time, but with no more success, the immovable knight. One of Richard's favorites, the Earl of Leicester, would have taken his place, and avenged his lord; but "let be, Robert," said the king: "it is a matter between him and me;" and he once more attacked William des Barres, and once more to no purpose. "Fly from my sight," cried he to the knight, "and take care never to appear again; for I will be ever a mortal foe to thee, to thee and thine." William des Barres, somewhat discomfited, went in search of the King of France, to put himself under his protection. Philip accordingly paid a visit to Richard, who merely said, "I'll not hear a word." It needed nothing less than the prayers of the bishops, and even, it is said, a threat of excommunication, to induce Richard to grant William des Barres the king's peace during the time of pilgrimage.
Such a comrade was assuredly very inconvenient, and might be under difficult circumstances very dangerous. Philip, without being susceptible or quarrelsome, was naturally independent, and disposed to act, on every occasion, according to his own ideas. He resolved, not to break with Richard, but to divide their commands, and separate their fortunes. On the approach of spring, 1191, he announced to him that the time had arrived for continuing their pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and that, as for himself, he was quite ready to set out. "I am not ready," said Richard; "and I cannot depart before the middle of August." Philip, after some discussion, set out alone, with his army, on the 30th of March, and on the 14th of April arrived before St. Jean d'Acre. This important place, of which Saladin had made himself master nearly four years before, was being besieged by the last King of Jerusalem, Guy de Lusignan, at the head of the Christians of Palestine, and by a multitude of crusaders, Genoese, Danish, Flemish, and German, who had flocked freely to the enterprise. A strong and valiant Mussulman garrison was defending St. Jean d'Acre. Saladin manoeuvred incessantly for its relief, and several battles had already been fought beneath the walls. "When the King of France arrived, he was received by the Christians besieging," say the chronicles of St. Denis, "with supreme joy, as if he were an angel come down from heaven.". Philip set vigorously to work to push on the siege; but at his departure he had promised Richard not to deliver the grand assault until they had formed a junction before the place with all their forces. Richard, who had set out from Messina at the beginning of May, though he had said that he would not be ready till August, lingered again on the way to reduce the island of Cyprus, and to celebrate there his marriage with Berengaria of Navarre, in lieu of Alice of France. At last he arrived, on the 7th of June, before St. Jean d'Acre; and several assaults in succession were made on the place with equal determination on the part of the besiegers and the besieged. "The tumultuous waves of the Franks," says an Arab historian, "rolled towards the walls of the city with the rapidity of a torrent; and they climbed the half-ruined battlements as wild goats climb precipitous rocks, whilst the Saracens threw themselves upon the besiegers like stones unloosed from the top of a mountain." At length, on the 13th of July, 1191, in spite of the energetic resistance offered by the garrison, which defended itself "as a lion defends his blood-stained den," St. Jean d'Acre surrendered. The terms of capitulation stated that two hundred thousand pieces of gold should be paid to the chiefs of the Christian army; that sixteen hundred prisoners and the wood of the true cross should be given up to them; and that the garrison as well as all the people of the town should remain in the conquerors' power, pending full execution of the treaty.
Whilst the siege was still going on, the discord between the Kings of France and England was increasing in animosity and venom. The conquest of Cyprus had become a new subject of dispute. When the French were most eager for the assault, King Richard remained in his tent; and so the besieged had scarcely ever to repulse more than one or other of the kings and armies at a time. Saladin, it is said, showed Richard particular attention, sending him grapes and pears from Damascus; and Philip conceived some mistrust of these relations. In camp the common talk, combined with anxious curiosity, was, that Philip was jealous of Richard's warlike popularity, and Richard was jealous of the power and political weight of the King of France.
When St. Jean d'Acre had been taken, the judicious Philip, in view of what it had cost the Christians of East and West, in time and blood, to recover this single town, considered that a fresh and complete conquest of Palestine and Syria, which was absolutely necessary for a re-establishment of the kingdom of Jerusalem, was impossible: he had discharged what he owed to the crusade; and the course now permitted and prescribed to him was to give his attention to France. The news he received from home was not encouraging; his son Louis, hardly four years old, had been dangerously ill; and he himself fell ill, and remained some days in bed, in the midst of the town he had just conquered. His enemies called his illness in question, for already there was a rumor abroad that he had an idea of giving up the crusade, and returning to France; but the details given by contemporary chroniclers about the effects of his illness scarcely permit it to be regarded as a sham. "Violent sweats," they say, "committed such havoc with his bones and all his members, that the nails fell from his fingers and the hair from his head, insomuch that it was believed—and, indeed, the rumor is not yet dispelled—that he had taken a deadly poison." There was nothing strange in Philip's illness, after all his fatigues, in such a country and such a season; Saladin, too, was ill at the same time, and more than once unable to take part with his troops in their engagements. But, however that may be, a contemporary English chronicler, Benedict, Abbot of Peterborough, relates that, on the 22d of July, 1191, whilst King Richard was playing chess with the Earl of Gloucester, the Bishop of Beauvais, the Duke of Burgundy, and two knights of consideration, presented themselves before him on behalf of the King of France. "They were dissolved in tears," says he, "in such sort they could not utter a single word; and, seeing them so moved, those present wept in their turn for pity's sake. 'Weep not,' said King Richard to them; 'I know what ye be come to ask; your lord, the King of France, desireth to go home again, and ye be come in his name to ask on his behalf my counsel and leave to get him gone.' 'It is true, sir; you know all,' answered the messengers; 'our king sayeth, that if he depart not speedily from this land, he will surely die.' 'It will be for him and for the kingdom of France,' replied King Richard, 'eternal shame, if he go home without fulfilling the work for the which he came, and he shall not go hence by my advice; but if he must die or return home, let him do what he will, and what may appear to him expedient for him, for him and his.'" The source from which this story comes, and the tone of it, are enough to take from it all authority; for it is the custom of monastic chroniclers to attribute to political or military characters emotions and demonstrations alien to their position and their times. Philip Augustus, moreover, was one of the most decided, most insensible to any other influence but that of his own mind, and most disregardful of his enemies' bitter speeches, of all the kings in French history. He returned to France after the capture of St. Jean d' Acre, because he considered the ultimate success of the crusade impossible, and his return necessary for the interests of France and for his own. He was right in thus thinking and acting; and King Richard, when insultingly reproaching him for it, did not foresee that, a year later, he would himself be doing the same thing, and would give up the crusade without having obtained anything more for Christendom, except fresh reverses.
On the 31st of July, 1191, Philip, leaving with the army of the crusaders ten thousand foot and five hundred knights, under the command of Duke Hugh of Burgundy, who had orders to obey King Richard, set sail for France; and, a few days after Christmas in the same year, landed in his kingdom, and forth-with resumed, at Fontainebleau according to some, and at Paris according to others, the regular direction of his government. We shall see before long with what intelligent energy and with what success he developed and consolidated the territorial greatness of France and the influence of the kingship, to her security in Europe and her prosperity at home.
From the 1st of August, 1191, to the 9th of October, 1192, King Richard remained alone in the East as chief of the crusade and defender of Christendom. He pertains, during that period, to the history of England, and no longer to that of France. We will, however, recall a few facts to show how fruitless, for the cause of Christendom in the East, was the prolongation of his stay and what strange deeds—at one time of savage barbarism, and at another of mad pride or fantastic knight-errantry—were united in him with noble instincts and the most heroic courage. On the 20th of August, 1191, five weeks after the surrender of St. Jean d'Acre, he found that Saladin was not fulfilling with sufficient promptitude the conditions of capitulation, and, to bring him up to time, he ordered the decapitation, before the walls of the place, of, according to some, twenty-five hundred, and, according to others, five thousand, Mussulman prisoners remaining in his hands.
The only effect of this massacre was, that during Richard's first campaign after Philip's departure for France, Saladin put to the sword all the Christians taken in battle or caught straggling, and ordered their bodies to be left without burial, as those of the garrison of St. Jean d'Acre had been. Some months afterwards Richard conceived the idea of putting an end to the struggle between Christendom and Islamry, which he was not succeeding in terminating by war, by a marriage. He had a sister, Joan of England, widow of William II., king of Sicily; and Saladin had a brother, Malek-Adhel, a valiant warrior, respected by the Christians. Richard had proposals made to Saladin to unite them in marriage and set them to reign together over the Christians and Mussulmans in the kingdom of Jerusalem. The only result of the negotiation was to give Saladin time for repairing the fortifications of Jerusalem, and to bring down upon King Richard and his sister, on the part of the Christian bishops, the fiercest threats of the fulminations of the Church. With the exception of this ridiculous incident, Richard's life, during the whole course of this year, was nothing but a series of great or small battles, desperately contested, against Saladin. When Richard had obtained a success, he pursued it in a haughty, passionate spirit; when he suffered a check, he offered Saladin peace, but always on condition of surrendering Jerusalem to the Christians, and Saladin always answered, "Jerusalem never was yours, and we may not without sin give it up to you; for it is the place where the mysteries of our religion were accomplished, and the last one of my soldiers will perish before the Mussulmans renounce conquests made in the name of Mahomet." Twice Richard and his army drew near Jerusalem, "without his daring to look upon it, he said, since he was not in a condition to take it." At last, in the summer of 1192, the two armies and the two chiefs began to be weary of a war without result. A great one, however, for Saladin and the Mussulmans was the departure of Richard and the crusaders. Being unable to agree about conditions for a definitive peace, they contented themselves, on both sides, with a truce for three years and eight months, leaving Jerusalem in possession of the Mussulmans, but open for worship to the Christians, in whose hands remained, at the same time, the towns they were in occupation of on the maritime coast, from Jaffa to Tyre. This truce, which was called peace, having received the signature of all the Christian and Mussulman princes, was celebrated by galas and tournaments, at which Christians and Mussulmans seemed for a moment to have forgotten their hate; and on the 9th of October, 1192, Richard embarked at St. Jean d'Acre to go and run other risks.
Thus ended the third crusade, undertaken by the three greatest sovereigns and the three greatest armies of Christian Europe, and with the loudly proclaimed object of retaking Jerusalem from the infidels, and re-establishing a king over the sepulchre of Jesus Christ. The Emperor Frederick Barbarossa perished in it before he had trodden the soil of Palestine. King Philip Augustus retired from it voluntarily, so soon as experience had foreshadowed to him the impossibility of success. King Richard abandoned it perforce, after having exhausted upon it his heroism and his knightly pride. The three armies, at the moment of departure from Europe, amounted, according to the historians of the time, to five or six hundred thousand men, of whom scarcely one hundred thousand returned; and the only result of the third crusade was to leave as head over all the most beautiful provinces of Mussulman Asia and Africa, Saladin, the most illustrious and most able chieftain, in war and in politics, that Islamry had produced since Mahomet.
From the end of the twelfth to the middle of the thirteenth century, between the crusade of Philip Augustus and that of St. Louis, it is usual to count three crusades, over which we will not linger. Two of these crusades—one, from 1195 to 1198, under Henry VI., Emperor of Germany, and the other, from 1216 to 1240, under the Emperor Frederick II. and Andrew II., King of Hungary—are unconnected with France, and almost exclusively German, or, in origin and range, confined to Eastern Europe. They led, in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, to wars, negotiations, and manifold complications; Jerusalem fell once more, for a while, into the hands of the Christians; and there, on the 18th of March, 1229, in the church of the Resurrection, the Emperor Frederick II., at that time excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX., placed with his own hands the royal crown upon his head. But these events, confused, disconnected, and short-lived as they were, did not produce in the West, and especially in France, any considerable reverberation, and did not exercise upon the relative situations of Europe and Asia, of Christendom and Islamry, any really historical influence. In people's lives, and in the affairs of the world, there are many movements of no significance, and more cry than wool; and those facts only which have had some weight and some duration are here to be noted for study and comprehension. The event which has been called the fifth crusade was not wanting, so far, in real importance, and it would have to be described here, if it had been really a crusade; but it does not deserve the name. The crusades were a very different thing from wars and conquests; their real and peculiar characteristic was, that they should be struggles between Christianity and Islamism, between the fruitful civilization of Europe and the barbarism and stagnation of Asia. Therein consist their originality and their grandeur. It was certainly on this understanding, and with this view, that Pope Innocent III., one of the greatest men of the thirteenth century, seconded with all his might the movement which was at that time springing up again in favor of a fresh crusade, and which brought about, in 1202, an alliance between a great number of powerful lords, French, Flemish, and Italian, and the republic of Venice, for the purpose of recovering Jerusalem from the infidels. But from the very first, the ambition, the opportunities, and the private interests of the Venetians, combined with a recollection of the perfidy displayed by the Greek emperors, diverted the new crusaders from the design they had proclaimed. What Bohemond, during the first crusade, had proposed to Godfrey de Bouillon, and what the Bishop of Langres, during the second, had suggested to Louis the Young, namely, the capture of Constantinople for the sake of insuring that of Jerusalem, the first crusaders of the thirteenth century were led by bias, greed, anger, and spite to take in hand and accomplish; they conquered Constantinople, and, having once made that conquest, they troubled themselves no more about Jerusalem. Founded, May 16th, 1204, in the person of Baldwin IX., Count of Flanders, the Latin empire of the East existed for seventy years, in the teeth of many a storm, only to fall once more, in 1273, into the hands of the Greek emperors, overthrown in 1453 by the Turks, who are still in possession.
One circumstance, connected rather with literature than politics, gives Frenchmen a particular interest in this conquest of the Greek empire by the Latin Christians; for it was a Frenchman, Geoffrey de Villehardouin, seneschal of Theobald III., Count of Champagne, who, after having been one of the chief actors in it, wrote the history of it; and his work, strictly historical as to facts, and admirably epic in description of character and warmth of coloring, is one of the earliest and finest monuments of French literature.
But to return to the real crusades.
At the beginning of the thirteenth century, whilst the enterprises which were still called crusades were becoming more and more degenerate in character and potency, there was born in France, on the 25th of April, 1215, not merely the prince, but the man who was to be the most worthy representative and the most devoted slave of that religious and moral passion which had inspired the crusades. Louis IX., though born to the purple, a powerful king, a valiant warrior, a splendid knight, and an object of reverence to all those who at a distance observed his life, and of affection to all those who approached his person, was neither biassed nor intoxicated by any such human glories and delights; neither in his thoughts nor in his conduct did they ever occupy the foremost place; before all and above all he wished to be, and was indeed, a Christian, a true Christian, guided and governed by the idea and the resolve of defending the Christian faith and fulfilling the Christian law. Had he been born in the most lowly condition, as the world holds, or, as religion, the most commanding; had he been obscure, needy, a priest, a monk, or a hermit, he could not have been more constantly and more zealously filled with the desire of living as a faithful servant of Jesus Christ, and of insuring, by pious obedience to God here, the salvation of his soul hereafter. This is the peculiar and original characteristic of St. Louis, and a fact rare and probably unique in the history of kings. (He was canonized on the 11th of August, 1297; and during twenty-four years nine successive popes had prosecuted the customary inquiries as to his faith and life.)
It is said that the Christian enthusiasm of St. Louis had its source in the strict education he received from Queen Blanche, his mother. That is overstepping the limits of that education and of her influence. Queen Blanche, though a firm believer and steadfastly pious, was a stranger to enthusiasm, and too discreet and too politic to make it the dominating principle of her son's life any more than of her own. The truth of the matter is that, by her watchfulness and her exactitude in morals, she helped to impress upon her son the great Christian lesson of hatred for sin and habitual concern for the eternal salvation of his soul. "Madame used to say of me," Louis was constantly repeating, "that if I were sick unto death, and could not be cured save by acting in such wise that I should sin mortally, she would let me die rather than that I should anger my Creator to my damnation."
In the first years of his government, when he had reached his majority, there was nothing to show that the idea of the crusade occupied Louis IX.'s mind; and it was only in 1239, when he was now four and twenty, that it showed itself vividly in him. Some of his principal vassals, the Counts of Champagne, Brittany, and Macon, had raised an army of crusaders, and were getting ready to start for Palestine; and the king was not contented with giving them encouragement, but "he desired that Amaury de Montfort, his constable, should, in his name, serve Jesus Christ in this war; and for that reason he gave him arms and assigned to him per day a sum of money, for which Amaury thanked him on his knees, that is, did him homage, according to the usage of those times. And the crusaders were mighty pleased to have this lord with them."
Five years afterwards, at the close of 1244, Louis fell seriously ill at Pontoise; the alarm and sorrow in the kingdom were extreme; the king himself believed that his last hour was come; and he had all his household summoned, thanked them for their kind attentions, recommended them to be good servants of God, "and did all that a good Christian ought to do. His mother, his wife, his brothers, and all who were about him kept continually praying for him; his mother, beyond all others, adding to her prayers great austerities." Once he appeared motionless and breathless; and he was supposed to be dead. "One of the dames who were tending him," says Joinville, "would have drawn the sheet over his face, saying that he was dead; but another dame, who was on the other side of the bed, would not suffer it, saying that there was still life in his body. When the king heard the dispute between these two dames, our Lord wrought in him: he began to sigh, stretched his arms and legs, and said, in a hollow voice, as if he had come forth from the tomb, 'He, by God's grace, hath visited me, He who cometh from on high, and hath recalled me from amongst the dead.' Scarcely had he recovered his senses and speech, when he sent for William of Auvergne, Bishop of Paris, together with Peter de Cuisy, Bishop of Meaux, in whose diocese he happened to be, and requested them 'to place upon his shoulder the cross of the voyage over the sea.' The two bishops tried to divert him from this idea, and the two queens, Blanche and Marguerite, conjured him on their knees to wait till he was well, and after that he might do as he pleased. He insisted, declaring that he would take no nourishment till he had received the cross. At last the Bishop of Paris yielded, and gave him a cross. The king received it with transport, kissing it, and placing it right gently Upon his breast." "When the queen, his mother, knew that he had taken the cross," says Joinville, "she made as great mourning as if she had seen him dead."
Still more than three years rolled by before Louis fulfilled the engagement which he had thus entered into, with himself alone, one might say, and against the wish of nearly everybody about him. The crusades, although they still remained an object of religious and knightly aspiration, were from the political point of view decried; and, without daring to say so, many men of weight, lay or ecclesiastical, had no desire to take part in them. Under the influence of this public feeling, timidly exhibited but seriously cherished, Louis continued, for three years, to apply himself to the interior concerns of his kingdom and to his relations with the European powers, as if he had no other idea. There was a moment when his wisest counsellors and the queen his mother conceived a hope of inducing him to give up his purpose. "My lord king," said one day that same Bishop of Paris, who, in the crisis of his illness, had given way to his wishes, "bethink you that, when you received the cross, when you suddenly and without reflection made this awful vow, you were weak, and, sooth to say, of a wandering mind, and that took away from your words the weight of verity and authority. Our lord the pope, who knoweth the necessities of your kingdom and your weakness of body, will gladly grant unto you a dispensation. Lo! we have the puissance of the schismatic Emperor Frederick, the snares of the wealthy King of the English, the treasons but lately stopped of the Poitevines, and the subtle wranglings of the Albigensians to fear; Germany is disturbed; Italy hath no rest; the Holy Land is hard of access; you will not easily penetrate thither, and behind you will be left the implacable hatred between the pope and Frederick. To whom will you leave us, every one of us, in our feebleness and desolation?" Queen Blanche appealed to other considerations, the good counsels she had always given her son, and the pleasure God took in seeing a son giving heed to and believing his mother; and to hers she promised, that, if he would remain, the Holy Land should not suffer, and that more troops should be sent thither than he could lead thither himself. The king listened attentively and with deep emotion. "You say," he answered, "that I was not in possession of my senses when I took the cross. Well, as you wish it, I lay it aside; I give it back to you;" and raising his hand to his shoulder, he undid the cross upon it, saying, "Here it is, my lord bishop; I restore to you the cross I had put on." All present congratulated themselves; but the king, with a sudden change of look and intention, said to them, "My friends, now, assuredly, I lack not sense and reason; I am neither weak nor wandering of mind; and I demand my cross back again. He who knoweth all things knoweth that until it is replaced upon my shoulder, no food shall enter my lips." At these words all present declared that "herein was the finger of God, and none dared to raise, in opposition to the king's saying, any objection."
In June, 1248, Louis, after having received at St. Denis, together with the oriflamme, the scrip and staff of a pilgrim, took leave, at Corbeil or Cluny, of his mother, Queen Blanche, whom he left regent during his absence, with the fullest powers. "Most sweet fair son," said she, embracing him; "fair tender son, I shall never see you more; full well my heart assures me." He took with him Queen Marguerite of Provence, his wife, who had declared that she would never part from him. On arriving, in the early part of August, at Aigues-Mortes, he found assembled there a fleet of thirty-eight vessels with a certain number of transport-ships which he had hired from the republic of Genoa; and they were to convey to the East the troops and personal retinue of the king himself. The number of these vessels proves that Louis was far from bringing one of those vast armies with which the first crusades had been familiar; it even appears that he had been careful to get rid of such mobs, for, before embarking, he sent away nearly ten thousand bow-men, Genoese, Venetian, Pisan, and even French, whom he had at first engaged, and of whom, after inspection, he desired nothing further. The sixth crusade was the personal achievement of St. Louis, not the offspring of a popular movement, and he carried it out with a picked army, furnished by the feudal chivalry and by the religious and military orders dedicated to the service of the Holy Land.
The Isle of Cyprus was the trysting-place appointed for all the forces of the expedition. Louis arrived there on the 12th of September, 1248, and reckoned upon remaining there only a few days; for it was Egypt that he was in a hurry to reach. The Christian world was at that time of opinion that, to deliver the Holy Land, it was necessary first of all to strike a blow at Islamism in Egypt, wherein its chief strength resided. But scarcely had the crusaders formed a junction in Cyprus, when the vices of the expedition and the weaknesses of its chief began to be manifest. Louis, unshakable in his religious zeal, was wanting in clear ideas and fixed resolves as to the carrying out of his design; he inspired his associates with sympathy rather than exercised authority over them, and he made himself admired without making himself obeyed. He did not succeed in winning a majority in the council of chiefs over to his opinion as to the necessity for a speedy departure for Egypt; it was decided to pass the winter in Cyprus, and during this leisurely halt of seven months, the improvidence of the crusaders, their ignorance of the places, people, and facts amidst which they were about to launch themselves, their headstrong rashness, their stormy rivalries, and their moral and military irregularities aggravated the difficulties of the enterprise, great as they already were. Louis passed his time in interfering between them, in hushing up their quarrels, in upbraiding them for their licentiousness, and in reconciling the Templars and Hospitallers. His kindness was injurious to his power; he lent too ready an ear to the wishes or complaints of his comrades, and small matters took up his thoughts and his time almost as much as great.
At last a start was made from Cyprus in May, 1249, and, in spite of violent gales of wind which dispersed a large number of vessels, they arrived on the 4th of June before Damietta.
The crusader-chiefs met on board the king's ship, the Mountjoy; and one of those present, Guy, a knight in the train of the Count of Melun, in a letter to one of his friends; a student at Paris, reports to him the king's address in the following terms: "My friends and lieges, we shall be invincible if we be inseparable in brotherly love. It was not without the will of God that we arrived here so speedily. Descend we upon this land and occupy it in force. I am not the King of France. I am not Holy Church. It is all ye who are King and Holy Church. I am but a man whose life will pass away as that of any other man whenever it shall please God. Any issue of our expedition is to usward good; if we be conquered we shall wing our way to heaven as martyrs; and if we be conquerors, men will celebrate the glory of the Lord; and that of France, and, what is more, that of Christendom, will grow thereby. It were senseless to suppose that God, whose providence is over everything, raised me up for nought: He will see in us His own, His mighty cause. Fight we for Christ; it is Christ who will triumph in us, not for our own sake, but for the honor and blessedness of His name." It was determined to disembark the next day. An army of Saracens lined the shore. The galley which bore the oriflamme was one of the first to touch. When the king heard tell that the banner of St. Denis was on shore, he, in spite of the pope's legate, who was with him, would not leave it; he leaped into the sea, which was up to his arm-pits, and went, shield on neck, helm on head, and lance in hand, and joined his people on the sea-shore. When he came to land, and perceived the Saracens, he asked what folk they were, and it was told him that they were the Saracens; then he put his lance beneath his arm and his shield in front of him, and would have charged the Saracens, if his mighty men, who were with him, had suffered him.
This, from his very first outset, was Louis exactly, the most fervent of Christians and the most splendid of knights, much rather than a general and a king.
Such he appeared at the moment of landing, and such he was during the whole duration, and throughout all the incidents of his campaign in Egypt, from June, 1249, to May, 1250: ever admirable for his moral greatness and knightly valor, but without foresight or consecutive plan as a leader, without efficiency as a commander in action, and ever decided or biassed either by his own momentary impressions or the fancies of his comrades. He took Damietta without the least difficulty. The Mussulmans, stricken with surprise as much as terror, abandoned the place; and when Fakr-Eddin, the commandant of the Turks, came before the Sultan of Egypt, Malek-Saleh, who was ill, and almost dying, "Couldst thou not have held out for at least an instant?" said the sultan. "What! not a single one of you got slain!" Having become masters of Damietta, St. Louis and the crusaders committed the same fault there as in the Isle of Cyprus: they halted there for an indefinite time. They were expecting fresh crusaders; and they spent the time of expectation in quarrelling over the partition of the booty taken in the city. They made away with it, they wasted it blindly. "The barons," said Joinville, "took to giving grand banquets, with an excess of meats; and the people of the common sort took up with bad women." Louis saw and deplored these irregularities, without being in a condition to stop them.
At length, on the 20th of November, 1249, after more than five months' inactivity at Damietta, the crusaders put themselves once more in motion, with the determination of marching upon Babylon, that outskirt of Cairo, now called Old Cairo, which the greater part of them, in their ignorance, mistook for the real Babylon, and where they flattered themselves they would find immense riches, and avenge the olden sufferings of the Hebrew captives. The Mussulmans had found time to recover from their first fright, and to organize, at all points, a vigorous resistance. On the 8th of February, 1250, a battle took place twenty leagues from Damietta, at Mansourah (the city of victory), on the right bank of the Nile. The king's brother, Robert, Count of Artois, marched with the vanguard, and obtained an early success; but William de Sonnac, grand master of the Templars, and William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, leader of the English crusaders but lately arrived at Damietta, insisted upon his waiting for the king before pushing the victory to the uttermost. Robert taxed them, ironically, with caution. "Count Robert," said William Longsword, "we shall be presently where thou'lt not dare to come nigh the tail of my horse." There came a message from the king ordering his brother to wait for him; but Robert made no account of it. "I have already put the Saracens to flight," said he, "and I will wait for none to complete their defeat;" and he rushed forward into Mansourah. All those who had dissuaded him followed after; they found the Mussulmans numerous and perfectly rallied; in a few moments the Count of Artois fell, pierced with wounds, and more than three hundred knights of his train, the same number of English, together with their leader, William Longsword, and two hundred and eighty Templars, paid with their lives for the senseless ardor of the French prince.
The king hurried up in all haste to the aid of his brother; but he had scarcely arrived, and as yet knew nothing of his brother's fate, when he himself engaged so impetuously in the battle that he was on the point of being taken prisoner by six Saracens who had already seized the reins of his horse. He was defending himself vigorously with his sword, when several of his knights came up with him, and set him free. He asked one of them if he had any news of his brother; and the other answered, "Certainly I have news of him: for I am sure that he is now in Paradise." "Praised be God!" answered the king, with a tear or two, and went on with his fighting. The battle-field was left that day to the crusaders; but they were not allowed to occupy it as conquerors, for, three days afterwards, on the 11th of February, 1250, the camp of St. Louis was assailed by clouds of Saracens, horse and foot, Mamelukes and Bedouins. All surprise had vanished, the Mussulmans measured at a glance the numbers of the Christians, and attacked them in full assurance of success, whatever heroism they might display; and the crusaders themselves indulged in no more self-illusion, and thought only of defending themselves. Lack of provisions and sickness soon rendered defence almost as impossible as attack; every day saw the Christian camp more and more encumbered with the famine-stricken, the dying, and the dead; and the necessity for retreating became evident. Louis made to the Sultan Malek-Moaddam an offer to evacuate Egypt, and give up Damietta, provided that the kingdom of Jerusalem were restored to the Christians, and the army permitted to accomplish its retreat without obstruction. The sultan, without accepting or rejecting the proposition, asked what guarantees would be given him for the surrender of Damietta. Louis offered as hostage one of his brothers, the Count of Anjou, or the Count of Poitiers. "We must have the king himself," said the Mussulmans. A unanimous cry of indignation arose amongst the crusaders. "We would rather," said Geoffrey de Sargines, "that we had been all slain, or taken prisoners by the Saracens, than be reproached with having left our king in pawn." All negotiation was broken off; and on the 5th of April, 1250, the crusaders decided upon retreating.
This was the most deplorable scene of a deplorable drama; and at the same time it was, for the king, an occasion for displaying, in their most sublime and most attractive traits, all the virtues of the Christian. Whilst sickness and famine were devastating the camp, Louis made himself visitor, physician, and comforter; and his presence and his words exercised upon the worst cases a searching influence. He had one day sent his chaplain, William de Chartres, to visit one of his household servants, a modest man of some means, named Gaugelme, who was at the point of death. When the chaplain was retiring, "I am waiting for my lord, our saintly king, to come," said the dying man; "I will not depart this life until I have seen him and spoken to him: and then I will die." The king came, and addressed to him the most affectionate words of consolation; and when he had left him, and before he had re-entered his tent, he was told that Gaugelme had expired. When the 5th of April, the day fixed for the retreat, had come, Louis himself was ill and much enfeebled. He was urged to go aboard one of the vessels which were to descend the Nile, carrying the wounded and the most suffering; but he refused absolutely, saying, "I don't separate from my people in the hour of danger." He remained on land, and when he had to move forward he fainted twice. When he came to himself, he was amongst the last to leave the camp, got himself helped on to the back of a little Arab horse, covered with silken housings, and marched at a slow pace with the rear-guard, having beside him Geoffrey de Sargines, who watched over him, "and protected me against the Saracens," said Louis himself to Joinville, "as a good servant protects his lord's tankard against the flies."
Neither the king's courage nor his servants' devotion was enough to insure success, even to the retreat. At four leagues' distance from the camp it had just left, the rear-guard of the crusaders, harassed by clouds of Saracens, was obliged to halt. Louis could no longer keep on his horse. "He was put up at a house," says Joinville, "and laid, almost dead, upon the lap of a tradeswoman from Paris; and it was believed that he would not last till evening." With his consent, one of his lieges entered into parley with one of the Mussulman chiefs; a truce was about to be concluded, and the Mussulman was taking off his ring from his finger as a pledge that he would observe it. "But during this," says Joinville, "there took place a great mishap. A traitor of a sergeant, whose name was Marcel, began calling to our people, 'Sirs knights, surrender, for such is the king's command: cause not the king's death.' All thought that it was the king's command; and they gave up their swords to the Saracens." Being forthwith declared prisoners, the king and all the rear-guard were removed to Mansourah; the king by boat; and his two brothers, the Counts of Anjou and Poitiers, and all the other crusaders, drawn up in a body and shackled, followed on foot on the river bank. The advance-guard, and all the rest of the army, soon met the same fate.
Ten thousand prisoners—this was all that remained of the crusade that had started eighteen months before from Aigues-Mortes. Nevertheless the lofty bearing and the piety of the king still inspired the Mussulmans with great respect. A negotiation was opened between him and the Sultan Malek-Moaddam, who, having previously freed him from his chains, had him treated with a certain magnificence. As the price of a truce and of his liberty, Louis received a demand for the immediate surrender of Damietta, a heavy ransom, and the restitution of several places which the Christians still held in Palestine. "I cannot dispose of those places," said Louis, "for they do not belong to me; the princes and the Christian orders, in whose hands they are, can alone keep or surrender them." The sultan, in anger, threatened to have the king put to the torture, or sent to the Grand Khalif of Bagdad, who would detain him in prison for the rest of his days. "I am your prisoner," said Louis; "you can do with me what you will." "You call yourself our prisoner," said the Mussulman negotiators, "and so, we believe you are; but you treat us as if you had us in prison." The sultan perceived that he had to do with an indomitable spirit; and he did not insist any longer upon more than the surrender of Damietta, and on a ransom of five hundred thousand livres (that is, about ten million one hundred and thirty-two thousand francs, or four hundred and five thousand two hundred and eighty pounds, of modern money, according to M. de Wailly, supposing, as is probable, that livres of Tours are meant). "I will pay willingly five hundred thousand livres for the deliverance of my people," said Louis, "and I will give up Damietta for the deliverance of my own person, for I am not a man who ought to be bought and sold for money." "By my faith," said the sultan, "the Frank is liberal not to have haggled about so large a sum. Go tell him that I will give him one hundred thousand livres to help towards paying the ransom." The negotiation was concluded on this basis; and victors and vanquished quitted Mansourah, and arrived, partly by land and partly by the Nile, within a few leagues of Damietta, the surrender of which was fixed for the 7th of May. But five days previously a tragic event took place. Several emirs of the Mamelukes suddenly entered Louis's tent. They had just slain the Sultan Malek-Moaddam, against whom they had for some time been conspiring. "Fear nought, sir," said they to the king; "this was to be. Do what concerns you in respect of the stipulated conditions, and you shall be free." Of these emirs one, who had slain the sultan with his own hand, asked the king, brusquely, "What wilt thou give me? I have slain thine enemy, who would have put thee to death, had he lived;" and he asked to be made knight. Louis answered not a word. Some of the crusaders present urged him to satisfy the desire of the emir, who had in his power the decision of their fate. "I will never confer knighthood on an infidel," said Louis; "let the emir turn Christian; I will take him away to France, enrich him, and make him knight." It is said that, in their admiration for this piety and this indomitable firmness, the emirs had at one time a notion of taking Louis himself for sultan in the place of him whom they had just slain; and this report was probably not altogether devoid of foundation, for, some time afterwards, in the intimacy of the conversations between them, Louis one day said to Joinville, "Think you that I would have taken the kingdom of Babylon, if they had offered it to me?" "Whereupon I told him," adds Joinville, "that he would have done a mad act, seeing that they had slain their lord; and he said to me that of a truth he would not have refused." However that may be, the conditions agreed upon with the late Sultan Malek-Moaddam were carried out; on the 7th of May, 1250, Geoffrey de Sargines gave up to the emirs the keys of Damietta; and the Mussulmans entered in tumultuously. The king was waiting aboard his ship for the payment which his people were to make for the release of his brother, the Count of Poitiers; and, when he saw approaching a bark on which he recognized his brother, "Light up! light up!" he cried instantly to his sailors; which was the signal agreed upon for setting out. And leaving forthwith the coast of Egypt, the fleet which bore the remains of the Christian army made sail for the shores of Palestine.
The king, having arrived at St. Jean d'Acre on the 14th of May, 1250, accepted without shrinking the trial imposed upon him by his unfortunate situation. He saw his forces considerably reduced; and the majority of the crusaders left to him, even his brothers themselves, did not hide their ardent desire to return to France. He had that virtue, so rare amongst kings, of taking into consideration the wishes of his comrades, and of desiring their free assent to the burden he asked them to bear with him. He assembled the chief of them, and put the question plainly before them. "The queen, my mother," he said, "biddeth me and prayeth me to get me hence to France, for that my kingdom hath neither peace nor truce with the king of England. The folk here tell me that, if I get me hence, this land is lost, for none of those that be there will dare to abide in it. I pray you, therefore, to give it thought, for it is a grave matter, and I grant you nine days for to answer me whatever shall seem to you good." Eight days after, they returned; and Guy de Mauvoisin, speaking in their name, said to the king, "Sir, your brothers and the rich men who be here have had regard unto your condition, and they see that you cannot remain in this country to your own and your kingdom's honor, for of all the knights who came in your train, and of whom you led into Cyprus twenty-eight hundred, there remain not one hundred in this city. Wherefore they do counsel you, sir, to get you hence to France, and to provide troops and money wherewith you may return speedily to this country, to take vengeance on these enemies of God who have kept you in prison." Louis, without any discussion, interrogated all present, one after another, and all, even the pope's legate, agreed with Guy de Mauvoisin. "I was seated just fourteenth, facing the legate," says Joinville, "and when he asked me how it seemed to me, I answered him that if the king could hold out so far as to keep the field for a year, he would do himself great honor if he remained."
Only two knights, William de Beaumont and Sire de Chatenay, had the courage to support the opinion of Joinville, which was bolder for the time being, but not less indecisive in respect of the immediate future than the contrary opinion. "I have heard you out, sirs," said the king: "and I will answer you, within eight clays from this time, touching that which it shall please me to do." "Next Sunday," says Joinville, "we came again, all of us, before the king. 'Sirs,' said he, 'I thank very much all those who have counselled me to get me gone to France, and likewise those who have counselled me to bide. But I have bethought me that, if I bide, I see no danger lest my kingdom of France be lost, for the queen, my mother, hath a many folk to defend it. I have noted likewise that the barons of this land do say that, if I go hence, the kingdom of Jerusalem is lost. At no price will I suffer to be lost the kingdom of Jerusalem, which I came to guard and conquer. My resolve, then, is, that I bide for the present. So I say unto you, ye rich men who are here, and to all other knights who shall have a mind to bide with me, come and speak boldly unto me, and I will give ye so much that it shall not be my fault if ye have no mind to bide.'"
Thus none, save Louis himself, dared go to the root of the question. The most discreet advised him to depart, only for the purpose of coming back, and recommencing what had been so unsuccessful; and the boldest only urged him to remain a year longer. None took the risk of saying, even after so many mighty but vain experiments, that the enterprise was chimerical, and must be given up. Louis alone was, in word and deed, perfectly true to his own absorbing idea of recovering the Holy Sepulchre from the Mussulmans and re-establishing the kingdom of Jerusalem. His was one of those pure and majestic souls, which are almost alien to the world in which they live, and in which disinterested passion is so strong that it puts judgment to silence, extinguishes all fear, and keeps up hope to infinity. The king's two brothers embarked with a numerous retinue. How many crusaders, knights, or men-at-arms, remained with Louis, there is nothing to show; but they were, assuredly, far from sufficient for the attainment of the twofold end he had in view, and even for insuring less grand results, such as the deliverance of the crusaders still remaining prisoners in the hands of the Mussulmans, and anything like an effectual protection for the Christians settled in Palestine and Syria.
Twice Louis believed he was on the point of accomplishing his desire. Towards the end of 1250, and again in 1252, the Sultan of Aleppo and Damascus, and the Emirs of Egypt, being engaged in a violent struggle, made offers to him, by turns, of restoring the kingdom of Jerusalem if he would form an active alliance with one or the other party against its enemies. Louis sought means of accepting either of these offers without neglecting his previous engagements, and without compromising the fate of the Christians still prisoners in Egypt, or living in the territories of Aleppo and Damascus; but, during the negotiations entered upon with a view to this end, the Mussulmans of Syria and Egypt suspended their differences, and made common cause against the remnants of the Christian crusaders; and all hope of re-entering Jerusalem by these means vanished away. Another time, the Sultan of Damascus, touched by Louis's pious perseverance, had word sent to him that he, if he wished, could go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and should find himself in perfect safety. "The king," says Joinville, "held a great council; and none urged him to go. It was shown unto him that if he, who was the greatest king in Christendom, performed his pilgrimage without delivering the Holy City from the enemies of God, all the other kings and other pilgrims who came after him would hold themselves content with doing just as much, and would trouble themselves no more about the deliverance of Jerusalem." He was reminded of the example set by Richard Coeur de Lion, who, sixty years before, had refused to cast even a look upon Jerusalem, when he was unable to deliver her from her enemies. Louis, just as Richard had, refused the incomplete satisfaction which had been offered him, and for nearly four years, spent by him on the coasts of Palestine and Syria since his departure from Damietta, from 1250 to 1254, he expended, in small works of piety, sympathy, protection, and care for the future of the Christian populations in Asia, his time, his strength, his pecuniary resources, and the ardor of a soul which could not remain icily abandoned to sorrowing over great desires unsatisfied.
An unexpected event occurred and brought about all at once a change in his position and his plans. At the commencement of the year 1253, at Sidon, the ramparts of which he was engaged in repairing, he heard that his mother, Queen Blanche, had died at Paris on the 27th of November, 1252. "He made so great mourning thereat," says Joinville, "that for two days no speech could be gotten of him. After that he sent a chamber-man for to fetch me. When I came before him, in his chamber where he was alone, so soon as he got sight of me, he stretched forth his arms, and said to me, 'O, seneschal, I have lost my mother!'" It was a great loss both for the son and for the king. Imperious, exacting, jealous, and often disagreeable in private life and in the bosom of her family, Blanche was, nevertheless, according to all contemporary authority, even the least favorable to her, "the most discreet woman of her time, with a mind singularly quick and penetrating, and with a man's heart to leaven her Woman's sex and ideas; personally magnanimous, of indomitable energy, sovereign mistress in all the affairs of her age, guardian and protectress of France, worthy of comparison with Semiramis, the most eminent of her sex." From the time of Louis's departure on the crusade as well as during his minority she had given him constant proofs of a devotion as intelligent as it was impassioned, as useful as it was masterful. All letters from France demanded the speedy return of the king. The Christians of Syria were themselves of the same opinion; the king, they said, has done for us, here, all he could do; he will serve us far better by sending us strong re-enforcements from France. Louis embarked at St. Jean d'Acre, on the 24th of April, 1254, carrying away with him, on thirteen vessels, large and small, Queen Marguerite, his children, his personal retinue, and his own more immediate men-at-arms, and leaving the Christians of Syria, for their protection in his name, a hundred knights under the orders of Geoffrey de Sargines, that comrade of his in whose bravery and pious fealty he had the most entire confidence. After two months and a half at sea, the king and his fleet arrived, on the 8th of July, 1254, off the port of Hyeres, which at that time belonged to the Empire, and not to France. For two days Louis refused to land at this point; for his heart was set upon not putting his foot upon land again save on the soil of his own kingdom, at Aigues-Mortes, whence he had, six years before, set out. At last he yielded to the entreaties of the queen and those who were about him, landed at Hyeres, passed slowly through France, and made his solemn entry into Paris on the 7th of September, 1254. "The burgesses and all those who were in the city were there to meet him, clad and bedecked in all their best according to their condition. If the other towns had received him with great joy, Paris evinced even more than any other. For several days there were bonfires, dances, and other public rejoicings, which ended sooner than the people wished; for the king, who was pained to see the expense, the dances, and the vanities indulged in, went off to the wood of Vincennes to put a stop to them."
So soon as he had resumed the government of his kingdom, after six years' absence and adventures, heroic, indeed, but all in vain for the cause of Christendom, those of his counsellors and servants who lived most closely with him and knew him best were struck at the same time with what he had remained and what he had become during this long and cruel trial. "When the king had happily returned to France, how piously he bare himself towards God, how justly towards his subjects, how compassionately towards the afflicted, and how humbly in his own respect, and with what zeal he labored to make progress, according to his power, in every virtue, all this can be attested by persons who carefully watched his manner of life, and who knew the spotlessness of his conscience. It is the opinion of the most clear-sighted and the wisest that, in proportion as gold is more precious than silver, so the manner of living and acting which the king brought back from his pilgrimage in the Holy Land was holy and new, and superior to his former behavior, albeit, even in his youth, he had ever been good and guileless, and worthy of high esteem." These are the words written about St. Louis by his confessor Geoffrey de Beaulieu, a chronicler, curt and simple even to dryness, but at the same time well informed. An attempt will be made presently to give a fair idea of the character of St. Louis's government during the last fifteen years of his reign, and of the place he fills in the history of the kingship and of politics in France; but just now it is only with the part he played in the crusades and with what became of them in his hands that we have to occupy our attention. For seven years after his return to France, from 1254 to 1261, Louis seemed to think no more about them, and there is nothing to show that he spoke of them even to his most intimate confidants; but, in spite of his apparent calmness, he was living, so far as they were concerned, in a continual ferment of imagination and internal fever, ever flattering himself that some favorable circumstance would call him back to his interrupted work. And he had reason to believe that circumstances were responsive to his wishes. The Christians of Palestine and Syria were a prey to perils and evils which became more pressing every day; the cross was being humbled at one time before the Tartars of Tchingis-Khan, at another before the Mussulmans of Egypt; Pope Urban was calling upon the King of France; and Geoffrey de Sargines, the heroic representative whom Louis had left in St. Jean d'Acre, at the head of a small garrison, was writing to him that ruin was imminent, and speedy succor indispensable to prevent it. In 1261, Louis held, at Paris, a parliament, at which, without any talk of a new crusade, measures were taken which revealed an idea of it: there were decrees for fasts and prayers on behalf of the Christians of the East and for frequent and earnest military drill. In 1263, the crusade was openly preached; taxes were levied, even on the clergy, for the purpose of contributing towards it; and princes and barons bound themselves to take part in it. Louis was all approval and encouragement, without declaring his own intention. In 1267, a parliament was convoked at Paris. The king, at first, conversed discreetly with some of his barons about the new plan of crusade; and then, suddenly, having had the precious relics deposited in the Holy Chapel set before the eyes of the assembly, he opened the session by ardently exhorting those present "to avenge the insult which had so long been offered to the Saviour in the Holy Land and to recover the Christian heritage possessed, for our sins, by the infidels." Next year, on the 9th of February, 1268, at a new parliament assembled at Paris, the king took an oath to start in the month of May, 1270.
Great was the surprise, and the disquietude was even greater than the surprise. The kingdom was enjoying abroad a peace and at home a tranquillity and prosperity for a long time past without example; feudal quarrels were becoming more rare and terminating more quickly; and the king possessed the confidence and the respect of the whole population. Why compromise such advantages by such an enterprise, so distant, so costly, and so doubtful of success? Whether from good sense or from displeasure at the burdens imposed upon them, many ecclesiastics showed symptoms of opposition, and Pope Clement IV. gave the king nothing but ambiguous and very reserved counsel. When he learned that Louis was taking with him on the crusade three of his sons, aged respectively twenty-two, eighteen, and seventeen, he could not refrain from writing to the Cardinal of St. Cecile, "It doth not strike us as an act of well-balanced judgment to impose the taking of the cross upon so many of the king's sons, and especially the eldest; and, albeit we have heard reasons to the contrary, either we be much mistaken or they are utterly devoid of reason." Even the king's personal condition was matter for grave anxiety. His health was very much enfeebled; and several of his most intimate and most far-seeing advisers were openly opposed to his design. He vehemently urged Joinville to take the cross again with him; but Joinville refused downright. "I thought," said he, "that they all committed a mortal sin to advise him the voyage, because the whole kingdom was in fair peace at home and with all neighbors, and, so soon as he departed, the state of the kingdom did nought but worsen. They also committed a great sin to advise him the voyage in the great state of weakness in which his body was, for he could not bear to go by chariot or to ride; he was so weak that he suffered me to carry him in my arms from the hotel of the Count of Auxerre, the place where I took leave of him, to the Cordeliers. And nevertheless, weak as he was, had he remained in France, he might have lived yet a while and wrought much good."
All objections, all warnings, all anxieties came to nothing in the face of Louis's fixed idea and pious passion. He started from Paris on the 16th of March, 1270, a sick man almost already, but with soul content, and probably the only one without misgiving in the midst of all his comrades. It was once more at Aigues-Mortes that he went to embark. All was as yet dark and undecided as to the plan of the expedition. Was Egypt, or Palestine, or Constantinople, or Tunis, to be the first point of attack? Negotiations, touching this subject, had been opened with the Venetians and the Genoese without arriving at any conclusion or certainty. Steps were taken at haphazard with full trust in Providence and utter forgetfulness that Providence does not absolve men from foresight. On arriving at Aigues-Mortes about the middle of May, Louis found nothing organized, nothing in readiness, neither crusaders nor vessels; everything was done slowly, incompletely, and with the greatest irregularity. At last, on the 2d of July, 1270, he set sail without any one's knowing and without the king's telling any one whither they were going. It was only in Sardinia, after four days' halt at Cagliari, that Louis announced to the chiefs of the crusade, assembled aboard his ship the Mountjoy, that he was making for Tunis, and that their Christian work would commence there. The King of Tunis (as he was then called), Mohammed Mostanser, had for some time been talking of his desire to become a Christian, if he could be efficiently protected against the seditions of his subjects. Louis welcomed with transport the prospect of Mussulman conversions. "Ah!" he cried, "if I could only see myself the gossip and sponsor of so great a godson!"
But on the 17th of July, when the fleet arrived before Tunis, the admiral, Florent de Varennes, probably without the king's orders and with that want of reflection which was conspicuous at each step of the enterprise, immediately took possession of the harbor and of some Tunisian vessels as prize, and sent word to the king "that he had only to support him and that the disembarkation of the troops might be effected in perfect safety." Thus war was commenced at the very first moment against the Mussulman prince whom there had been a promise of seeing before long a Christian.
At the end of a fortnight, after some fights between the Tunisians and the crusaders, so much political and military blindness produced its natural consequences. The re-enforcements promised to Louis, by his brother Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily, had not arrived; provisions were falling short; and the heats of an African summer were working havoc amongst the army with such rapidity that before long there was no time to bury the dead, but they were cast pell-mell into the ditch which surrounded the camp, and the air was tainted thereby. On the 3d of August Louis was attacked by the epidemic fever, and obliged to keep his bed in his tent. He asked news of his son John Tristan, Count of Nevers, who had fallen ill before him, and whose recent death, aboard the vessel to which he had been removed in hopes that the sea air might be beneficial, had been carefully concealed from him. The count, as well as the Princess Isabel, married to Theobald the Young, King of Navarre, was a favorite child of Louis, who, on hearing of his loss, folded his hands and sought in silence and prayer some assuagement of his grief. His malady grew worse; and having sent for his successor, Prince Philip (Philip the Bold), he took from his hour-book some instructions which he had written out for him, with his own hand and in French, and delivered them to him, bidding him to observe them scrupulously. He gave likewise to his daughter Isabel, who was weeping at the foot of his bed, and to his son-in-law the King of Navarre, some writings which had been intended for them, and he further charged Isabel to deliver another to her youngest sister, Agnes, affianced to the Duke of Burgundy. "Dearest daughter," said he, "think well hereon: full many folk have fallen asleep with wild thoughts of sin, and in the morning their place hath not known them." Just after he had finished satisfying his paternal solicitude, it was announced to him, on the 24th of August, that envoys from the Emperor Michael Palaeologus had landed at Cape Carthage, with orders to demand his intervention with his brother Charles, King of Sicily, to deter him from making war on the but lately re-established Greek empire. Louis summoned all his strength to receive them in his tent, in the presence of certain of his counsellors, who were uneasy at the fatigue he was imposing upon himself. "I promise you, if I live," said he to the envoys, "to cooperate, so far as I may be able, in what your master demands of me; meanwhile, I exhort you to have patience, and be of good courage." This was his last political act, and his last concern with the affairs of the world; henceforth he was occupied only with pious effusions which had a bearing at one time on his hopes for his soul, at another on those Christian interests which had been so dear to him all his life. He kept repeating his customary orisons in a low voice, and he was heard murmuring these broken words: "Fair Sir God, have mercy on this people that bideth here, and bring them back to their own land! Let them not fall into the hands of their enemies, and let them not be constrained to deny Thy name!" And at the same time that he thus expressed his sad reflections upon the situation in which he was leaving his army and his people, he cried from time to time, as he raised himself on his bed, "Jerusalem! Jerusalem! We will go up to Jerusalem!" During the night of the 24th 25th of August he ceased to speak, all the time continuing to show that he was in full possession of his senses; he insisted upon receiving extreme unction out of bed, and lying upon a coarse sack-cloth covered with cinders, with the cross before him; and on Monday, the 25th of August, 1270, at three P.M., he departed in peace, whilst uttering these his last words: "Father, after the example of the Divine Master, into Thy hands I commend my spirit!"
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE KINGSHIP IN FRANCE.
That the kingship occupied an important place and played an important part in the history of France is an evident and universally recognized fact. But to what causes this fact was due, and what particular characteristics gave the kingship in France that preponderating influence which, in weal and in woe, it exercised over the fortunes of the country, is a question which has been less closely examined, and which still remains vague and obscure. This question it is which we would now shed light upon and determine with some approach to precision. We cannot properly comprehend and justly appreciate a great historical force until we have seen it issuing from its primary source and followed it in its various developments.
At the first glance, two facts strike us in the history of the kingship in France. It was in France that it adopted soonest and most persistently maintained its fundamental principle, heredity. In the other monarchical states of Europe—in England, in Germany, in Spain, and in Italy—divers principles, at one time election, and at another right of conquest, have been mingled with or substituted for the heredity of the throne; different dynasties have reigned; and England has had her Saxon, Danish, and Norman kings, her Plantagenets, her Tudors, her Stuarts, her Nassaus, her Brunswicks. In Germany, and up to the eighteenth century, the Empire, the sole central dignity, was elective and transferable. Spain was for a long while parcelled out into several distinct kingdoms, and since she attained territorial unity the houses of Austria and Bourbon have both occupied her throne. The monarchy and the republic for many a year disputed and divided Italy. Only in France was there, at any time during eight centuries, but a single king and a single line of kings. Unity and heredity, those two essential principles of monarchy, have been the invariable characteristics of the kingship in France.
A second fact, less apparent and less remarkable, but, nevertheless, not without importance or without effect upon the history of the kingship in France, is the extreme variety of character, of faculties, of intellectual and moral bent, of policy and personal conduct amongst the French kings. In the long roll of thirty-three kings who reigned in France from Hugh Capet to Louis XVI. there were kings wise and kings foolish, kings able and kings incapable, kings rash and kings slothful, kings earnest and kings frivolous, kings saintly and kings licentious, kings good and sympathetic towards their people, kings egotistical and concerned solely about themselves, kings lovable and beloved, kings sombre and dreaded or detested. As we go forward and encounter them on our way, all these kingly characters will be seen appearing and acting in all their diversity and all their incoherence. Absolute monarchical power in France was, almost in every successive reign, singularly modified, being at one time aggravated and at another alleviated according to the ideas, sentiments, morals, and spontaneous instincts of the monarchs. Nowhere else, throughout the great European monarchies, has the difference between kingly personages exercised so much influence on government and national condition. In that country the free action of individuals has filled a prominent place and taken a prominent part in the course of events.
It has been shown how insignificant and inert, as sovereigns, were the first three successors of Hugh Capet. The goodness to his people displayed by King Robert was the only kingly trait which, during that period, deserved to leave a trace in history. The kingship appeared once more with the attributes of energy and efficiency on the accession of Louis VI., son of Philip I. He was brought up in the monastery of St. Denis, which at that time had for its superior a man of judgment, the Abbot Adam; and he then gave evidence of tendencies and received his training under influences worthy of the position which awaited him. He was handsome, tall, strong, and alert, determined and yet affable. He had more taste for military exercises than for the amusements of childhood and the pleasures of youth. He was at that time called Louis the Wide-awake. He had the good fortune to find in the Monastery of St. Denis a fellow-student capable of becoming a king's counsellor. Suger, a child born at St. Denis, of obscure parentage, and three or four years younger than Prince Louis, had been brought up for charity's sake in the abbey, and the Abbot Adam, who had perceived his natural abilities, had taken pains to develop them. A bond of esteem and mutual friendship was formed between the two young people, both of whom were disposed to earnest thought and earnest living; and when, in 1108, Louis the Wide-awake ascended the throne, the monk Suger became his adviser whilst remaining his friend.
A very small kingdom was at that time the domain belonging properly and directly to the King of France. Ile-de-France, properly so called, and a part of Orleanness (l'Oreanais), pretty nearly the five departments of the Seine, Seine-et-Oise, Seineet-Marne, Oise and Loiret, besides, through recent acquisitions, French Vexin (which bordered on the Ile-de-France and had for its chief place Pontoise, being separated by the little River Epte from Norman Vexin, of which Rouen was the capital), half the countship of Sens and the countship of Bourges—such was the whole of its extent. But this limited state was as liable to agitation, and often as troublous and as toilsome to govern, as the very greatest of modern states. It was full of Petty lords, almost sovereigns in their own estates, and sufficiently strong to struggle against their kingly suzerain, who had, besides, all around his domains, several neighbors more powerful than himself in the extent and population of their states. But lord and peasant, layman and ecclesiastic, castle and country and the churches of France, were not long discovering that, if the kingdom was small, it had verily a king. Louis did not direct to a distance from home his ambition and his efforts; it was within his own dominion, to check the violence of the strong against the weak, to put a stop to the quarrels of the strong amongst themselves, to make an end, in France at least, of unrighteousness and devastation, and to establish there some sort of order and some sort of justice, that he displayed his energy and his perseverance. "He was animated," says Suger, "by a strong sense of equity; to air his courage was his delight; he scorned inaction; he opened his eyes to see the way of discretion; he broke his rest and was unwearied in his solicitude." Suger has recounted in detail sixteen of the numerous expeditions which Louis undertook into the interior, to accomplish his work of repression or of exemplary chastisement. Bouchard, Lord of Montmorency, Matthew de Beaumont, Dreux de Mouchy-le-Chatel, Ebble de Roussi, Leon de Mean, Thomas de Marle, Hugh de Crecy, William de la Roche-Guyon, Hugh du Puiset, and Amaury de Montfort learned, to their cost, that the king was not to be braved with impunity. "Bouchard, on taking up arms one day against him, refused to accept his sword from the hands of one of his people who offered it to him, and said by way of boast to the countess his wife, 'Noble countess, give thou joyously this glittering sword to the count thy spouse: he who taketh it from thee as count will bring it back to thee as king.'" "In this very campaign, Bouchard, by his death," says Suger, "restored peace to the kingdom, and took away himself and his war to the bottomless pit of hell." Hugh du Puiset had frequently broken his oaths of peace and recommenced his devastations and revolts; and Louis resumed his course of hunting him down, "destroyed the castle of Puiset, threw down the walls, dug up the wells, and razed it completely to the ground, as a place devoted to the curse of Heaven." Thomas de Marle, Lord of Couci, had been committing cruel ravages upon the town and church of Laon, lands and inhabitants; when "Louis, summoned by their complaints, repaired to Laon, and there, on the advice of the bishops and grandees, and especially of Raoul, the illustrious Count of Vermandois, the most powerful, after the king, of the lords in this part of the country, he determined to go and attack the castle of Couci, and so went back to his own camp. The people whom he had sent to explore the spot reported that the approach to the castle was very difficult, and in truth impossible. Many urged the king to change his purpose in the matter; but he cried, 'Nay, what we resolved on at Laon stands: I would not hold back therefrom, though it were to save my life. The king's majesty would be vilified, if I were to fly before this scoundrel.' Forthwith, in spite of his corpulence, and with admirable ardor, he pushed on with his troops through ravines and roads encumbered with forests. . . . Thomas, made prisoner and mortally wounded, was brought to King Louis, and by his order removed to Laon, to the almost universal satisfaction of his own folk and ours. Next day, his lands were sold for the benefit of the public treasury, his ponds were broken up, and King Louis, sparing the country because he had the lord of it at his disposal, took the road back to Laon, and afterwards returned in triumph to Paris."
Sometimes, when the people, and their habitual protectors, the bishops, invoked his aid, Louis would carry his arms beyond his own dominions, by sole right of justice and kingship. "It is known," says Suger, "that kings have long hands." In 1121, the Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand made a complaint to the king against William VI., Count of Auvergne, who had taken possession of the town, and even of the episcopal church, and was exercising therein "unbridled tyranny." The king, who never lost a moment when there was a question of helping the Church, took up with pleasure and solemnity what was, under these circumstances, the cause of God; and having been unable, either by word of mouth or by letters sealed with the seal of the king's majesty, to bring back the tyrant to his duty, he assembled his troops, and led into revolted Auvergne a numerous army of Frenchmen. He had now become exceeding fat, and could scarce support the heavy mass of his body. Any one else, however humble, would have had neither the will nor the power to ride a-horseback; but he, against the advice of all his friends, listened only to the voice of courage, braved the fiery suns of June and August, which were the dread of the youngest knights, and made a scoff of those who could not bear the heat, although many a time, during the passage of narrow and difficult swampy places, he was constrained to get himself held on by those about him. After an obstinate struggle, and at the intervention of William VII., Duke of Aquitaine, the Count of Auvergne's suzerain, "Louis fixed a special day for regulating and deciding, in parliament, at Orleans, and in the duke's presence, between the bishop and the count, the points to which the Auvergnats had hitherto refused to subscribe. Then triumphantly leading back his army, he returned victoriously to France." He had asserted his power, and increased his ascendency, without any pretension to territorial aggrandizement.
Into his relations with his two powerful neighbors, the King of England, Duke of Normandy, and the Emperor of Germany, Louis the Fat introduced the same watchfulness, the same firmness, and, at need, the same warlike energy, whilst observing the same moderation, and the same policy of holding aloof from all turbulent or indiscreet ambition, adjusting his pretensions to his power, and being more concerned to govern his kingdom efficiently than to add to it by conquest. Twice, in 1109 and in 1118, he had war in Normandy with Henry I., King of England, and he therein was guilty of certain temerities resulting in a reverse, which he hastened to repair during a vigorous prosecution of the campaign; but, when once his honor was satisfied, he showed a ready inclination for the peace which the Pope, Calixtus II., in council at Rome, succeeded in establishing between the two rivals. The war with the Emperor of Germany, Henry V., in 1124, appeared, at the first blush, a more serious matter. The emperor had raised a numerous army of Lorrainers, Allemannians, Bavarians, Suabians, and Saxons, and was threatening the very city of Rheims with instant attack. Louis hastened to put himself in position; he went and took solemnly, at the altar of St. Denis, the banner of that patron of the kingdom, and flew with a mere handful of men to confront the enemy, and parry the first blow, calling on the whole of France to follow him. France summoned the flower of her chivalry; and when the army had assembled from every quarter of the kingdom at Rheims, there was seen, says Suger, "so great a host of knights and men a-foot, that they might have been compared to swarms of grasshoppers covering the face of the earth, not only on the banks of the rivers, but on the mountains and over the plains." This multitude was formed in three divisions. The third division was composed of Orleanese, Parisians, the people of Etampes, and those of St. Denis; and at their head was the king in person: "With them," said he, "I shall fight bravely and with good assurance; besides being protected by the saint, my liege lord, I have here of my country-men those who nurtured me with peculiar affection, and who, of a surety, will back me living, or carry me off dead, and save my body." At news of this mighty host, and the ardor with which they were animated, the Emperor Henry V. advanced no farther, and, before long, "marching, under some pretext, towards other places, he preferred the shame of retreating like a coward to the risk of exposing his empire and himself to certain destruction. After this victory, which was more than as great as a triumph on the field of battle, the French returned, every one, to their homes."
The three elements which contributed to the formation and character of the kingship in France,—the German element, the Roman element, and the Christian element,—appear in con-junction in the reign of Louis the Fat. We have still the warrior-chief of a feudal society founded by conquest in him who, in spite of his moderation and discretion, cried many a time, says Suger, "What a pitiable state is this of ours, to never have knowledge and strength both together! In my youth had knowledge, and in my old age had strength been mine, I might have conquered many kingdoms;" and probably from this exclamation of a king in the twelfth century came the familiar proverb, "If youth but knew, and age could do!" "We see the maxims of the Roman empire and reminiscences of Charlemagne in Louis's habit of considering justice to emanate from the king as fountain head, and of believing in his right to import it everywhere. And what conclusion of a reign could be more Christian-like than his when, exhausted by the long enfeeblement of his wasted body, but disdaining to die ignobly or unpreparedly, he called about him pious men, bishops, abbots, and many priests of holy Church; and then, scorning all false shame, he demanded to make his confession devoutly before them all, and to fortify himself against death by the comfortable sacrament of the body and blood of Christ! Whilst everything is being arranged, the king on a sudden rises, of himself, dresses himself, issues, fully clad, from his chamber, to the wonderment of all, advances to meet the body of our Lord Jesus Christ, and prostrates himself in reverence. Thereupon, in the presence of all, cleric and laic, he lays aside his kingship, deposes himself from the government of the state, confesses the sin of having ordered it ill, hands to his son Louis the king's ring, and binds him to promise, on oath, to protect the Church of God, the poor, and the orphan, to respect the rights of everybody, and to keep none prisoner in his court, save such a one as should have actually transgressed in the court itself."
This king, so well prepared for death, in his last days found great cause for rejoicing as a father. William VII., Duke of Aquitaine, had, at his death, intrusted to him the guardianship of his daughter Eleanor, heiress of all his dominions, that is to say, of Poitou, of Saintonge, of Gascony, and of the Basque country, the most beautiful provinces of the south-west of France, from the lower Loire to the Pyrenees. A marriage between Eleanor and Louis the Young, already sharing his father's throne, was soon concluded; and a brilliant embassy, composed of more than five hundred lords and noble knights, to whom the king had added his intimate adviser, Suger, set out for Aquitaine, where the ceremony was to take place. At the moment of departure the king had them all assembled about him, and, addressing himself to his son, said, "May the strong hand of God Almighty, by whom kings reign, protect thee, my dear son, both thee and thine! If, by any mischance, I were to lose thee, thee and those I send with thee, neither my life, nor my kingdom would thenceforth be aught to me." The marriage took place at Bordeaux, at the end of July, 1137, and, on the 8th of August following, Louis the Young, on his way back to Paris, was crowned at Poitiers as Duke of Aquitaine. He there learned that the king, his father, had lately died, on the 1st of August. Louis the Fat was far from foreseeing the deplorable issues of the marriage, which he regarded as one of the blessings of his reign.
In spite of its long duration of forty-three years, the reign of Louis VII., called the Young, was a period barren of events and of persons worthy of keeping a place in history. We have already had the story of this king's unfortunate crusade from 1147 to 1149, the commencement at Antioch of his imbroglio with his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the fatal divorce which, in 1152, at the same time that it freed the king from a faithless queen, entailed for France the loss of the beautiful provinces she had brought him in dowry, and caused them to pass into the possession of Henry II., King of England. Here was the only event, under Louis the Young's reign, of any real importance, in view of its long and bloody consequences for his country. A Petty war or a sullen strife between the Kings of France and England, petty quarrels of Louis with some of the great lords of his kingdom, certain rigorous measures against certain districts in travail of local liberties, the first bubblings of that religious fermentation which resulted before long, in the south of France, in the crusade against the Albigensians—such were the facts which went to make up with somewhat of insipidity the annals of this reign. So long as Suger lived, the kingship preserved at home the wisdom which it had been accustomed to display, and abroad the respect it had acquired under Louis the Fat; but at the death of Suger it went on languishing and declining, without encountering any great obstacles. It was reserved for Louis the Young's son, Philip Augustus, to open for France, and for the kingship in France, a new era of strength and progress.
Philip II., to whom history has preserved the name of Philip Augustus, given him by his contemporaries, had shared the crown, been anointed, and taken to wife Isabel of Hainault, a year before the death of Louis VII. put him in possession of the kingdom. He was as yet only fifteen, and his father, by his will, had left him under the guidance of Philip of Alsace, Count of Flanders, as regent, and of Robert Clement, marshal of France, as governor. But Philip, though he began his reign under this double influence, soon let it be seen that he intended to reign by himself, and to reign with vigor. "Whatever my vassals do," said he, during his minority, "I must bear with their violence and outrageous insults and villanous misdeeds; but, please God, they will get weak and old whilst I shall grow in strength and power, and shall be, in my turn, avenged according to my desire." He was hardly twenty, when, one day, one of his barons seeing him gnawing, with an air of abstraction and dreaminess, a little green twig, said to his neighbors, "If any one could tell me what the king is thinking of, I would give him my best horse." Another of those present boldly asked the King. "I am thinking," answered Philip, "of a certain matter, and that is, whether God will grant unto me or unto one of my heirs grace to exalt France to the height at which she was in the time of Charlemagne."
It was not granted to Philip Augustus to resuscitate the Frankish empire of Charlemagne, a work impossible for him or any one whatsoever in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; but he made the extension and territorial construction of the kingdom of France the chief aim of his life, and in that work he was successful. Out of the forty-three years of his reign, twenty-six at the least were war-years, devoted to that very purpose. During the first six, it was with some of his great French vassals, the Count of Champagne, the Duke of Burgundy, and even the Count of Flanders, sometime regent, that Philip had to do battle, for they all sought to profit by his minority so as to make themselves independent and aggrandize themselves at the expense of the crown; but, once in possession of the personal power as well as the title of king, it was, from 1187 to 1216, against three successive kings of England, Henry II., Richard Coeur de Lion, and John Lackland, masters of the most beautiful provinces of France, that Philip directed his persistent efforts. They were in respect of power, of political capacity and military popularity, his most formidable foes. Henry II., what with his ripeness of age, his ability, energy, and perseverance, without any mean jealousy or puerile obstinacy, had over Philip every advantage of position and experience, and he availed himself thereof with discretion, habitually maintaining his feudal status of great French vassal as well as that of foreign sovereign, seeking peace rather than strife with his youthful suzerain, and some-times even going to his aid. He thus played off the greater part of the undeclared attempts or armed expeditions by which, from 1186 to 1189, Philip tried to cut him short in his French possessions, and, so long as Henry IL lived, there were but few changes in the territorial proportions of the two states. But, at Henry's death, Philip found himself in a very different position towards Henry's two sons, Richard Coeur de Lion and John Lackland. They were of his own generation; he had been on terms with them, even in opposition to their own father, of complicity and familiarity: they had no authority over him, and he had no respect for them. Richard was the feudal prince, beyond comparison the boldest, the most unreflecting, the most passionate, the most ruffianly, the most heroic adventurer of the middle ages, hungering after movement and action, possessed of a craving spirit for displaying his strength, and doing his pleasure at all times and in all places, not only in contempt of the rights and well-being of his subjects, but at the risk of his own safety, his own power, and even of his crown. Philip was of a sedate temperament, patient, persevering, moved but little by the spirit of adventure, more ambitious than fiery, capable of far-reaching designs, and discreet at the same time that he was indifferent as to the employment of means. He had fine sport with Richard. We have already had the story of the relations between them, and their rupture during their joint crusade in the East. On returning to the West, Philip did not wrest from King Richard those great and definitive conquests which were to restore to France the greater part of the marriage-portion that went with Eleanor of Aquitaine; but he paved the way for them by petty victories and petty acquisitions, and by making more and more certain his superiority over his rival. When, after Richard's death, he had to do with John Lackland, cowardly and insolent, knavish and addle-pated, choleric, debauched, and indolent, an intriguing subordinate on the throne on which he made pretence to be the most despotic of kings, Philip had over him, even more than over his brother Richard, immense advantages. He made such use of them that after six years' struggling, from 1199 to 1205, he deprived John of the greater part of his French possessions, Anjou, Normandy, Touraine, Maine, and Poitou. Philip would have been quite willing to dispense with any legal procedure by way of sanction to his conquests, but John furnished him with an excellent pretext; for on the 3d of April, 1203, he assassinated with his own hand, in the tower of Rouen, his young nephew Arthur, Duke of Brittany, and in that capacity vassal of Philip Augustus, to whom he was coming to do homage. Philip had John, also his vassal, cited before the court of the barons of France, his peers, to plead his defence of this odious act. "King John," says the contemporary English historian Matthew Paris, "sent Eustace, Bishop of Ely, to tell King Philip that he would willingly go to his court to answer before his judges, and to show entire obedience in the matter, but that he must have a safe-conduct. King Philip replied, but with neither heart nor visage unmoved, 'Willingly; let him come in peace and safety.' 'And return so too, my lord?' said the bishop. 'Yes,' rejoined the king, 'if the decision of his peers allow him.' And when the envoys from England entreated him to grant to the King of England to go and return in safety, the King of France was wroth, and answered with his usual oath, 'No, by all the saints of France, unless the decision tally therewith.' 'My lord king,' rejoined the bishop, 'the Duke of Normandy cannot come unless there come also the King of England, since the duke and the king are one and the same person. The baronage of England would never allow it in any way, and if the king were willing, he would run, as you know, risk of imprisonment or death.' King Philip answered him, 'How now, my lord bishop? It is well known that my liegeman, the Duke of Normandy, by violence got possession of England. And so, prithee, if a vassal increase in honor and power, shall his lord suzerain lose his rights? Never!'
"King John was not willing to trust to chance and the decision of the French, who liked him not; and he feared above everything to be reproached with the shameful murder of Arthur. The grandees of France, nevertheless, proceeded to a decision, which they could not do lawfully, since he whom they had to try was absent, and would have gone had he been able."
The condemnation, not a whit the less, took full effect; and Philip Augustus thus recovered possession of nearly all the territories which his father, Louis VII., had kept but for a moment. He added, in succession, other provinces to his dominions; in such wise that the kingdom of France, which was limited, as we have seen, under Louis the Fat, to the Ile-de-France and certain portions of Picardy and Orleanness, comprised besides, at the end of the reign of Philip Augustus, Vermandois, Artois, the two Vexins, French and Norman, Berri, Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Poitou, Touraine, and Auvergne.
In 1206 the territorial work of Philip Augustus was well nigh completed; but his wars were not over. John Lackland, when worsted, kicked against the pricks, and was incessantly hankering, in his antagonism to the King of France, after hostile alliances and local conspiracies easy to hatch amongst certain feudal lords discontented with their suzerain. John was on intimate terms with his nephew, Otho IV., Emperor of Germany and the foe of Philip Augustus, who had supported against him Frederick II., his rival for the empire. They prepared in concert for a grand attack upon the King of France, and they had won over to their coalition some of his most important vassals, amongst others, Renaud de Dampierre, Count of Boulogne. Philip determined to divert their attack, whilst anticipating it, by an unexpected enterprise—the invasion of England itself. Circumstances seemed favorable. King John, by his oppression and his perfidy, had drawn upon him the hatred and contempt of his people; and the barons of England, supported and guided by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, had commenced against him the struggle which was to be ended some years afterwards by the forced concession of Magna Charta, that foundation-stone of English liberties. John, having been embroiled for five years past with the court of Rome, affected to defy the excommunication which the pope had hurled at him, and of which the King of France had been asked by several prelates of the English Church to insure the efficient working. On the 8th of April, 1213, Philip convoked, at Soissons, his principal vassals or allies, explained to them the grounds of his design against the King of England, and, by a sort of special confederation, they bound themselves, all of them, to support him. One of the most considerable vassals, however, the sometime regent of France during the minority of Philip, Ferrand, Count of Flanders, did not attend the meeting to which he had been summoned, and declared his intention of taking no part in the war against England. "By all the saints of France," cried Philip, "either France shall become Flanders, or Flanders France!" And, all the while pressing forward the equipment of a large fleet collected at Calais for the invasion of England, he entered Flanders, besieged and took several of the richest cities in the country, Cassel, Ypres, Bruges, and Courtrai, and pitched his camp before the walls of Ghent, "to lower," as he said, "the pride of the men of Ghent and make them bend their necks beneath the yoke of kings." But he heard that John Lackland, after making his peace with the court of Rome through acceptance of all the conditions and all the humiliations it had thought proper to impose upon him, had just landed at Rochelle, and was exciting a serious insurrection amongst the lords of Saintonge and Poitou. At the same time Philip's fleet, having been attacked in Calais roads by that of John, had been half destroyed or captured; and the other half had been forced to take shelter in the harbor of Damme, where it was strictly blockaded. Philip, forthwith adopting a twofold and energetic resolution, ordered his son Philip to go and put down the insurrection of the Poitevines on the banks of the Loire, and himself took in hand the war in Flanders, which was of the most consequence, considering the quality of the foe and the designs they proclaimed. They had at their head the Emperor Otho IV., who had already won the reputation of a brave and able soldier; and they numbered in their ranks several of the greatest lords, German, Flemish, and Dutch, and Hugh de Boves, the most dreaded of those adventurers in the pay of wealthy princes who were known at that time by the name of roadsters (routiers, mercenaries). They proposed, it was said, to dismember France; and a promise to that effect had been made by the Emperor Otho to his principal chieftains assembled in secret conference. "It is against Philip himself, and him alone," he had said to them, "that we must direct all our efforts; it is he who must be slain first of all, for it is he alone who opposes us and makes himself our foe in everything. When he is dead, you will be able to subdue and divide the kingdom according to our pleasure; as for thee, Renaud, thou shalt take Peronne and all Vermandois; Hugh shall be master of Beauvais, Salisbury of Dreux, Conrad of Mantes, together with Vexin, and as for thee, Ferranti, thou shalt have Paris."
The two armies marched over the Low Countries and Flanders, seeking out both of them the most favorable position for commencing the attack. On Sunday, the 27th of August, 1214, Philip had halted near the bridge of Bouvines, not far from Lille, and was resting under an ash beside a small chapel dedicated to St. Peter. There came running to him a messenger, sent by Guerin, Bishop of Senlis, his confidant in war as well as government, and brought him word that his rear-guard, attacked by the Emperor Otho, was not sufficient to resist him. Philip went into the chapel, said a short prayer, and cried as he came out, "Haste we forward to the rescue of our comrades!" Then he put on his armor, mounted his horse, and made swiftly for the point of attack, amidst the shouts of all those who were about him, "To arms! to arms!"
Both armies numbered in their ranks not only all the feudal chivalry on the two sides, but burgher-forces, those from the majority of the great cities of Flanders being for Otho, and those from sixteen towns or communes of France for Philip Augustus. It was not, as we have seen, the first time that the forces from the French rural districts had taken part in the king's wars; Louis the Fat had often received their aid against the tyrannical and turbulent lords of his small kingdom; but since the reign of Louis the Fat the organization and importance of the communes had made great progress in France; and it was not only rural communes, but considerable cities, such as Amiens, Arras, Beauvais, Compiegne, and Soissons, which sent to the army of Philip Augustus bodies of men in large numbers and ready trained to arms. Contemporary historians put the army of Otho at one hundred thousand, and that of Philip Augustus at from fifty to sixty thousand men; but amongst modern historians one of the most eminent, M. Sismondi, reduces them both to some fifteen or twenty thousand. One would say that the reduction is as excessive as the original estimate. However that may be, the communal forces evidently filled an important place in the king's army at Bouvines, and maintained it brilliantly. So soon as Philip had placed himself at the head of the first line of his troops, "the men of Soissons," says William the Breton, who was present at the battle, "being impatient and inflamed by the words of Bishop Guerin, let out their horses at the full speed of their legs, and attacked the enemy." But the Flemish knights prick not forward to the encounter, indignant that the first charge against them was not made by knights, as would have been seemly, and remain motionless at their post. The men of Soissons, meanwhile, see no need of dealing softly with them and humoring them, so thrust them roughly, upset them from their horses, slay a many of them, and force them to leave their place or defend themselves, willy nilly. At last, the Chevalier Eustace, scorning the burghers and proud of his illustrious ancestors, moves out into the middle of the plain, and with haughty voice, roars, "Death to the French!" The battle soon became general and obstinate; it was a multitude of hand-to-hand fights in the midst of a confused melley. In this melley, the knights of the Emperor Otho did not forget the instructions he had given them before the engagement: they sought out the King of France himself, to aim their blows at him; and ere long they knew him by the presence of the royal standard, and made their way almost up to him. The communes, and chiefly those of Corbeil, Amiens, Beauvais, Compiegne, and Arras, thereupon pierced through the battalions of the knights and placed themselves in front of the king, when some German infantry crept up round Philip, and with hooks and light lances threw him down from his horse; but a small body of knights who had remained by him overthrew, dispersed, and slew these infantry, and the king, recovering himself more quickly than had been expected, leaped upon another horse, and dashed again into the melley. Then danger threatened the Emperor Otho in his turn. The French drove back those about him, and came right up to him; a sword thrust, delivered with vigor, entered the brain of Otho's horse; the horse, mortally wounded, reared up and turned his head in the direction whence he had come; and the emperor, thus carried away, showed his back to the French, and was off in full flight. "Ye will see his face no more to-day," said Philip to his followers: and he said truly. In vain did William des Barres, the first knight of his day in strength, and valor, and renown, dash off in pursuit of the emperor; twice he was on the point of seizing him, but Otho escaped, thanks to the swiftness of his horse and the great number of his German knights, who, whilst their emperor was flying, were fighting to a miracle. But their bravery saved only their master; the battle of Bouvines was lost for the Anglo-Germano-Flemish coalition. It was still prolonged for several hours; but in the evening it was over, and the prisoners of note were conducted to Philip Augustus. There were five counts, Ferrand of Flanders, Renaud of Boulogne, William of Salisbury, a natural brother of King John, Otho of Tecklemburg, and Conrad of Dartmund; and twenty-five barons "bearing their own standard to battle." Philip Augustus spared all their lives; sent away the Earl of Salisbury to his brother, confined the Count of Boulogne at Peronne, where he was subjected "to very rigorous imprisonment, with chains so short that he could scarce move one step," and as for the Count of Flanders, his sometime regent, Philip dragged him in chains in his train.
It is difficult to determine, from the evidence of contemporaries, which was the more rejoiced at and proud of this victory, king or people. "The same day, when evening approached," says William the Breton, "the army returned laden with spoils to the camp; and the king, with a heart full of joy and gratitude, offered a thousand thanksgivings to the Supreme King, who had vouchsaved to him a triumph over so many enemies. And in order that posterity might preserve forever a memorial of so great a success, the Bishop of Senlis founded, outside the walls of that town, a chapel, which he named Victory, and which, endowed with great possessions and having a government according to canonical rule, enjoyed the honor of possessing an abbot and a holy convent. . . . Who can recount, imagine, or set down with a pen, on parchment or tablets, the cheers of joy, the hymns of triumph, and the numberless dances of the people; the sweet chants of the clergy; the harmonious sounds of warlike instruments; the solemn decorations of the churches, inside and out; the streets, the houses, the roads of all the castles and towns, hung with curtains and tapestry of silk and covered with flowers, shrubs and green branches; all the inhabitants of every sort, sex, and age running from every quarter to see so grand a triumph; peasants and harvesters breaking off their work, hanging round their necks their sickles and hoes (for it was the season of harvest), and throwing themselves in a throng upon the roads to see in irons that Count of Flanders, that Fernand whose arms they had formerly dreaded!"
It was no groundless joy on the part of the people, and a spontaneous instinct gave them a forecast of the importance of that triumph which elicited their cheers. The battle of Bouvines was not the victory of Philip Augustus, alone, over a coalition of foreign princes; the victory was the work of king and people, barons, knights, burghers, and peasants of Ile-de-France, of Orleanness, of Picardy, of Normandy, of Champagne, and of Burgundy. And this union of different classes and different populations in a sentiment, a contest, and a triumph shared in common was a decisive step in the organization and unity of France. The victory of Bouvines marked the commencement of the time at which men might speak, and indeed did speak, by one single name, of the French. The nation in France and the kingship in France on that day rose out of and above the feudal system.
Philip Augustus was about the same time apprised of his son Louis's success on the banks of the Loire. The incapacity and swaggering insolence of King John had made all his Poitevine allies disgusted with him; he had been obliged to abandon his attack upon the King of France in the provinces, and the insurrection, growing daily more serious, of the English barons and clergy for the purpose of obtaining Magna Charta was preparing for him other reverses. He had ceased to be a dangerous rival to Philip.
No period has had better reason than our own to know how successes and conquests can intoxicate warlike kings; but Philip, whose valor, on occasion, was second to none, had no actual inclination towards war or towards conquest for the sole pleasure of extending his dominion. "Liking better, according to his custom," says William the Breton, "to conquer by peace than by war," he hasted to put an end by treaties, truces, or contracts to his quarrels with King John, the Count of Flanders, and the principal lords made prisoners at Bouvines; discretion, in his case, was proof against the temptations of circumstances, or the promptings of passion, and he took care not to overtly compromise his power, his responsibility, and the honor of his name by enterprises which did not naturally come in his way, or which he considered without chances of success. Whilst still a youth, he had given, in 1191, a sure proof of that self-command which is so rare amongst ambitious princes by withdrawing from the crusade in which he had been engaged with Richard Coeur de Lion; and it was still more apparent in two great events at the latter end of his reign—the crusade against the Albigensians and his son Louis's expedition in England, the crown of which had, in 1215, been offered to him by the barons at war with King John in defence of Magna Charta.
The organization of the kingdom, the nation, and the kingship in France was not the only great event and the only great achievement of that epoch. At the same time that this political movement was going on in the State, a religious and intellectual ferment was making head in the Church and in men's minds. After the conquest of the Gauls by the Franks, the Christian clergy, sole depositaries of all lights to lighten their age, and sole possessors of any idea of opposing the conquerors with arguments other than those of brute force, or of employing towards the vanquished any instrument of subjection other than violence, became the connecting link between the nation of the conquerors and the nation of the conquered, and, in the name of one and the same divine law, enjoined obedience on the subjects, and, in the case of the masters, moderated the transports of power. But in the course of this active and salutary participation in the affairs of the world, the Christian clergy lost somewhat of their primitive and proper character; religion in their hands was a means of power as well as of civilization; and its principal members became rich, and frequently substituted material weapons for the spiritual authority which had originally been their only reliance. When they were in a condition to hold their own against powerful laymen, they frequently adopted the powerful laymen's morals and shared their ignorance; and in the seventh and eighth centuries the barbarism which held the world in its clutches had made inroads upon the Church. Charlemagne essayed to resuscitate dying civilization, and sought amongst the clergy his chief means of success; he founded schools, filled them with students to whom promises of ecclesiastical preferments were held out as rewards of their merit, and, in fine, exerted himself with all his might to restore to the Christian Church her dignity and her influence. When Charlemagne was dead, nearly all his great achievements disappeared in the chaos which came after him; his schools alone survived and preserved certain centres of intellectual activity. When the feudal system had become established, and had introduced some rule into social relations, when the fate of mankind appeared no longer entirely left to the risks of force, intellect once more found some sort of employment, and once more assumed some sort of sway. Active and educated minds once more began to watch with some sort of independence the social facts before their eyes, to stigmatize vices and to seek for remedies. The spectacle afforded by their age could not fail to strike them. Society, after having made some few strides away from physical chaos, seemed in danger of falling into moral chaos; morals had sunk far below the laws, and religion was in deplorable contrast to morals. It was not laymen only who abandoned themselves with impunity to every excess of violence and licentiousness; scandals were frequent amongst the clergy themselves; bishoprics and other ecclesiastical benefices, publicly sold or left by will, passed down through families from father to son, and from husband to wife, and the possessions of the Church served for dowry to the daughters of bishops. Absolution was at a low quotation in the market, and redemption for sins of the greatest enormity cost scarcely the price of founding a church or a monastery. Horror-stricken at the sight of such corruption in the only things they at that time recognized as holy, men no longer knew where to find the rule of life or the safeguard of conscience. But it is the peculiar and glorious characteristic of Christianity that it is unable to bear for long, without making an effort to check them, the vices it has been unable to prevent, and that it always carries in its womb the vigorous germ of human regeneration. In the midst of their irregularities, the eleventh and twelfth centuries saw the outbreak of a grand religious, moral, and intellectual fermentation, and it was the Church herself that had the honor and the power of taking the initiative in the reformation. Under the influence of Gregory VII. the rigor of the popes began to declare itself against the scandals of the episcopate, the traffic in ecclesiastical benefices, and the bad morals of the secular clergy. At the same time, austere men exerted themselves to rekindle the fervor of monastic life, re-established rigid rules in the cloister, and refilled the monasteries by their preaching and example. St. Robert of Moleme founded the order of Citeaux; St. Norbert that of Premontre; St. Bernard detached Clairvaux from Meaux, which he considered too worldly; St. Bruno built Chartreuse; St. Hugo, St. Gerard, and others besides gave the Abbey of Cluni its renown; and ecclesiastical reform extended everywhere. Hereupon rich and powerful laymen, filled with ardor for their faith or fear for their eternal welfare, went seeking after solitude, and devoted themselves to prayer in the monasteries they had founded or enriched with their wealth; whole families were dispersed amongst various religious houses; and all the severities of penance hardly sufficed to quiet imaginations scared at the perils of living in the world or at the vices of their age. And, at the same time, in addition to this outburst of piety, ignorance was decried and stigmatized as the source of the prevailing evils; the function of teaching was included amongst the duties of the religious estate; and every newly-founded or reformed monastery became a school in which pupils of all conditions were gratuitously instructed in the sciences known by the name of liberal arts. Bold spirits began to use the rights of individual thought in opposition to the authority of established doctrines; and others, without dreaming of opposing, strove at any rate to understand, which is the way to produce discussion. Activity and freedom of thought were receiving development at the same time that fervent faith and fervent piety were.
This great moral movement of humanity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries arose from events very different in different parts of the beautiful country which was not yet, but was from that time forward tending to become, France. Amongst these events, which cannot be here recounted in detail, we will fix upon two, which were the most striking, and the most productive of important consequences in the whole history of the epoch, the quarrel of Abelard with St. Bernard and the crusade against the Albigensians. We shall there see how Northern France and Southern France differed one from the other before the bloody crisis which was to unite them in one single name and one common destiny.
In France properly so called at that time, north of the Rhone and the Loire, the church had herself accomplished the chief part of the reforms which had become necessary. It was there that the most active and most eloquent of the reforming monks had appeared, had preached, and had founded or regenerated a great number of monasteries. It was there that, at first amongst the clergy, and then, through their example, amongst the laity, Christian discipline and morals had resumed some sway. There, too, the Christian faith and church were, amongst the mass of the population, but little or not at all assailed; heretics, when any appeared, obtained support neither from princes nor people; they were proceeded against, condemned, and burned, without their exciting public sympathy by their presence, or public commiseration by their punishment. It was in the very midst of the clergy themselves, amongst literates and teachers, that, in Northern France, the intellectual and innovating movement of the period was manifested and concentrated. The movement was vigorous and earnest, and it was a really studious host which thronged to the lessons of Abelard at Paris, on Mount St. Genevieve, at Melun, at Corbeil, and at the Paraclete; but this host contained but few of the people; the greater part of those who formed it were either already in the church, or soon, in various capacities, about to be. And the discussions raised at the meetings corresponded with the persons attending them; there was the disputation of the schools; there was no founding of sects; the lessons of Abelard and the questions he handled were scientifico-religious; it was to expound and propagate what they regarded as the philosophy of Christianity, that masters and pupils made bold use of the freedom of thought; they made but slight war upon the existing practical abuses of the church; they differed from her in the interpretation and comments contained in some of her dogmas; and they considered themselves in a position to explain and confirm faith by reason. The chiefs of the church, with St. Bernard at their head, were not slow to descry, in these interpretations and comments based upon science, danger to the simple and pure faith of the Christian; they saw the apparition of dawning rationalism confronting orthodoxy. They were, as all their contemporaries were, wholly strangers to the bare notion of freedom of thought and conscience, and they began a zealous struggle against the new teachers; but they did not push it to the last cruel extremities. They had many a handle against Abelard: his private life, the scandal of his connection with Heloise, the restless and haughty fickleness of his character, laid him open to severe strictures; but his stern adversaries did not take so much advantage of them as they might have taken. They had his doctrines condemned at the councils of Soissons and Sens; they prohibited him from public lecturing; and they imposed upon him the seclusion of the cloister; but they did not even harbor the notion of having him burned as a heretic, and science and glory were respected in his person, even when his ideas were proscribed. Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluni, one of the most highly considered and honored prelates of the church, received him amongst his own monks, and treated him with paternal kindness, taking care of his health, as well as of his eternal welfare; and he who was the adversary of St. Bernard and the teacher condemned by the councils of Soissons and Sens, died peacefully, on the 21st of April, 1142, in the abbey of St. Marcellus, near Chalon-sur-Saone, after having received the sacraments with much piety, and in presence of all the brethren of the monastery. "Thus," wrote Peter the Venerable to Heloise, abbess for eleven years past of the Paraclete, "the man who, by his singular authority in science, was known to nearly all the world, and was illustrious wherever he was known, learned, in the school of Him who said, 'Know that I am meek and lowly of heart,' to remain meek and lowly; and, as it is but right to believe, he has thus returned to Him."
The struggle of Abelard with the Church of Northern France and the crusade against the Albigensians in Southern France are divided by much more than diversity and contrast; there is an abyss between them. In their religious condition, and in the nature as well as degree of their civilization, the populations of the two regions were radically different. In the north-east, between the Rhine, the Scheldt, and the Loire, Christianity had been obliged to deal with little more than the barbarism and ignorance of the German conquerors. In the south, on the two banks of the Rhone and the Garonne, along the Mediterranean, and by the Pyrenees, it had encountered all manner of institutions, traditions, religions, and disbeliefs, Greek, Roman, African, Oriental, Pagan, and Mussulman; the frequent invasions and long stay of the Saracens in those countries had mingled Arab blood with the Gallic, Roman, Asiatic, and Visigothic, and this mixture of so many different races, tongues, creeds, and ideas had resulted in a civilization more developed, more elegant, more humane, and more liberal, but far less coherent, simple, and strong, morally as well as politically, than the warlike, feudal civilization of Germanic France. In the religious order especially, the dissimilarity was profound. In Northern France, in spite of internal disorder, and through the influence of its bishops, missionaries, and monastic reformers, the orthodox Church had obtained a decided superiority and full dominion; but in Southern France, on the contrary, all the controversies, all the sects, and all the mystical or philosophical heresies which had disturbed Christendom from the second century to the ninth, had crept in and spread abroad. In it there were Arians, Manicheans, Gnostics, Paulicians, Cathars (the pure), and other sects of more local or more recent origin and name, Albigensians, Vaudians, Good People and Poor of Lyons, some piously possessed with the desire of returning to the pure faith and fraternal organization of the primitive evangelical Church, others given over to the extravagances of imagination or asceticism. The princes and the great laic lords of the country, the Counts of Toulouse, Foix, and Comminges, the Viscount of Beziers, and many others had not remained unaffected by this condition of the people: the majority were accused of tolerating and even protecting the heretics; and some were suspected of allowing their ideas to penetrate within their own households. The bold sallies of the critical and jeering spirit, and the abandonment of established creeds and discipline, bring about, before long, a relaxation of morals; and liberty requires long time and many trials before it learns to disavow and rise superior to license. In many of the feudal courts and castles of Languedoc, Provence, and Aquitaine, imaginations, words, and lives were licentious; and the charming poetry of the troubadours and the gallant adventures of knights caused it to be too easily forgotten that morality was but little more regarded than the faith. Dating from the latter half of the eleventh century, not only the popes, but the whole orthodox Church of France and its spiritual heads, were seriously disquieted at the state of mind of Southern France, and the dangers it threatened to the whole of Christendom. In 1145 St. Bernard, in all the lustre of his name and influence, undertook, in concert with Cardinal Alberic, legate of the Pope Eugenius III., to go and preach against the heretics in the countship of Toulouse. "We see here," he wrote to Alphonse Jourdain, Count of Toulouse, "churches without flocks, flocks without priests, priests without the respect which is their due, and Christians without Christ; men die in their sins without being reconciled by penance or admitted to the holy communion; souls are sent pell-mell before the awful tribunal of God; the grace of baptism is refused to little children; those to whom the Lord said, 'Suffer little children to come unto Me,' do not obtain the means of coming to salvation. Is it because of a belief that these little children have no need of the Saviour, inasmuch as they are little? Is it then for nought that our Lord from being great became little? What say I? Is it then for nought that He was scourged and spat upon, crucified and dead?" St. Bernard preached with great success in Toulouse itself, but he was not satisfied with easy successes. He had come to fight the heretics; and he went to look for them where he was told he would find them numerous and powerful. "He repaired," says a contemporary chronicler, "to the castle of Vertfeuil (or Verfeil, in the district of Toulouse), where flourished at that time the scions of a numerous nobility and of a multitude of people, thinking that, if he could extinguish heretical perversity in this place where it was so very much spread, it would be easy for him to make head against it elsewhere. When he had begun preaching, in the church, against those who were of most consideration in the place, they went out, and the people followed them; but the holy man, going out after them, gave utterance to the word of God in the public streets. The nobles then hid themselves on all sides in their houses; and as for him, he continued to preach to the common people who came about him. Whereupon, the others making uproar and knocking upon the doors, so that the crowd could not hear his voice, he then, having shaken off the dust from his feet as a testimony against them, departed from their midst, and, looking on the town, cursed it, saying, 'Vertfeuil, God wither thee!' Now there were, at that time, in the castle, a hundred knights abiding, having arms, banners, and horses, and keeping themselves at their own expense, not at the expense of other."
After the not very effectual mission of St. Bernard, who died in 1153, and for half a century, the orthodox Church was several times occupied with the heretics of Southern France, who were before long called Albigensians, either because they were numerous in the diocese of Albi, or because the council of Lombers, one of the first at which their condemnation was expressly pronounced (in 1165), was held in that diocese. But the measures adopted at that time against them were at first feebly executed, and had but little effect. The new ideas spread more and more; and in 1167 the innovators themselves held, at St. Felix-de-Caraman, a petty council, at which they appointed bishops for districts where they had numerous partisans. Raymond VI., who, in 1195, succeeded his father, Raymond V., as Count of Toulouse, was supposed to be favorably disposed towards them; he admitted them to intimacy with him, and, it was said, allowed himself, in respect of the orthodox Church, great liberty of thought and speech. Meanwhile the great days and the chief actors in the struggle commenced by St. Bernard were approaching. In 1198, Lothaire Conti, a pupil of the University of Paris, was elected pope, with the title of Innocent III.; and, four or five years later, Simon, Count of Montfort l'Amaury, came back from the fifth crusade in the East, with a celebrity already established by his valor and his zeal against the infidels. Innocent III., no unworthy rival of Gregory VII., his late predecessor in the Holy See, had the same grandeur of ideas and the same fixity of purpose, with less headiness in his character, and more knowledge of the world, and more of the spirit of policy. He looked upon the whole of Christendom as his kingdom, and upon himself as the king whose business it was to make prevalent everywhere the law of God. Simon, as Count of Montfort l'Amaury, was not a powerful lord; but he was descended, it was said, from a natural son of King Robert his mother, who was English, had left him heir to the earldom of Leicester, and he had for his wife Alice de Montmorency. His social status and his personal renown, superior as they were to his worldly fortunes, authorized in his case any flight of ambition; and in the East he had learned to believe that anything was allowed to him in the service of the Christian faith. Innocent III., on receiving the tiara, set to work at once upon the government of Christendom. Simon de Montfort, on returning from Palestine, did not dream of the new crusade to which he was soon to be summoned, and for which he was so well prepared.
Innocent III. at first employed against the heretics of Southern France only spiritual and legitimate weapons. Before proscribing, he tried to convert them; he sent to them a great number of missionaries, nearly all taken from the order of Citeaux, and of proved zeal already; many amongst them had successively the title and power of legates; and they went preaching throughout the whole country, communicating with the princes and laic lords, whom they requested to drive away the heretics from their domains, and holding with the heretics themselves conferences which frequently drew a numerous attendance. A knight "full of sagacity," according to a contemporary chronicler, "Pons d'Adhemar, of Rodelle, said one day to Foulques, Bishop of Toulouse, one of the most zealous of the pope's delegates, 'We could not have believed that Rome had so many powerful arguments against these folk here.' 'See you not,' said the bishop, 'how little force there is in their objections?' 'Certainly,' answered the knight. 'Why, then, do you not expel them from your lands?' 'We cannot,' answered Pons; 'we have been brought up with them; we have amongst them folk near and dear to us, and we see them living honestly.'" Some of the legates, wearied at the little effect of their preaching, showed an inclination to give up their mission. Peter de Castelnau himself, the most zealous of all, and destined before long to pay for his zeal with his life, wrote to the pope to beg for permission to return to his monastery. Two Spanish priests, Diego Azebes, Bishop of Osma, and his sub-prior Dominic, falling in with the Roman legates at Montpellier, heard them express their disgust. "Give up," said they to the legates, "your retinue, your horses, and your goings in state; proceed in all humility, afoot and barefoot, without gold or silver, living and teaching after the example of the Divine Master." "We dare not take on ourselves such things," answered the pope's agents; "they would seem sort of innovation; but if some person of sufficient authority consent to precede us in such guise, we would follow him readily." The Bishop of Osma sent away his retinue to Spain, and kept with him only his companion Dominic; and they, taking with them two of the monks of Citeaux, Peter de Castelnau and Raoul,—the most fervent of the delegates from Rome,—began that course of austerity and of preaching amongst the people which was ultimately to make of the sub-prior Dominic a saint and the founder of a great religious order, to which has often, but wrongly, been attributed the origin, though it certainly became the principal agent, of the Inquisition. Whilst joining in humble and pious energy with the two Spanish priests, the two monks of Citeaux, and Peter de Castelnau especially, did not cease to urge amongst the laic princes the extirpation of the heretics. In 1205 they repaired to Toulouse to demand of Raymond VI. a formal promise, which indeed they obtained; but Raymond was one of those undecided and feeble characters who dare not refuse to promise what they dare not attempt to do. He wished to live in peace with the orthodox Church without behaving cruelly to a large number of his subjects. The fanatical legate, Peter de Castelnau, enraged at his tergiversation, instantly excommunicated him; and the pope sent the count a threatening letter, giving him therein to understand that in case of need stronger measures would be adopted against him. Raymond, affrighted, prevailed on the two legates to repair to St. Gilles, and he there renewed his promises to them; but he always sought for and found on the morrow some excuse for retarding the execution of them. The legates, after having reproached him vehemently, determined to leave St. Gilles without further delay, and the day after their departure (January 15th, 1208), as they were getting ready to cross the Rhone, two strangers, who had lodged the night before in the same hostelry with them, drew near, and one of the two gave Peter de Castelnau a lance-thrust with such force, that the legate, after exclaiming, "God forgive thee, as I do!" had only time to give his comrade his last instructions, and then expired.
Great was the emotion in France and at Rome. It was barely thirty years since in England, after an outburst of passion on the part of King Henry II., four knights of his court had murdered the Archbishop Thomas-a-Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. Was the Count of Toulouse, too, guilty of having instigated the shedding of blood and the murder of a prelate? Such was, in the thirteenth century, the general cry throughout the Catholic Church and the signal for war against Raymond VI.; a war undertaken on the plea of a personal crime, but in reality for the extirpation of heresy in Southern France, and for the dispossession of the native princes, who would not fully obey the decrees of the papacy, in favor of foreign conquerors who would put them into execution. The crusade against the Albigensians was the most striking application of two principles equally false and fatal, which did more than as much evil to the Catholics as to the heretics, and to the papacy as to freedom; and they are, the right of the spiritual power to claim for the coercion of souls the material force of the temporal powers, and its right to strip temporal sovereigns, in case they set at nought its injunctions, of their title to the obedience of their people; in other words, denial of religious liberty to conscience and of political independence to states. It was by virtue of these two principles, at that time dominant, but not without some opposition, in Christendom, that Innocent III., in 1208, summoned the King of France, the great lords and the knights, and the clergy, secular and regular, of the kingdom to assume the cross and go forth to extirpate from Southern France the Albigensians, "worse than the Saracens;" and that he promised to the chiefs of the crusaders the sovereignty of such domains as they should win by conquest from the princes who were heretics or protectors of heretics.
Throughout all France, and even outside of France, the passions of religion and ambition were aroused at this summons.
Twelve abbots and twenty monks of Citeaux dispersed themselves in all directions preaching the crusade; and lords and knights, burghers and peasants, laymen and clergy, hastened to respond. "From near and far they came," says the contemporary poet-chronicler, William of Tudela; "there be men from Auvergne and Burgundy, France and Limousin; there be men from all the world; there be Germans, Poitevines, Gascons, Rouergats, and Saintongese. Never did God make scribe who, whatsoever his pains, could set them all down in writing, in two months or in three." The poet reckons "twenty thousand horsemen armed at all points, and more than two hundred thousand villeins and peasants, not to speak of burghers and clergy." A less exaggerative though more fanatical writer, Peter of Vaulx-Cernay, the chief contemporary chronicler of this crusade, contents himself with saying that, at the siege of Carcassonne, one of the first operations of the crusaders, "it was said that their army numbered fifty thousand men." Whatever may be the truth about the numbers, the crusaders were passionately ardent and persevering: the war against the Albigensians lasted fifteen years (from 1208 to 1223), and of the two leading spirits, one ordering and the other executing, Pope Innocent III. and Simon de Montfort, neither saw the end of it. During these fifteen years, in the region situated between the Rhone, the Pyrenees, the Garonne, and even the Dordogne, nearly all the towns and strong castles, Beziers, Carcassonne, Castelnaudary, Lavaur, Gaillac, Moissae, Minerve, Termes, Toulouse, &c., were taken, lost, retaken, given over to pillage, sack, and massacre, and burnt by the crusaders with all the cruelty of fanatics and all the greed of conquerors. We do not care to dwell here in detail upon this tragical and monotonous history; we will simply recall some few of its characteristics. Doubt has been thrown upon the answer attributed to Arnauld-Amaury, Abbot of Citeaux, when he was asked, in 1209, by the conquerors of Beziers, how, at the assault of the city, they should distinguish the heretics from the faithful: "Slay them all; God will be sure to know His own." The doubt is more charitable than reasonable; for it is a contemporary, himself a monk of Citeaux, who reports, without any comment, this hateful speech. Simon de Montfort, the hero of the crusade, employed similar language. One day two heretics, taken at Castres, were brought before him; one of them was unshakable in his belief, the other expressed a readiness to turn convert: "Burn them both," said the count; "if this fellow mean what he says, the fire will serve for expiation of his sins, and, if he lie, he will suffer the penalty for his imposture." At the siege of the castle of Lavaur, in 1211, Amaury, Lord of Montreal, and eighty knights, had been made prisoners: and "the noble Count Simon," says Peter of Vaulx-Cernay, "decided to hang them all on one gibbet; but when Amaury, the most distinguished amongst them, had been hanged, the gallows-poles, which, from too great haste, had not been firmly fixed in the ground, having come down, the count, perceiving how great was the delay, ordered the rest to be slain. The pilgrims therefore fell upon them right eagerly and slew them on the spot. Further, the count caused stones to be heaped upon the lady of the castle, Amaury's sister, a very wicked heretic, who had been cast into a well. Finally our crusaders, with extreme alacrity, burned heretics without number."
In the midst of these atrocious unbridlements of passions supposed to be religious, other passions were not slow to make their appearance. Innocent III. had promised the crusaders the sovereignty of the domains they might win by conquest from princes who were heretics or protectors of heretics. After the capture, in 1209, of Beziers and Carcassonne, possessions of Raymond Roger, Viscount of Albi, and nephew of the Count of Toulouse, the Abbot of Citeaux, a legate of the pope, assembled the principal chiefs of the crusaders that they might choose one amongst them as lord and governor of their conquests. The offer was made, successively, to Eudes, Duke of Burgundy, to Peter de Courtenay, Count of Nevers, and to Walter de Chatilion, Count of St. Paul; but they all three declined, saying that they had sufficient domains of their own without usurping those of the Viscount of Beziers, to whom, in their opinion, they had already caused enough loss. The legate, somewhat embarrassed, it is said, proposed to appoint two bishops and four knights, who, in concert with him, should choose a new master for the conquered territories. The proposal was agreed to, and, after some moments of hesitation, Simon de Montfort, being elected by this committee, accepted the proffered domains, and took immediate possession of them on publication of a charter conceived as follows: "Simon, Lord of Montfort, Earl of Leicester, Viscount of Beziers and Carcassonne. The Lord having delivered into my hands the lands of the heretics, an unbelieving people, that is to say, whatsoever He hath thought fit to take from them by the hand of the crusaders, His servants, I have accepted humbly and devoutly this charge and administration, with confidence in His aid." The pope wrote to him forthwith to confirm him in hereditary possession of his new dominions, at the same time expressing to him a hope that, in concert with the legates, he would continue to carry out the extirpation of the heretics. The dispossessed Viscount, Raymond Roger, having been put in prison by his conqueror in a tower of Carcassonne itself, died there at the end of three months, of disease according to some, and a violent death according to others; but the latter appears to be a groundless suspicion, for it was not to cowardly and secret crimes that Simon de Montfort was inclined.
From this time forth the war in Southern France changed character, or, rather, it assumed a double character; with the war of religion was openly joined a war of conquest; it was no longer merely against the Albigensians and their heresies, it was against the native princes of Southern France and their domains that the crusade was prosecuted. Simon de Montfort was eminently qualified to direct and accomplish this twofold design: sincerely fanatical and passionately ambitious; of a valor that knew no fatigue; handsome and strong; combining tact with authority; pitiless towards his enemies as became his mission of doing justice in the name of the faith and the Church; a leader faithful to his friends and devoted to their common cause whilst reckoning upon them for his own private purposes, he possessed those natural qualities which confer spontaneous empire over men and those abilities which lure them on by opening a way for the fulfilment of their interested hopes. And as for himself, by the stealthy growth of selfishness, which is so prone to become developed when circumstances are tempting, he every day made his personal fortunes of greater and greater account in his views and his conduct. His ambitious appetite grew by the very difficulties it encountered as well as by the successes it fed upon. The Count of Toulouse, persecuted and despoiled, complained loudly in the ears of the pope; protested against the charge of favoring the heretics; offered and actually made the concessions demanded by Rome; and, as security, gave up seven of his principal strongholds. But, being ever too irresolute and too weak to keep his engagements to his subjects' detriment no less than to stand out against his adversaries' requirements, he was continually falling back into the same condition, and keeping off attacks which were more and more urgent by promises which always remained without effect. After having sent to Rome embassy upon embassy with explanations and excuses, he twice went thither himself, in 1210 and in 1215; the first time alone, the second with his young son, who was then thirteen, and who was at a later period Raymond VII. He appealed to the pope's sense of justice; he repudiated the stories and depicted the violence of his enemies; and finally pleaded the rights of his son, innocent of all that was imputed to himself, and yet similarly attacked and despoiled. Innocent III. had neither a narrow mind nor an unfeeling heart; he listened to the father's pleading, took an interest in the youth, and wrote, in April, 1212, and January, 1213, to his legates in Languedoc and to Simon de Montfort, "After having led the army of the crusaders into the domains of the Count of Toulouse, ye have not been content with invading all the places wherein there were heretics, but ye have further gotten possession of those where-in there was no suspicion of heresy. . . . The same ambassadors have objected to us that ye have usurped what was another's with so much greed and so little consideration that of all the domains of the Count of Toulouse there remains to him barely the town of that name, together with the castle of Montauban. . . . Now, though the said count has been found guilty of many matters against God and against the Church, and our legates, in order to force him to acknowledgment thereof, have excommunicated his person, and have left his domains to the first captor, nevertheless, he has not yet been condemned as a heretic nor as an accomplice in the death of Peter de Castelnau, of sacred memory, albeit he is strongly suspected thereof. That is why we did ordain that, if there should appear against him a proper accuser, within a certain time, there should be appointed him a day for clearing himself, according to the form pointed out in our letters, reserving to ourselves the delivery of a definitive sentence thereupon: in all which the procedure hath not been according to our orders. We wot not, therefore, on what ground we could yet grant to others his dominions which have not been taken away either from him or from his heirs; and, above all, we would not appear to have fraudulently extorted from him the castles he hath committed to us, the will of the Apostle being that we should refrain from even the appearance of wrong."
But Innocent III. forgot that, in the case of either temporal or spiritual sovereigns, when there has once been an appeal to force, there is no stopping, at pleasure and within specified limits, the movement that has been set going and the agents which have the work in hand. He had decreed war against the princes who were heretics or protectors of heretics; and he had promised their domains to their conquerors. He meant to reserve to himself the right of pronouncing definitive judgment as to the condemnation of princes as heretics, and as to dispossessing them of their dominions; but when force had done its business on the very spot, when the condemnation of the princes as heretics had been pronounced by the pope's legates and their bodily dispossession effected by his laic allies, the reserves and regrets of Innocent III. were vain. He had proclaimed two principles—the bodily extirpation of the heretics and the political dethronement of the princes who were their accomplices or protectors; but the application of the principles slipped out of his own hands. Three local councils assembled in 1210, 1212, and 1213, at St. Gilles, at Arles, and at Lavaur, and presided over by the pope's legates, proclaimed the excommunication of Raymond VI., and the cession of his dominions to Simon de Montfort, who took possession of them for himself and his comrades. Nor were the pope's legates without their share in the conquest; Arnauld Amaury, Abbot of Citeaux, became Archbishop of Narbonne; and Abbot Foulques of Marseilles, celebrated in his youth as a gallant troubadour, was Bishop of Toulouse and the most ardent of the crusaders. When these conquerors heard that the pope had given a kind reception to Raymond VI. and his young son, and lent a favorable ear to their complaints, they sent haughty warnings to Innocent III., giving him to understand that the work was all over, and that, if he meddled, Simon de Montfort and his warriors might probably not bow to his decisions. Don Pedro II., king of Aragon, had strongly supported before Innocent III. the claims of the Count of Toulouse and of the southern princes his allies. "He cajoled the lord pope," says the prejudiced chronicler of these events, the monk Peter of Vaulx-Cernay, "so far as to persuade him that the cause of the faith was achieved against the heretics, they being put to distant flight and completely driven from the Albigensian country, and that accordingly it was necessary for him to revoke altogether the indulgence be had granted to the crusaders. . . . The sovereign pontiff, too credulously listening to the perfidious suggestions of the said king, readily assented to his demands, and wrote to the Count of Montfort, with orders and commands to restore without delay to the Counts of Comminges and of Foix, and to Gaston of Beam, very wicked and abandoned people, the lands which, by just judgment of God and by the aid of the crusaders, he at last had conquered." But, in spite of his desire to do justice, Innocent III., studying policy rather than moderation, did not care to enter upon a struggle against the agents, ecclesiastical and laic, whom he had let loose upon Southern France. In November, 1215, the fourth Lateran council met at Rome; and the Count of Toulouse, his son, and the Count of Foix brought their claims before it. "It is quite true," says Peter of Vaulx-Cernay, "that they found there—and, what is worse, amongst the prelates—certain folk who opposed the cause of the faith, and labored for the restoration of the said counts; but the counsel of Ahitophel did not prevail, for the lord pope, in agreement with the greater and saner part of the council, decreed that the city of Toulouse and other territories conquered by the crusaders should be ceded to the Count of Montfort, who, more than any other, had borne himself right valiantly and loyally in the holy enterprise; and, as for the domains which Count Raymond possessed in Provence, the sovereign pontiff decided that they should be reserved to him, in order to make provision, either with part or even the whole, for the son of this count, provided always that, by sure signs of fealty and good behavior, he should show himself worthy of compassion."
This last inclination towards compassion on the part of the pope in favor of the young Count Raymond, "provided he showed himself worthy of it," remained as fruitless as the remonstrances addressed to his legates; for on the 17th of July, 1216, seven months after the Lateran council, Innocent III. died, leaving Simon de Montfort and his comrades in possession of all they had taken, and the war still raging between the native princes of Southern France and the foreign conquerors. The primitive, religious character of the crusade wore off more and more; worldly ambition and the spirit of conquest became more and more predominant; and the question lay far less between catholics and heretics than between the old and new masters of the country, between the independence of the southern people and the triumph of warriors come from the north of France, that is to say, between two different races, civilizations, and languages. Raymond VI. and his son recovered thenceforth certain supports and opportunities of which hitherto the accusation of heresy and the judgments of the court of Rome had robbed them; their neighboring allies and their secret or intimidated partisans took fresh courage; the fortune of battle became shifty; successes and reverses were shared by both sides; and not only many small places and castles, but the largest towns, Toulouse amongst others, fell into the hands of each party alternately. Innocent III.'s successor in the Holy See, Pope Honorius III., though at first very pronounced in his opposition to the Albigensians, had less ability, less perseverance, and less influence than his predecessor. Finally, on the 20th of June, 1218, Simon de Montfort, who had been for nine months unsuccessfully besieging Toulouse, which had again come into the possession of Raymond VI., was killed by a shower of stones, under the walls of the place, and left to his son Amaury the inheritance of his war and his conquests, but not of his vigorous genius and his warlike renown.
The struggle still dragged on for five years with varied fortune on each side, but Amaury de Montfort was losing ground every day, and Raymond VI., when he died in August, 1222, had recovered the greater part of his dominions. His son, Raymond VII., continued the war for eighteen months longer, with enough of popular favor and of success to make his enemies despair of recovering their advantages; and, on the 14th of January, 1224, Amaury de Montfort, after having concluded with the Counts of Toulouse and Foix a treaty which seemed to have only a provisional character, "went forth," says the History of Languedoc, "with all the French from Carcassonne, and left forever the country which his house had possessed for nearly fourteen years." Scarcely had he arrived at the court of Louis VIII., who had just succeeded his father, Philip Augustus, when he ceded to the King of France his rights over the domains which the crusaders had conquered by a deed conceived in these terms: "Know that we give up to our Lord Louis, the illustrious King of the French, and to his heirs forever, to dispose of according to their pleasure, all the privileges and gifts that the Roman Church did grant unto our father Simon of pious memory, in respect of the countship of Toulouse and other districts in Albigeois; supposing that the pope do accomplish all the demands made to him by the king through the Archbishop of Bourges, and the Bishops of Langres and Chartres; else, be it known for certain that we cede not to any one aught of all these domains."
Whilst this cruel war lasted Philip Augustus would not take any part in it. Not that he had any leaning towards the Albigensian heretics on the score of creed or religious liberty; but his sense of justice and moderation was shocked at the violence employed against them, and he had a repugnance to the idea of taking part in the devastation of the beautiful southern provinces. He took it ill, moreover, that the pope should arrogate to himself the right of despoiling of their dominions, on the ground of heresy, princes who were vassals of the King of France; and, without offering any formal opposition, he had no mind to give his assent thereto. When Innocent III. called upon him to co-operate in the crusade, Philip answered, "that he had at his flanks two huge and terrible lions, the Emperor Otho, and King John of England, who were working with all their might to bring trouble upon the kingdom of France; that, consequently, he had no inclination at all to leave France, or even to send his son; but it seemed to him enough, for the present, if he allowed his barons to march against the disturbers of peace and of the faith in the province of Narbonne." In 1213, when Simon de Montfort had gained the battle of Muret, Philip allowed Prince Louis to go and look on when possession was taken of Toulouse by the crusaders; but when Louis came back and reported to his father, "in the presence of the princes and barons who were, for the most part, relatives and allies of Count Raymond, the great havoc committed by Count Simon in the city after surrender, the king withdrew to his apartments without any ado beyond saying to those present, 'Sirs, I have yet hope that before very long Count de Montfort and his brother Guy will die at their work, for God is just, and will suffer these counts to perish thereat, because their quarrel is unjust.'" Nevertheless, at a little later period, when the crusade was at its greatest heat, Philip, on the pope's repeated entreaty, authorized his son to take part in it with such lords as might be willing to accompany him; but he ordered that the expedition should not start before the spring, and, on the occurrence of some fresh incident, he had it further put off until the following year. He received visits from Count Raymond VI., and openly testified good will towards him. When Simon de Montfort was decisively victorious, and in possession of the places wrested from Raymond, Philip Augustus recognized accomplished facts, and received the new Count of Toulouse as his vassal; but when, after the death of Simon de Montfort and Innocent III., the question was once more thrown open, and when Raymond VI., first, and then his son Raymond VII., had recovered the greater part of their dominions, Philip formally refused to recognize Amaury de Montfort as successor to his father's conquests: nay, he did more; he refused to accept the cession of those conquests, offered to him by Amaury de Montfort and pressed upon him by Pope Honorius III. Philip Augustus was not a scrupulous sovereign, nor disposed to compromise himself for the mere sake of defending justice and humanity; but he was too judicious not to respect and protect, to a certain extent, the rights of his vassals as well as his own, and, at the same time, too discreet to involve himself, without necessity, in a barbarous and dubious war. He held aloof from the crusade against the Albigensians with as much wisdom, and more than as much dignity, as he had displayed, seventeen years before, in withdrawing from the crusade against the Saracens.
He had, in 1216, another great chance of showing his discretion. The English barons were at war with their king, John Lackland, in defence of Magna Charta, which they had obtained the year before; and they offered the crown of England to the King of France, for his son, Prince Louis. Before accepting, Philip demanded twenty-four hostages, taken from the men of note in the country, as a guarantee that the offer would be supported in good earnest; and the hostages were sent to him. But Pope Innocent III. had lately released King John from his oath in respect of Magna Charta, and had excommunicated the insurgent barons; and he now instructed his legate to oppose the projected design, with a threat of excommunicating the King of France. Philip Augustus, who in his youth had dreamed of resuscitating the empire of Charlemagne, was strongly tempted to seize the opportunity of doing over again the work of William the Conqueror; but he hesitated to endanger his power and his kingdom in such a war against King John and the pope. The prince was urgent in entreating his father: "Sir," said he, "I am your liegeman for the fief you have given me on this side of the sea; but it pertains not to you to decide aught as to the kingdom of England; I do beseech you to place no obstacle in the way of my departure." The king, "seeing his son's firm resolution and anxiety," says the historian Matthew Paris, "was one with him in feeling and desire; but, foreseeing the dangers of events to come, he did not give his public consent, and, without any expression of wish or counsel, permitted him to go, with the gift of his blessing." It was the young and ambitious Princess Blanche of Castille, wife of Prince Louis, and destined to be the mother of St. Louis, who, after her husband's departure for England, made it her business to raise troops for him and to send him means of sustaining the war. Events justified the discreet reserve of Philip Augustus; for John Lackland, after having suffered one reverse previously, died on the 19th of October, 1216; his death broke up the party of the insurgent barons; and his son, Henry III., who was crowned on the 28th of October, in Gloucester cathedral, immediately confirmed the Great Charter. Thus the national grievance vanished, and national feeling resumed its sway in England; the French everywhere became unpopular; and after a few months' struggle, with equal want of skill and success, Prince Louis gave up his enterprise and returned to France with his French comrades, on no other conditions but a mutual exchange of prisoners, and an amnesty for the English who had been his adherents.
At this juncture, as well as in the crusade against the Albigensians, Philip Augustus behaved towards the pope with a wisdom and ability hard of attainment at any time, and very rare in his own: he constantly humored the papacy without being subservient to it, and he testified towards it his respect, and at the same time his independence. He understood all the gravity of a rupture with Rome, and he neglected nothing to avoid one; but he also considered that Rome, herself not wanting in discretion, would be content with the deference of the King of France rather than get embroiled with him by exacting his submission. Philip Augustus, in his political life, always preserved this proper mean, and he found it succeed; but in his domestic life there came a day when he suffered himself to be hurried out of his usual deference towards the pope; and, after a violent attempt at resistance, he resigned himself to submission. Three years after the death of his first wife, Isabel of Hainault, who had left him a son, Prince Louis, he married Princess Ingeburga of Denmark, without knowing anything at all of her, just as it generally happens in the case of royal marriages. No sooner had she become his wife than, without any cause that can be assigned with certainty, he took such a dislike to her that, towards the end of the same year, he demanded of and succeeded in obtaining from a French council, held at Compiegne, nullity of his marriage on the ground of prohibited consanguinity. "O, naughty France! naughty France! O, Rome! Rome!" cried the poor Danish princess, on learning this decision; and she did in fact appeal to Pope Celestine III. Whilst the question was being investigated at Rome, Ingeburga, whom Philip had in vain tried to send back to Denmark, was marched about, under restraint, in France from castle to castle and convent to convent, and treated with iniquitous and shocking severity. Pope Celestine, after examination, annulled the decision of the council of Compiegne touching the pretended consanguinity, leaving in suspense the question of divorce, and, consequently, without breaking the tie of marriage between the king and the Danish princess. "I have seen," he wrote to the Archbishop of Sens, "the genealogy sent to me by the bishops, and it is due to that inspection and the uproar caused by this scandal that I have annulled the decree; take care now, therefore, that Philip do not marry again, and so break the tie which still unites him to the Church." Philip paid no heed to this canonical injunction; his heart was set upon marrying again; and, after having unsuccessfully sought the band of two German princesses, on the borders of the Rhine, who were alarmed by the fate of Ingeburga, he obtained that of a princess, a Tyrolese by origin, Agnes (according to others, Mary) of Merania, that is, Moravia (an Austrian province, in German Moehren, out of which the chroniclers of the time made Meranie or Merania, the name that has remained in the history of Agnes). She was the daughter of Berthold, Marquis of Istria, whom, about 1180, the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa had made Duke of Moravia. According to all contemporary chronicles, Agnes was not only beautiful, but charming; she made a great impression at the court of France; and Philip Augustus, after his marriage with her in June, 1196, became infatuated with her. But a pope more stern and bold than Celestine III., Innocent III., had just been raised to the Holy See, and was exerting himself, in court as well as monastery, to effect a reformation of morals. Immediately after his accession, he concerned himself with the conjugal irregularity in which the King of France was living. "My predecessor, Celestine," he wrote to the Bishop of Paris, "would fain have put a stop to this scandal, but he was unsuccessful; as for me, I am quite resolved to prosecute his work, and obtain by all and any means fulfilment of God's law. Be instant in speaking thereof to the king on my behalf; and tell him that his obstinate refusals may probably bring upon him both the wrath of God and the thunders of the Church." And indeed Philip's refusals were very obstinate; for the pride of the king and the feelings of the man were equally wounded. "I had rather lose half my domains," said he, "than separate from Agnes." The pope threatened him with the interdict,—that is, the suspension of all religious ceremonies, festivals, and forms in the Church of France. Philip resisted not only the threat, but also the sentence of the interdict, which was actually pronounced, first in the churches of the royal domain, and afterwards in those of the whole kingdom. "So wroth was the king," says the chronicle of St. Denis, "that he thrust from their sees all the prelates of his kingdom, because they had assented to the interdict." "I had rather turn Mussulman," said Philip; "Saladin was a happy man, for he had no pope." But Innocent III. was inflexible; he claimed respect for laws divine and human, for the domestic hearth and public order. The conscience of the nation was troubled. Agnes herself applied to the pope, urging her youth, her ignorance of the world, the sincerity and purity of her love for her husband. Innocent III. was touched, and before long gave indisputable evidence that he was, but without budging from his duty and his right as a Christian. For four years the struggle went on. At last Philip yielded to the injunction of the pope and the feeling of his people; he sent away Agnes, and recalled Ingeburga. The pope, in his hour of victory, showed his sense of equity and his moral appreciation; taking into consideration the good faith of Agnes in respect of her marriage, and Philip's possible mistake as to his right to marry her, he declared the legitimacy of the two children born of their union. Agnes retired to Poissy, where, a few months afterwards, she died. Ingeburga resumed her title and rights as queen, but without really enjoying them. Philip, incensed as well as beaten, banished her far from him and his court, to Etampes, where she lived eleven years in profound retirement. It was only in 1212 that, to fully satisfy the pope, Philip, more persevering in his political wisdom than his domestic prejudices, restored the Danish princess to all her royal station at his side. She was destined to survive him.
There can be little doubt but that the affection of Philip Augustus for Agnes of Merania was sincere; nothing can be better proof of it than the long struggle he maintained to prevent separation from her; but, to say nothing of the religious scruples which at last, perhaps, began to prick the conscience of the king, great political activity and the government of a kingdom are a powerful cure for sorrows of the heart, and seldom is there a human soul so large and so constant as to have room for sentiments and interests so different, both of them at once, and for a long continuance. It has been shown with what intelligent assiduity Philip Augustus strove to extend, or, rather, to complete the kingdom of France; what a mixture of firmness and moderation he brought to bear upon his relations with his vassals, as well as with his neighbors; and what bravery he showed in war, though he preferred to succeed by the weapons of peace. He was as energetic and effective in the internal administration of his kingdom as in foreign affairs. M. Leopold Delisle, one of the most learned French academicians, and one of the most accurate in his knowledge, has devoted a volume of more than seven hundred pages octavo to a simple catalogue of the official acts of Philip Augustus, and this catalogue contains a list of two thousand two hundred and thirty-six administrative acts of all kinds, of which M. Delisle confines himself to merely setting forth the title and object. Search has been made in this long table to see what part was taken by Philip Augustus in the establishment and interior regulation of the communes, that great fact which is so conspicuous in the history of French civilization, and which will before long be made the topic of discourse here. The search brings to light, during this reign, forty-one acts confirming certain communes already established, or certain privileges previously granted to certain populations, forty-three acts establishing new communes, or granting new local privileges, and nine acts decreeing suppression of certain communes, or a repressive intervention of the royal authority in their internal regulation, on account of quarrels or irregularities in their relations either with their lord, or, especially, with their bishop. These mere figures show the liberal character of the government of Philip Augustus, in respect of this important work of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Nor are we less struck by his efficient energy in his care for the interests and material civilization of his people. In 1185, "as he was walking one day in his palace, he placed himself at a window whence he was sometimes pleased, by way of pastime, to watch the Seine flowing by. Some carts, as they passed, caused the mud with which the streets were filled to emit a fetid smell, quite unbearable. The king, shocked at what was as unhealthy as it was disgusting, sent for the burghers and provost of the city, and ordered that all the thoroughfares and streets of Paris should be paved with hard and solid stone, for this right Christian prince aspired to rid Paris of her ancient name, Lutetia (Mud-town)." It is added that, on hearing of so good a resolution, a moneyed man of the day, named Gerard de Poissy, volunteered to contribute towards the construction of the pavement eleven thousand silver marks. Nor was Philip Augustus less concerned for the external security than for the internal salubrity of Paris. In 1190, on the eve of his departure for the crusade, "he ordered the burghers of Paris to surround with a good wall, flanked by towers, the city he loved so well, and to make gates thereto;" and in twenty years this great work was finished on both sides of the Seine. "The king gave the same orders," adds the historian Rigord, "about the towns and castles of all his kingdom;" and indeed it appears from the catalogue of M. Leopold Delisle, at the date of 1193, "that, at the request of Philip Augustus, Peter de Courtenai, Count of Nevers, with the aid of the church-men, had the walls of the town of Auxerre built." And Philip's foresight went beyond such important achievements. "He had a good wall built to enclose the wood of Vincennes, heretofore open to any sort of folk. The King of England, on hearing thereof, gathered a great mass of fawns, hinds, does, and bucks, taken in his forests in Normandy and Aquitaine; and having had them shipped aboard a large covered vessel, with suitable fodder, he sent them by way of the Seine to King Philip Augustus, his liege-lord at Paris. King Philip received the gift gladly, had his parks stocked with the animals, and put keepers over them." A feeling, totally unconnected with the pleasures of the chase, caused him to order an enclosure very different from that of Vincennes. "The common cemetery of Paris, hard by the Church of the Holy Innocents, opposite the street of St. Denis, had remained up to that time open to all passers, man and beast, without anything to prevent it from being confounded with the most profane spot; and the king, hurt at such indecency, had it enclosed by high stone walls, with as many gates as were judged necessary, which were closed every night." At the same time he had built, in this same quarter, the first great municipal market-places, enclosed, likewise, by a wall, with gates shut at night, and surmounted by a sort of covered gallery. He was not quite a stranger to a certain instinct, neither systematic nor of general application, but practical and effective on occasion, in favor of the freedom of industry and commerce. Before his time, the ovens employed by the baking trade in Paris were a monopoly for the profit of certain religious or laic establishments; but when Philip Augustus ordered the walling in of the new and much larger area of the city "he did not think it right to render its new inhabitants subject to these old liabilities, and he permitted all the bakers to have ovens wherein to bake their bread, either for themselves, or for all individuals who might wish to make use of them." Nor were churches and hospitals a whit less than the material interests of the people an object of solicitude to him. His reign saw the completion, and, it might almost be said, the construction of Notre-Dame de Paris, the frontage of which, in particular, was the work of this epoch. At the same time the king had the palace of the Louvre repaired and enlarged; and he added to it that strong tower in which he kept in captivity for more than twelve years Ferrand, Count of Flanders, taken prisoner at the battle of Bouvines. It would be a failure of justice and truth not to add to these proofs of manifold and indefatigable activity on the part of Philip Augustus the constant interest he testified in letters, science, study, the University of Paris, and its masters and pupils. It was to him that in 1200, after a violent riot, in which they considered they had reason to complain of the provost of Paris, the students owed a decree, which, by regarding them as clerics, exempted them from the ordinary criminal jurisdiction, so as to render them subject only to ecclesiastical authority. At that time there was no idea how to efficiently protect freedom save by granting some privilege.
A death which seems premature for a man as sound and strong in constitution as in judgment struck down Philip Augustus at the age of only fifty-eight, as he was on his way from Pacy-sur-Eure to Paris to be present at the council which was to meet there and once more take up the affair of the Albigensians. He had for several months been battling with an incessant fever; he was obliged to halt at Mantes, and there he died on the 14th of January, 1223, leaving the kingdom of France far more extensive and more compact, and the kingship in France far stronger and more respected than he had found them. It was the natural and well-deserved result of his life. At a time of violence and irregular adventure, he had shown to Europe the spectacle of an earnest, far-sighted, moderate, and able government, and one which in the end, under many hard trials, had nearly always succeeded in its designs, during a reign of forty-three years.
He disposed, by will, of a considerable amount amassed without parsimony, and even, historians say, in spite of a royal magnificence. We will take from that will but two paragraphs, the first two:—
"We will and prescribe first of all that, without any gainsaying, our testamentary executors do levy and set aside, out of our possessions, fifty thousand livres of Paris, in order to restore, as God shall inspire them with wisdom, whatsoever may be due to those from whom they shall recognize that we have unjustly taken or extorted or kept back aught; and we do ordain this most strictly."
"We do give to our dear spouse Isamber (evidently Inyeburya), Queen of the French, ten thousand livres of Paris. We might have given more to the said queen, but we have confined ourselves to this sum in order that we might make more complete restitution and reparation of what we have unjustly levied."
There is in these two cases of testamentary reparation, to persons unknown on the one hand and to a lady long maltreated on the other, a touch of probity and honorable regret for wrong-doing which arouses for this great king, in his dying hour, more moral esteem than one would otherwise be tempted to feel for him.
His son, Louis VIII., inherited a great kingdom, an undisputed crown, and a power that was respected. It was matter of general remark, moreover, that, by his mother, Isabel of Hainault, he was descended in the direct line from Hermengarde, Countess of Namur, daughter of Charles of Lorraine, the last of the Carlovingians. Thus the claims of the two dynasties of Charlemagne and of Hugh Capet were united in his person; and, although the authority of the Capetians was no longer disputed, contemporaries were glad to see in Louis VIII. this two-fold heirship, which gave him the perfect stamp of a legitimate monarch. He was, besides, the first Capetian whom the king his father had not considered it necessary to have consecrated during his own life so as to impress upon him in good time the seal of religion. Louis was consecrated at Rheims no earlier than the 6th of August, 1223, three weeks after the death of Philip Augustus; and his consecration was celebrated, at Paris as well as at Rheims, with rejoicings both popular and magnificent. But in the condition in which France was during the thirteenth century, amidst a civilization still so imperfect and without the fortifying institutions of a free government, no accidental good fortune could make up for a king's want of personal merit; and Louis VIII. was a man of downright mediocrity, without foresight, volatile in his resolves and weak and fickle in the execution of them. He, as well as Philip Augustus, had to make war on the King of England, and negotiate with the pope on the subject of the Albigensians; but at one time he followed, without well understanding it, his father's policy, at another he neglected it for some whim, or under some temporary influence. Yet he was not unsuccessful in his wax-like enterprises; in his campaign against Henry III., King of England, he took Niort, St. Jean d'Angely, and Rochelle; he accomplished the subjection of Limousin and Perigord; and had he pushed on his victories beyond the Garonne, he might perhaps have deprived the English of Aquitaine, their last possession in France; but at the solicitation of Pope Honorius III., he gave up this war, to resume the crusade against the Albigensians. Philip Augustus had foreseen this mistake. "After my death," he had said, "the clergy will use all their efforts to entangle my son Louis in the matters of the Albigensians; but he is in weak and shattered health; he will be unable to bear the fatigue; he will soon die, and then the kingdom will be left in the hands of a woman and children; and so there will be no lack of dangers." The prediction was realized. The military campaign of Louis VIII. on the Rhone was successful; after a somewhat difficult siege, he took Avignon; the principal towns in the neighborhood, Nimes and Arles, amongst others, submitted; Amaury de Montfort had ceded to him all his rights over his father's conquests in Languedoc; and the Albigensians were so completely destroyed or dispersed or cowed that, when it seemed good to make a further example amongst them of the severity of the Church against heretics, it was a hard matter to rout out in the diocese of Narbonne one of their former preachers, Peter Isarn, an old man hidden in an obscure retreat, from which he was dragged to be burned in solemn state. This was Louis VIII.'s last exploit in Southern France. He was displeased with the pope, whom he reproached with not keeping all his promises; his troops were being decimated by sickness; and he was deserted by Theobald IV., Count of Champagne, after serving, according to feudal law, for forty days.
Louis, incensed, disgusted, and ill, himself left his army, to return to his own Northern France; but he never reached it, for fever compelled him to halt at Montpensier, in Auvergne, where he died on the 8th of November, 1226, after a reign of three years, adding to the history of France no glory save that of having been the son of Philip Augustus, the husband of Blanche of Castille, and the father of St. Louis.
We have already perused the most brilliant and celebrated amongst the events of St. Louis's reign, his two crusades against the Mussulmans; and we have learned to know the man at the same time with the event, for it was in these warlike outbursts of his Christian faith that the king's character, nay, his whole soul, was displayed in all its originality and splendor. It was his good fortune, moreover, to have at that time as his comrade and biographer, Sire de Joinville, one of the most sprightly and charming writers of the nascent French language. It is now of Louis in France and of his government at home that we have to take note. And in this part of his history he is not the only royal and really regnant personage we encounter: for of the forty-four years of St. Louis's reign, nearly fifteen, with a long interval of separation, pertained to the government of Queen Blanche of Castille rather than that of the king her son. Louis, at his accession in 1226, was only eleven; and he remained a minor up to the age of twenty-one, in 1236, for the time of majority in the case of royalty was not yet specially and rigorously fixed. During those ten years Queen Blanche governed France; not at all, as is commonly asserted, with the official title of regent, but simply as guardian of the king her son. With a good sense really admirable in a person so proud and ambitious, she saw that official power was ill suited to her woman's condition, and would weaken rather than strengthen her; and she screened herself from view behind her son. He it was who, in 1226, wrote to the great vassals, bidding them to his consecration; he it was who reigned and commanded; and his name alone appeared on royal decrees and on treaties. It was not until twenty-two years had passed, in 1248, that Louis, on starting for the crusade, officially delegated to his mother the kingly authority, and that Blanche, during her son's absence, really governed with the title of regent, up to the 1st of December, 1252, the day of his death.
During the first period of his government, and so long as her son's minority lasted, Queen Blanche had to grapple with intrigues, plots, insurrections, and open war, and, what was still worse for her, with the insults and calumnies of the crown's great vassals, burning to seize once more, under a woman's government, the independence and power which had been effectually disputed with them by Philip Augustus. Blanche resisted their attempts, at one time with open and persevering energy, at another dexterously with all the tact, address, and allurements of a woman. Though she was now forty years of age, she was beautiful, elegant, attractive, full of resources, and of grace in her conversation as well as her administration, endowed with all the means of pleasing, and skilful in availing herself of them with a coquetry which was occasionally more telling than discreet. The malcontents spread the most odious scandals about her. It so happened that one of the most considerable amongst the great vassals of France, Theobald IV., Count of Champagne, a brilliant and gay knight, an ingenious and prolific poet, had conceived a passion for her; and it was affirmed not only that she had yielded to his desires, in order to keep him bound to her service, but that she had, a while ago, in concert with him, murdered her husband, King Louis VIII. In 1230, some of the greatest barons of the kingdom, the Count of Brittany, the Count of Boulogne, and the Count of St. Pol formed a coalition for an attack upon Count Theobald, and invaded Champagne. Blanche, taking with her the young king her son, went to the aid of Count Theobald, and, on arriving near Troyes, she had orders given, in the king's name, for the barons to withdraw: "If you have plaint to make," said she, "against the Count of Champagne, present before me your claim, and I will do you justice." "We will not plead before you," they answered, "for the custom of women is to fix their choice upon him, in preference to other men, who has slain their husband." But in spite of this insulting defiance, the barons did withdraw. Five years later, in 1235, the Count of Champagne had, in his turn, risen against the king, and was forced, as an escape from imminent defeat, to accept severe terms.
An interview took place between Queen Blanche and him; and "'Pardie, Count Theobald,' said the queen, 'you ought not to have been against us; you ought surely to have remembered the kindness shown you by the king my son, who came to your aid, to save your land from the barons of France when they would fain have set fire to it all and laid it in ashes.' The count cast a look upon the queen, who was so virtuous and so beautiful that at her great beauty he was all abashed, and answered her, 'By my faith, madame, my heart and my body and all my land is at your command, and there is nothing which to please you I would not readily do; and against you or yours, please God, I will never go.' Thereupon he went his way full pensively, and often there came back to his remembrance the queen's soft glance and lovely countenance. Then his heart was touched by a soft and amorous thought. But when he remembered how high a dame she was, so good and pure that he could never enjoy her, his soft thought of love was changed to a great sadness. And because deep thoughts engender melancholy, it was counselled unto him by certain wise men that he should make his study of canzonets for the viol and soft delightful ditties. So made he the most beautiful canzonets and the most delightful and most melodious that at any time were heard." (Histoire des Dues et des Comtes de Champagne, by M. d'Arbois de Jubainville, t. iv. pp. 249, 280; Chroniques de Saint-Denis, in the Recueil des Historiens des Gaules et de France, t. xxi. pp. 111, 112.)
Neither in the events nor in the writings of the period is it easy to find anything which can authorize the accusations made by the foes of Queen Blanche. There is no knowing whether her heart were ever so little touched by the canzonets of Count Theobald; but it is certain that neither the poetry nor the advances of the count made any difference in the resolutions and behavior of the queen. She continued her resistance to the pretensions and machinations of the crown's great vassals, whether foes or lovers, and she carried forward, in the face and in the teeth of all, the extension of the domains and the power of the kingship. We observe in her no prompting of enthusiasm, of sympathetic charitableness, or of religious scrupulousness, that is, none of those grand moral impulses which are characteristic of Christian piety, and which were predominant in St. Louis. Blanche was essentially politic and concerned with her temporal interests and successes; and it was not from her teaching or her example that her son imbibed those sublime and disinterested feelings which stamped him the most original and the rarest on the roll of glorious kings. What St. Louis really owed to his mother —and it was a great deal—was the steady triumph which, whether by arms or by negotiation, Blanche gained over the great vassals, and the preponderance which, amidst the struggles of the feudal system, she secured for the kingship of her son in his minority. She saw by profound instinct what forces and alliances might be made serviceable to the kingly power against its rivals. When, on the 29th of November, 1226, only three weeks after the death of her husband, Louis VIII., she had her son crowned at Rheims, she bade to the ceremony not only the prelates and grandees of the kingdom, but also the inhabitants of the neighboring communes; wishing to let the great lords see the people surrounding the royal child. Two years later, in 1228, amidst the insurrection of the barons, who were assembled at Corbeil, and who meditated seizing the person of the young king during his halt at Montlhery on his march to Paris, Queen Blanche had summoned to her side, together with the faithful chivalry of the country, the burghers of Paris and of the neighborhood; and they obeyed the summons with alacrity. "They went forth all under arms, and took the road to Montlhery, where they found the king, and escorted him to Paris, all in their ranks and in order of battle. From Montlhery to Paris, the road was lined, on both sides, by men-at-arms and others, who loudly besought Our Lord to grant the young king long life and prosperity, and to vouchsafe him protection against all his enemies. As soon as they set out from Paris, the lords, having been told the news, and not considering themselves in a condition to fight so great a host, retired each to his own abode; and by the ordering of God, who disposes as he pleases Him of times and the deeds of men, they dared not undertake anything against the king during the rest of this year." (Vie de Saint Louis, by Lenain de Tillemont, t. i. pp. 429, 478.)
Eight years later, in 1236, Louis IX. attained his majority, and his mother transferred to him a power respected, feared, and encompassed by vassals always turbulent and still often aggressive, but disunited, weakened, intimidated, or discredited, and always outwitted, for a space of ten years, in their plots.
When she had secured the political position of the king her son, and as the time of his majority approached, Queen Blanche gave her attention to his domestic life also. She belonged to the number of those who aspire to play the part of Providence towards the objects of their affection, and to regulate their destiny in everything. Louis was nineteen; he was handsome, after a refined and gentle style which spoke of moral worth without telling of great physical strength; he had delicate and chiselled features, a brilliant complexion, and light hair, abundant and glossy, which, through his grandmother Isabel, he inherited from the family of the Counts of Hainault. He displayed liveliness and elegance in his tastes; he was fond of amusements, games, hunting, hounds and hawking-birds, fine clothes, magnificent furniture. A holy man, they say, even reproached the queen his mother with having winked at certain inclinations evinced by him towards irregular connections. Blanche determined to have him married; and had no difficulty in exciting in him so honorable a desire. Raymond Beranger, Count of Provence, had a daughter, his eldest, named Marguerite, "who was held," say the chronicles, "to be the most noble, most beautiful, and best educated princess at that time in Europe. . . . By the advice of his mother and of the wisest persons in his kingdom," Louis asked for her hand in marriage. The Count of Provence was overjoyed at the proposal; but he was somewhat anxious about the immense dowry which, it was said, he would have to give his daughter. His intimate adviser was a Provencal nobleman, named Romeo de Villeneuve, who said to him, "Count, leave it to me, and let not this great expense cause you any trouble. If you marry your eldest high, the more consideration of the alliance will get the others married better and at less cost." Count Raymond listened to reason, and before long acknowledged that his adviser was right. He had four daughters, Marguerite, Eleanor, Sancie, and Beatrice; and when Marguerite was Queen of France, Eleanor became Queen of England, Sancie Countess of Cornwall and afterwards Queen of the Romans, and Beatrice Countess of Anjou and Provence, and ultimately Queen of Sicily. Princess Marguerite arrived in France escorted by a brilliant embassy, and the marriage was celebrated at Sens, on the 27th of May, 1234, amidst great rejoicings and abundant largess to the people. As soon as he was married and in possession of happiness at home, Louis of his own accord gave up the worldly amusements for which he had at first displayed a taste; his hunting establishment, his games, his magnificent furniture and dress, gave place to simpler pleasures and more Christian occupations. The active duties of the kingship, the fervent and scrupulous exercise of piety, the pure and impassioned joys of conjugal life, the glorious plans of a knight militant of the cross, were the only things which took up the thoughts and the time of this young king, who was modestly laboring to become a saint and a hero.
There was one heartfelt discomfort which disturbed and troubled sometimes the sweetest moments of his life. Queen Blanche, having got her son married, was jealous of the wife and of the happiness she had conferred upon her; jealous as mother and as queen, a rival for affection and for empire. This sad and hateful feeling hurried her into acts as devoid of dignity as they were of justice and kindness. "The harshness of Queen Blanche towards Queen Marguerite," says Joinville, "was such that Queen Blanche would not suffer, so far as her power went, that her son should keep his wife's company. Where it was most pleasing to the king and the queen to live was at Pontoise, because the king's chamber was above and the queen's below. And they had so well arranged matters that they held their converse on a spiral staircase which led down from the one chamber to the other. When the ushers saw the queen-mother coming into the chamber of the king her son, they knocked upon the door with their staves, and the king came running into his chamber, so that his mother might find him there; and so, in turn, did the ushers of Queen Marguerite's chamber when Queen Blanche came thither, so that she might find Queen Marguerite there. One day the king was with the queen his wife, and she was in great peril of death, for that she had suffered from a child of which she had been delivered. Queen Blanche came in, and took her son by the hand, and said to him, 'Come you away; you are doing no good here.' When Queen Marguerite saw that the queen-mother was taking the king away, she cried, 'Alas! neither dead nor alive will you let me see my lord; and thereupon she swooned, and it was thought that she was dead. The king, who thought she was dying, came back, and with great pains she was brought round."
Louis gave to his wife consolation and to his mother support. Amongst the noblest souls and in the happiest lives there are wounds which cannot be healed and sorrows which must be borne in silence.
When Louis reached his majority, his entrance upon personal exercise of the kingly power produced no change in the conduct of public affairs. There was no vain seeking after innovation on purpose to mark the accession of a new master, and no reaction in the deeds and words of the sovereign or in the choice and treatment of his advisers; the kingship of the son was a continuance of the mother's government. Louis persisted in struggling for the preponderance of the crown against the great vassals; succeeded in taming Peter Mauclerc, the turbulent Count of Brittany; wrung from Theobald IV., Count of Champagne, the rights of suzerainty in the countships of Chartres, Blois, and Sancerre, and the viscountship of Chateaudun, and purchased the fertile countship of Macon from its possessor. It was almost always by pacific procedure, by negotiations ably conducted, and conventions faithfully executed, that he accomplished these increments of the kingly domain; and when he made war on any of the great vassals, he engaged therein only on their provocation, to maintain the rights or honor of his crown, and he used victory with as much moderation as he had shown before entering upon the struggle. In 1241, he was at Poitiers, where his brother Alphonso, the new Count of Poitou, was to receive, in his presence, the homage of the neighboring lords whose suzerain he was. A confidential letter arrived, addressed not to Louis himself, but to Queen Blanche, whom many faithful subjects continued to regard as the real regent of the kingdom, and who probably continued also to have her own private agents. An inhabitant of Rochelle, at any rate, wrote to inform the queen-mother that a great plot was being hatched amongst certain powerful lords, of La Marche, Saintonge, Angoumois, and perhaps others, to decline doing homage to the new Count of Poitou, and thus to enter into rebellion against the king himself. The news was true, and was given with circumstantial detail. Hugh de Lusignan, Count of La Marche, and the most considerable amongst the vassals of the Count of Poitiers, was, if not the prime mover, at any rate the principal performer in the plot. His wife, Joan (Isabel) of Angouleme, widow of the late King of England, John Lackland, and mother of the reigning king, Henry III., was indignant at the notion of becoming a vassal of a prince himself a vassal of the King of France, and so seeing herself—herself but lately a queen, and now a king's widow and a king's mother—degraded, in France, to a rank below that of the Countess of Poitiers. When her husband, the Count of La Marche, went and rejoined her at Angouleme, he found her giving way alternately to anger and tears, tears and anger. "Saw you not," said she, "at Poitiers, where I waited three days to please your king and his queen, how that when I appeared before them, in their chamber, the king was seated on one side of the bed, and the queen, with the Countess of Chartres, and her sister, the abbess, on the other side: They did not call me nor bid me sit with them, and that purposely, in order to make me vile in the eyes of so many folk. And neither at my coming in nor at my going out did they rise just a little from their scats, rendering me vile, as you did see yourself. I cannot speak of it, for grief and shame. And it will be my death, far more even than the less of our land which they have unworthily wrested from us; unless, by God's grace, they do repent them, and I see them in their turn reduced to desolation, and losing somewhat of their own lands. As for me, either I will lose all I have for that end or I will perish in the attempt." Queen Blanche's correspondent added, "The Count of La Marche, whose kindness you know, seeing the countess in tears, said to her, 'Madam, give your commands: I will do all I can; be assured of that.' 'Else,' said she, 'you shall not come near my person, and I will never see you more.' Then the count declared, with many curses, that he would do what his wife desired."
And he was as good as his word. That same year, 1241, at the end of the autumn, "the new Count of Poitiers, who was holding his court for the first time, did not fail to bid to his feasts all the nobility of his appanage, and, amongst the very first, the Count and Countess of La Marche. They repaired to Poitiers; but, four days before Christmas, when the court of Count Alphonso had received all its guests, the Count of La Marche, mounted on his war-horse, with his wife on the crupper behind him, and escorted by his men-at-arms also mounted, cross-bow in hand and in readiness for battle, was seen advancing to the prince's presence. Every one was on the tiptoe of expectation as to what would come next. Then the Count of La Marche addressed himself in a loud voice to the Count of Poitiers, saying, 'I might have thought, in a moment of forgetfulness and weakness, to render thee homage; but now I swear to thee, with a resolute heart, that I will never be thy liegeman; thou dost unjustly dub thyself my lord; thou didst shamefully filch this countship from my step-son, Earl Richard, whilst he was faithfully fighting for God in the Holy Land, and was delivering our captives by his discretion and his compassion.' After this insolent declaration, the Count of La Marche violently thrust aside, by means of his men-at-arms, all those who barred his passage; hasted, by way of parting insult, to fire the lodging appointed for him by Count Alphonso, and, followed by his people, left Poitiers at a gallop." (Histoire de Saint Louis, by M. Felix Faure, t. i. p. 347.)
This meant war; and it burst out at the commencement of the following spring. It found Louis equally well prepared for it and determined to carry it through. But in him prudence and justice were as little to seek as resolution; he respected public opinion, and he wished to have the approval of those whom he called upon to commit themselves for him and with him. He summoned the crown's vassals to a parliament; and, "What think you," he asked them, "should be done to a vassal who would fain hold land without owning a lord, and who goeth against the fealty and homage due from him and his predecessors?" The answer was, that the lord ought in that case to take back the fief as his own property. "As my name is Louis," said the king, "the Comet of La Marche doth claim to hold land in such wise, land which hath been a fief of France since the days of the valiant King Clovis, who won all Aquitaine from King Alaric, a pagan without faith or creed, and all the country to the Pyrenean mount." And the barons promised the king their energetic co-operation.
The war was pushed on zealously by both sides. Henry III., King of England, sent to Louis messengers charged to declare to him that his reason for breaking the truce concluded between them was, that he regarded it as his duty towards his step-father, the Count of La Marche, to defend him by arms. Louis answered that, for his own part, he had scrupulously observed the truce, and had no idea of breaking it; but he considered that he had a perfect right to punish a rebellious vassal. In this young King of France, this docile son of an able mother, none knew what a hero there was, until he revealed himself on a sudden. Near two towns of Saintonge, Taillebourg and Saintes, at a bridge which covered the approaches of one and in front of the walls of the other, Louis, on the 21st and 22d of July, delivered two battles, in which the brilliancy of his personal valor and the affectionate enthusiasm he excited in his troops secured victory and the surrender of the two places. "At sight of the numerous banners, above which rose the oriflamme, close to Taillebourg, and of such a multitude of tents, one pressing against another and forming as it were a large and populous city, the King of England turned sharply to the Count of La Marche, saying, 'My father, is this what you did promise me? Is yonder the numerous chivalry that you did engage to raise for me, when you said that all I should have to do would be to get money together?' 'That did I never say,' answered the count. 'Yea, verily,' rejoined Richard, Earl of Cornwall, brother of Henry III.: 'for yonder I have amongst my baggage writing of your own to such purport.' And when the Count of La Marche energetically denied that he had ever signed or sent such writing, Henry III. reminded him bitterly of the messages he had sent to England, and of his urgent exhortations to war. 'It was never done with my consent,' cried the Count of La Marche, with an oath; 'put the blame of it upon your mother, who is my wife; for, by the gullet of God, it was all devised without my knowledge.'"
It was not Henry III. alone who was disgusted with the war in which his mother had involved him; the majority of the English lords who had accompanied him left him, and asked the King of France for permission to pass through his kingdom on their way home. There were those who would have dissuaded Louis from compliance; but, "Let them go," said he; "I would ask nothing better than that all my foes should thus depart forever far away from my abode." Those about him made merry over Henry III., a refugee at Bordeaux, deserted by the English and plundered by the Gascons. "Hold! hold!" said Louis; "turn him not into ridicule, and make me not hated of him by reason of your banter; his charities and his piety shall exempt him from all contumely." The Count of La Marche lost no time in asking for peace; and Louis granted it with the firmness of a far-seeing politician and the sympathetic feeling of a Christian. He required that the domains he had just wrested from the count should belong to the crown, and to the Count of Poitiers, under the suzerainty of the crown. As for the rest of his lands, the Count of La Marche, his wife and children, were obliged to beg a grant of them at the good pleasure of the king, to whom the count was, further, to give up, as guarantee for fidelity in future, three castles, in which a royal garrison should be kept at the count's expense. When introduced into the king's presence, the count, his wife, and children, "with sobs, and sighs, and tears, threw themselves upon their knees before him, and began to cry aloud, 'Most gracious sir, forgive us thy wrath and thy displeasure, for we have done wickedly and pridefully towards thee.' And the king, seeing the Count of La Marche such humble guise before him, could not restrain his compassion amidst his wrath, but made him rise up, and forgave him graciously all the evil he had wrought against him."
A prince who knew so well how to conquer and how to treat the conquered might have been tempted to make an unfair use, alternately, of his victories and of his clemency, and to pursue his advantages beyond measure; but Louis was in very deed a Christian. When War was not either a necessity or a duty, this brave and brilliant knight, from sheer equity and goodness of heart, loved peace rather than war. The successes he had gained in his campaign of 1242 were not for him the first step in an endless career of glory and conquest; he was anxious only to consolidate them whilst securing, in Western Europe, for the dominions of his adversaries, as well as for his own, the benefits of peace. He entered into negotiations, successively, with the Count of La Marche, the King of England, the Count of Toulouse, the King of Aragon, and the various princes and great feudal lords who had been more or less engaged in the war; and in January, 1213, says the latest and most enlightened of his biographers, "the treaty of Lorris marked the end of feudal troubles for the whole duration of St. Louis's reign. He drew his sword no more, save only against the enemies of the Christian faith and Christian civilization, the Mussulmans." (Histoire de St. Louis, by M. Felix Faure, t. i. p. 388.)
Nevertheless there was no lack of opportunities for interfering with a powerful arm amongst the sovereigns his neighbors, and for working their disagreements to the profit of his ambition, had ambition guided his conduct. The great struggle between the Empire and the Papacy, in the persons of Frederick II., Emperor of Germany, and the two popes, Gregory IX. and Innocent IV., was causing violent agitation in Christendom, the two powers setting no bounds to their aspirations of getting the dominion one over the other, and of disposing one of the other's fate. Scarcely had Louis reached his majority when, in 1237, he tried his influence with both sovereigns to induce them to restore peace to the Christian world. He failed; and thenceforth he preserved a scrupulous neutrality towards each. The principles of international law, especially in respect of a government's interference in the contests of its neighbors, whether princes or peoples, were not, in the thirteenth century, systematically discussed and defined as they are nowadays with us; but the good sense and the moral sense of St. Louis caused him to adopt, on this point, the proper course, and no temptation, not even that of satisfying his fervent piety, drew him into any departure from it. Distant or friendly, by turns, towards the two adversaries, according as they tried to intimidate him or win him over to them, his permanent care was to get neither the State nor the Church of France involved in the struggle between the priesthood and the empire, and to maintain the dignity of his crown and the liberties of his subjects, whilst employing his influence to make prevalent throughout Christendom a policy of justice and peace.
That was the policy required, in the thirteenth century more than ever, by the most urgent interests of entire Christendom.
She was at grips with two most formidable foes and perils. Through the crusades she had, from the end of the eleventh century, become engaged in a deadly struggle against the Mussulmans in Asia; and in the height of this struggle, and from the heart of this same Asia, there spread, towards the middle of the thirteenth century, over Eastern Europe, in Russia, Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, and Germany, a barbarous and very nearly pagan people, the Mongol Tartars, sweeping onward like an inundation of blood, ravaging and threatening with complete destruction all the dominions which were penetrated by their hordes. The name and description of these barbarians, the fame and dread of their devastations, ran rapidly through the whole of Christian Europe. "What must we do in this sad plight?" asked Queen Blanche of the king, her son. "We must, my mother," answered Louis (with sorrowful voice, but not without divine inspiration, adds the chronicler), "we must be sustained by a heavenly consolation. If these Tartars, as we call them, arrive here, either we will hurl them back to Tartarus, their home, whence they are come, or they shall send us up to Heaven." About the same period, another cause of disquietude and another feature of attraction came to be added to all those which turned the thoughts and impassioned piety of Louis towards the East. The perils of the Latin empire of Constantinople, founded, as has been already mentioned, in 1204, under the headship of Baldwin, Count of Flanders, were becoming day by day more serious. Greeks, Mussulmans, and Tartars were all pressing it equally hard. In 1236, the emperor, Baldwin II., came to solicit in person the support of the princes of Western Europe, and especially of the young King of France, whose piety and chivalrous ardor were already celebrated everywhere. Baldwin possessed a treasure, of great power over the imaginations and convictions of Christians, in the crown of thorns worn by Jesus Christ during His passion. He had already put it in pawn at Venice for a considerable loan advanced to him by the Venetians; and he now offered it to Louis in return for effectual aid in men and money. Louis accepted the proposal with transport. He had been scared, a short time ago, at the chance of losing another precious relic deposited in the abbey of St. Denis, one of the nails which, it was said, had held Our Lord's body upon the cross. It had been mislaid one ceremonial day whilst it was being exhibited to the people; and, when he recovered it, "I would rather," said Louis, "that the best city in my kingdom had been swallowed up in the earth." After having taken all the necessary precautions for avoiding any appearance of a shameful bargain, he obtained the crown of thorns, all expenses included, for eleven thousand livres of Paris, that is, they say, about twenty-six thousand dollars of our money. Our century cannot have any fellow-feeling with such ready credulity, which is not required by Christian faith or countenanced by sound criticism; but we can and we ought to comprehend such sentiments in an age when men not only had profound faith in the facts recorded in the Gospels, but could not believe themselves to be looking upon the smallest tangible relic of those facts without experiencing an emotion and a reverence as profound as their faith. It is to such sentiments that we owe one of the most perfect and most charming monuments of the middle ages, the Holy Chapel, which St. Louis had built between 1245 and 1248 in order to deposit there the precious relics he had collected. The king's piety had full justice and honor done it by the genius of the architect, Peter de Montreuil, who, no doubt, also shared his faith.
It was after the purchase of the crown of thorns and the building of the Holy Chapel that Louis, accomplishing at last the desire of his soul, departed on his first crusade. We have already gone over the circumstances connected with his determination, his departure, and his life in the East, during the six years of pious adventure and glorious disaster he passed there. We have already seen what an impression of admiration and respect was produced throughout his kingdom when he was noticed to have brought back with him from the Holy Land "a fashion of living and doing superior to his former behavior, although in his youth he had always been good and innocent and worthy of high esteem." These expressions of his confessor are fully borne out by the deeds and laws, the administration at home and the relations abroad, by the whole government, in fact, of St. Louis during the last fifteen years of his reign. The idea which was invariably conspicuous and constantly maintained during his reign was not that of a premeditated and ambitious policy, ever tending towards an interested object which is pursued with more or less reasonableness and success, and always with a large amount of trickery and violence on the part of the prince, of unrighteousness in his deeds, and of suffering on the part of the people. Philip Augustus, the grandfather, and Philip the Handsome, the grandson, of St. Louis, the former with the moderation of an able man, the latter with headiness and disregard of right or wrong, labored both of them without cessation to extend the domains and power of the crown, to gain conquests over their neighbors and their vassals, and to destroy the social system of their age, the feudal system, its rights as well as its wrongs and tyrannies, in order to put in its place pure monarchy, and to exalt the kingly authority above all liberties, whether of the aristocracy or of the people. St. Louis neither thought of nor attempted anything of the kind; he did not make war, at one time openly, at another secretly, upon the feudal system; he frankly accepted its principles, as he found them prevailing in the facts and the ideas of his times. Whilst fully bent on repressing with firmness his vassals' attempts to shake themselves free from their duties towards him, and to render themselves independent of the crown, he respected their rights, kept his word to them scrupulously, and required of them nothing but what they really owed him. Into his relations with foreign sovereigns, his neighbors, he imported the same loyal spirit. "Certain of his council used to tell him," reports Joinville, "that he did not well in not leaving those foreigners to their warfare; for, if he gave them his good leave to impoverish one another, they would not attack him so readily as if they were rich." To that the king replied that they said not well; for, quoth he, if the neighboring princes perceived that I left them to their warfare, they might take counsel amongst themselves, and say, 'It is through malice that the king leaves us to our warfare; then it might happen that by cause of the hatred they would have against me, they would come and attack me, and I might be a great loser there-by. Without reckoning that I should thereby earn the hatred of God, who says, 'Blessed be the peacemakers!' So well established was his renown as a sincere friend of peace and a just arbiter in great disputes between princes and peoples that his intervention and his decisions were invited wherever obscure and dangerous questions arose. In spite of the brilliant victories which, in 1212, he had gained at Taillebourg and Saintes over Henry III., King of England, he himself perceived, on his return from the East, that the conquests won by his victories might at any moment become a fresh cause of new and grievous wars, disastrous, probably, for one or the other of the two peoples. He conceived, therefore, the design of giving to a peace which was so desirable a more secure basis by founding it upon a transaction accepted on both sides as equitable. And thus, whilst restoring to the King of England certain possessions which the war of 1242 had lost to him, he succeeded in obtaining from him in return "as well in his own name as in the names of his sons and their heirs, a formal renunciation of all rights that he could pretend to over the duchy of Normandy, the countships of Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Poitou, and, generally, all that his family might have possessed on the continent, except only the lands which the King of France restored to him by the treaty and those which remained to him in Gascony. For all these last the King of England undertook to do liege-homage to the King of France, in the capacity of peer of France and Duke of Aquitaine and to faithfully fulfil the duties attached to a fief." When Louis made known this transaction to his counsellors, "they were very much against it," says Joinville. "It seemeth to us, sir," said they to the king, "that, if you think you have not a right to the conquest won by you and your antecessors from the King of England, you do not make proper restitution to the said king in not restoring to him the whole; and if you think you have a right to it, it seemeth to us that you are a loser by all you restore." "Sirs," answered Louis, "I am certain that the antecessors of the King of England did quite justly lose the conquest which I hold; and as for the land I give him, I give it him not as a matter in which I am bound to him or his heirs, but to make love between my children and his, who are cousins-german. And it seemeth to me that what I give him I turn to good purpose, inasmuch as he was not my liegeman, and he hereby cometh in amongst my liegeman." Henry III., in fact, went to Paris, having with him the ratification of the treaty, and prepared to accomplish the ceremony of homage. "Louis received him as a brother, but without sparing him aught of the ceremony, in which, according to the ideas of the times, there was nothing humiliating any more than in the name of vassal, which was proudly borne by the greatest lords. It took place on Thursday, December 4, 1259, in the royal enclosure stretching in front of the palace, on the spot where at the present day is the Place Dauphine. There was a great concourse of prelates, barons, and other personages belonging to the two courts and the two nations. The King of England, on his knees, bareheaded, without cloak, belt, sword, or spurs, placed his folded hands in those of the King of France his suzerain, and said to him, 'Sir, I become your liegeman with mouth and hands, and I swear and promise you faith and loyalty, and to guard your right according to my power, and to do fair justice at your summons or the summons of your bailiff, to the best of my wit.' Then the king kissed him on the mouth and raised him up."
Three years later Louis gave not only to the King of England, but to the whole English nation, a striking proof of his judicious and true-hearted equity. An obstinate civil war was raging between Henry III. and his barons. Neither party, in defending its own rights, had any notion of respecting the rights of its adversaries, and England was alternating between a kingly and an aristocratic tyranny. Louis, chosen as arbiter by both sides, delivered solemnly, on the 23d of January, 1264, a decision which was favorable to the English kingship, but at the same, time expressly upheld the Great Charter and the traditional liberties of England. He concluded his decision with the following suggestions of amnesty: "We will also that the King of England and his barons do forgive one another mutually, that they do forget all the resentments that may exist between them; by consequence of the matters submitted to our arbitration, and that henceforth they do refrain reciprocally from an offence and injury on account of the same matters." But when men have had their ideas, passions, and interests profoundly agitated and made to clash, the wisest decisions and the most honest counsels in the world are not sufficient to re-establish peace; the cup of experience has to be drunk to the dregs; and the parties are not resigned to peace until on or the other, or both, have exhausted themselves in the struggle and perceive the absolute necessity of accepting either defeat compromise. In spite of the arbitration of the King of France the civil war continued in England; but Louis did not seek any way to profit by it so as to extend, at the expense of his neighbors, his own possessions or power; he held himself also from their quarrels, and followed up by honest neutrality ineffectual arbitration. Five centuries afterwards the great English historian, Hume, rendered him due homage in these terms: "Every time this virtuous prince interfered in the affairs of England, it was invariably with the view of settling differences between the king and the nobility. Adopting an admirable course of conduct, as politic probably as it certainly was just, he never interposed his good offices save to put an end the disagreements of the English; he seconded all the measures which could give security to both parties, and he made persistent efforts, though without success, to moderate the fiery ambition of the Earl of Leicester." (Hume, History of England, t. ii. p. 465.)
It requires more than political wisdom, more even than virtue, to enable a king, a man having in charge the government of men, to accomplish his mission and to really deserve the title of Most Christian; it requires that he should be animated by a sentiment of affection, and that he should, in heart as well as mind, be in sympathy with those multitudes of creatures over whose lot he exercises so much influence. St. Louis more perhaps than any other king was possessed of this generous and humane quality: spontaneously and by the free impulse of his nature he loved his people, loved mankind, and took a tender and comprehensive interest in their fortunes, their joys, or their miseries. Being seriously ill in 1259, and desiring to give his eldest son, Prince Louis, whom he lost in the following year, his last and most heartfelt charge, "Fair son," said he, "I pray thee make thyself beloved of the people of thy kingdom, for verily I would rather a Scot should come from Scotland and govern our people well and loyally than have thee govern it ill." To watch over the position and interests of all parties in his dominions, and to secure to all his subjects strict and prompt justice, this was what continually occupied the mind of Louis IX. There are to be found in his biography two very different but equally striking proofs of his solicitude in this respect. M. Felix Faure has drawn up a table of all the journeys made by Louis in France, from 1254 to 1270, for the better cognizance of matters requiring his attention, and another of the parliaments which he held, during the same period, for considering the general affairs of the kingdom and the administration of justice. Not one of these sixteen years passed without his visiting several of his provinces, and the year 1270 was the only one in which he did not hold a parliament. (Histoire de Saint Louis, by M. Felix Faure, t. ii. pp. 120, 339.) Side by side with this arithmetical proof of his active benevolence we will place a moral proof taken from Joinville's often-quoted account of St. Louis's familiar intervention in his subjects' disputes about matters of private interest. "Many a time," says he, "it happened in summer that the king went and sat down in the wood of Vincennes after mass, and leaned against an oak, and made us sit down round about him. And all those who had business came to speak to him without restraint of usher or other folk. And then he demanded of them with his own mouth, 'Is there here any who hath a suit?' and they who had their suit rose up; and then he said, 'Keep silence, all of ye; and ye shall have despatch one after the other.' And then he called my Lord Peter de Fontaines and my Lord Geoffrey de Villette (two learned lawyers of the day and counsellors of St. Louis), and said to one of them, 'Despatch me this suit.' And when he saw aught to amend in the words of those who were speaking for another, he himself amended it with his own mouth. I sometimes saw in summer that, to despatch his people's business, he went into the Paris garden, clad in camlet coat and linsey surcoat without sleeves, a mantle of black taffety round his neck, hair right well combed and without coif, and on his head a hat with white peacock's plumes. And he had carpets laid for us to sit round about him. And all the people who had business before him set themselves standing around him; and then he had their business despatched in the manner I told you of before as to the wood of Vincennes." (Joinville, chap. xii.)
The active benevolence of St. Louis was not confined to this paternal care for the private interests of such subjects as approached his person; he was equally attentive and zealous in the case of measures called for by the social condition of the times and the general interests of the kingdom. Amongst the twenty-six government ordinances, edicts, or letters, contained under the date of his reign in the first volume of the Recueil des Ordonnances des Rois de France, seven, at the least, are great acts of legislation and administration of a public kind; and these acts are all of such a stamp as to show that their main object is not to extend the power of the crown or subserve the special interests of the kingship at strife with other social forces; they are real reforms, of public and moral interest, directed against the violence, disturbances, and abuses of the feudal system. Many other of St. Louis's legislative and administrative acts have been published either in subsequent volumes of the Recueil des Ordonnances des Rois, or in similar collections, and the learned have drawn attention to a great number of them still remaining unpublished in various archives. As for the large collection of legislative enactments known by the name of Etailissements de Saint Louis, it is probably a lawyer's work, posterior, in great part at least, to his reign, full of incoherent and even contradictory enactments, and without any claim to be considered as a general code of law of St. Louis's date and collected by his order, although the paragraph which serves as preface to the work is given under his name and as if it had been dictated by him.
Another act, known by the name of the Pragmatic Sanction, has likewise got placed, with the date of March, 1268, in the Recueil des Ordonnances des Rois de France, as having originated with St. Louis. Its object is, first of all, to secure the rights, liberties, and canonical rules, internally, of the Church of France; and, next, to interdict "the exactions and very heavy money-charges which have been imposed or may hereafter be imposed on the said Church by the court of Rome, and by the which our kingdom hath been miserably impoverished; unless they take place for reasonable, pious, and very urgent cause, through inevitable necessity, and with our spontaneous and express consent and that of the Church of our kingdom." The authenticity of this act, vigorously maintained in the seventeenth century by Bossuet (in his Defense de la Declaration du Clerge de France de 1682, chap. ix. t. xliii. p. 26), and in our time by M. Daunou (in the Histoire litteraire de la France, continuee par des Hembres de l'Institut, t. xvi. p. 75, and t. xix. p. 169), has been and still is rendered doubtful for strong reasons, which M. Felix Faure, in his Histoire de Saint Louis (t. ii. p. 271), has summed up with great clearness. There is no design of entering here upon an examination of this little historical problem; but it is a bounden duty to point out that, if the authenticity of the Pragmatic Sanction, as St. Louis's, is questionable, the act has, at bottom, nothing but what bears a very strong resemblance to, and is quite in conformity with, the general conduct of that prince. He was profoundly respectful, affectionate, and faithful towards the papacy, but, at the same time, very careful in upholding both the independence of the crown in things temporal, and its right of superintendence in things spiritual. Attention has been drawn to his posture of reserve during the great quarrel between the priestdom and the empire, and his firmness in withstanding the violent measures adopted by Gregory IX. and Innocent IV. against the Emperor Frederick II. Louis carried his notions, as to the independence of his judgment and authority, very far beyond the cases in which that policy went hand in hand with interest, and even into purely religious questions. The Bishop of Auxerre said to him one day, in the name of several prelates, "'Sir, these lords which be here, archbishops and bishops, have told me to tell you that Christianity is perishing in your hands.' The king crossed himself and said, Well, tell me how that is made out!' 'Sir,' said the bishop, 'it is because nowadays so little note is taken of excommunications, that folk let death overtake them excommunicate without getting absolution, and have no mind to make atonement to the Church. These lords, therefore, do pray you, sir, for the love of God and because you ought to do so, to command your provosts and bailiffs that all those who shall remain a year and a day excommunicate be forced, by seizure of their goods, to get themselves absolved.' Whereto the king made answer that he would willingly command this in respect of the excommunicate touching whom certain proofs should be given him that they were in the wrong. The bishop said that the prelates would not have this at any price, and that they disputed the king's right of jurisdiction in their causes. And the king said that he would not do it else; for it would be contrary to God and reason if he should force folks to get absolution when the clergy had done them wrong. As to that,' said the king, 'I will give you the example of the Count of Brittany, who for seven years, being fully excommunicate, was at pleas with the prelates of Brittany; and he prevailed so far that the pope condemned them all. If, then, I had forced the Count of Brittany, the first year, to get absolution, I should have sinned against God and against him.' Then the prelates gave up; and never since that time have I heard that a single demand was made touching the matters above spoken of." (Joinville, chap. xiii. p. 43.)
One special fact in the civil and municipal administration of St. Louis deserves to find a place in history. After the time of Philip Augustus there was malfeasance in the police of Paris. The provostship of Paris, which comprehended functions analogous to those of prefect, mayor, and receiver-general, became a purchasable office, filled sometimes by two provosts at a time. The burghers no longer found justice or security in the city where the king resided. At his return from his first crusade, Louis recognized the necessity for applying a remedy to this evil; the provostship ceased to be a purchasable office; and he made it separate from the receivership of the royal domain. In 1258 he chose as provost Stephen Boileau, a burgher of note and esteem in Paris; and in order to give this magistrate the authority of which he had need, the king sometimes came and sat beside him when he was administering justice at the Chatelet. Stephen Boileau justified the king's confidence, and maintained so strict a police that he had his own godson hanged for theft. His administrative foresight was equal to his judicial severity. He established registers wherein were to be inscribed the rules habitually followed in respect of the organization and work of the different corporations of artisans, the tariffs of the dues charged, in the name of the king, upon the admittance of provisions and merchandise, and the titles on which the abbots and other lords founded the privileges they enjoyed within the walls of Paris. The corporations of artisans, represented by their sworn masters or prud'hommes, appeared one after the other before the provost to make declaration of the usages in practice amongst their communities, and to have them registered in the book prepared for that purpose. This collection of regulations relating to the arts and trades of Paris in the thirteenth century, known under the name of Livre des Metiers d'Etienne Boileau, is the earliest monument of industrial statistics drawn up by the French administration, and it was inserted, for the first time in its entirety, in 1837, amongst the Collection des Documents relatifs d l'Histoire de France, published during M. Guizot's ministry of public instruction.
St. Louis would be but very incompletely understood if we considered him only in his political and kingly aspect; we must penetrate into his private life, and observe his personal intercourse with his family, his household, and his people, if we would properly understand and appreciate all the originality and moral worth of his character and his life. Mention has already been made of his relations towards the two queens, his mother and his wife; and, difficult as they were, they were nevertheless always exemplary. Louis was a model of conjugal fidelity, as well as of filial piety. He had by Queen Marguerite eleven children, six sons and five daughters; he loved her tenderly, he never severed himself from her, and the modest courage she displayed in the first crusade rendered her still dearer to him. But he was not blind to her ambitious tendencies, and to the insufficiency of her qualifications for government. When he made ready for his second crusade, not only did he not confide to Queen Marguerite the regency of the kingdom, but he even took care to regulate her expenses, and to curb her passion for authority. He forbade her to accept any present for herself or her children, to lay any commands upon the officers of justice, and to choose any one for her service, or for that of her children, without the consent of the council of the regency. And he had reason so to act; for, about this same time, Queen Marguerite, emulous of holding in the state the same place that had been occupied by Queen Blanche, was giving all her thoughts to what her situation would be after her husband's death, and was coaxing her eldest son, Philip, then sixteen years old, to make her a promise on oath to remain under her guardianship up to thirty years of age, to take to himself no counsellor without her approval, to reveal to her all designs which might be formed against her, to conclude no treaty with his uncle, Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily, and to keep as a secret the oath she was thus making him take. Louis was probably informed of this strange promise by his young son Philip himself, who got himself released from it by Pope Urban IV. At any rate, the king had a foreshadowing of Queen Marguerite's inclinations, and took precautions for rendering them harmless to the crown and the state.
As for his children, Louis occupied himself in thought and deed with their education and their future, moral and social, showing as much affection and assiduity as could have been displayed by any father of a family, even the most devoted to this single task. "After supper they followed him into his chamber, where he made them sit down around him; he instructed them in their duties, and then sent them away to bed. He drew their particular attention to the good and evil deeds of princes. He, moreover, went to see then in their own apartment when he had any leisure, informed himself as to the progress they were making, and, like another Tobias, gave them excellent instructions. . . . On Holy Thursday his sons used to wash, just as he used, the feet of thirteen of the poor, give them a considerable sum as alms, and then wait upon them at table. The king having been minded to carry the first of the poor souls to the Hotel-Dieu, at Compiegne, with the assistance of his son-in-law, King Theobald of Navarre, whom he loved as a son, his two eldest sons, Louis and Philip, carried the second thither." They were wont to behave towards him in the most respectful manner. He would have all of them, even Theobald, yield him strict obedience in that which he enjoined upon them. He desired anxiously that the three children born to him in the East, during his first crusade, John Tristan, Peter, and Blanche, and even Isabel, his eldest daughter, should enter upon the cloistered life, which he looked upon as the safest for their salvation. He exhorted them thereto, especially his daughter Isabel, many and many a time, in letters equally tender and pious; but, as they testified no taste for it, he made no attempt to force their inclinations, and concerned himself only about having them well married, not forgetting to give them good appanages, and, for their life in the world, the most judicious counsels. The instructions, written with his own hand in French, which he committed to his eldest son, Philip, as soon as he found himself so seriously ill before Tunis, are a model of virtue, wisdom, and tenderness on the part of a father, a king, and a Christian.
Pass we from the king's family to the king's household, and from the children to the servitors of St. Louis. We have here no longer the powerful tie of blood, and of that feeling, at the same time personal and yet disinterested, which is experienced by parents on seeing themselves living over again in their children. Far weaker motives, mere kindness and custom, unite masters to their servants, and stamp a moral character upon the relations between them; but with St. Louis, so great was his kindness, that it resembled affection, and caused affection to spring up in the hearts of those who were the objects of it. At the same time that he required in his servitors an almost austere morality, he readily passed over in silence their little faults, and treated them, in such cases, not only with mildness, but with that consideration which, in the humblest conditions, satisfies the self-respect of people, and elevates them in their own eyes. "Louis used to visit his domestics when they were ill; and when they died he never failed to pray for them, and to commend them to the prayers of the faithful. He had the mass for the dead, which it was his custom to hear every day, sung for them." He had taken back an old servitor of his grandfather, Philip Augustus, whom that king had dismissed because his fire sputtered, and John, whose duty it was to attend to it, did not know how to prevent that slight noise. Louis was, from time to time, subject to a malady, during which his right leg, from the ankle to the calf, became inflamed, as red as blood, and painful. One day, when he had an attack of this complaint, the king, as he lay, wished to make a close inspection of the redness in his leg; as John was clumsily holding a lighted candle close to the king, a drop of hot grease fell on the bad leg; and the king, who had sat up on his bed, threw himself back, exclaiming, "Ah! John, John, my grandfather turned you out of his house for a less matter!" and the clumsiness of John drew down upon him no other chastisement save this exclamation. (Vie de Saint Louis, by Queen Marguerite's confessor; Recueiz des Historiens de France, t. xx. p. 105; Vie de Saint Louis, by Lenain de Tillemont, t. v. p. 388.)
Far away from the king's household and service, and without any personal connection with him, a whole people, the people of the poor, the infirm, the sick, the wretched, and the neglected of every sort occupied a prominent place in the thoughts and actions of Louis. All the chroniclers of the age, all the historians of his reign, have celebrated his charity as much as his piety; and the philosophers of the eighteenth century almost forgave him his taste for relics, in consideration of his beneficence. And it was not merely legislative and administrative beneficence; St. Louis did not confine himself to founding and endowing hospitals, hospices, asylums, the Hotel-Dieu at Pontoise, that at Vernon, that at Compiegne, and, at Paris, the house of Quinze-Vingts, for three hundred blind, but he did not spare his person in his beneficence, and regarded no deed of charity as beneath a king's dignity. "Every day, wherever the king went, one hundred and twenty-two of the poor received each two loaves, a quart of wine, meat or fish for a good dinner, and a Paris denier. The mothers of families had a loaf more for each child. Besides these hundred and twenty-two poor having out-door relief, thirteen others were every day introduced into the hotel, and there lived as the king's officers; and three of them sat at table at the same time with the king, in the same hall as he, and quite close." . . . "Many a time," says Joinville, "I saw him cut their bread, and give them to drink. He asked me one day if I washed the feet of the poor on Holy Thursday. 'Sir,' said I, 'what a benefit! The feet of those knaves! Not I.' 'Verily,' said he, 'that is ill said, for you ought not to hold in disdain what God did for our instruction. I pray you, therefore, for love of me accustom yourself to wash them.'" Sometimes, when the king had leisure, he used to say, "Come and visit the poor in such and such a place, and let us feast them to their hearts' content." Once when he went to Chateauneuf-sur-Loire, a poor old woman, who was at the door of her cottage, and held in her hand a loaf, said to him, "Good king, it is of this bread, which comes of thine alms, that my husband, who lieth sick yonder indoors, doth get sustenance." The king took the bread, saying, "It is rather hard bread." And he went into the cottage to see with his own eyes the sick man.
When he was visiting the churches one Holy Friday, at Compiegne, as he was going that day barefoot according to his custom, and distributing alms to the poor whom he met, he perceived, on the yonder side of a miry pond which filled a portion of the street, a leper, who, not daring to come near, tried, nevertheless, to attract the king's attention. Louis walked through the pond, went up to the leper, gave him some money, took his hand and kissed it. "All present," says the chronicler, "crossed themselves for admiration at seeing this holy temerity of the king, who had no fear of putting his lips to a hand that none would have dared to touch." In such deeds there was infinitely more than the goodness and greatness of a kingly sold; there was in them that profound Christian sympathy which is moved at the sight of any human creature suffering severely in body or soul, and which, at such times, gives heed to no fear, shrinks from no pains, recoils with no disgust, and has no other thought but that of offering some fraternal comfort to the body or the soul that is suffering.
He who thus felt and acted was no monk, no prince enwrapt in mere devoutness and altogether given up to works and practices of piety; he was a knight, a warrior, a politician, a true king, who attended to the duties of authority as well as to those of charity, and who won respect from his nearest friends as well as from strangers, whilst astonishing them at one time by his bursts of mystic piety and monastic austerity, at another by his flashes of the ruler's spirit and his judicious independence, even towards the representatives of the faith and Church with whom he was in sympathy. "He passed for the wisest man in all his council." In difficult matters and on grave occasions none formed a judgment with more sagacity, and what his intellect so well apprehended he expressed with a great deal of propriety and grace. He was, in conversation, the nicest and most agreeable of men; "he was gay," says Joinville, "and when we were private at court, he used to sit at the foot of his bed; and when the preachers and cordeliers who were there spoke to him of a book he would like to hear, he said to them, 'Nay, you shall not read to me, for there is no book so good, after dinner, as talk ad libitum, that is, every one saying what he pleases.'" Not that he was at all averse from books and literates: "He was sometimes present at the discourses and disputations of the University; but he took care to search out for himself the truth in the word of God and in the traditions of the Church. . . . Having found out, during his travels in the East, that a Saracenic sultan had collected a quantity of books for the service of the philosophers of his sect, he was shamed to see that Christians had less zeal for getting instructed in the truth than infidels had for getting themselves made dexterous in falsehood; so much so that, after his return to France, he had search made in the abbeys for all the genuine works of St. Augustin, St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. Gregory, and other orthodox teachers, and, having caused copies of them to be made, he had them placed in the treasury of Sainte-Chapelle. He used to read them when he had any leisure, and he readily lent them to those who might get profit from them for themselves or for others. Sometimes, at the end of the afternoon meal, he sent for pious persons with whom he conversed about God, about the stories in the Bible and the histories of the saints, or about the lives of the Fathers." He had a particular friendship for the learned Robert of Sorbon, founder of the Sorbonne, whose idea was a society of secular ecclesiastics, who, living in common and having the necessaries of life, should give themselves up entirely to study and gratuitous teaching. Not only did St. Louis give him every facility and every aid necessary for the establishment of his learned college, but he made him one of his chaplains, and often invited him to his presence and his table in order to enjoy his conversation. "One day it happened," says Joinville, "that Master Robert was taking his meal beside me, and we were talking low. The king reproved us, and said, 'Speak up, for your company think that you may be talking evil of them. If you speak, at meals, of things which should please us, speak up; if not, be silent.'" Another day, at one of their reunions, with the king in their midst, Robert of Sorbon reproached Joinville with being "more bravely clad than the king; for," said he, "you do dress in furs and green cloth, which the king doth not." Joinville defended himself vigorously, in his turn attacking Robert for the elegance of his dress. The king took the learned doctor's part, and when he had gone, "My lord the king," says Joinville, "called his son, my lord Philip, and King Theobald, sat him down at the entrance of his oratory, placed his hand on the ground and said, 'Sit ye down here close by me, that we be not overheard;' and then he told me that he had called us in order to confess to us that he had wrongfully taken the part of Master Robert; for, just as the seneschal [Joinville] saith, ye ought to be well and decently clad, because your womankind will love you the better for it, and your people will prize you the more; for, saith the wise man, it is right so to bedeck one's self with garments and armor that the proper men of this world say not that there is too much made thereof, nor the young folk too little." (Joinville, ch. cxxxv. p. 301; ch. v. and vi. pp. 12 16; t. v. pp. 326, 364, and 368.)
Assuredly there was enough in such and so free an exercise of mind, in such a rich abundance of thoughts and sentiments, in such a religious, political, and domestic life, to occupy and satisfy a soul full of energy and power. But, as has already been said, an idea cherished with a lasting and supreme passion, the idea of the crusade took entire possession of St. Louis. For seven years, after his return from the East, from 1254 to 1261, he appeared to think no more of it; and there is nothing to show that he spoke of it even to his most intimate confidants. But, in spite of apparent tranquillity, he lived, so far, in a ferment of imagination and a continual fever, resembling in that respect, though the end aimed at was different, those great men, ambitious warriors or politicians, of natures forever at boiling point, for whom nothing is sufficient, and who are constantly fostering, beyond the ordinary course of events, some vast and strange desire, the accomplishment of which becomes for them a fixed idea and an insatiable passion. As Alexander and Napoleon were incessantly forming some new design, or, to speak more correctly, some new dream of conquest and dominion, in the same way St. Louis, in his pious ardor, never ceased to aspire to a re-entry of Jerusalem, to the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre, and to the victory of Christianity over Mohammedanism in the East, always flattering himself that some favorable circumstance would recall him to his interrupted work. It has already been told, at the termination, in the preceding chapter, of the crusaders' history, how he had reason to suppose, in 1261, that circumstances were responding to his desire; how he first of all prepared, noiselessly and patiently, for his second crusade; how, after seven years' labor, less and less concealed as days went on, he proclaimed his purpose, and swore to accomplish it in the following year; and how at last, in the month of March, 1270, against the will of France, of the pope, and even of the majority of his comrades, he actually set out—to go and die, on the 25th of the following August, before Tunis, without having dealt the Mussulmans of the East even the shadow of an effectual blow, having no strength to do more than utter, from time to time, as he raised himself on his bed, the cry of Jerusalem! Jerusalem! and, at the last moment, as he lay in sackcloth and ashes, pronouncing merely these parting words: "Father, after the example of our Divine Master, into Thy hands I commend my spirit!" Even the crusader was extinct in St. Louis; and only the Christian remained.
The world has seen upon the throne greater captains, more profound politicians, vaster and more brilliant intellects, princes who have exercised, beyond their own lifetime, a more powerful and a more lasting influence than St. Louis; but it has never seen a rarer king, never seen a man who could possess, as he did, sovereign power without contracting the passions and vices natural to it, and who, in this respect, displayed in his government human virtues exalted to the height of Christian. For all his moral sympathy, and superior as he was to his age, St. Louis, nevertheless, shared, and even helped to prolong, two of its greatest mistakes; as a Christian he misconceived the rights of conscience in respect of religion, and, as a king, he brought upon his people deplorable evils and perils for the sake of a fruitless enterprise. War against religious liberty was, for a long course of ages, the crime of Christian communities and the source of the most cruel evils as well as of the most formidable irreligious reactions the world has had to undergo. The thirteenth century was the culminating period of this fatal notion and the sanction of it conferred by civil legislation as well as ecclesiastical teaching. St. Louis joined, so far, with sincere conviction, in the general and ruling idea of his age; and the jumbled code which bears the name of Etablissements de Saint Louis, and in which there are collected many ordinances anterior or posterior to his reign, formally condemns heretics to death, and bids the civil judges to see to the execution, in this respect, of the bishops' sentences. In 1255 St. Louis himself demanded of Pope Alexander IV. leave for the Dominicans and Franciscans to exercise, throughout the whole kingdom, the inquisition already established, on account of the Albigensians, in the old domains of the Counts of Toulouse. The bishops, it is true, were to be consulted before condemnation could be pronounced by the inquisitors against a heretic; but that was a mark of respect for the episcopate and for the rights of the Gallican Church rather than a guarantee for liberty of conscience; and such was St. Louis's feeling upon this subject, that liberty, or rather the most limited justice, was less to be expected from the kingship than from the episcopate. St. Louis's extreme severity towards what he called the knavish oath (vilain serment), that is, blasphemy, an offence for which there is no definition save what is contained in the bare name of it, is, perhaps, the most striking indication of the state of men's minds, and especially of the king's, in this respect. Every blasphemer was to receive on his mouth the imprint of a red-hot iron. "One day the king had a burgher of Paris branded in this way; and violent murmurs were raised in the capital and came to the king's ears. He responded by declaring that he wished a like brand might mark his lips, and that he might bear the shame of it all his life, if only the vice of blasphemy might disappear from his kingdom. Some time afterwards, having had a work of great public utility executed, he received, on that occasion, from the landlords of Paris numerous expressions of gratitude. 'I expect,' said he, 'a greater recompense from the Lord for the curses brought upon me by that brand inflicted upon blasphemers than for the blessings I get because of this act of general utility.'" (Joinville, chap. cxxxviii.; Histoire de Saint Louis, by M. Felix Faure, t. ii. p. 300.)
Of all human errors those most in vogue are the most dangerous, for they are just those from which the most superior minds have the greatest difficulty in preserving themselves. It is impossible to see, without horror, into what aberrations of reason and of moral sense men otherwise most enlightened and virtuous may be led away by the predominant ideas of their age. And the horror becomes still greater when a discovery is made of the iniquities, sufferings, and calamities, public and private, consequent upon the admission of such aberrations amongst the choice spirits of the period. In the matter of religious liberty, St. Louis is a striking example of the vagaries which may be fallen into, under the sway of public feeling, by the most equitable of minds and the most scrupulous of consciences. A solemn warning, in times of great intellectual and popular ferment, for those men whose hearts are set on independence in their thoughts as well as in their conduct, and whose only object is justice and truth.
As for the crusades, the situation of Louis was with respect to them quite different and his responsibility far more personal. The crusades had certainly, in their origin, been the spontaneous and universal impulse of Christian Europe towards an object lofty, disinterested, and worthy of the devotion of men; and St. Louis was, without any doubt, the most lofty, disinterested, and heroic representative of this grand Christian movement. But towards the middle of the thirteenth century the moral complexion of the crusades had already undergone great alteration; the salutary effect they were to have exercised for the advancement of European civilization still loomed obscurely in the distance; whilst their evil results were already clearly manifesting themselves, and they had no longer that beauty lent by spontaneous and general feeling which had been their strength and their apology. Weariness, doubt, and common sense had, so far as this matter was concerned, done their work amongst all classes of the feudal community. As Sire de Joinville, so also had many knights, honest burghers, and simple country-folks recognized the flaws in the enterprise, and felt no more belief in its success. It is the glory of St. Louis that he was, in the thirteenth century, the faithful and virtuous representative of the crusade such as it was when it sprang from the womb of united Christendom, and when Godfrey de Bouillon was its leader at the end of the eleventh. It was the misdemeanor of St. Louis, and a great error in his judgment, that he prolonged, by his blindly prejudiced obstinacy, a movement which was more and more inopportune and illegitimate, for it was becoming day by day more factitious and more inane.
In the long line of kings of France, called Most Christian Kings, only two, Charlemagne and Louis IX., have received the still more august title of Saint. As for Charlemagne, we must not be too exacting in the way of proofs of his legal right to that title in the Catholic Church; he was canonized, in 1165 or 1166, only by the anti-pope Pascal III., through the influence of Frederick Barbarossa; and since that time, the canonization of Charlemagne has never been officially allowed and declared by any popes recognized as legitimate. They tolerated and tacitly admitted it, on account, no doubt, of the services rendered by Charlemagne to the papacy. But Charlemagne had ardent and influential admirers outside the pale of popes and emperors; he was the great man and the popular hero of the Germanic race in Western Europe. His saintship was welcomed with acclamation in a great part of Germany, where it had always been religiously kept up. Prom the earliest date of the University of Paris, he had been the patron there of all students of the German race. In France, nevertheless, his position as a saint was still obscure and doubtful, when Louis XI., towards the end of the fifteenth century, by some motive now difficult to unravel, but probably in order to take from his enemy, Charles the Rash, Duke of Burgundy, who was in possession of the fairest provinces of Charlemagne's empire, the exclusive privilege of so great a memory, ordained that there should be rendered to the illustrious emperor the honors due to the saints; and he appointed the 28th of January for his feast-day, with a threat of the penalty of death against all who should refuse conformity with the order. Neither the command nor the threat of Louis XI. had any great effect. It does not appear that, in the Church of France, the saintship of Charlemagne was any the more generally admitted and kept up; but the University of Paris faithfully maintained its traditions, and some two centuries after Louis XI., in 1661, without expressly giving to Charlemagne the title of saint, it loudly proclaimed him its patron, and made his feast-day an annual and solemn institution, which, in spite of some hesitation on the part of the parliament of Paris, and in spite of the revolutions of our time, still exists as the grand feast-day throughout the area of our classical studies. The University of France repaid Charlemagne for the service she had received from him; she protected his saintship as he had protected her schools and her scholars.
The saintship of Louis IX. was not the object of such doubt, and had no such need of learned and determined protectors. Claimed as it was on the very morrow of his death, not only by his son Philip III., called The Bold, and by the barons and prelates of the kingdom, but also by the public voice of France and of Europe, it at once became the subject of investigations and deliberations on the part of the Holy See. For twenty-four years, new popes, filling in rapid succession the chair of St. Peter (Gregory X., Innocent V., John XXI., Nicholas III., Martin IV., Honorius IV., Nicholas IV., St. Celestine V., and Boniface VIII.), prosecuted the customary inquiries touching the faith and life, the virtues and miracles, of the late king; and it was Boniface VIII., the pope destined to carry on against Philip the Handsome, grandson of St. Louis, the most violent of struggles, who decreed, on the 11th of August, 1297, the canonization of the most Christian amongst the kings of France, and one of the truest Christians, king or simple, in France and in Europe.
St. Louis was succeeded by his son, Philip III., a prince, no doubt, of some personal valor, since he has retained in history the nickname of The Bold, but not otherwise beyond mediocrity. His reign had an unfortunate beginning. After having passed several months before Tunis, in slack and unsuccessful continuation of his father's crusade, he gave it up, and re-embarked in November, 1270, with the remnants of an army anxious to quit "that accursed land," wrote one of the crusaders, "where we languish rather than live, exposed to torments of dust, fury of winds, corruption of atmosphere, and putrefaction of corpses." A tempest caught the fleet on the coast of Sicily; and Philip lost, by it several vessels, four or five thousand men, and all the money he had received from the Mussulmans of Tunis as the price of his departure. Whilst passing through Italy, at Cosenza, his wife, Isabel of Aragon, six months gone with child, fell from her horse, was delivered of a child which lived barely a few hours, and died herself a day or two afterwards, leaving her husband almost as sick as sad. He at last arrived at Paris, on the 21st of May, 1271, bringing back with him five royal biers, that of his father, that of his brother, John Tristan, Count of Nevers, that of his brother-in-law, Theobald King of Navarre, that of his wife, and that of his son. The day after his arrival he conducted them all in state to the Abbey of St. Denis, and was crowned at Rheims, not until the 30th of August following. His reign, which lasted fifteen years, was a period of neither repose nor glory. He engaged in war several times over in Southern France and in the north of Spain, in 1272, against Roger Bernard, Count of Foix, and in 1285 against Don Pedro III., King of Aragon, attempting conquests and gaining victories, but becoming easily disgusted with his enterprises and gaining no result of importance or durability. Without his taking himself any official or active part in the matter, the name and credit of France were more than once compromised in the affairs of Italy through the continual wars and intrigues of his uncle Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily, who was just as ambitious, just as turbulent, and just as tyrannical as his brother St. Louis was scrupulous, temperate, and just. It was in the reign of Philip the Bold that there took place in Sicily, on the 30th of March, 1282, that notorious massacre of the French which is known by the name of Sicilian Vespers, which was provoked by the unbridled excesses of Charles of Anjou's comrades, and through which many noble French families had to suffer cruelly.
At the same time, the celebrated Italian Admiral Roger de Loria inflicted, by sea, on the French party in Italy, the Provincal navy, and the army of Philip the Bold, who was engaged upon incursions into Spain, considerable reverses and losses. At the same period the foundations were being laid in Germany and in the north of Italy, in the person of Rudolph of Hapsburg, elected emperor, of the greatness reached by the House of Austria, which was destined to be so formidable a rival to France. The government of Philip III. showed hardly more ability at home than in Europe; not that the king was himself violent, tyrannical, greedy of power or money, and unpopular; he was, on the contrary, honorable, moderate in respect of his personal claims, simple in his manners, sincerely pious and gentle towards the humble; but he was at the same time weak, credulous, very illiterate, say the chroniclers, and without penetration, foresight, or intelligent and determined will. He fell under the influence of an inferior servant of his house, Peter de la Brosse, who had been surgeon and barber first of all to St. Louis and then to Philip III., who made him, before long, his chancellor and familiar counsellor. Being, though a skilful and active intriguer, entirely concerned with his own personal fortunes and those of his family, this barber-mushroom was soon a mark for the jealousy and the attacks of the great lords of the court. And he joined issue with them, and even with the young queen, Maria of Brabant, the second wife of Philip III. Accusations of treason, of poisoning and peculation, were raised against him, and, in 1276, he was hanged at Paris, on the thieves' gibbet, in presence of the Dukes of Burgundy and Brabant, the Count of Artois, and many other personages of note, who took pleasure in witnessing his execution. His condemnation, "the cause of which remained unknown to the people," says the chronicler William of Nangis, "was a great source of astonishment and grumbling." Peter de la Brosse was one of the first examples, in French history, of those favorites who did not understand that, if the scandal caused by their elevation were not to entail their ruin, it was incumbent upon them to be great men.
In spite of the want of ability and the weakness conspicuous in the government of Philip the Bold, the kingship in France had, in his reign, better fortunes than could have been expected.
The death, without children, of his uncle Alphonso, St. Louis's brother, Count of Poitiers and also Count of Toulouse, through his wife, Joan, daughter of Raymond VII., put Philip in possession of those fair provinces. He at first possessed the count-ship of Toulouse merely with the title of count, and as a private domain which was not definitively incorporated with the crown of France until a century later. Certain disputes arose between England and France in respect of this great inheritance; and Philip ended them by ceding Agenois to Edward I., King of England, and keeping Quercy. He also ceded to Pope Urban IV. the county of Venaissin, with its capital Avignon, which the court of Rome claimed by virtue of a gift from Raymond VII., Count of Toulouse, and which, through a course of many disputations and vicissitudes, remained in possession of the Holy See until it was reunited to France on the 19th of February, 1797, by the treaty of Tolentino. But, notwithstanding these concessions, when Philip the Bold died, at Perpignan, the 5th of October, 1285, on his return from his expedition in Aragon, the sovereignty in Southern France, as far as the frontiers of Spain, had been won for the kingship of France.
A Flemish chronicler, a monk at Egmont, describes the character of Philip the Bold's successor in the following words: "A certain King of France, also named Philip, eaten up by the fever of avarice and cupidity." And that was not the only fever inherent in Philip IV., called The Handsome; he was a prey also to that of ambition, and, above all, to that of power. When he mounted the throne, at seventeen years of age, he was handsome, as his nickname tells us, cold, taciturn, harsh, brave at need, but without fire or dash, able in the formation of his designs, and obstinate in prosecuting them by craft or violence, by means of bribery or cruelty, with wit to choose and support his servants, passionately vindictive against his enemies, and faithless and unsympathetic towards his subjects, but from time to time taking care to conciliate them, either by calling them to his aid in his difficulties or his dangers, or by giving them protection against other oppressors. Never, perhaps, was king better served by circumstances or more successful in his enterprises; but he is the first of the Capetians who had a scandalous contempt for rights, abused success, and thrust the king-ship, in France, upon the high road of that arrogant and reckless egotism which is sometimes compatible with ability and glory, but which carries with it in the germ, and sooner or later brings out in full bloom, the native vices and fatal consequences of arbitrary and absolute power.
Away from his own kingdom, in his dealings with foreign countries, Philip the Handsome had a good fortune, which his predecessors had lacked, and which his successors lacked still more. Through William the Conqueror's settlement in England and Henry II.'s marriage with Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Kings of England had, by reason of their possessions and their claims in France, become the natural enemies of the Kings of France, and war was almost incessant between the two kingdoms. But Edward I., King of England, ever since his accession to the throne, in 1272, had his ideas fixed upon, and his constant efforts directed towards, the conquests of the countries of Wales and Scotland, so as to unite under his sway the whole island of Great Britain. The Welsh and the Scotch, from prince to peasant, offered an energetic resistance in defence of their independence; and it was only after seven years' warfare, from 1277 to 1284, that the conquest of Wales by the English was accomplished, and the style of Prince of Wales became the title of the heir to the throne of England. Scotland, in spite of dissensions at home, made a longer and a more effectual resistance; and though it was reduced to submission, it was not conquered by Edward I. Two national heroes, William Wallace and Robert Bruce, excited against him insurrections which were often triumphant and always being renewed; and after having, during eighteen years of strife, maintained a precarious dominion in Scotland, Edward I. died, in 1307, without having acquired the sovereignty of it. But his persevering ardor in this two-fold enterprise kept him out of war with France; he did all he could to avoid it, and when the pressure of circumstances involved him in it for a time, he was anxious to escape from it. Being summoned to Paris by Philip the Handsome, in 1286, to swear fealty and homage on account of his domains in France, he repaired thither with a good grace, and, on his knees before his souzerain, repeated to him the solemn form of words, "I become your liegeman for the lands I hold of you this side the sea, according to the fashion of the peace which was made between our ancestors." The conditions of this peace were confirmed, and, by a new treaty between the two princes, the annual payment of fifty thousand dollars to the King of England, in exchange for his claims over Normandy, was guaranteed to him, and Edward renounced his pretensions to Querey in consideration of a yearly sum of three thousand livres of Tours. In 1292, a quarrel and some hostilities at sea between the English and Norman commercial navies grew into a war between the two kings; and it dragged its slow length along for four years in the south-west of France. Edward made an alliance, in the north, with the Flemish, who were engaged in a deadly struggle with Philip the Handsome, and thereby lost Aquitaine for a season; but, in 1296, a truce was concluded between the belligerents, and though the importance of England's commercial relations with Flanders decided Edward upon resuming his alliance with the Flemish, when, in 1300, war broke out again between them and France, he withdrew from it three years afterwards, and made a separate peace with Philip the Handsome, who gave him back Aquitaine. In 1306, fresh differences arose between the two kings; but before they had rekindled the torch of war, Edward I. died at the opening of a new campaign in Scotland, and his successor, Edward II., repaired to Boulogne, where he, in his turn, did homage to Philip the Handsome for the duchy of Aquitaine, and espoused Philip's daughter Isabel, reputed to be the most beautiful woman in Europe. In spite, then, of frequent interruptions, the reign of Edward I. was on the whole a period of peace between England and France, being exempt, at any rate, from premeditated and obstinate hostilities.
In Southern France, at the foot of the Pyrenees, Philip the Handsome, just as his father, Philip the Bold, was, during the first years of his reign, at war with the Kings of Aragon, Alphonso III. and Jayme II.; but these campaigns, originating in purely local quarrels, or in the ties between the descendants of St. Louis and of his brother, Charles of Anjou, King of the Two Sicilies, rather than in furtherance of the general interests of France, were terminated in 1291 by a treaty concluded at Tarascon between the belligerents, and have remained without historical importance.
The Flemish were the people with whom Philip the Handsome engaged in and kept up, during the whole of his reign, with frequent alternations of defeat and success, a really serious war. In the thirteenth century, Flanders was the most populous and the richest country in Europe. She owed the fact to the briskness of her manufacturing and commercial undertakings, not only amongst her neighbors, but throughout Southern and Eastern Europe, in Italy, in Spain, in Sweden, in Norway, in Hungary, in Russia, and even as far as Constantinople, where, as we have seen, Baldwin I., Count of Flanders, became, in 1204, Latin Emperor of the East. Cloth, and all manner of woollen stuffs, were the principal articles of Flemish production, and it was chiefly from England that Flanders drew her supply of Wool, the raw material of her industry. Thence arose between the two countries commercial relations which could not fail to acquire political importance. As early as the middle of the twelfth century, several Flemish towns formed a society for founding in England a commercial exchange, which obtained great privileges, and, under the name of the Flemish hanse of London, reached rapid development. The merchants of Bruges had taken the initiative in it; but soon all the towns of Flanders—and Flanders was covered with towns—Ghent, Lille, Ypres, Courtrai, Furnes, Alost, St. Omer, and Douai, entered the confederation, and made unity as well as extension of liberties in respect of Flemish commerce the object of their joint efforts. Their prosperity became celebrated; and its celebrity gave it increase. It was a burgher of Bruges who was governor of the hanse of London, and he was called the Count of the Hanse. The fair of Bruges, held in the month of May, brought together traders from the whole world. "Thither came for exchange," says the most modern and most enlightened historian of Flanders (Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove, Histoire de Flandre, t. ii. p. 300), "the produce of the North and the South, the riches collected in the pilgrimages to Novogorod, and those brought over by the caravans from Samarcand and Bagdad, the pitch of Norway and the oils of Andalusia, the furs of Russia and the dates from the Atlas, the metals of Hungary and Bohemia, the figs of Granada, the honey of Portugal, the wax of Morocco, and the spice of Egypt; whereby, says an ancient manuscript, no land is to be compared in merchandise to the land of Flanders." At Ypres, the chief centre of cloth fabrics, the population increased so rapidly that, in 1247, the sheriffs prayed Pope Innocent IV. to augment the number of parishes in their city, which contained, according to their account, about two hundred thousand persons. So much prosperity made the Counts of Flanders very puissant lords. "Marguerite II., called the Black, Countess of Flanders and Hainault, from 1244 to 1280, was extremely rich," says a chronicler, "not only in lands, but in furniture, jewels, and money; and, as is not customary with women, she was right liberal and right sumptuous, not only in her largesses, but in her entertainments, and whole manner of living; insomuch that she kept up the state of queen rather than countess." Nearly all the Flemish towns were strongly organized communes, in which prosperity had won liberty, and which became before long small republics sufficiently powerful not only for the defence of their municipal rights against the Counts of Flanders, their lords, but for offering an armed resistance to such of the sovereigns their neighbors as attempted to conquer them or to trammel them in their commercial relations, or to draw upon their wealth by forced contributions or by plunder. Philip Augustus had begun to have a taste of their strength during his quarrels with Count Ferdinand of Portugal, whom he had made Count of Flanders by marrying him to the Countess Joan, heiress of the countship, and whom, after the battle of Bouvines, he had confined for thirteen years in the tower of the Louvre. Philip the Handsome laid himself open to and was subjected by the Flemings to still rougher experiences.
At the time of the latter king's accession to the throne, Guy de Dampierre, of noble Champagnese origin, had been for five years Count of Flanders, as heir to his mother, Marguerite II. He was a prince who did not lack courage, or, on a great emergency, high-mindedness and honor; but he was ambitious, covetous, as parsimonious as his mother had been munificent, and above all concerned to get his children married in a manner conducive to his own political importance. He had by his two wives, Matilda of Bethune and Isabel of Luxembourg, nine sons and eight daughters, offering free scope for combinations and connections, in respect of which Guy de Dampierre was not at all scrupulous about the means of success. He had a quarrel with his son-in-law, Florent V., Count of Holland, to whom he had given his daughter Beatrice in marriage; and another of his sons-in-law, John I., Duke of Brabant, married to another of his daughters, the Princess Marguerite, offered himself as mediator in the difference. The two brothers-in-law went together to see their father-in-law; but, on their arrival, Guy de Dampierre seized the person of the Count of Holland, and would not release him until the Duke of Brabant offered to become prisoner in his place, and found himself obliged, in order to obtain his liberty, to pay his father-in-law a tough ransom. It was not long before Guy himself suffered from the same sort of iniquitous surprise that he had practised upon his sons-in-law. In 1293 he was secretly negotiating the marriage of Philippa, one of his daughters, with Prince Edward, eldest son of the King of England. Philip the Handsome, having received due warning, invited the Count of Flanders to Paris, "to take counsel with him and the other barons touching the state of the kingdom." At first Guy hesitated; but he dared not refuse, and he repaired to Paris, with his sons John and Guy. As soon as he arrived he bashfully announced to the king the approaching union of his daughter with the English prince, protesting, "that he would never cease, for all that, to serve him loyally, as every good and true man should serve his lord." "In God's name, Sir Count," said the enraged king, "this thing will never do; you have made alliance with my foe, without my wit; wherefore you shall abide with me;" and he had him, together with his sons, marched off at once to the tower of the Louvre, where Guy remained for six months, and did not then get out save by leaving as hostage to the King of France his daughter Philippa herself, who was destined to pass in this prison her young and mournful life. On once more entering Flanders, Count Guy oscillated for two years between the King of France and the King of England, submitting to the exactions of the former, at the same time that he was privily renewing his attempts to form an intimate alliance with the latter. Driven to extremity by the haughty severity of Philip, he at last came to a decision, concluded a formal treaty with Edward I., affianced to the English crown-prince the most youthful of his daughters, Isabel of Flanders, youngest sister of Philippa, the prisoner in the tower of the Louvre, and charged two ambassadors to go to Paris, as the bearers of the following declaration: "Every one doth know in how many ways the King of France hath misbehaved towards God and justice. Such is his might and his pride, that he doth acknowledge nought above himself, and he hath brought us to the necessity of seeking allies who may be able to defend and protect us. . . . By reason whereof we do charge our ambassadors to declare and say, for us and from us, to the above said king, that because of his misdeeds and defaults of justice, we hold ourselves unbound, absolved, and delivered from all bonds, all alliances, obligations, conventions, subjections, services, and dues whereby we may have been bounden towards him."
This meant war. And it was prompt and sharp on the part of the King of France, slow and dull on the part of the King of England, who was always more bent upon the conquest of Scotland than upon defending, on the Continent, his ally, the Count of Flanders. In June, 1297, Philip the Handsome, in person, laid siege to Lille, and, on the 13th of August, Robert, Count of Artois, at the head of the French chivalry, gained at Furnes, over the Flemish army, a victory which decided the campaign. Lille capitulated. The English re-enforcements arrived too late, and served no other purpose but that of inducing Philip to grant the Flemings a truce for two years. A fruitless attempt was made, with the help of Pope Boniface VIII., to change the truce into a lasting peace. The very day on which it expired, Charles, Count of Valois, and brother of Philip the Handsome, entered Flanders with a powerful army, surprised Douai, passed through Bruges, and, on arriving at Ghent, gave a reception to its magistrates, who came and offered him the keys. "The burghers of the towns of Flanders," says a chronicler of the age, "were all bribed by gifts or promises from the King of France, who would never have dared to invade their frontiers, had they been faithful to their count." Guy de Dampierre, hopelessly beaten, repaired, with two of his sons, and fifty-one of his faithful knights, to the camp of the Count of Valois, who gave him a kind reception, and urged him to trust himself to the king's generosity, promising at the same time to support his suit. Guy set out for Paris with all his retinue. On approaching the City-palace which was the usual residence of the kings, he espied at one of the windows Queen Joan of Navarre, who took a supercilious pleasure in gazing upon the humiliation of the victim of defeat. Guy drooped his head, and gave no greeting. When he was close to the steps of the palace, he dismounted from his horse, and placed himself and all his following at the mercy of the king. The Count of Valois said a few words in his favor, but Philip, cutting his brother short, said, addressing himself to Guy, "I desire no peace with you, and if my brother has made any engagements with you, he had no right to do so." And he had the Count of Flanders taken off immediately to Compiegne, "to a strong tower, such that all could see him," and his comrades were distributed amongst several towns, where they were strictly guarded. The whole of Flanders submitted; and its principal towns, Ypres, Audenarde, Termonde, and Cassel, fell successively into the hands of the French. Three of the sons of Count Guy retired to Namur. The constable Raoul of Nesle "was lieutenant for the King of France in his newly-won country of Flanders." Next year, in the month of May, 1301, Philip determined to pay his conquest a visit; and the queen, his wife, accompanied him. There is never any lack of galas for conquerors. After having passed in state through Tournai, Courtrai, Audenarde, and Ghent, the King and Queen of France made their entry into Bruges. All the houses were magnificently decorated; on platforms covered with the richest tapestry thronged the ladies of Bruges; there was nothing but haberdashery and precious stones. Such an array of fine dresses, jewels, and riches, excited a woman's jealousy in the Queen of France: "There is none but queens," quoth she, "to be seen in Bruges; I had thought that there was none but I who had a right to royal state." But the people of Bruges remained dumb; and their silence scared Philip the Handsome, who vainly attempted to attract a concourse of people about him by the proclamation of brilliant jousts. "These galas," says the historian Villani, who was going through Flanders at this very time, "were the last whereof the French knew aught in our time, for Fortune, who till then had shown such favor to the King of France, on a sudden turned her wheel, and the cause thereof lay in the unrighteous captivity of the innocent maid of Flanders, and in the treason whereof the Count of Flanders and his sons had been the victims." There were causes, however, for this new turn of events of a more general and more profound character than the personal woes of Flemish princes. James de Chiltillon, the governor assigned by Philip the Handsome to Flanders, was a greedy oppressor of it; the municipal authorities whom the victories or the gold of Philip had demoralized became the objects of popular hatred; and there was an outburst of violent sedition. A simple weaver, obscure, poor, undersized, and one-eyed, but valiant, and eloquent in his Flemish tongue, one Peter Deconing, became the leader of revolt in Bruges; accomplices flocked to him from nearly all the towns of Flanders; and he found allies amongst their neighbors. In 1302 war again broke out; but it was no longer a war between Philip the Handsome and Guy de Dampierre: it was a war between the Flemish communes and their foreign oppressors. Everywhere resounded the cry of insurrection: "Our bucklers and our friends for the lion of Flanders! Death to all Walloons!" "Philip the Handsome precipitately levied an army of sixty thousand men," says Villani, "and gave the command of it to Count Robert of Artois, the hero of Furnes. The forces of the Flemings amounted to no more than twenty thousand fighting men. The two armies met near Courtrai. The French chivalry were full of ardor and confidence; and the Italian archers in their service began the attack with some success. My lord," said one of his knights to the Count of Artois, "these knaves will do so well that they will gain the honor of the day; and, if they alone put an end to the war, what will be left for the noblesse to do?" "Attack, then!" answered the prince. Two grand attacks succeeded one another; the first under the orders of the Constable Raoul of Nesle, the second under those of the Count of Artois in person. After two hours' fighting, both failed against the fiery national passion of the Flemish communes, and the two French leaders, the Constable and the Count of Artois, were left, both of them, lying on the field of battle amidst twelve or fifteen thousand of their dead. "I yield me! I yield me!" cried the Count of Artois; but, "We understand not thy lingo," ironically answered in their own tongue the Flemings who surrounded him; and he was forthwith put to the sword. Too late to save him galloped up a noble ally of the insurgents, Guy of Namur. "From the top of the towers of our monastery," says the Abbot of St. Martin's of Tournai, "we could see the French flying over the roads, across fields and through hedges, in such numbers that the sight must have been seen to be believed. There were in the outskirts of our town and in the neighboring villages, so vast a multitude of knights and men-at-arms tormented with hunger, that it was a matter horrible to see. They gave their arms to get bread."
A French knight, covered with wounds, whose name has remained unknown, hastily scratched a few words upon a scrap of parchment dyed with blood; and that was the first account Philip the Handsome received of the battle of Courtrai, which was fought and lost on the 11th of July, 1302.
The news of this great defeat of the French spread rapidly throughout Europe, and filled with joy all those who were hostile to or jealous of Philip the Handsome. The Flemings celebrated their victory with splendor, and rewarded with bounteous gifts their burgher heroes, Peter Deconing amongst others, and those of their neighbors who had brought them aid. Philip, greatly affected and a little alarmed, sent for his prisoner, the aged Guy de Dampierre, and loaded him with reproaches, as if he had to thank him for the calamity; and, forthwith levying a fresh army, "as numerous," say the chroniclers, "as the grains of sand on the borders of the sea from Propontis to the Ocean," he took up a position at Arras, and even advanced quite close to Douai; but he was of those in whom obstinacy does not extinguish prudence, and who, persevering all the while in their purposes, have wit to understand the difficulties and clangers of them. Instead of immediately resuming the war, he entered into negotiations with the Flemings; and their envoys met him in a ruined church beneath the walls of Douai. John of Chalons, one of Philip's envoys, demanded, in his name, that the king should be recognized as lord of all Flanders, and authorized to punish the insurrection of Bruges, with a promise, however, to spare the lives of all who had taken part in it. "How!" said a Fleming, Baldwin de Paperode; "our lives would be left us, but only after our goods had been pillaged and our limbs subjected to every torture!" "Sir Castellan," answered John of Chalons, "why speak you so? A choice must needs be made; for the king is determined to lose his crown rather than not be avenged." Another Fleming, John de Renesse, who, leaning on the broken altar, had hitherto kept silence, cried, "Since so it is, let answer be made to the king that we be come hither to fight him, and not to deliver up to him our fellow-citizens;" and the Flemish envoys withdrew. Still Philip did not give up negotiating, for the purpose of gaining time and of letting the edge wear off the Flemings' confidence. He returned to Paris, fetched Guy de Dampierre from the tower of the Louvre, and charged him to go and negotiate peace under a promise of returning to his prison if he were unsuccessful. Guy, respected as he was throughout Flanders on account of his age and his long misfortunes, failed in his attempt, and, faithful to his word, went back and submitted himself to the power of Philip. "I am so old," said he to his friends, "that I am ready to die whensoever it shall please God." And he did die, on the 7th of March, 1304, in the prison of Compiegne, to which he had been transferred. Philip, all the while pushing forward his preparations for war, continued to make protestation of pacific intentions. The Flemish communes desired the peace necessary for the prosperity of their commerce; but patriotic anxieties wrestled with material interests. A burgher of Ghent was quietly fishing on the banks of the Scheldt, when an old man acosted him, saying sharply, "Knowest thou not, then, that the king is assembling all his armies? It is time the Ghentese shook off their sloth; the lion of Flanders must no longer slumber." In the spring of 1304, the cry of war resounded everywhere. Philip had laid an impost extraordinary upon all real property in his kingdom; regulars and reserves had been summoned to Arras, to attack the Flemings by land and sea. He had taken into his pay a Genoese fleet commanded by Regnier de Grimaldi, a celebrated Italian admiral; and it arrived in the North Sea, and blockaded Zierikzee, a maritime town of Zealand. On the 10th of August, 1304, the Flemish fleet which was defending the place was beaten and dispersed. Philip hoped for a moment that this reverse would discourage the Flemings; but it was not so at all. A great battle took place on the 17th of August between the two land armies at Mons-en-Puelle (or, Mont-en-Pevele, according to the true local spelling), near Lille; the action was for some time indecisive, and even after it was over both sides hesitated about claiming the victory; but when the Flemings saw their camp swept off and rifled, and when they no longer found in it, say the chroniclers, "their fine stuffs of Bruges and Ypres, their wines of Rochelle, their beers of Cambrai, and their cheeses of Bethune," they declared that they would return to their hearths; and their leaders, unable to restrain them, were obliged to shut themselves up in Lille, whither Philip, who had himself retired at first to Arras, came to besiege them. When the first days of downheartedness were over, and at sight of the danger which threatened Lille and the remains of the Flemish army assembled within its walls, all Flanders rushed to arms. "The labors of the workshop and the field were everywhere suspended," say contemporary Historians: "the women kept guard in the towns: you might traverse the country without meeting a single man, for they were all in the camp at Courtrai, to the number of twelve hundred thousand, according to popular exaggeration, swearing one to another that they would rather die fighting than live in slavery." Philip was astounded. "I thought the Flemings," said he, "were destroyed; but they seem to rain from heaven;" and he resumed his protestations and pacific overtures. Circumstances were favorable to him: old Guy de Dampierre was dead; Robert of Bethune, his eldest son and successor, was still the prisoner of Philip the Handsome, who set him at liberty after having imposed conditions upon him. Robert, timid in spirit and weak of heart, accepted them, in spite of the grumblings of the Flemish populations, always eager to recommence war after a short respite from its trials. The burghers of Bruges had made themselves a new seal, whereon the old symbol of the bridge of their city on the Reye was replaced by the lion of Flanders wearing the crown and armed with the cross, with this inscription: "The lion hath roared and burst his fetters" (Rugiit leo, vincula fregit). During ten years, from 1305 to 1314, there was between France and Flanders a continual alternation of reciprocal concessions and retractations, of treaties concluded and of renewed insurrections, without decisive and ascertained results. It was neither peace nor war; and, after the death of Philip the Handsome, his successors were destined, for a long time to come, to find again and again amongst the Flemish communes deadly enmities and grievous perils.
At the same time that he was prosecuting this interminable war against the Flemings, Philip was engaged, in this case also beyond the boundaries of his kingdom, in a struggle which was still more serious, owing to the nature of the questions which gave rise to it and to the quality of his adversary. In 1294 a new pope, Cardinal Benedetto Gaetani, had been elected under the name of Boniface VIII. He had been for a long time connected with the French party in Italy, and he owed his elevation to the influence, especially, of Charles II., King of Naples and Sicily, grandson of St. Louis and cousin-german of Philip the Handsome. Shortly before his election, Benedetto Gaetani said to that prince, "Thy pope (Celestine V.) was willing and able to serve thee, only he knew not how; as for me, if thou make me pope, I shall be willing and able and know how to be useful to thee." The long quarrel between the popes and the Emperors of Germany, who, as Kings of the Romans, aspired to invade or dominate Italy, had made the Kings of France natural allies of the papacy, and there had been a saying ever since, arising from a popular instinct, which had already found its way into poetry,—
| "'Tis a goodly match as match can be, To marry the Church and the fleurs-de-lis: Should either mate a-straying go, Then each—too late—will own 'twas so." |
Boniface VIII. did not seem fated to withdraw from this policy; he was old (sixty-six); his party-engagements were of long standing; his personal fortune was made; three years before his election he possessed twelve ecclesiastical benefices, of which seven were in France; by his accession to the Holy See his ambition was satisfied; and as legate in France in 1290 he had made the acquaintance there of the young king, Philip the Handsome, and had conceived a liking for him. King Philip must have considered that he had ground for seeing in him a faithful and useful ally.
Neither of the two sovereigns took into account the changes that had come, during two centuries past, over the character of their power, and of the influence which these changes must exercise upon their posture and their relations one towards the other. Louis the Fat in the first instance, and then in a special manner Philip Augustus and St. Louis, each with very different sentiments and by very different processes, had disentangled the kingship in France from the feudal system, and had acquired for it a sovereignty of its own, beyond and above the rights of the suzerain over his vassals. The popes, for their part, Gregory VII. and Innocent III. amongst others, had raised the papacy to a region of intellectual and moral supremacy whence it looked down upon all the terrestrial powers. Gregory VII., the most disinterested of all ambitious men in high places, had dedicated his stormy life to establishing the dominion of the Church over the world, kings as well as people, and also to reforming internally the Church herself, her morals and her discipline. "I have loved justice and hated iniquity; and that is why I am dying in exile," he had said on his death-bed: but his works survived him, and a hundred years after him, in spite of the troubles which had disturbed the Church under eighteen mediocre and transitory popes, Innocent III., whilst maintaining, only with more moderation and prudence, the same principles as Gregory VII. had maintained, exercised peacefully, for a space of eighteen years, the powers of the right divine, whilst Philip Augustus was extending and confirming the kingly power in France. This parallel progress of the kingship and the papacy had its critics and its supporters. Learned lawyers, on the authority of the maxims and precedents of the Roman empire, proclaimed the king's sovereignty in the State; and profound theologians, on the authority of the divine origin of Christianity, laid down as a principle the right divine of the papacy in the Church and in the dealings of the Church with the State.
Thus, at the end of the thirteenth century, there were found face to face two systems, one laic and the other ecclesiastical, of absolute power. But the teachers of the doctrine of the right divine do not expunge from human affairs the passions, errors, and vices of the individuals who put their systems in practice; and absolute power, which is the greatest of all demoralizers, entails before long upon communities, whether civil or religious, the disorders, abuses, faults, and evils which it is the special province of governments to prevent or keep under. The French kingship and the papacy, the representatives of which had but lately been great and glorious princes, such as Philip Augustus and St. Louis, Gregory VII. and Innocent III., were, at the end of the thirteenth century, vested in the persons of men of far less moral worth and less political wisdom, Philip the Handsome and Boniface VIII. We have already had glimpses of Philip the Handsome's greedy, ruggedly obstinate, haughty and tyrannical character; and Boniface VIII. had the same defects, with more hastiness and less ability. The two great poets of Italy in that century, Dante and Petrarch, who were both very much opposed to Philip the Handsome, paint Boniface VIII. in similar colors. "He was," says Petrarch (Epistoloe Ramiliares, bk. ii. letter 3), "an inexorable sovereign, whom it was very hard to break by force, and impossible to bend by humility and caresses;" and Dante (Inferno, canto xix. v. 45 57) makes Pope Nicholas III. say, "Already art thou here and proudly upstanding, O Boniface? Hast thou so soon been sated with that wealth for which thou didst not fear to deceive that fair dame (the Church) whom afterwards thou didst so disastrously govern?" Two men so deeply imbued with evil and selfish passions could not possibly meet without clashing; and it was not long before facts combined to produce between them an outburst of hatred and strife which revealed the latent vices and fatal results of the two systems of absolute power of which they were the representatives.
Philip the Handsome had been nine years king when Boniface VIII. became pope. On his accession to the throne he had testified an intention of curtailing the privileges and power of the Church. He had removed the clergy from judicial functions, in the domains of the lords as well as in the domain of the king, and he had everywhere been putting into the hands of laymen the administration of civil justice. He had considerably increased the percentage to be paid on real property acquired by the Church (called possessions in mortmain), by way of compensation for the mutation-dues which their fixity caused the State to lose. At the time of the crusades the property of the clergy had been subjected to a special tax of a tenth of the revenues, and this tax had been several times renewed for reasons other than the crusades. The Church recognized her duty of contributing towards the defence of the kingdom, and the chapter-general of the order of Citeaux wrote to Philip the Handsome himself, "On all grounds of natural equity and rules of law we ought to bear our share of such a burden out of the goods which God hath given us." In every instance, the question had been as to the necessity for and the quota of the ecclesiastical contribution, which was at one time granted by the bishops and local clergy, at another expressly authorized by the papacy. There is nothing to show that Boniface VIII., at the time of his elevation to the Holy See, was opposed to these augmentations and demands on the part of the French crown; he was at that time too much occupied by his struggle against his own enemies at Rome, the family of the Colonnas, and he felt the necessity of remaining on good terms with France; but in 1296, Philip the Handsome, at war with the King of England and the Flemings, imposed upon the clergy two fresh tenths. The bishops alone were called upon to vote them; and the order of Citeaux refused to pay them, and addressed to the pope a protest, with a comparison between Philip and Pharaoh. Boniface not only entertained the protest, but addressed to the king a bull (called Clericis laicos, from its first two words), in which, led on by his zeal to set forth the generality and absoluteness of his power, he laid down as a principle that churches and ecclesiastics could not be taxed save with the permission of the sovereign pontiff, and that "all emperors, kings, dukes, counts, barons, or governors whatsoever, who should violate this principle, and all prelates or other ecclesiastics who should through weakness lend themselves to such violation, would by this mere fact incur excommunication, and would be incapable of release therefrom, save in articulo mortis, unless by a special decision of the Holy See." This was going far beyond the traditions of the French Church, and, in the very act of protecting it, to strike a blow at its independence in its dealings with the French State. Philip was mighty wroth, but he did not burst out; he confined himself to letting the pope perceive his displeasure by means of divers administrative measures, amongst others by forbidding the exportation from the kingdom of gold, silver, and valuable articles, which found their way chiefly to Rome. Boniface, on his side, was not slow to perceive that he had gone too far, and that his own interests did not permit him to give so much offence to the King of France. A year after the bull Clericis laicos, he modified it by a new bull, which not only authorized the collection of the two tenths voted by the French bishops, but recognized the right of the King of France to tax the French clergy with their consent and without authorization from the Holy See, whenever there was a pressing necessity for it. Philip, on his side, testified to the pope his satisfaction at this concession by himself making one at the expense of the religious liberty of his subjects. In 1292 he had ordered the seneschal of Carcassonne to place limits to the power of the inquisitors in Languedoc by taking from them the right of having their sentences against heretics executed without appeal; and in 1298 he issued an ordinance to the effect that "to further the proceedings of the Inquisition against heretics, for the glory of God and for the augmentation of the faith, he laid his injunctions upon all dukes, counts, barons, seneschals, bailiffs, and provosts of his kingdom, to obey the diocesan bishops and the inquisitors deputed by the Holy See in handing over to them, whenever they should be requested, all heretics and their creed-fellows, favorers, and harborers, and to see to the immediate execution of sentences passed by the judges of the Church, notwithstanding any appeal and any complaint on the part of heretics and their favorers."
Thus the two absolute sovereigns changed their policy and made temporary sacrifice of their mutual pretensions, according as it suited them to fight or to agree. But there arose a question in respect of which this continual alternation of pretensions and compromises, of quarrels and accommodations, was no longer possible; in order to keep up their position in the eyes of one another, they were obliged to come to a deadly clash; and in this struggle, perilous for both, Boniface VIII. was the aggressor, and with Philip the Handsome remained the victory.
On the 2d of February, 1300, Boniface VIII., who had much at heart the lustre and popularity of the Holy See, published a bull which granted indulgences to the pilgrims who should that year, and every centenary to come, visit the church of the apostles St. Peter and St. Paul at Rome. At this first celebration of the centenarian Christian jubilee the concourse was immense; the most moderate historians say that there were never fewer than a hundred thousand pilgrims at Rome; others put the numbers as high as two hundred thousand, and contemporary poetry as well as history has celebrated this pious assemblage of Christians of every nation, language, and age around the tomb of their fathers in the faith. "The old man with white hair goeth far away," says Petrarch (Sonnet xiv.), "from the sweet haunts where his life hath been passed, and from his little family astonished to find their dear father missing. As for him, in the last days of his age, broken down by weight of years and a-weary of the road, he draggeth along as best he may by force of willing spirit his old and tottering limbs, and cometh to Rome to fulfil his desire of seeing the image of Him whom he hopeth to see ere long up yonder in the heavens." The success of the measure and the solemn homage of Christendom filled with joy and proud confidence the heart of the septuagenarian pontiff. He had three years before decreed to Louis IX., the most Christian of the Kings of France, the honors of canonization and the title of Saint. Being chosen as mediator, in 1298, by the Kings of France and England in a war which pressed heavily on both, the decree of arbitration which he pronounced, favorable rather to Philip than to Edward I., had been accepted by both of them; and the pope, on laying his injunctions upon them with some severity of language, had exhibited authority in a manner salutary for both kingdoms. Everything seemed at that time to smile on Boniface, and to invite him to believe himself the real sovereign of Christendom.
An opportunity for a splendid confirmation of his universal supremacy in the Christian world came to tempt him. A quarrel had arisen between Philip and the Archbishop of Narbonne on the subject of certain dues claimed by both in that great diocese. Boniface was loud in his advocacy of the archbishop against the officers of the king: "If, my son, thou tolerate such enterprises against the Churches of thy kingdom," he wrote to Philip (on the 18th of July, 1300), "thou mayest thereafter have reasonable fear lest God, the author of judgments and the King of kings, exact vengeance for it; and assuredly His vicar will not, in the long run, keep silence. Though he wait a while patiently, in order not to close the door to compassion, there will be full need at last that he rouse himself for the punishment of the wicked and the glory of the good." Nor did Boniface content himself with writing: he sent to Paris, to support his words, Bernard de Saisset, whom he, on his own authority, had just appointed Bishop of Pamiers. The choice of bishops was not yet, at that time, subject to any fixed and generally recognized rule: most often it was the chapter of the diocese that elected its bishop, with a subsequent application for the approbation of the king and the pope; sometimes the king and also the pope made such appointments directly and independently. Boniface VIII. had quite recently created a new bishopric at Pamiers in order to immediately appoint to it Bernard de Saisset, hitherto simple Abbot of St. Antonine in that city. Bernard, who was devoted to his patron, was, further, a passionate Languedocian and a foe to the dominion of the French kings of the North over Southern France; and he gave himself out as a personal descendant of the last Counts of Toulouse. On arriving in Paris as the pope's legate, he made use there of violent and inconsiderate language; he even affirmed, it was said, that St. Louis had predicted the disappearance of his line in the third generation, and that King Philip was only an illegitimate descendant of Charlemagne. He was accused of having incessantly labored to excite revolts against the king in the south, at one time for the advantage of the local lords, at another in favor of foreign enemies of the kingdom. Being summoned before the king and his council at Senlis (October 14, 1301), he denied, but with an air of arrogance and aggression, the accusations against him. Philip had, at that time, as his chief councillors, lay-lawyers, servants passionately attached to the kingship. They were Peter Flotte his chancellor, William of Nogaret, judge-major at Beaucaire, and William of Plasian, Lord of Vezenobre, the two latter belonging, as Bernard de Saisset belonged, to Southern France, and determined to withstand, in the south as well as the north, the domination of ecclesiastics. They, in their turn, rose up against the doctrine and language of the Bishop of Pamiers. He was arrested and committed to the keeping of the Archbishop of Narbonne; and Philip sent to Rome his chancellor Peter Flotte himself and William of Nogaret, with orders to demand of the pope "that he should avenge the wrongs of God, the king, and the whole kingdom, by depriving of his orders and every clerical privilege that man whose longer life would taint the places he inhabited; and this in order that the king might make of him a sacrifice to God in the way of justice, for there could be no hope of his amendment if he were suffered to live, seeing that, from his youth up, he had always lived ill, and that baseness and abandonment only became more and more confirmed in him by inveterate habit."
To this violent and threatening language Boniface replied by changing the venue to his own personal tribunal in the case of the Bishop of Pamiers. "We do bid thy majesty," he wrote to the king, "to give this bishop free leave to depart and come to us, for we do desire his presence. We do warn thee to have all his goods restored to him, not to stretch out for the future thy rapacious hands towards the like things, and not to offend the Divine Majesty or the dignity of the Apostolic See, lest we be forced to employ some other remedy; for thou must know that, unless thou canst allege some excuse founded on reason and truth, we do not see how thou shouldest escape the sentence of the holy canons for having laid rash hands on this bishop."
"My power,—the spiritual power,"—said the pope to the Chancellor of France, "embraces the temporal, and includes it." "Be it so," answered Peter Flotte; "but your power is nominal, the king's real."
Here was a coarse challenge hurled by the crown at the tiara: and Boniface VIII. unhesitatingly accepted it. But, instead of keeping the advantage of a defensive position by claiming, in the name of lawful right, the liberties and immunities of the Church, he assumed the offensive against the kingship by proclaiming the supremacy of the Holy See in things temporal as well as spiritual, and by calling upon Philip the Handsome to acknowledge it. On the 5th of December, 1301, he addressed to the king, commencing with the words, "Hearken, most dear son" (Ausculta, carissime fili), a long bull, in which, with circumlocutions and expositions full of obscurity and subtlety, he laid down and affirmed, at bottom, the principle of the final sovereignty of the spiritual power, being of divine origin, over every temporal power, being of human creation. "In spite of the insufficiency of our deserts," said he, "God hath established us above kings and kingdoms by imposing upon us, in virtue of the Apostolic office, the duty of plucking away, destroying, dispersing, dissipating, building up and planting in His name and according to His doctrine; to the end that, in tending the flock of the Lord, we may strengthen the weak, heal the sick, bind up the broken limbs, raise the fallen, and pour wine and oil into all wounds. Let none, then, most dear son, persuade thee that thou hast no superior, and that thou art not subject to the sovereign head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy; for he who so thinketh is beside himself; and if he obstinately affirm any such thing, he is an infidel, and hath no place any longer in the fold of the good Shepherd." At the same time Boniface summoned the bishops of France to a council at Rome, "in order to labor for the preservation of the liberties of the Catholic Church, the reformation of the kingdom, the amendment of the king, and the good government of France."
Philip the Handsome and his councillors did not misconceive the tendency of such language, however involved and full of specious reservations it might be. The final supremacy of the pope in the body politic, and over all sovereigns, meant the absorption of the laic community in the religious, and the abolition of the State's independence, not in favor of the national Church, but to the advantage of the foreign head of the universal Church. The defenders of the French kingship formed a better estimate than was formed at Rome of the effect which would be produced by such doctrine on France, in the existing condition of the French mind; they entered upon no theological and abstract polemics; they confined themselves entirely to setting in a vivid light the pope's pretensions and their consequences, feeling sure that, by confining themselves to this question, they would enlist in their opposition not only all laymen, nobles, and commoners, but the greater part of the French ecclesiastics themselves, who were no strangers to the feeling of national patriotism, and to whom the pope's absolute power in the body politic was scarcely more agreeable than the king's. In order to make a strong impression upon the public mind, there was published at Paris, as the actual text of the pope's bull, a very short summary of his long bull, "Hearken, most dear Son," in the following terms: "Boniface, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Philip, King of the French. Fear thou God, and keep His commandments. We would have thee to know that thou art subject unto us in things spiritual and temporal. The presentation to benefices and prebends appertaineth to thee in no wise. If thou have the keeping of certain vacancies, thou art bound to reserve the revenues of them for the successors to them. If thou have made any presentations, we declare them void, and revoke them. We consider as heretics all those who believe otherwise." Together with this document there was put in circulation the king's answer to the pope, in the following terms: "Philip, by the grace of God, King of the French, to Boniface, who giveth himself out for sovereign pontiff, little or no greeting. Let thy Extreme Fatuity know that we be subject to none in things temporal, that the presentation to churches and prebends that be vacant belongeth to us of kingly right, that the revenues therefrom be ours, that presentations already made or to be made be valid both now and hereafter, that we will firmly support the possessors of them to thy face and in thy teeth, and that we do hold as senseless and insolent those who think otherwise." The pope disavowed, as a falsification, the summary of his long bull; and there is nothing to prove that the unseemly and insulting letter of Philip the Handsome was sent to Rome. But, at bottom, the situation of affairs remained the same; indeed, it did not stop where it was. On the 11th of February, 1302, the bull, Hearken, most dear Son, was solemnly burned at Paris in presence of the king and a numerous multitude. Philip convoked, for the 8th of April following, an assembly of the barons, bishops, and chief ecclesiastics, and of deputies from the communes to the number of two or three for each city, all being summoned "to deliberate on certain affairs which in the highest degree concern the king, the kingdom, the churches, and all and sundry." This assembly, which really met on the 10th of April, at Paris, in the church of Notre-Dame, is reckoned in French history as the first "states-general." The three estates wrote separately to Rome; the clergy to the pope himself, the nobility and the deputies of the communes to the cardinals, all, however, protesting against the pope's pretensions in matters temporal, the two laic orders writing in a rough and threatening tone, the clergy making an appeal "to the wisdom and paternal clemency of the Holy Father, with tearful accents, and sobs mingled with their tears." The king evidently had on his side the general feeling of the nation: and the news from Rome was not of a kind to pacify him. In spite of the king's formal prohibition, forty-five French bishops had repaired to the council summoned by the pope for All Saints' day, 1302, and, after this meeting, a papal decree of November 18 had declared, "There be two swords, the temporal and the spiritual; both are in the power of the Church, but one is held by the Church herself, the other by kings only with the assent and by sufferance of the sovereign pontiff. Every human being is subject to the Roman pontiff; and to believe this is necessary to salvation." Philip made a seizure of the temporalities of such bishops as had been present at that council, and renewed his prohibition forbidding them to leave the kingdom. Boniface ordered those who had not been to Rome to attend there within three months; and the cardinal of St. Marcellinus, legate of the Holy See, called a fresh council in France itself, without the king's knowledge. On both sides, there were at one time words of conciliation and attempts to keep up appearances of respect, at another new explosions of complaints and threats; but, amidst all these changes of language, the struggle was day by day becoming more violent, and preparations were being made by both parties for something other than threats.
On the 12th of March and the 13th of June, 1303, at two assemblies of barons, prelates, and legists held at the Louvre, in presence of the king, which several historians have considered to have been states-general, one of the crown's most intimate advisers, William of Plasian, proposed, against Boniface, a form of accusation which imputed to him, beyond his ambition and his claims to absolutism, crimes as improbable as they were hateful. It was demanded that the Church should be governed by a lawful pope, and the king, as defender of the faith, was pressed to appeal to the convocation of a general council. On the 24th of June, in the palace-garden, a great crowd of people assembled; and, after a sermon preached in French, the form of accusation against Boniface, and the appeal to the future council, were solemnly made public. The pope meanwhile did not remain idle; he protested against the imputations of which he was the subject. "Forty years ago," he said, "we were admitted a doctor of laws, and learned that both powers, the temporal and the spiritual, be ordained of God. Who can believe that such fatuity can have entered into our mind? But who can also deny that the king is subject unto us on the score of sin? . . . We be disposed to grant unto him every grace. . . . So long as I was cardinal, I was French in heart; since then, we have testified how we do love the king. . . . Without us, he would not have even one foot on the throne. We do know all the secrets of the kingdom. We do know how the Germans, the Burgundians, and the folks who speak the Oc tongue do love the king. If he mend not, we shall know how to chastise him, and treat him as a little boy (sicut unum garcionem), though greatly against our will." On the 13th of April, Boniface declared Philip excommunicate if he persisted in preventing the prelates from attending at Rome. Philip, being warned, effected the arrest at Troyes of the priest who was bringing the pope's letter to his legate in France. The legate took to flight. Boniface, on his side, being warned that the king was appealing against him to an approaching council, declared by a bull, on the 15th of August, that it appertained to him alone to summon a council. After this bull, there was full expectation that another would be launched, which would pronounce the deposition of the king. And a new bull was actually prepared at Rome on the 5th of September, and was to be published on the 8th. It did not expressly depose the king; it merely announced that measures would be taken more serious even than excommunication. Philip had taken his precautions. He had demanded and obtained from the great towns, churches, and universities more than seven hundred declarations of support in his appeal to the future council, and an engagement to take no notice of the decree which might be issued by the pope to release the king's subjects from their oath of allegiance. Only a few, and amongst them the Abbot of Citeaux, gave him a refusal. The order of the Templars gave only a qualified support. At the approaching advent of the new bull which was being anticipated, the king resolved to act still more roughly and speedily. Notification must be sent to the pope of the king's appeal to the future council. Philip could no longer confide this awkward business to his chancellor, Peter Flotte; for he had fallen at Courtrai, in the battle against the Flemings. William of Nogaret undertook it, at the same time obtaining from the king a sort of blank commission authorizing and ratifying in advance all that, under the circumstances, he might consider it advisable to do. Notification of the appeal had to be made to the pope at Anagni, his native town, whither he had gone for refuge, and the people of which, being zealous in his favor, had already dragged in the mud the lilies and the banner of France. Nogaret was bold, ruffianly, and clever. He repaired in haste to Florence, to the king's banker, got a plentiful supply of money, established communications in Anagni, and secured, above all, the co-operation of Sciarra Colonna, who was passionately hostile to the pope, had been formerly proscribed by him, and, having fallen into the hands of corsairs, had worked at the oar for them during many a year rather than reveal his name and be sold to Boniface Gaetani. On the 7th of September, 1303, Colonna and his associates introduced Nogaret and his following into Anagni, with shouts of "Death to Pope Boniface! Long live the King of France!" The populace, dumbfounded, remained motionless. The pope, deserted by all, even by his own nephew, tried to touch the heart of Colonna himself, whose only answer was a summons to abdicate, and to surrender at discretion. "Those be hard words," said Boniface, and burst into tears. But this old man, seventy-five years of age, had a proud spirit, and a dignity worthy of his rank. "Betrayed, like Jesus," said he, "shall I die; but I will die pope." He donned the cloak of St. Peter, put the crown of Constantine upon his head, took in his hands the keys and the cross, and, as his enemies drew nigh, he said to them, "Here is my neck, and here is my head." There is a tradition, of considerable trustworthiness, that Sciarra Colonna would have killed him, and did with his mailed hand strike him in the face. Nogaret, however, prevented the murder, and confined himself to saying, "Thou caitiff pope, confess, and behold the goodness of my lord, the King of France, who, though so far away from thee in his own kingdom, both watcheth over and defendeth thee by my hand." "Thou art of heretic family," answered the pope: "at thy hands I look for martyrdom."
The captivity of Boniface VIII., however, lasted only three days; for the people of Anagni, having recovered themselves, and seeing the scanty numbers of the foreigners, rose and delivered the pope. The old man was conducted to the public square, crying like a child. "Good folks," said he to the crowd around him, "ye have seen that mine enemies have robbed me of all my goods and those of the Church. Behold me here as poor as Job. Nought have I either to eat or drink. If there be any good woman who would give me an alms of wine and bread, I would bestow upon her God's blessing and mine." All the people began to shout, "Long live the Holy Father!" He was reconducted into his palace: "and women thronged together thither, bringing him bread, wine, and water. Finding no proper vessels, they poured them into a chest. . . . Any one who liked went in, and talked with the pope, as with any other beggar." So soon as the agitation was somewhat abated, Boniface set out for Rome, with a great crowd following him; but he was broken down in spirit and body. Scarcely had he arrived when he fell into a burning fever, which traditions, probably invented and spread by his enemies, have represented as a fit of mad rage. He died on the 11th of October, 1303, without having recovered his reason. It is reported that his predecessor, Celestine V., had said of him, "Thou risest like a fox; thou wilt rule like a lion, and die like a dog." The last expression was unjustified. Boniface VIII. was a fanatic, ambitious, proud, violent, and crafty, but with sincerity at the bottom of his prejudiced ideas, and stubborn and blind in his fits of temper: his death was that of an old lion at bay.
We were bound to get a good idea and understanding of this violent struggle between the two sovereigns of France and Rome, not only because of its dramatic interest, but because it marks an important period in the history of the papacy and its relations with foreign governments. From the tenth century and the accession of the Capetians the policy of the Holy See had been enterprising, bold, full of initiative, often even aggressive, and more often than not successful in the prosecution of its designs. Under Innocent III. it had attained the apogee of its strength and fortune. At that point its motion forward and upward came to a stop. Boniface had not the wit to recognize the changes which had taken place in European communities, and the decided progress which had been made by laic influences and civil powers. He was a stubborn preacher of maxims he could no longer practise. He was beaten in his enterprise; and the papacy, even on recovering from his defeat, found itself no longer what it had been before him. Starting from the fourteenth century we find no second Gregory VII., or Innocent III. Without expressly abandoning their principles, the policy of the Holy See became essentially defensive and conservative, more occupied in the maintenance than the aggrandizement of itself, and sometimes even more stationary and stagnant than was required by necessity or recommended by foresight. The posture assumed and the conduct adopted by the earliest successors of Boniface VIII. showed how far the situation of the papacy was altered, and how deep had been the penetration of the stab which, in this conflict between the two aspirants to absolute power, Philip the Handsome had inflicted on his rival.
On the 22d of October, 1303, eleven days after the death of Boniface VIII., Benedict XI., son of a simple shepherd, was elected at Rome to succeed him. Philip the Handsome at once sent his congratulations, but by William of Plasian, who had lately been the accuser of Boniface, and who was charged to hand to the new pope, on the king's behalf, a very bitter memorandum touching his predecessor. Philip at the same time caused an address to be presented to himself in his own kingdom and in the vulgar tongue, called a supplication from the people of France to the King against Boniface. Benedict XI. exerted himself to give satisfaction to the conqueror; he declared the Colonnas absolved; he released the barons and prelates of France from the excommunications pronounced against them; and he himself wrote to the king to say that he would behave towards him as the good shepherd in the parable, who leaves ninety and nine sheep to go after one that is lost. Nogaret and the direct authors of the assault at Anagni were alone excepted from this amnesty. The pope reserved for a future occasion the announcement of their absolution, when he should consider it expedient. But on the 7th of June, 1304, instead of absolving them, he launched a fresh bull of excommunication against "certain wicked men who had dared to commit a hateful crime against a person of good memory, Pope Boniface." A month after this bull Benedict XI. was dead. It is related that a young woman had put before him at table a basket of fresh figs, of which he had eaten and which had poisoned him. The chroniclers of the time impute this crime to William of Nogaret, to the Colonnas, and to their associates at Anagni; a single one names King Philip. Popular credulity is great in matters of poisoning; but one thing is certain, namely, that no prosecution was ordered. There is no proof of Philip's complicity; but, full as he was of hatred and dissimulation, he was of those who do their best to profit by crimes which they have not ordered. It is clear that such a pope as Benedict XI. would not do either for his passions or his purposes.
He found one, however, from whom he flattered himself, not without reason, that he would get more complete and efficient co-operation. The cardinals, after being assembled in conclave for six months at Perouse, were unable to arrive at an agreement about a choice of pope. As a way out of their embarrassment, they entered into a secret convention to the effect that one of them, a confidant of Philip the Handsome, should make known to him that the Archbishop of Bordeaux, Bertrand de Goth, was the candidate in respect of whom they could agree. He was a subject of the King of England and a late favorite of Boniface VIII., who had raised him from the bishopric of Comminges to the archbishopric of Bordeaux. He was regarded as an enemy of France; but Philip knew what may be done with an ambitious man, whose fortune is only half made, by offering to advance him to his highest point. He, therefore, appointed a meeting with the archbishop. "Hearken," said he: "I have in my grasp wherewithal to make thee pope if I please; and provided that thou promise me to do six things I demand of thee, I will confer upon thee that honor; and to prove to thee that I have the power, here be letters and advices I have received from Rome." After having heard and read, "the Gascon, overcome with joy," says the contemporary historian Villani, "threw himself at the king's feet, saying, 'My lord, now know I that thou art my best friend, and that thou wouldest render me good for evil. It is for thee to command and for me to obey: such will ever be my disposition.'" Philip then set before him his six demands, amongst which there were only two which could have caused the archbishop any uneasiness. The fourth purported that he should condemn the memory of Pope Boniface. "The sixth, which is important and secret, I keep to myself," said Philip, "to make known to thee in due time and place." The archbishop bound himself by oath taken on the sacred host to accomplish the wishes of the king, to whom, furthermore, he gave as hostages his brother and his two nephews. Six weeks after this interview, on the 5th of June, 1305, Bertrand de Goth was elected pope, under the name of Clement V.
It was not long before he gave the king the most certain pledge of his docility. After having held his pontifical court at Bordeaux and Poitiers he declared that he would fix his residence in France, in the county of Venaissin, at Avignon, a territory which Philip the Bold had remitted to Pope Gregory X. in execution of a deed of gift from Raymond VII., Count of Toulouse. It was renouncing, in fact, if not in law, the practical independence of the papacy to thus place it in the midst of the dominions and under the very thumb of the King of France. "I know the Gaseous," said the old Italian Cardinal Matthew Rosso, dean of the Sacred College, when he heard of this resolution; "it will be long ere the Church comes back to Italy." And, indeed, it was not until sixty years afterwards, under Pope Gregory XI., that Italy regained possession of the Holy See; and historians called this long absence the Babylonish captivity. Philip lost no time in profiting by his propinquity to make the full weight of his power felt by Clement V. He claimed from him the fulfilment of the fourth promise Bertrand de Goth had made in order to become pope, which was the condemnation of Boniface VIII.; and he revealed to him the sixth, that "important and secret one which he kept to himself to make known to him in clue time and place;" and it was the persecution and abolition of the order of the Templars. The pontificate of Clement V. at Avignon was, for him, a nine years' painful effort, at one time to elude and at another to accomplish, against the grain, the heavy engagements he had incurred towards the king.
He found the condemnation of Boniface VIII. rather an embarrassment than a danger. He shrank, on becoming pope, from condemning the pope his predecessor, who had appointed him archbishop and cardinal. Instead of an official condemnation, he offered the king satisfaction in various ways. It was only from headstrong pride and to cloak himself in the eyes of his subjects that Philip clung to the condemnation of the memory of Boniface; and, after a long period of mutual tergiversation, it was agreed in the end to let bygones be bygones. The principal promoter of the assault at Anagni, William of Nogaret, was the sole exception to the amnesty; and the pope imposed upon him, by way of penance, merely the obligation of making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, which he never fulfilled. On the contrary he remained, in great favor, about the person of King Philip, who made him his chancellor, and gave him, in Languedoc, some rich lands, amongst others those of Calvisson, Massillargues, and Manduel. For Philip knew how to liberally reward and faithfully support his servants.
And he knew still better how to persecute and ruin his foes. He had no reason, of a public kind, to consider the Templars his enemies. It is true that they had given him a merely qualified support on his appeal to the council against Boniface VIII.; but, both before and after that occurrence, Philip had shown them marks of the most friendly regard. He had asked to be affiliated to their order; and he had borrowed their money. During a violent outbreak of the populace at Paris, in 1306, on the occasion of a fresh tax, he had sought and found a refuge in the very palace of the Temple, where the chapters-general were held and where its treasures were kept. It is said that the sight of these treasures kindled the longings of Philip, and his ardent desire to get hold of them. At the time of the formation of the order, in 1119, after the first crusade, the Templars were far from being rich. Nine knights had joined together to protect the arrival and sojourning of pilgrims in Palestine; and Baldwin II., the third Christian King of Jerusalem, had given them a lodging in his own palace, to the east of Solomon's temple, whence they had assumed the name of "Poor United Champions of Christ and the Temple." Their valor and pious devotion had soon rendered them famous in the West as well as the East; and St. Bernard had commended them to the Christian world. At the council of Troyes, in 1123, Pope Honorius II. had recognized their order, and regulated their dress, a white mantle, on which Pope Eugenius III. placed a red cross. In 1172 the rules of the order were drawn up in seventy-two articles, and the Templars began to exempt themselves from the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Jerusalem, recognizing that of the pope only. Their number and their importance rapidly increased. In 1130 the Emperor Lothaire II. gave them lands in the Duchy of Brunswick. They received other gifts in the Low Countries, in Spain, and in Portugal. After a voyage to the West, Hugh des Payens, the chief of the nine Templars, returned to the East with three hundred knights enlisted in his order; and a hundred and fifty years after its foundation the order of the Temple, divided into fourteen or fifteen provinces,—four in the East and ten or eleven in the West,—numbered, it is said, eighteen or twenty thousand knights, mostly French, and nine thousand commanderies or territorial benefices, the revenue of which is calculated at fifty-four millions of francs (about ten and a half million dollars). It was an army of monks, once poor men and hard-working soldiers, but now rich and idle, and abandoned to all the temptations of riches and idleness. There was still some fine talk about Jerusalem, pilgrims, and crusades. The popes still kept these words prominent, either to distract the Western Christians from intestine quarrels, or to really promote some new Christian effort in the East. The Isle of Cyprus was still a small Christian kingdom, and the warrior-monks, who were vowed to the defence of Christendom in the East, the Templars and the Hospitallers, had still in Palestine, Syria, Armenia, and the adjacent lands, certain battles to fight and certain services to render to the Christian cause. But these were events too petty and too transitory to give serious employment to the two great religious and military orders, whose riches and fame were far beyond the proportions of their public usefulness and their real strength; a position fraught with perils for them, for it inspired the sovereign powers of the state with the spirit rather of jealousy than fear of them.
In 1303 the king and the pope simultaneously summoned from Cyprus to France the Grand Master of the Templars, James do Molay, a Burgundian nobleman, who had entered the order when he was almost a child, had valiantly fought the infidels in the East, and fourteen years ago had been unanimously elected Grand Master. For several months he was well treated, to all appearance, by the two monarchs. Philip said he wished to discuss with him a new plan of crusade, and asked him to stand godfather to one of his children; and Molay was pall-bearer at the burial of the king's sister-in-law. Meanwhile the most sinister reports, the gravest imputations, were bruited abroad against the Templars; they were accused "of things distasteful, deplorable, horrible to think on, horrible to hear, of betraying Christendom for the profit of the infidels, of secretly denying the faith, of spitting upon the cross, of abandoning themselves to idolatrous practices and the most licentious lives." In 1307, in the month of October, Philip the Handsome and Clement V. had met at Poitiers; and the king asked the pope to authorize an inquiry touching the Templars and the accusations made against them. James de Molay was forthwith arrested at Paris with a hundred and forty of his knights; sixty met the same fate at Beaucaire; many others all over France; and their property was put in the king's keeping for the service of the Holy Land. On the 12th of August, 1308, a papal bull appointed a grand commission of inquiry charged to conduct, at Paris, an examination of the matter "according as the law requires." The Archbishops of Canterbury in England and of Mayence, Cologne, and Troves in Germany, were also named commissioners, and the pope announced that he would deliver his judgment within two years, at a general council held at Vienne, in Dauphiny, territory of the Empire. Twenty-six princes and laic lords, the Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, the Counts of Flanders, Nevers, and Auxerre, and the Count of Talleyrand de Perigord, offered themselves as the Templars' accusers, and gave powers of attorney to act in their names. On the 22d of November, 1309, the Grand Master, Molay, was, called before the commission. At first he firmly denied all that his order had been accused of; afterwards he became confused and embarrassed, said that he had not the ability to undertake the defence of his order, that he was but a poor, unlettered knight, that the pope had reserved to himself the decision in the case, and that, for his part, he only wished the pope would summon him as soon as possible before him. On the 28th of March, 1310, five hundred and forty-six knights, who had declared their readiness to defend their order, appeared before the commission; and they were called upon to choose proctors to speak in their name. "We ought also, then," said they, "to have been tortured by proxy only." The prisoners were treated with the uttermost rigor and reduced to the most wretched plight: "out of their poor pay of twelve deniers per diem they were obliged to pay for their passage by water to go and submit to their examination in the city, and to give money besides to the man who undid and riveted their fetters." In October, 1310, at a council held at Paris, a large number of Templars were examined, several acquitted, some subjected to special penances, and fifty-four condemned as heretics to the stake, and burned the same day in a field close to the abbey of St. Anthony; and nine others met the same fate at the hands of a council held at Senlis the same year: "They confessed under their tortures," says Bossuet, "but they denied at their execution." The business dragged slowly on; different decisions were pronounced, according to the place of decision; the Templars were pronounced innocent, on the 17th of June, 1310, at Ravenna, on the 1st of July at Mayence, and on the 21st of October at Salamanca; and in Aragon they made a successful resistance. Europe began to be wearied at the uncertainty of such judgments and at the sight of such horrible spectacles; and Clement V. felt some shame at thus persecuting monks who, on more than one occasion, had shown devotion to the Holy See.
But Philip the Handsome had attained his end: he was in possession of the Templars' riches. On the 11th of June, 1311, the commission of inquiry terminated its sittings, and the report of its labors concluded as follows: "For further precaution, we have deposited the said procedure, drawn up by notaries in authentic form, in the treasury of Notre-Dame, at Paris, to be shown to none without special letters from Your Holiness." The council-general, announced in 1308 by the pope, to decide definitively upon this great case, was actually opened at Vienne, in October, 1311; more than three hundred bishops assembled; and nine Templars presented themselves for the defence of their order, saying that there were at Lyons, or in the neighborhood, fifteen hundred or two thousand of their brethren, ready to support them. The pope had the nine defenders arrested, adjourned the decision once more, and, on the 22d of March in the following year, at a mere secret consistory, made up of the most docile bishops and a few cardinals, pronounced, solely on his pontifical authority, the abolition of the order of the Temple: and it was subsequently proclaimed officially, on the 3d of April, 1312, in presence of the king and the council. And not a soul protested.
The Grand Master, James de Molay, in confinement at Gisors, survived his order. The pope had reserved to himself the task of trying him; but, disgusted with the work, he committed the trial to ecclesiastical commissioners assembled at Paris, before whom Molay was brought, together with three of the principal leaders of the Temple, survivors like himself. They had read over to them, from a scaffold erected in the forecourt of Notre-Dame, the confessions they had made, but lately, under torture, and it was announced to them that they were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. Remorse had restored to the Grand Master all his courage; he interrupted the reading, and disavowed his avowals, protesting that torture alone had made him speak so falsely, and maintaining that
| "Of his grand order nought he wist 'Gainst honor and the laws of Christ." |
One of his three comrades in misfortune, the commander of Normandy, made aloud a similar disavowal. The embarrassed judges sent the two Templars back to the provost of Paris, and put off their decision to the following day; but Philip the Handsome, without waiting for the morrow, and without consulting the judges, ordered the two Templars to be burned the same evening, March 11, 1314, at the hour of vespers, in Ile-de-la-Cite, on the site of the present Place Dauphine. A poet-chronicler, Godfrey of Paris, who was a witness of the scene, thus describes it: "The Grand Master, seeing the fire prepared, stripped himself briskly; I tell just as I saw; he bared himself to his shirt, light-heartedly and with a good grace, without a whit of trembling, though he was dragged and shaken mightily. They took hold of him to tie him to the stake, and they were binding his hands with a cord, but he said to them, 'Sirs, suffer me to fold my hands a while, and make my prayer to God, for verily it is time. I am presently to die; but wrongfully, God wot. Wherefore woe will come, ere long, to those who condemn us without a cause. God will avenge our death.'"
It was probably owing to these last words that there arose a popular rumor, soon spread abroad, that James de Molay, at his death, had cited the pope and the king to appear with him, the former at the end of forty days, and the latter within a year, before the judgment-seat of God. Events gave a sanction to the legend: for Clement V. actually died on the 20th of April, 1314, and Philip the Handsome on the 29th of November, 1314, the pope, undoubtedly, uneasy at the servile acquiescence he had shown towards the king, and the king expressing some sorrow for his greed and for the imposts (maltote, maletolta, or black mail) with which he had burdened his people.
In excessive and arbitrary imposts, indeed, consisted the chief grievance for which France, in the fourteenth century, had to complain of Philip the Handsome; and, probably, it was the only wrong for which he upbraided himself. Being badly wounded, out hunting, by a wild boar, and perceiving himself to be in bad case, he gave orders for his removal to Fontainebleau, and there, says Godfrey of Paris, the poet-chronicler just quoted in reference to the execution of the Templars, "he said and commanded that his children, his brothers, and his other friends should be sent for. They were no long time in coming; they entered Fontainebleau, into the chamber where the king was, and where there was very little light. So soon as they were there, they asked him how he was, and he answered, 'Ill in body and in soul; if our Lady the Virgin save me not by her prayers, I see that death will seize me here; I have put on so many talliages, and laid hands on so much riches, that I shall never be absolved. Sirs, I know that I am in such estate that I shall die, methinks, to-night, for I suffer grievous hurt from the curses which pursue me: there will be no fine tales to be told of me.'" Philip's anxiety about his memory was not without foundation; his greed is the vice which has clung to his name; not only did he load his subjects with poll taxes and other taxes unauthorized by law and the traditions of the feudal system; not only was he unjust and cruel towards the Templars in order to appropriate their riches; but he committed, over and over again, that kind of spoliation which imports most trouble into the general life of a people; he debased the coinage so often and to such an extent, that he was everywhere called "the base coiner." This was a financial process of which none of his predecessors, neither St. Louis nor Philip Augustus, had set him an example, though they had quite as many costly wars and expeditions to keep up as he had. Some chroniclers of the fourteenth century say that Philip the Handsome was particularly munificent and lavish towards his family and his servants; but it is difficult to meet with any precise proof of this allegation, and we must impute the financial difficulties of Philip the Hand-some to his natural greed, and to the secret expenses entailed upon him by his policy of dissimulation and hatred, rather than to his lavish generosity. As he was no stranger to the spirit of order in his own affairs, he tried, towards the end of his reign, to obtain an exact account of his finances. His chief adviser, Enguerrand de Marigny, became his superintendent-general, and on the 19th of January, 1311, at the close of a grand council held at Poissy, Philip passed an ordinance which established, under the headings of expenses and receipts, two distinct tables and treasuries, one for ordinary expenses, the civil list, and the payment of the great bodies of the state, incomes, pensions, &c., and the other for extraordinary expenses. The ordinary expenses were estimated at one hundred and seventy-seven thousand five hundred livres of Tours, that is, according to M. Boutaric, who published this ordinance, fifteen million nine hundred thousand francs (about three million eighty-four thousand dollars). Numerous articles regulated the execution of the measure; and the royal treasurers took an oath not to reveal, within two years, the state of their receipts, save to Enguerrand de Marigny, or by order of the king himself. This first budget of the French monarchy dropped out of sight after the death of Philip the Handsome, in the reaction which took place against his government. "God forgive him his sins," says Godfrey of Paris, "for in the time of his reign great loss came to France, and there was small regret for him." The general history of France has been more indulgent towards Philip the Handsome than his contemporaries were; it has expressed its acknowledgments to him for the progress made, under his sway, by the particular and permanent characteristics of civilization in France. The kingly domain received in the Pyrenees, in Aquitaine, in Franche-Comte, and in Flanders territorial increments which extended national unity. The legislative power of the king penetrated into and secured footing in the lands of his vassals. The scattered semi-sovereigns of feudal society bowed down before the incontestable pre-eminence of the kingship, which gained the victory in its struggle against the papacy. Far be it from us to attach no importance to the intervention of the deputies of the communes in the states-general of 1302, on the occasion of that struggle: it was certainly homage paid to the nascent existence of the third estate; but it is puerile to consider that homage as a real step towards public liberties and constitutional government. The burghers of 1302 did not dream of such a thing; Philip, knowing that their feelings were, in this instance, in accordance with his own, summoned them in order to use their co-operation as a useful appendage for himself, and absolute kingship gained more strength by the co-operation than the third estate acquired influence. The general constitution of the judiciary power, as delegated from the kingship, the creation of several classes of magistrates devoted to this great social function, and, especially, the strong organization and the permanence of the parliament of Paris, were far more important progressions in the development of civil order and society in France. But it was to the advantage of absolute power that all these facts were turned, and the perverted ability of Philip the Handsome consisted in working them for that single end. He was a profound egotist; he mingled with his imperiousness the leaven of craft and patience, but he was quite a stranger to the two principles which constitute the morality of governments, respect for rights and patriotic sympathy with public sentiment; he concerned himself about nothing but his own position, his own passions, his own wishes, or his own fancies. And this is the radical vice of absolute power. Philip the Handsome is one of the kings of France who have most contributed to stamp upon the kingship in France this lamentable characteristic, from which France has suffered so much, even in the midst of her glories, and which, in our time, was so grievously atoned for by the kingship itself when it no longer deserved the reproach.
Philip the Handsome left three sons, Louis X., called le Hutin (the Quarreller), Philip V., called the Long, and Charles IV., called the Handsome, who, between them, occupied the throne only thirteen years and ten months. Not one of them distinguished himself by his personal merits; and the events of the three reigns hold scarcely a higher place in history than the actions of the three kings do. Shortly before the death of Philip the Handsome, his greedy despotism had already excited amongst the people such lively discontent that several leagues were formed in Champagne, Burgundy, Artois, and Beauvaisis, to resist him; and the members of these leagues, "nobles and commoners," say the accounts, engaged to give one another mutual support in their resistance, "at their own cost and charges." After the death of Philip the Handsome, the opposition made head more extensively and effectually; and it produced two results: ten ordinances of Louis the Quarreller for redressing the grievances of the feudal aristocracy, for one; and, for the other, the trial and condemnation of Enguerrand de Marigny "coadjutor and rector of the kingdom" under Philip the Hand-some. Marigny, at the death of the king his master, had against him, rightly or wrongly, popular clamor and feudal hostility, especially that of Charles of Valois, Philip the Handsome's brother, who acted as leader of the barons. "What has become of all those subsidies, and all those sums produced by so much tampering with the coinage?" asked the new king one day in council. "Sir," said Prince Charles, "it was Marigny who had the administration of everything; and it is for him to render an account." "I am quite ready," said Marigny. "This moment, then," said the prince. "Most willingly, my lord: I gave a great portion to you." "You lie!" cried Charles. "Nay, you, by God!" replied Marigny. The prince drew his sword, and Marigny was on the point of doing the same. The quarrel was, however, stifled for the moment; but, shortly afterwards, Marigny was accused, condemned by a commission assembled at Vincennes, and hanged on the gibbet of Montfaucon which he himself, it is said, had set up. He walked to execution with head erect, saying to the crowd, "Good folks, pray for me." Some months afterwards, the young king, who had indorsed the sentence reluctantly, since he did not well know, between his father's brother and minister, which of the two was guilty, left by will a handsome legacy to Marigny's widow "in consideration of the great misfortune which had befallen her and hers;" and Charles of Valois himself, falling into a decline, and considering himself stricken by the hand of God "as a punishment for the trial of Enguerrand de Marigny," had liberal alms distributed to the poor with this injunction: "Pray God for Euguerrand de Marigny and for the Count of Valois." None can tell, after this lapse of time, whether this remorse proceeded from weakness of mind or sincerity of heart, and which of the two personages was really guilty; but, ages afterwards, such is the effect of blind, popular clamor and unrighteous judicial proceedings, that the condemned lives in history as a victim and all but a guileless being.
Whilst the feudal aristocracy was thus avenging itself of kingly tyranny, the spirit of Christianity was noiselessly pursuing its work, the general enfranchisement of men. Louis the Quarreller had to keep up the war with Flanders, which was continually being renewed; and in order to find, without hateful exactions, the necessary funds, he was advised to offer freedom to the serfs of his domains. Accordingly he issued, on the 3d of July, 1315, an edict to the following effect: "Whereas, according to natural right, every one should be born free, and whereas, by certain customs which, from long age, have been introduced into and preserved to this day in our kingdom . . . many persons amongst our common people have fallen into the bonds of slavery, which much displeaseth us; we, considering that our kingdom is called and named the kingdom of the Free (Franks), and willing that the matter should in verity accord with the name . . . have by our grand council decreed and do decree that generally throughout our whole kingdom . . . such serfdoms be redeemed to freedom, on fair and suitable conditions . . . and we will, likewise, that all other lords who have body-men (or serfs) do take example by us to bring them to freedom." Great credit has very properly been given to Louis the Quarreller for this edict; but it has not been sufficiently noticed that Philip the Handsome had himself set his sons the example, for, on confirming the enfranchisement granted by his brother Charles to the serfs in the countship of Valois, he had based his decree on the following grounds: "Seeing that every human being, which is made in the image of Our Lord, should generally be free by natural right." The history of Christian communities is full of these happy inconsistencies; when a moral and just principle is implanted in the soul, absolute power itself does not completely escape from its healthy influence, and the good makes its way athwart the evil, just as a source of fresh and pure water ceases not to flow through and spread over a land wasted by the crimes or follies of men.
It is desirable to give an idea and an example of the conduct which was already beginning to be adopted and of the authority which was already beginning to be exercised in France, amidst the feudal reaction that set in against Philip the Handsome and amidst the feeble government of his sons, by that magistracy, of such recent and petty origin, which was called upon to defend, in the king's name, order and justice against the count-less anarchical tyrannies scattered over the national territory. During the early years of the fifteenth century, a lord of Gascony, Jordan de Lisle, "of most noble origin, but most ignoble deeds," says a contemporary chronicler, "abandoned himself to all manner of irregularities and crimes." Confident in his strength and his connections,—for Pope John XXII. had given his niece to him in marriage,—"he committed homicides, entertained evil-doers and murderers, countenanced robbers, and rose against the king. He killed, with the man's own truncheon, one of the king's servants who was wearing the royal livery according to the custom of the royal servants. When his misdeeds were known, he was summoned for trial to Paris; and he went thither surrounded by a stately retinue of counts, nobles, and barons of Aquitaine. He was confined, at first, in the prison of Chatelet; and when a hearing had been accorded to his reply and to what he alleged in his defence against the crimes of which he was accused, he was finally pronounced worthy of death by the doctors of the parliament, and on Trinity-eve he was dragged at the tail of horses and hanged, as he deserved, on the public gallows at Paris." It was, assuredly, a difficult and a dangerous task for the obscure members of this parliament, scarcely organized as it was and quite lately established for a permanence in Paris, to put down such disorders and such men. In the course of its long career the French magistracy has committed many faults; it has more than once either aspired to overstep its proper limits or failed to fulfil all its duties; but history would be ungrateful and untruthful not to bring into the light the virtues this body has displayed from its humble cradle, and the services it has rendered to France, to her security at home, to her moral dignity, to her intellectual glory, and to the progress of her civilization with all its brilliancy and productiveness, though it is still so imperfect and so thwarted.
Another fact which has held an important place in the history of France, and exercised a great influence over her destinies, likewise dates from this period; and that is the exclusion of women from the succession to the throne, by virtue of an article, ill understood, of the Salic law. The ancient law of the Salian Franks, drawn up, probably, in the seventh century, had no statute at all touching this grave question; the article relied upon was merely a regulation of civil law prescribing that "no portion of really Salic land (that is to say, in the full territorial ownership of the head of the family) should pass into the possession of women, but it should belong altogether to the virile sex." From the time of Hugh Capet heirs male had never been wanting to the crown, and the succession in the male line had been a fact uninterrupted indeed, but not due to prescription or law. Louis the Quarreller, at his death, on the 5th of June, 1316, left only a daughter, but his second wife, Queen Clemence, was pregnant. As soon as Philip the Long, then Count of Poitiers, heard of his brother's death, he hurried to Paris, assembled a certain number of barons, and got them to decide that he, if the queen should be delivered of a son, should be regent of the kingdom for eighteen years; but that if she should bear a daughter he should immediately take possession of the crown. On the 15th of November, 1316, the queen gave birth to a son, who was named John, and who figures as John I. in the series of French kings; but the child died at the end of five days, and on the 6th of January, 1317, Philip the Long was crowned king at Rheims. He forthwith summoned—there is no knowing exactly where and in what numbers—the clergy, barons, and third estate, who declared, on the 2d of February, that "the laws and customs, inviolably observed among the Franks, excluded daughters from the crown." There was no doubt about the fact; but the law was not established, nor even in conformity with the entire feudal system or with general opinion. And "thus the kingdom went," says Froissart, "as seemeth to many folks, out of the right line." But the measure was evidently wise and salutary for France as well as for the king-ship; and it was renewed, after Philip the Long died on the 3d of January, 1322, and left daughters only, in favor of his brother Charles the Handsome, who died, in his turn, on the 1st of January, 1328, and likewise left daughters only. The question as to the succession to the throne then lay between the male line represented by Philip, Count of Valois, grandson of Philip the Bold through Charles of Valois, his father, and the female line represented by Edward III., King of England, grandson, through his mother, Isabel, sister of the late King Charles the Handsome, of Philip the Handsome. A war of more than a century's duration between France and England was the result of this lamentable rivalry, which all but put the kingdom of France under an English king; but France was saved by the stubborn resistance of the national spirit and by Joan of Arc, inspired by God. One hundred and twenty-eight years after the triumph of the national cause, and four years after the accession of Henry IV., which was still disputed by the League, a decree of the parliament of Paris, dated the 28th of June, 1593, maintained, against the pretensions of Spain, the authority of the Salic law, and on the 1st of October, 1789, a decree of the National Assembly, in conformity with the formal and unanimous wish of the memorials drawn up by the states-general, gave a fresh sanction to that principle, which, confining the heredity of the crown to the male line, had been salvation to the unity and nationality of the monarchy in France.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE COMMUNES AND THE THIRD ESTATE.
The history of the Merovingians is that of barbarians invading Gaul and settling upon the ruins of the Roman empire. The history of the Carlovingians is that of the greatest of the barbarians taking upon himself to resuscitate the Roman empire, and of Charlemagne's descendants disputing amongst themselves for the fragments of his fabric, as fragile as it was grand. Amidst this vast chaos and upon this double ruin was formed the feudal system, which by transformation after transformation became ultimately France. Hugh Capet, one of its chieftains, made himself its king. The Capetians achieved the French kingship. We have traced its character and progressive development from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, through the reigns of Louis the Fat, of Philip Augustus, of St. Louis, and of Philip the Handsome, princes very diverse and very unequal in merit, but all of them able and energetic. This period was likewise the cradle of the French nation. That was the time when it began to exhibit itself in its different elements, and to arise under monarchical rule from the midst of the feudal system. Its earliest features and its earliest efforts in the long and laborious work of its development are now to be set before the reader's eyes.
The two words inscribed at the head of this chapter, the Communes and the Third-Estate, are verbal expressions for the two great facts at that time revealing that the French nation was in labor of formation. Closely connected one with the other and tending towards the same end, these two facts are, nevertheless, very diverse, and even when they have not been confounded, they have not been with sufficient clearness distinguished and characterized, each of them apart. They are diverse both in their chronological date and their social importance. The Communes are the first to appear in history. They appear there as local facts, isolated one from another, often very different in point of origin, though analogous in their aim, and in every case neither assuming nor pretending to assume any place in the government of the state. Local interests and rights, the special affairs of certain populations agglomerated in certain spots, are the only objects, the only province of the communes. With this purely municipal and individual character they come to their birth, their confirmation, and their development from the eleventh to the fourteenth century; and at the end of two centuries they enter upon their decline, they occupy far less room and make far less noise in history. It is exactly then that the Third Estate comes to the front, and uplifts itself as a general fact, a national element, a political power. It is the successor, not the contemporary, of the Communes; they contributed much towards, but did not suffice for its formation; it drew upon other resources, and was developed under other influences than those which gave existence to the communes. It has subsisted, it has gone on growing throughout the whole course of French history; and at the end of five centuries, in 1789, when the Communes had for a long while sunk into languishment and political insignificance, at the moment at which France was electing her Constituent Assembly, the Abbe Sicyes, a man of powerful rather than scrupulous mind, could say, "What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it hitherto been in the body politic? Nothing. What does it demand? To be something."
These words contain three grave errors. In the course of government anterior to 1789, so far was the third estate from being nothing, that it had been every day becoming greater and stronger. What was demanded for it in 1789 by M. Sicyes and his friends was not that it might become something, but that it should be everything. That was a desire beyond its right and its strength; and the very Revolution, which was its own victory, proved this. Whatever may have been the weaknesses and faults of its foes, the third estate had a terrible struggle to conquer them; and the struggle was so violent and so obstinate that the third estate was broken up therein, and had to pay dearly for its triumph. At first it obtained thereby despotism instead of liberty; and when liberty returned, the third estate found itself confronted by twofold hostility, that of its foes under the old regimen and that of the absolute democracy which claimed in its turn to be everything. Outrageous claims bring about in-tractable opposition and excite unbridled ambition. What there was in the words of the Abbe Sicyes in 1789 was not the verity of history; it was a lying programme of revolution.
We have anticipated dates in order to properly characterize and explain the facts as they present themselves, by giving a glimpse of their scope and their attainment. Now that we have clearly marked the profound difference between the third estate and the communes, we will return to the communes alone, which had the priority in respect of time. We will trace the origin and the composition of the third estate, when we reach the period at which it became one of the great performers in the history of France by reason of the place it assumed and the part it played in the states-general of the kingdom.
In dealing with the formation of the communes from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, the majority of the French historians, even M. Thierry, the most original and clear-sighted of them all, often entitle this event the communal revolution. This expression hardly gives a correct idea of the fact to which it is applied. The word revolution, in the sense, or at least the aspect, given to it amongst us by contemporary events, points to the overthrow of a certain regimen, and of the ideas and authority predominant thereunder, and the systematic elevation in their stead of a regimen essentially different in principle, and in fact. The revolutions of our day substitute, or would fain substitute, a republic for a monarchy, democracy for aristocracy, political liberty for absolute power. The struggles which from the eleventh to the fourteenth century gave existence to so many communes had no such profound character; the populations did not pretend to any fundamental overthrow of the regimen they attacked; they conspired together, they swore together, as the phrase is according to the documents of the time—they rose to extricate themselves from the outrageous oppression and misery they were enduring, but not to abolish feudal sovereignty and to change the personality of their masters. When they succeeded they obtained those treaties of peace called charters, which brought about in the condition of the insurgents salutary changes accompanied by more or less effectual guarantees. When they failed or when the charters were violated, the result was violent reactions, mutual excesses; the relations between the populations and their lords were tempestuous and full of vicissitudes; but at bottom neither the political regimen nor the social system of the communes was altered. And so there were, at many spots without any connection between them, local revolts and civil wars, but no communal revolution.
One of the earliest facts of this kind which have been set forth with some detail in history clearly shows their primitive character; a fact the more remarkable in that the revolt described by the chroniclers originated and ran its course in the country among peasants with a view of recovering complete independence, and not amongst an urban population with a view of resulting in the erection of a commune. Towards the end of the tenth century, under Richard II., Duke of Normandy, called the Good, and whilst the good King Robert was reigning in France, "In several countships of Normandy," says William of Jumiege, "all the peasants, assembling in their conventicles, resolved to live according to their inclinations and their own laws, as well in the interior of the forests as along the rivers, and to reck nought of any established right. To carry out this purpose these mobs of madmen chose each two deputies, who were to form at some central point an assembly charged to see to the execution of their decrees. As soon as the duke (Richard II.) was informed thereof, he sent a large body of men-at-arms to repress this audaciousness of the country districts and to scatter this rustic assemblage. In execution of his orders, the deputies of the peasants and many other rebels were forthwith arrested, their feet and hands were cut off, and they were sent away thus mutilated to their homes, in order to deter their like from such enterprises, and to make them wiser, for fear of worse. After this experience the peasants left off their meetings and returned to their ploughs."
It was about eighty years after the event when the monk William of Jumiege told the story of this insurrection of peasants so long anterior, and yet so similar to that which more than three centuries afterwards broke out in nearly the whole of Northern. France, and which was called the Jacquery. Less than a century after William of Jumiege, a Norman poet, Robert Wace, told the same story in his Romance of Rou, a history in verse of Rollo and the first dukes of Normandy: "The lords do us nought but ill," he makes the Norman peasants say: "with them we have nor gain nor profit from our labors; every day is for us a day of suffering, of travail, and of fatigue; every day our beasts are taken from us for forced labor and services . . . why put up with all this evil, and why not get quit of travail? Are not we men even as they are? Have we not the same stature, the same limbs, the same strength—for suffering? Bind we ourselves by oath; swear we to aid one another; and if they be minded to make war on us, have we not for every knight thirty or forty young peasants ready and willing to fight with club, or boar-spear, or arrow, or axe, or stones, if they have not arms? Learn we to resist the knights, and we shall be free to hew down trees, to hunt game, and to fish after our fashion, and we shall work our will on flood and in field and wood."
These two passages have already been quoted in Chapter XIV. of this history in the course of describing the general condition of France under the Capetians before the crusades, and they are again brought forward here because they express and paint to the life the chief cause which from the end of the tenth century led to so many insurrections amongst the rural as well as urban populations, and brought about the establishment of so many communes.
We say the chief cause only, because oppression and insurrection were not the sole origin of the communes. Evil, moral and material, abounds in human communities, but it never has the sole dominion there; force never drives justice into utter banishment, and the ruffianly violence of the strong never stifles in all hearts every sympathy for the weak. Two causes, quite distinct from feudal oppression, viz., Roman traditions and Christian sentiments, had their share in the formation of the communes and in the beneficial results thereof.
The Roman municipal regimen, which is described in M. Guizot's L'Essais sur l'Histoire de France (1st Essay, pp. 1-44), did not everywhere perish with the empire; it kept its footing in a great number of towns, especially in those of Southern Gaul, Marseilles, Arles, Nismes, Narbonne, Toulouse, &c. At Arles the municipality actually bore the name of commune (communitas), Toulouse gave her municipal magistrates the name of Capitouls, after the Capitol of Rome, and in the greater part of the other towns in the south they were called Consuls. After the great invasion of barbarians from the seventh to the end of the eleventh century, the existence of these Roman municipalities appears but rarely and confusedly in history; but in this there is nothing peculiar to the towns and the municipal regimen, for confusion and obscurity were at that time universal, and the nascent feudal system was plunged therein as well as the dying little municipal systems were. Many Roman municipalities were still subsisting without influencing any event of at all a general kind, and without leaving any trace; and as the feudal system grew and grew they still went on in the midst of universal darkness and anarchy. They had penetrated into the north of Gaul in fewer numbers and with a weaker organization than in the south, but still keeping their footing and vaunting themselves on their Roman origin in the face of their barbaric conquerors. The inhabitants of Rheims remembered with pride that their municipal magistracy and its jurisdiction were anterior to Clovis, dating as they did from before the days of St. Remigius, the apostle of the Franks. The burghers of Metz boasted of having enjoyed civil rights before there was any district of Lorraine: "Lorraine," said they, "is young, and Metz is old." The city of Bourges was one of the most complete examples of successive transformations and denominations attained by a Roman municipality from the sixth to the thirteenth century under the Merovingians, the Carlovingians, and the earliest Capetians. At the time of the invasion it had arenas, an amphitheatre, and all that characterized a Roman city. In the seventh century, the author of the life of St. Estadiola, born at Bourges, says that "she was the child of illustrious parents who, as worldly dignity is accounted, were notable by reason of senatorial rank; and Gregory of Tours quotes a judgment delivered by the principals (primores) of the city of Bourges. Coins of the time of Charles the Bald are struck with the name of the city of Bourges and its inhabitants (Bituriges). In 1107, under Philip I., the members of the municipal body of Bourges are named prud'hommes. In two charters, one of Louis the Young, in 1145, and the other of Philip Augustus, in 1218, the old senators of Bourges have the name at one time of bons hommes, at another of barons of the city. Under different names, in accordance with changes of language, the Roman municipal regimen held on and adapted itself to new social conditions."
In our own day there has been far too much inclination to dispute, and M. Augustin Thierry has, in M. Guizot's opinion, made far too little of, the active and effective part played by the kingship in the formation and protection of the French communes. Not only did the kings, as we shall presently see, often interpose as mediators in the quarrels of the communes with their laic or ecclesiastical lords, but many amongst them assumed in their own domains and to the profit of the communes an intelligent and beneficial initiative. The city of Orleans was a happy example of this. It was of ancient date, and had prospered under the Roman empire; nevertheless the continuance of the Roman municipal regimen does not appear there clearly as we have just seen that it did in the case of Bourges; it is chiefly from the middle ages and their kings that Orleans held its municipal franchises and its privileges; they never raised it to a commune, properly so called, by a charter sworn to and guaranteed by independent institutions, but they set honestly to work to prevent local oppression, to reform abuses, and make justice prevail there. From 1051 to 1281 there are to be found in the Recueil des ordonnances des rois seven important charters relating to Orleans. In 1051, at the demand of the people of Orleans and its bishop, who appears in the charter as the head of the people, the defender of the city, Henry I. secures to the inhabitants of Orleans freedom of labor and of going to and fro during the vintages, and interdicts his agents from exacting anything upon the entry of wines. From 1137 to 1178, during the administration of Suger, Louis the Young in four successive ordinances gives, in respect of Orleans, precise guarantees for freedom of trade, security of person and property, and the internal peace of the city; and in 1183 Philip Augustus exempts from all talliage, that is, from all personal impost, the present and future inhabitants of Orleans, and grants them divers privileges, amongst others that of not going to law-courts farther from their homes than Etampes. In 1281 Philip the Bold renews and confirms the concessions of Philip Augustus. Orleans was not, within the royal domain, the only city where the kings of that period were careful to favor the progress of the population, of wealth, and of security; several other cities, and even less considerable burghs, obtained similar favor; and in 1155 Louis the Young, probably in confirmation of an act of his father, Louis the Fat, granted to the little town of Lorris, in Gatinais (nowadays chief place of a canton in the department of the Loiret), a charter, full of detail, which regulated its interior regimen in financial, commercial, judicial, and military matters, and secured to all its inhabitants good conditions in respect of civil life. This charter was in the course of the twelfth century regarded as so favorable that it was demanded by a great number of towns and burghs; the king was asked for the customs of Lorris (consuetudines Lauracienses), and in the space of fifty years they were granted to seven towns, some of them a considerable distance from Orleanness. The towns which obtained them did not become by this qualification communes properly so called in the special and historical sense of the word; they had no jurisdiction of their own, no independent magistracy; they had not their own government in their hands; the king's officers, provosts, bailiffs, or others, were the only persons who exercised there a real and decisive power. But the king's promises to the inhabitants, the rights which he authorized them to claim from him, and the rules which he imposed upon his officers in their government, were not concessions which were of no value or which remained without fruit. As we follow in the course of our history the towns which, without having been raised to communes properly so called, had obtained advantages of that kind, we see them developing and growing in population and wealth, and sticking more and more closely to that kingship from which they had received their privileges, and which, for all its imperfect observance and even frequent violation of promises, was nevertheless accessible to complaint, repressed from time to time the misbehavior of its officers, renewed at need and even extended privileges, and, in a word, promoted in its administration the progress of civilization and the counsels of reason, and thus attached the burghers to itself without recognizing on their side those positive rights and those guarantees of administrative independence which are in a perfect and solidly constructed social fabric the foundation of political liberty.
Nor was it the kings alone who in the middle ages listened to the counsels of reason, and recognized in their behavior towards their towns the rights of justice. Many bishops had become the feudal lords of the episcopal city; and the Christian spirit enlightened and animated many amongst them just as the monarchical spirit sometimes enlightened and guided the kings. Troubles had arisen in the town of Cambrai between the bishops and the people. "There was amongst the members of the metropolitan clergy," says M. Augustin Thierry, "a certain Baudri de Sarchainville, a native of Artois, who had the title of chaplain of the bishopric. He was a man of high character and of wise and reflecting mind. He did not share the violent aversion felt by most of his order for the institution of communes. He saw in this institution a sort of necessity beneath which it would be inevitable sooner or later, Willy nilly, to bow, and he thought it was better to surrender to the wishes of the citizens than to shed blood in order to postpone for a while an unavoidable revolution. In 1098 he was elected Bishop of Noyon. He found this town in the same state in which he had seen that of Cambrai. The burghers were at daily loggerheads with the metropolitan clergy, and the registers of the Church contained a host of documents entitled Peace made between us and the burghers of Noyon. But no reconciliation was lasting; the truce was soon broken, either by the clergy or by the citizens, who were the more touchy in that they had less security for their persons and their property. The new bishop thought that the establishment of a commune sworn to by both the rival parties might become a sort of compact of alliance between them, and he set about realizing this noble idea before the word commune had served at Noyon as the rallying cry of popular insurrection. Of his own mere motion he convoked in assembly all the inhabitants of the town, clergy, knights, traders, and craftsmen. He presented them with a charter which constituted the body of burghers an association forever under magistrates called jury-men, like those of Cambrai. 'Whosoever,' said the charter, 'shall desire to enter this commune shall not be able to be received as a member of it by a single individual, but only in the presence of the jurymen. The sum of money he shall then give shall be employed for the benefit of the town, and not for the private advantage of any one whatsoever. If the commune be outraged, all those who have sworn to it shall be bound to march to its defence, and none shall be empowered to remain at home unless he be infirm or sick, or so poor that he must needs be himself the watcher of his own wife and children lying sick. If any one have wounded or slain any one on the territory of the commune, the jurymen shall take vengeance therefor.'"
The other articles guarantee to the members of the commune of Noyon the complete ownership of their property, and the right of not being handed over to justice save before their own municipal magistrates. The bishop first swore to this charter, and the inhabitants of every condition took the same oath after him. In virtue of his pontifical authority he pronounced the anathema, and all the curses of the Old and New Testament, against whoever should in time to come dare to dissolve the commune or infringe its regulations. Furthermore, in order to give this new pact a stronger warranty, Baudri requested the king of France. Louis the Fat, to corroborate it, as they used to say at the time, by his approbation and by the great seal of the crown. The king consented to this request of the bishop, and that was all the part taken by Louis the Fat in the establishment of the commune of Noyon. The king's charter is not preserved, but, under the date of 1108, there is extant one of the bishop's own, which may serve to substantiate the account given:—
"Baudri, by the grace of God Bishop of Noyon, to all those who do preserve and go on in the faith:
"Most dear brethren, we learn by the example and words of-the holy Fathers, that all good things ought to be committed to writing, for fear lest hereafter they come to be forgotten. Know, then, all Christians present and to come, that I have formed at Noyon a commune, constituted by the counsel and in an assembly of clergy, knights, and burghers; that I have confirmed it by oath, by pontifical authority, and by the bond of anathema; and that I have prevailed upon our lord King Louis to grant this commune and corroborate it with the king's seal. This establishment formed by me, sworn to by a great number of persons, and granted by the king, let none be so bold as to destroy or alter; I give warning thereof, on behalf of God and myself, and I forbid it in the name of pontifical authority. Whosoever shall transgress and violate the present law, be subjected to excommunication; and whosoever, on the contrary, shall faithfully keep it, be preserved forever amongst those who dwell in the house of the Lord."
This good example was not without fruit. The communal regimen was established in several towns, notably at St. Quentin and at Soissons, without trouble or violence, and with one accord amongst the laic and ecclesiastical lords and the inhabitants.
We arrive now at the third and chief source of the communes, at the case of those which met feudal oppression with energetic resistance, and which, after all the sufferings, vicissitudes, and outrages, on both sides, of a prolonged struggle, ended by winning a veritable administrative, and, to a certain extent, political independence. The number of communes thus formed from the eleventh to the thirteenth century was great, and we have a detailed history of the fortunes of several amongst them, Cambrai, Beauvais, Laon, Amiens, Rheims, Etampes, Vezelay, &c. To give a correct and vivid picture of them we will choose the commune of Laon, which was one of those whose fortunes were most checkered as well as most tragic, and which after more than two centuries of a very tempestuous existence was sentenced to complete abolition, first by Philip the Handsome, then by Philip the Long and Charles the Handsome, and, finally, by Philip of Valois, "for certain misdeeds and excesses notorious, enormous, and detestable, and on full deliberation of our council." The early portion of the history connected with the commune of Laon has been narrated for us by Guibert, an abbot of Nogent-sous-Coucy, in the diocese of Laon, a contemporary writer, sprightly and bold. "In all that I have written and am still writing," says he, "I dismiss all men from my mind, caring not a whit about pleasing anybody. I have taken my side in the opinions of the world, and with calmness and indifference on my own account I expect to be exposed to all sorts of language, to be as it were beaten with rods. I proceed with my task, being fully purposed to bear with equanimity the judgments of all who come snarling after me."
Laon was at the end of the eleventh century one of the most important towns in the kingdom of France. It was full of rich and industrious inhabitants; the neighboring people came thither for provisions or diversion; and such concourse led to the greatest disturbances. "The nobles and their servitors," says M. Augustin Thierry, "sword in hand, committed robbery upon the burghers; the streets of the town were not safe by night or even by day, and none could go out without running a risk of being stopped and robbed or killed. The burghers in their turn committed violence upon the peasants, who came to buy or sell at the market of the town." "Let me give as example," says Guibert of Nogent, "a single fact, which, had it taken place amongst the Barbarians or the Scythians, would assuredly have been considered the height of wickedness, in the judgment even of those who recognize no law. On Saturday the inhabitants of the country places used to leave their fields, and come from all sides to Laon to get provisions at the market. The townsfolk used then to go round the place, carrying in baskets, or bowls, or otherwise, samples of vegetables, or grain, or any other article, as if they wished to sell. They would offer them to the first peasant who was in search of such things to buy; he would promise to pay the price agreed upon; and then the seller would say to the buyer, 'Come with me to my house to see and examine the whole of the articles I am selling you.' The other would go; and then, when they came to the bin containing the goods, the honest seller would take off and hold up the lid, saying to the buyer, 'Step hither, and put your head or arms into the bin, to make quite sure that it is all exactly the same goods as I showed you outside.' And then when the other, jumping on to the edge of the bin, remained leaning on his belly, with his head and shoulders hanging down, the worthy seller, who kept in the rear, would hoist up the thoughtless rustic by the feet, push him suddenly into the bin, and, clapping on the lid as he fell, keep him shut up in this safe prison until he had bought himself out."
In 1106 the bishopric of Laon had been two years vacant. It was sought after and obtained for a sum of money, say contemporaries, by Gaudri, a Norman by birth, referendary of Henry I., King of England, and one of those Churchmen who, according to M. Augustin Thierry's expression, "had gone in the train of William the Bastard to seek their fortunes amongst the English by seizing the property of the vanquished." It appears that thenceforth the life of Gaudri had been scarcely edifying; he had, it is said, the tastes and habits of a soldier; he was hasty and arrogant, and he liked beyond everything to talk of fighting and hunting, of arms, of horses, and of hounds. When he was repairing with a numerous following to Rome, to ask for confirmation of his election, he met at Langres Pope Pascal II., come to France to keep the festival of Christmas at the abbey of Cluny. The pope had no doubt heard something about the indifferent reputation of the new bishop, for, the very day after his arrival at Langres, he held a conference with the ecclesiastics who had accompanied Gaudri, and plied them with questions concerning him. "He asked us first," says Guibert of Nogent, who was in the train, "why we had chosen a man who was unknown to us. As none of the priests, some of whom did not know even the first rudiments of the Latin language, made any answer to this question, he turned to the abbots. I was seated between my two colleagues. As they likewise kept silence, I began to be urged, right and left, to speak. I was one of those whom this election had displeased; but with culpable timidity I had yielded to the authority of my superiors in dignity. With the bashfulness of youth I could only with great difficulty and much blushing prevail upon myself to open my mouth. The discussion was carried on, not in our mother tongue, but in the language of scholars. I therefore, though with great confusion of mind and face, betook myself to speaking in a manner to tickle the palate of him who was questioning us, wrapping up in artfully arranged form of speech expressions which were softened down, but were not entirely removed from the truth. I said that we did not know, it was true, to the extent of having been familiar by sight and intercourse with him, the man of whom we had made choice, but that we had received favorable reports of his integrity. The pope strove to confound my arguments by this quotation from the Gospel: 'He that hath seen giveth testimony.' But as he did not explicitly raise the objection that Gaudri had been elected by desire of the court, all subtle subterfuge on any such point became useless; so I gave it up, and confessed that I could say nothing in opposition to the pontiff's words; which pleased him very much, for he had less scholarship than would have become his high office. Clearly perceiving, however, that all the phrases I had piled up in defence of our election had but little weight, I launched out afterwards upon the urgent straits wherein our Church was placed, and on this subject I gave myself the more rein in proportion as the person elected was unfitted for the functions of the episcopate."
Gaudri was indeed very scantily fitted for the office of bishop, as the town of Laon was not slow to perceive. Scarcely had he been installed when he committed strange outrages. He had a man's eyes put out on suspicion of connivance with his enemies; and he tolerated the murder of another in the metropolitan church. In imitation of rich crusaders on their return from the East, he kept a black slave, whom he employed upon his deeds of vengeance. The burghers began to be disquieted, and to wax wroth. During a trip the bishop made to England, they offered a great deal of money to the clergy and knights who ruled in his absence, if they would consent to recognize by a genuine Act the right of the commonalty of the inhabitants to be governed by authorities of their own choice. "The clergy and knights," says a contemporary chronicler, "came to an agreement with the common folk in hopes of enriching themselves in a speedy and easy fashion." A commune was therefore set up and proclaimed at Laon, on the model of that of Noyon, and invested with effective powers. The bishop, on his return, was very wroth, and for some days abstained from re-entering the town. But the burghers acted with him, as they had with his clergy and the knights: they offered him so large a sum of money that "it was enough," says Guibert of Nogent, "to appease the tempest of his words." He accepted the commune, and swore to respect it. The burghers wished to have a higher warranty; so they sent to Paris, to King Louis the Fat, a deputation laden with rich presents. "The king," says the chronicler, "won over by this plebeian bounty, confirmed the commune by his own oath," and the deputation took back to Laon their charter sealed with the great seal of the crown, and augmented by two articles to the following purport: "The folks of Laon shall not be liable to be forced to law away from their town; if the king have a suit against any one amongst them, justice shall be done him in the episcopal court. For these advantages, and others further granted to the aforesaid inhabitants by the king's munificence, the folks of the commune have covenanted to give the king, besides the old plenary court dues, and man-and-horse dues [dues paid for exemption from active service in case of war], three lodgings a year, if he come to the town, and, if he do not come, they will pay him instead twenty livres for each lodging."
For three years the town of Laon was satisfied and tranquil; the burghers were happy in the security they enjoyed, and proud of the liberty they had won. But in 1112 the knights, the clergy of the metropolitan church, and the bishop himself had spent the money they had received, and keenly regretted the power they had lost; and they meditated reducing to the old condition the serfs emancipated from the yoke. The bishop invited King Louis the Fat to come to Laon for the keeping of Holy Week, calculating upon his presence for the intimidation of the burghers. "But the burghers, who were in fear of ruin," says Guibert of Nogent, "promised the king and those about him four hundred livres, or more, I am not quite sure which; whilst the bishop and the grandees, on their side, urged the monarch to come to an understanding with them, and engaged to pay him seven hundred livres. King Louis was so striking in person that he seemed made expressly for the majesty of the throne; he was courageous in war, a foe to all slowness in business, and stout-hearted in adversity; sound, however, as he was on every other point, he was hardly praiseworthy in this one respect, that he opened too readily both heart and ear to vile fellows corrupted by avarice. This vice was a fruitful source of hurt, as well as blame, to himself, to say nothing of unhappiness to many. The cupidity of this prince always caused him to incline towards those who promised him most. All his own oaths, and those of the bishops and the grandees, were consequently violated." The charter sealed with the king's seal was annulled; and on the part of the king and the bishop, an order was issued to all the magistrates of the commune to cease from their functions, to give up the seal and banner of the town, and to no longer ring the belfry chimes which rang out the opening and closing of their audiences. But at this proclamation, so violent was the uproar in the town, that the king, who had hitherto lodged in a private hotel, thought it prudent to leave, and go to pass the night in the episcopal palace, which was surrounded by strong walls. Not content with this precaution, and probably a little ashamed of what he had done, he left Laon the next morning at daybreak, with all his train, without waiting for the festival of Easter, for the celebration of which he had undertaken his journey.
All the day after his departure the shops of the tradespeople and the houses of the innkeepers were kept closed; no sort of article was offered for sale; everybody remained shut up at home. But when there is wrath at the bottom of men's souls, the silence and stupor of the first paroxysm are of short duration. Next day a rumor spread that the bishop and the grandees were busy "in calculating the fortunes of all the citizens, in order to demand that, to supply the sum promised to the king, each should pay on account of the destruction of the commune as much as each had given for its establishment." In a fit of violent indignation the burghers assembled; and forty of them bound themselves by oath, for life or death, to kill the bishop and all those grandees who had labored for the ruin of the commune. The archdeacon, Anselm, a good sort of man, of obscure birth, who heartily disapproved of the bishop's perjury, went nevertheless and warned him, quite privately, and without betraying any one, of the danger that threatened him, urging him not to leave his house, and particularly not to accompany the procession on Easter-day. "Pooh!" answered the bishop, "I die by the hands of such fellows!" Next day, nevertheless, he did not appear at matins, and did not set foot within the church; but when the hour for the procession came, fearing to be accused of cowardice, he issued forth at the head of his clergy, closely followed by his domestics and some knights with arms and armor under their clothes. As the company filed past, one of the forty conspirators, thinking the moment favorable for striking the blow, rushed out suddenly from under an arch, with a shout of "Commune! commune!" A low murmur ran through the throng; but not a soul joined in the shout or the movement, and the ceremony came to an end without any explosion. The day after, another solemn procession was to take place to the church of St. Vincent. Somewhat reassured, but still somewhat disquieted, the bishop fetched from the domains of the bishopric a body of peasants, some of whom he charged to protect the church, others his own palace, and once more accompanied the procession without the conspirators daring to attack him. This time he was completely reassured, and dismissed the peasants he had sent for. "On the fourth day after Easter," says Guibert of Nogent, "my corn having been pillaged in consequence of the disorder that reigned in the town, I repaired to the bishop's, and prayed him to put a stop to this state of violence. 'What do you suppose,' said he to me, 'those fellows can do with all their outbreaks? Why, if my blackamoor John were to pull the nose of the most formidable amongst them, the poor devil durst not even grumble. Have I not forced them to give up what they called their commune, for the whole duration of my life?' I held my tongue," adds Guibert; "many folks besides me warned him of his danger; but he would not deign to believe anybody."
Three days later all seemed quiet; and the bishop was busy with his archdeacon in discussing the sums to be exacted from the burghers. All at once a tumult arose in the town; and a crowd of people thronged the streets, shouting "Commune! commune!" Bands of burghers armed with swords, axes, bows, hatchets, clubs, and lances, rushed into the episcopal palace. At the news of this, the knights who had promised the bishop to go to his assistance if he needed it came up one after another to his protection; and three of them, in succession, were hotly attacked by the burgher bands, and fell after a short resistance. The episcopal palace was set on fire. The bishop, not being in a condition to repulse the assaults of the populace, assumed the dress of one of his own domestics, fled to the cellar of the church, shut himself in, and ensconced himself in a cask, the bung-hole of which was stopped up by a faithful servitor. The crowd wandered about everywhere in search of him on whom they wished to wreak their vengeance. A bandit named Teutgaud, notorious in those times for his robberies, assaults, and murders of travellers, had thrown himself headlong into the cause of the commune. The bishop, who knew him, had by way of pleasantry and on account of his evil mien given him the nickname of Isengrin. This was the name which was given in the fables of the day to the wolf, and which corresponded to that of Master Reynard. Teutgaud and his men penetrated into the cellar of the church; they went along tapping upon all the casks; and on what suspicion there is no knowing, but Teutgaud halted in front of that in which the bishop was huddled up, and had it opened, crying, "Is there any one here?" "Only a poor prisoner," answered the bishop, trembling. "Ha! ha!" said the playful bandit, who recognized the voice, "so it is you, Master Isengrin, who are hiding here!" And he took him by the hair, and dragged him out of his cask. The bishop implored the conspirators to spare his life, offering to swear on the Gospels to abdicate the bishopric, promising them all the money he possessed, and saying that if they pleased he would leave the country. The reply was insults and blows. He was immediately despatched; and Teutgaud, seeing the episcopal ring glittering on his finger, cut off the finger to get possession of the ring. The body, stripped of all covering, was thrust into a corner, where passers-by threw stones or mud at it, accompanying their insults with ribaldry and curses.
[Bishop Gaudri dragged from the Cask——224]
Murder and arson are contagious. All the day of the insurrection and all the following night armed bands wandered about the streets of Laon searching everywhere for relatives, friends, or servitors of the bishop, for all whom the angry populace knew or supposed to be such, and wreaking on their persons or their houses a ghastly or a brutal vengeance. In a fit of terror many poor innocents fled before the blind wrath of the populace; some were caught and cut down pell-mell amongst the guilty; others escaped through the vineyards planted between two hills in the outskirts of the town. "The progress of the fire, kindled on two sides at once, was so rapid," says Guibert of Nogent, "and the winds drove the flames so furiously in the direction of the convent of St. Vincent, that the monks were afraid of seeing all they possessed become the fire's prey, and all the persons who had taken refuge in this monastery trembled as if they had seen swords hanging over their heads." Some insurgents stopped a young man who had been body-servant to the bishop, and asked him whether the bishop had been killed or not; they knew nothing about it, nor did he know any more; he helped them to look for the corpse, and when they came upon it, it had been so mutilated that not a feature was recognizable. "I remember," said the young man, "that when the prelate was alive he liked to talk of deeds of war, for which to his hurt he always showed too much bent; and he often used to say that one day in a sham-fight, just as he was, all in the way of sport, attacking a certain knight, the latter hit him with his lance, and wounded him under the neck, near the tracheal artery." The body of Gaudri was eventually recognized by this mark, and "Archdeacon Anselm went the next day," says Guibert of Nogent, "to beg of the insurgents permission at least to bury it, if only because it had once borne the title and worn the insignia of bishop. They consented, but reluctantly. It were impossible to tell how many threats and insults were launched against those who undertook the obsequies, and what outrageous language was vented against the dead himself. His corpse was thrown into a half-dug hole, and at church there was none of the prayers or ceremonies prescribed for the burial of, I will not say a bishop, but the worst of Christians." A few days afterwards, Raoul, Archbishop of Rheims, came to Laon to purify the church. "The wise and venerable archbishop," says Guibert, "after having, on his arrival, seen to more decently disposing the remains of some of the dead and celebrated divine service in memory of all, amidst the tears and utter grief of their relatives and connections, suspended the holy sacrifice of the mass, in order to deliver a discourse, touching those execrable institutions of communes, whereby we see serfs, contrary to all right and justice, withdrawing themselves by force from the lawful authority of their masters."
Here is a striking instance of the changeableness of men's feelings and judgments; and it causes a shock even when it is natural and almost allowable. Guibert of Nogent, the contemporary historian, who was but lately loud in his blame of the bishop of Laon's character and conduct, now takes sides with the reaction aroused by popular excesses and vindictiveness, and is indignant with "those execrable institutions of communes," the source of so many disturbances and crimes. The burghers of Laon themselves, "having reflected upon the number and enormity of the crimes they had committed, shrank up with fear," says Guibert, "and dreaded the judgment of the king." To protect themselves against the consequences of his resentment, they added a fresh wound to the old by summoning to their aid Thomas de Marle, son of Lord Enguerrand de Coucy. "This Thomas, from his earliest youth, enriched himself by plundering the poor and the pilgrim, contracted several incestuous marriages, and exhibited a ferocity so unheard of in our age, that certain people, even amongst those who have a reputation for cruelty, appear less lavish of the blood of common sheep than Thomas was of human blood. Such was the man whom the burghers of Laon implored to come and put himself at their head, and whom they welcomed with joy when he entered their town. As for him, when he had heard their request, he consulted his own people to know what he ought to do; and they all replied that his forces were not sufficiently numerous to defend such a city against the king. Thomas then induced the burghers to go out and hold a meeting in a field where he would make known to them his plan. When they were about a mile from the town, he said to them, 'Laon is the head of the kingdom; it is impossible for me to keep the king from making himself master of it. If you dread his arms, follow me to my own land, and you will find in me a protector and a friend.' These words threw them into an excess of consternation; soon, however, the popular party, troubled at the recollection of the crime they had committed, and fancying they already saw the king threatening their lives, fled away to the number of a great many in the wake of Thomas. Teutgaud himself, that murderer of Bishop Gaudri, hastened to put himself under the wing of the Lord of Marie. Before long the rumor spread abroad amongst the population of the country-places near Laon that that town was quite empty of inhabitants; and all the peasants rushed thither and took possession of the houses they found without defenders. Who could tell, or be believed if he were to attempt to tell, how much money, raiment, and provision of all kinds was discovered in this city? Before long there arose between the first and last comers disputes about the partition of their plunder; all that the small folks had taken soon passed into the hands of the powerful; if two men met a third quite alone they stripped him; the state of the town was truly pitiable. The burghers who had quitted it with Thomas de Marle had beforehand destroyed and burned the houses of the clergy and grandees whom they hated; and now the grandees, escaped from the massacre, carried off in their turn from the houses of the fugitives all means of subsistence and all movables to the very hinges and bolts."
The rumor of so many disasters, crimes, and reactions succeeding one another spread rapidly throughout all districts. Thomas de Marle was put under the ban of the kingdom, and visited with excommunication "by a general assembly of the Church of the Gauls," says Guibert of Nogent, "assembled at Beauvais;" and this sentence was read every Sunday after mass in all the metropolitan and parochial churches. Public feeling against Thomas de Marle became so strong that Enguerrand de Bowes, Lord of Coucy, who passed, says Suger, for his father, joined those who declared war against him in the name of Church and King. Louis the Fat took the field in person against him. "Men-at-arms, and in very small numbers, too," says Guibert of Nogent, "were with difficulty induced to second the king, and did not do so heartily; but the light-armed infantry made up a considerable force, and the Archbishop of Rheims and the bishops had summoned all the people to this expedition, whilst offering to all absolution from their sins. Thomas de Marle, though at that time helpless and stretched upon his bed, was not sparing of scoffs and insults towards his assailants; and at first he absolutely refused to listen to the king's summons." But Louis persisted without wavering in his enterprise, exposing himself freely, and in person leading his infantry to the attack when the men-at-arms did not come on or bore themselves slackly. He carried successively the castles of Crecy and Nogent, domains belonging to Thomas de Marle, and at last reduced him to the necessity of buying himself off at a heavy ransom, indemnifying the churches he had spoiled, giving guarantees for future behavior, and earnestly praying for re-admission to the communion of the faithful. As for those folks of Laon, perpetrators of or accomplices in the murder of Bishop Gaudri, who had sought refuge with Thomas de Marle, the king showed them no mercy. "He ordered them," says Suger, "to be strung up to the gibbet, and left for food to the voracity of kites, and crows, and vultures."
There are certain discrepancies between the two accounts, both contemporaneous, which we possess of this incident in the earliest years of the twelfth century, one in the Life of Louis the Fat, by Suger, and the other in the Life of Guibert of Nogent, by himself. They will be easily recognized on comparing what was said, after Suger, in Chapter XVIII. of this history, with what has just been said here after Guibert. But these discrepancies are of no historical importance, for they make no difference in respect of the essential facts characteristic of social condition at the period, and of the behavior and position of the actors.
Louis the Fat, after his victory over Thomas de Marle and the fugitives from Laon, went to Laon with the Archbishop of Rheims; and the presence of the king, whilst restoring power to the foes of the commune, inspired them, no doubt, with a little of the spirit of moderation, for there was an interval of peace, during which no attention was paid to anything but expiatory ceremonies and the restoration of the churches which had been a prey to the flames. The archbishop celebrated a solemn mass for the repose of the souls of those who had perished during the disturbances, and he preached a sermon exhorting serfs to submit themselves to their masters, and warning them on pain of anathema from resisting by force. The burghers of Laon, however, did not consider every sort of resistance forbidden, and the lords had, no doubt, been taught not to provoke it, for in 1128, sixteen years after the murder of Bishop Gaudri, fear of a fresh insurrection determined his successor to consent to the institution of a new commune, the charter of which was ratified by Louis the Fat in an assembly held at Compiegne. Only the name of commune did not recur in this charter; it was replaced by that of Peace-establishment; the territorial boundaries of the commune were called peace-boundaries, and to designate its members recourse was had to the formula, All those who have signed this peace. The preamble of the charter runs, "In the name of the holy and indivisible Trinity, we Louis, by the grace of God king of the French, do make known to all our lieges present and to come that, with the consent of the barons of our kingdom and the inhabitants of the city of Laon, we have set up in the said city a peace-establishment." And after having enumerated the limits, forms, and rules of it, the charter concludes with this declaration of amnesty: "All former trespasses and offences committed before the ratification of the present treaty are wholly pardoned. If any one, banished for having trespassed in past time, desire to return to the town, he shall be admitted and shall recover possession of his property. Excepted from pardon, however, are the thirteen whose names do follow;" and then come the names of the thirteen excepted from the amnesty and still under banishment. "Perhaps," says M. Augustin Thierry, "these thirteen under banishment, shut out forever from their native town at the very moment it became free, had been distinguished amongst all the burghers of Laon by their opposition to the power of the lords; perhaps they had sullied by deeds of violence this patriotic opposition; perhaps they had been taken at haphazard to suffer alone for the crimes of their fellow-citizens." The second hypothesis appears the most probable; for that deeds of violence and cruelty had been committed alternately by the burghers and their foes is an ascertained fact, and that the charter of 1128 was really a work of liberal pacification is proved by its contents and wording. After such struggles and at the moment of their subsidence some of the most violent actors always bear the burden of the past, and amongst the most violent some are often the most sincere.
For forty-seven years after the charter of Louis the Fat the town of Laon enjoyed the internal peace and the communal liberties it had thus achieved; but in 1175 a new bishop, Roger de Rosoy, a man of high birth, and related to several of the great lords his neighbors, took upon himself to disregard the regimen of freedom established at Laon. The burghers of Laon, taught by experience, applied to the king, Louis the Young, and offered him a sum of money to grant them a charter of commune. Bishop Roger, "by himself and through his friends," says a chronicler, a canon of Laon, "implored the king to have pity on his Church, and abolish the serfs' commune; but the king, clinging to the promise he had received of money, would not listen to the bishop or his friends," and in 1177 gave the burghers of Laon a charter which confirmed their peace-establishment of 1128. Bishop Roger, however, did not hold himself beaten. He claimed the help of the lords his neighbors, and renewed the war against the burghers of Laon, who, on their side, asked and obtained the aid of several communes in the vicinity. In an access of democratic rashness, instead of awaiting within their walls the attack of their enemies, they marched out without cavalry to the encounter, ravaging as they went the lands of the lords whom they suspected of being ill-disposed towards them; but on arriving in front of the bishop's allies, "all this rustic multitude," says the canon-chronicler, "terror-stricken at the bare names of the knights they found assembled, took suddenly to flight, and a great number of the burghers were massacred before reaching their city." Louis the Young then took the field to help them; but Baldwin, Count of Hainault, went to the aid of the Bishop of Laon with seven hundred knights and several thousand infantry. King Louis, after having occupied and for some time held in sequestration the lands of the bishop, thought it advisable to make peace rather than continue so troublesome a war, and at the intercession of the pope and the Count of Hainault he restored to Roger de Rosoy his lands and his bishopric on condition of living in peace with the commune. And so long as Louis VII. lived, the bishop did refrain from attacking the liberties of the burghers of Laon; but at the king's death, in 1180, he applied to his successor, Philip Augustus, and offered to cede to him the lordship of Fere-sur-Oise, of which he was the possessor, provided that Philip by charter abolished the commune of Laon. Philip yielded to the temptation, and in 1190 published an ordinance to the following purport: "Desiring to avoid for our soul every sort of danger, we do entirely quash the commune established in the town of Laon as being contrary to the rights and liberties of the metropolitan church of St. Mary, in regard for justice and for the sake of a happy issue to the pilgrimage which we be bound to make to Jerusalem." But next year, upon entreaty and offers from the burghers of Laon, Philip changed his mind, and without giving back the lordship of Fere-sur-Oise to the bishop, guaranteed and confirmed in perpetuity the peace-establishment granted in 1128 to the town of Laon, "on the condition that every year at the feast of All Saints they shall pay to us and our successors two hundred livres of Paris." For a century all strife of any consequence ceased between the burghers of Laon and their bishop; there was no real accord or good under-standing between them, but the public peace was not troubled, and neither the Kings of France nor the great lords of the neighborhood interfered in its affairs. In 1294 some knights and clergy of the metropolitan chapter of Laon took to quarrelling with some burghers; and on both sides they came to deeds of violence, which caused sanguinary struggles in the streets of the town and even in the precincts of the episcopal palace. The bishop and his chapter applied to the pope, Boniface VIII., who applied to the king, Philip the Handsome, to put an end to these scandalous disturbances. Philip the Handsome, in his turn, applied to the Parliament of Paris, which, after inquiry, "deprived the town of Laon of every right of commune and college, under whatsoever name." The king did not like to execute this decree in all its rigor. He granted the burghers of Laon a charter which maintained them provisionally in the enjoyment of their political rights, but with this destructive clause: "Said commune and said shrievalty shall be in force only so far as it shall be our pleasure." For nearly thirty years, from Philip the Handsome to Philip of Valois, the bishops and burghers of Laon were in litigation before the crown of France, the former for the maintenance of the commune of Laon in its precarious condition and at the king's good pleasure, the latter for the recovery of its independent and durable character. At last, in 1331, Philip of Valois, "considering that the olden commune of Laon, by reason of certain misdeeds and excesses, notorious, enormous, and detestable, had been removed and put down forever by decree of the court of our most clear lord and uncle, King Philip the Handsome, confirmed and approved by our most dear lords, Kings Philip and Charles, whose souls are with God, we, on great deliberation of our council, have ordained that no commune, corporation, college, shrievalty, mayor, jurymen, or any other estate or symbol belonging thereto, be at any time set up or established at Laon." By the same ordinance the municipal administration of Laon was put under the sole authority of the king and his delegates; and to blot out all remembrance of the olden independence of the commune, a later ordinance forbade that the tower from which the two huge communal bells had been removed should thenceforth be called belfry-tower.
The history of the commune of Laon is that of the majority of the towns which, in Northern and Central France, struggled from the eleventh to the fourteenth century to release themselves from feudal oppression and violence. Cambrai, Beauvais, Amiens, Soissons, Rheims, Vezelay, and several other towns displayed at this period a great deal of energy and perseverance in bringing their lords to recognize the most natural and the most necessary rights of every human creature and community. But within their walls dissensions were carried to extremity, and existence was ceaselessly tempestuous and troublous; the burghers were hasty, brutal, and barbaric,—as barbaric as the lords against whom they were defending their liberties. Amongst those mayors, sheriffs, jurats, and magistrates of different degrees and with different titles, set up in the communes, many came before very long to exercise dominion arbitrarily, violently, and in their own personal interests. The lower orders were in an habitual state of jealousy and sedition of a ruffianly kind towards the rich, the heads of the labor market, the controllers of capital and of work. This reciprocal violence, this anarchy, these internal evils and dangers, with their incessant renewals, called incessantly for intervention from without; and when, after releasing themselves from oppression and iniquity coming from above, the burghers fell a prey to pillage and massacre coming from below, they sought for a fresh protector to save them from this fresh evil. Hence that frequent recourse to the king, the great suzerain whose authority could keep down the bad magistrates of the commune or reduce the mob to order; and hence also, before long, the progressive downfall, or, at any rate, the utter enfeeblement of those communal liberties so painfully won. France was at that stage of existence and of civilization at which security can hardly be purchased save at the price of liberty. We have a phenomenon peculiar to modern times in the provident and persistent effort to reconcile security with liberty, and the bold development of individual powers with the regular maintenance of public order. This admirable solution of the social problem, still so imperfect and unstable in our time, was unknown in the middle ages; liberty was then so stormy and so fearful, that people conceived before long, if not a disgust for it, at any rate a horror of it, and sought at any price a political regimen which would give them some security, the essential aim of the social estate. When we arrive at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century, we see a host of communes falling into decay or entirely disappearing; they cease really to belong to and govern themselves; some, like Laon, Cambrai, Beauvais, and Rheims, fought a long while against decline, and tried more than once to re-establish themselves in all their independence; but they could not do without the king's support in their resistance to their lords, laic or ecclesiastical; and they were not in a condition to resist the kingship, which had grown whilst they were perishing. Others, Meulan and Soissons, for example (in 1320 and 1335), perceived their weakness early, and themselves requested the kingship to deliver them from their communal organization, and itself assume their administration. And so it is about this period, under St. Louis and Philip the Handsome, that there appear in the collections of acts of the French kingship, those great ordinances which regulate the administration of all communes within the kingly domains. Hitherto the kings had ordinarily dealt with each town severally; and as the majority were almost independent, or invested with privileges of different kiwis and carefully respected, neither the king nor any great suzerain dreamed of prescribing general rules for communal regimen, nor of administering after a uniform fashion all the communes in their domains. It was under St. Louis and Philip the Handsome that general regulations on this subject began. The French communes were associations too small and too weak to suffice for self-maintenance and self-government amidst the disturbances of the great Christian community; and they were too numerous and too little enlightened to organize themselves into one vast confederation, capable of giving them a central government. The communal liberties were not in a condition to found in France a great republican community; to the kingship appertained the power and fell the honor of presiding over the formation and the fortunes of the French nation.
But the kingship did not alone accomplish this great work. At the very time that the communes were perishing and the kingship was growing, a new power, a new social element, the Third Estate, was springing up in France; and it was called to take a far more important place in the history of France, and to exercise far more influence upon the fate of the French father-land, than it had been granted to the communes to acquire during their short and incoherent existence.
It may astonish many who study the records of French history from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, not to find anywhere the words third estate; and a desire may arise to know whether those inquirers of our day who have devoted themselves professedly to this particular study, have been more successful in discovering that grand term at the time when it seems that we ought to expect to meet with it. The question was, therefore, submitted to a learned member of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres, M. Littre, in fact, whose Dictionnaire etymologique de la Langur Francaise is consulted with respect by the whole literary world, and to a young magistrate, M. Picot, to whom the Acacdemie des Sciences morales et politiques but lately assigned the first prize for his great work on the question it had propounded, as to the history and influence of states-general in France; and here are inserted, textually, the answers given by two gentlemen of so much enlightenment and authority upon such a subject.
M. Littre, writing on the 3d of October, 1871, says, "I do not find, in my account of the word, third estate before the sixteenth century. I quote these two instances of it: 'As to the third order called third estate . . .' (La Noue, Discours, p. 541); and 'clerks and deputies for the third estate, same for the estate of labor (laborers).' (Coustumier general, t. i. p. 335.) In the fifteenth century, or at the end of the fourteenth, in the poems of Eustace Deschamps, I have—
| 'Prince, dost thou yearn for good old times again? In good old ways the Three Estates restrain.' |
"At date of fourteenth century, in Du Cange, we read under the word status, 'Per tres status concilii generalis Praelatorum, Baronum, nobilium et universitatum comitatum.' According to these documents, I think it is in the fourteenth century that they began to call the three orders tres status, and that it was only in the sixteenth century that they began to speak in French of the tiers estat (third estate). But I cannot give this conclusion as final, seeing that it is supported only by the documents I consulted for my dictionary."
M. Picot replied on the 3d of October, 1871, "It is certain that acts contemporary with King John frequently speak of the 'three estates,' but do not utter the word tiers-etat (third estate). The great chronicles and Froissart say nearly always, 'the church-men, the nobles, and the good towns.' The royal ordinances employ the same terms; but sometimes, in order not to limit their enumeration to the deputies of closed cities, they add, the good towns, and the open country (Ord. t. iii p. 221, note). When they apply to the provincial estates of the Oil tongue it is the custom to say, the burghers and inhabitants; when it is a question of the Estates of Languedoc, the commonalties of the seneschalty. Such were, in the middle of the fourteenth century, the only expressions for designating the third order.
"Under Louis XI., Juvenal des Ursins, in his harangue, addresses the deputies of the third by the title of burghers and inhabitants of the good towns. At the States of Tours, the spokesman of the estates, John de Rely, says, the people of the common estate, the estate of the people. The special memorial presented to Charles VIII. by the three orders of Languedoc likewise uses the word people.
"It is in Masselin's report and the memorial of grievances presented in 1485 that I meet for the first time with the expression third estate (tiers-etat). Masselin says, 'It was decided that each section should furnish six commissioners, two ecclesiastics, two nobles, and two of the third estate (duos ecclesiasticos, duos nobiles, et duos tertii status.)' (Documents inedits sur l'Histoire de France; proces-verbal de Masselin, p. 76.) The commencement of the chapter headed Of the Commons (du commun) is, 'For the third and common estate the said folks do represent . . .' and a few lines lower, comparing the kingdom with the human body, the compilers of the memorial say, 'The members are the clergy, the nobles, and the folks of the third estate. (Ibid. after the report of Masselin, memorial of grievances, p. 669.)
"Thus, at the end of the fifteenth century, the expression third estate was constantly employed; but is it not of older date? There are words which spring so from the nature of things that they ought to be contemporaneous with the ideas they express; their appearance in language is inevitable, and is scarcely noticed there. On the day when the deputies of the communes entered an assembly, and seated themselves beside the first two orders, the new comer, by virtue of the situation and rank occupied, took the name of third order; and as our fathers used to speak of the third denier (tiers denier), and the third day (tierce journee), so they must have spoken of the (tiers-etat) third estate. It was only at the end of the fifteenth century that the expression became common; but I am inclined to believe that it existed in the beginning of the fourteenth.
"For an instant I had imagined, in the course of my researches, that, under King John, the ordinances had designated the good towns by the name of third estate. I very soon saw my mistake; but you will see how near I found myself to the expression of which we are seeking the origin. Four times, in the great ordinance of December, 1335, the deputies wrest from the king a promise that in the next assemblies the resolutions shall be taken according to the unanimity of the orders 'without two estates, if they be of one accord, being able to bind the third.' At first sight it might be supposed that the deputies of the towns had an understanding to secure themselves from the dangers of common action on the part of the clergy and noblesse, but a more attentive examination made me fly back to a more correct opinion: it is certain that the three orders had combined for mutual protection against an alliance of any two of them. Besides, the States of 1576 saw how the clergy readopted to their profit, against the two laic orders, the proposition voted in 1355. It is beyond a doubt that this doctrine served to keep the majority from oppressing the minority whatever may have been its name. Only, in point of fact, it was most frequently the third estate that must have profited by the regulation.
"In brief, we may, before the fifteenth century, make suppositions, but they are no more than mere conjectures. It was at the great States of Tours, in 1468, that, for the first time, the third order bore the name which has been given to it by history."
The fact was far before its name. Had the third estate been centred entirely in the communes at strife with their lords, had the fate of burgherdom in France depended on the communal liberties won in that strife, we should see, at the end of the thirteenth century, that element of French society in a state of feebleness and decay. But it was far otherwise. The third estate drew its origin and nourishment from all sorts of sources; and whilst one was within an ace of drying up, the others remained abundant and fruitful. Independently of the commune properly so called and invested with the right of self-government, many towns had privileges, serviceable though limited franchises, and under the administration of the king's officers they grew in population and wealth. These towns did not share, towards the end of the thirteenth century, in the decay of the once warlike and victorious communes. Local political liberty was to seek in them; the spirit of independence and resistance did not prevail in them; but we see growing up in them another spirit which has played a grand part in French history, a spirit of little or no ambition, of little or no enterprise, timid even and scarcely dreaming of actual resistance, but honorable, inclined to order, persevering, attached to its traditional franchises, and quite able to make them respected, sooner or later. It was especially in the towns administered in the king's name and by his provosts that there was a development of this spirit, which has long been the predominant characteristic of French burgherdom. It must not be supposed that, in the absence of real communal independence, these towns lacked all internal security. The kingship was ever fearful lest its local officers should render themselves independent, and remembered what had become in the ninth century of the crown's offices, the duchies and the countships, and of the difficulty it had at that time to recover the scattered remnants of the old imperial authority. And so the Capetian kings with any intelligence, such as Louis VI., Philip Augustus, St. Louis, and Philip the Handsome, were careful to keep a hand over their provosts, sergeants, and officers of all kinds, in order that their power should not grow so great as to become formidable. At this time, besides, Parliament and the whole judicial system was beginning to take form; and many questions relating to the administration of the towns, many disputes between the provosts and burghers, were carried before the Parliament of Paris, and there decided with more independence and equity than they would have been by any other power. A certain measure of impartiality is inherent in judicial power; the habit of delivering judgment according to written texts, of applying laws to facts, produces a natural and almost instinctive respect for old-acquired rights. In Parliament the towns often obtained justice and the maintenance of their franchises against the officers of the king. The collection of kingly ordinances at this time abounds with instances of the kind. These judges, besides, these bailiffs, these provosts, these seneschals, and all these officers of the king or of the great suzerains, formed before long a numerous and powerful class. Now the majority amongst them were burghers, and their number and their power were turned to the advantage of burgherdom, and led day by day to its further extension and importance. Of all the original sources of the third estate, this it is, perhaps, which has contributed most to bring about the social preponderance of that order. Just when burgherdom, but lately formed, was losing in many of the communes a portion of its local liberties, at that same moment it was seizing by the hand of Parliaments, provosts, judges, and administrators of all kinds, a large share of central power. It was through burghers admitted into the king's service and acting as administrators or judges in his name that communal independence and charters were often attacked and abolished; but at the same time they fortified and elevated burgherdom, they caused it to acquire from day to day more wealth, more credit, more importance and power in the internal and external affairs of the state.
Philip the Handsome, that ambitious and despotic prince, was under no delusion when in 1302, 1308, and 1314, on convoking the first states-general of France, he summoned thither "the deputies of the good towns." He did not yet give them the name of third estate; but he was perfectly aware that he was thus summoning to his aid against Boniface VIII. and the Templars and the Flemings a class already invested throughout the country with great influence and ready to lend him efficient support. His son, Philip the Long, was under no delusion when in 1317 and 1321 he summoned to the states-general "the commonalties and good towns of the kingdom" to decide upon the interpretation of the Salle law as to the succession to the throne, "or to advise as to the means of establishing a uniformity of coins, weights, and measures;" he was perfectly aware that the authority of burgherdom would be of great assistance to him in the accomplishment of acts so grave. And the three estates played the prelude to the formation, painful and slow as it was, of constitutional monarchy, when, in 1338, under Philip of Valois, they declared, "in presence of the said king, Philip of Valois, who assented thereto, that there should be no power to impose or levy talliage in France if urgent necessity or evident utility did not require it, and then only by grant of the people of the estates."
In order to properly understand the French third estate and its importance, more is required than to look on at its birth; a glance must be taken at its grand destiny and the results at which it at last arrived. Let us, therefore, anticipate centuries and get a glimpse, now at once, of that upon which the course of events from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century will shed full light.
Taking the history of France in its entirety and under all its phases, the third estate has been the most active and determining element in the process of French civilization. If we follow it in its relation with the general government of the country, we see it at first allied for six centuries to the kingship, struggling without cessation against the feudal aristocracy and giving predominance in place thereof to a single central power, pure monarchy, closely bordering, though with some frequently repeated but rather useless reservations, on absolute monarchy. But, so soon as it had gained this victory and brought about this revolution, the third estate went in pursuit of a new one, attacking that single power to the foundation of which it had contributed so much and entering upon the task of changing pure monarchy into constitutional monarchy. Under whatever aspect we regard it during these two great enterprises, so different one from the other, whether we study the progressive formation of French society or that of its government, the third estate is the most powerful and the most persistent of the forces which have influenced French civilization.
This fact is unique in the history of the world. We recognize in the career of the chief nations of Asia and ancient Europe nearly all the great facts which have agitated France; we meet in them mixture of different races, conquest of people by people, immense inequality between classes, frequent changes in the forms of government and extent of public power; but nowhere is there any appearance of a class which, starting from the very lowest, from being feeble, despised, and almost imperceptible at its origin, rises by perpetual motion and by labor without respite, strengthens itself from period to period, acquires in succession whatever it lacked, wealth, enlightenment, influence, changes the face of society and the nature of government, and arrives at last at such a pitch of predominance that it may be said to be absolutely the country. More than once in the world's history the external semblances of such and such a society have been the same as those which have just been reviewed here, but it is mere semblance. In India, for example, foreign invasions and the influx and establishment of different races upon the same soil have occurred over and over again; but with what result? The permanence of caste has not been touched; and society has kept its divisions into distinct and almost changeless classes. After India take China. There too history exhibits conquests similar to the conquest of Europe by the Germans; and there too, more than once, the barbaric conquerors settled amidst a population of the conquered. What was the result? The conquered all but absorbed the conquerors, and changelessness was still the predominant characteristic of the social condition. In Western Asia, after the invasions of the Turks, the separation between victors and vanquished remained insurmountable; no ferment in the heart of society, no historical event, could efface this first effect of conquest. In Persia, similar events succeeded one another; different races fought and intermingled; and the end was irremediable social anarchy, which has endured for ages without any change in the social condition of the country, without a shadow of any development of civilization.
So much for Asia. Let us pass to the Europe of the Greeks and Romans. At the first blush we seem to recognize some analogy between the progress of these brilliant societies and that of French society; but the analogy is only apparent; there is, once more, nothing resembling the fact and the history of the French third estate. One thing only has struck sound judgments as being somewhat like the struggle of burgherdom in the middle ages against the feudal aristocracy, and that is the struggle between the plebeians and patricians at Rome. They have often been compared; but it is a baseless comparison. The struggle between the plebeians and patricians commenced from the very cradle of the Roman republic; it was not, as happened in the France of the middle ages, the result of a slow, difficult, incomplete development on the part of a class which, through a long course of great inferiority in strength, wealth, and credit, little by little extended itself and raised itself, and ended by engaging in a real contest with the superior class. It is now acknowledged that the struggle at Rome between the plebeians and patricians was a sequel and a prolongation of the war of conquest, was an effort on the part of the aristocracy of the cities conquered by Rome to share the rights of the conquering aristocracy. The families of plebeians were the chief families of the vanquished peoples; and though placed by defeat in a position of inferiority, they were not any the less aristocratic families, powerful but lately in their own cities, encompassed by clients, and calculated from the very first to dispute with their conquerors the possession of power. There is nothing in all this like that slow, obscure, heart-breaking travail of modern burgherdom escaping, full hardly, from the midst of slavery or a condition approximating to slavery, and spending centuries, not in disputing political power, but in winning its own civil existence. The more closely the French third estate is examined, the more it is recognized as a new fact in the world's history, appertaining exclusively to the civilization of modern, Christian Europe.
Not only is the fact new, but it has for France an entirely special interest, since—to employ an expression much abused in the present day— it is a fact eminently French, essentially national. Nowhere has burgherdom had so wide and so productive a career as that which fell to its lot in France. There have been communes in the whole of Europe, in Italy, Spain, Germany, and England, as well as in France. Not only have there been communes everywhere, but the communes of France are not those which, as communes, under that name and in the middle ages, have played the chiefest part and taken the highest place in history. The Italian communes were the parents of glorious republics. The German communes became free and sovereign towns, which had their own special history, and exercised a great deal of influence upon the general history of Germany. The communes of England made alliance with a portion of the English feudal aristocracy, formed with it the preponderating house in the British government, and thus played, full early, a mighty part in the history of their country. Far were the French communes, under that name and in their day of special activity, from rising to such political importance and to such historical rank. And yet it is in France that the people of the communes, the burgherdom, reached the most complete and most powerful development, and ended by acquiring the most decided preponderance in the general social structure. There have been communes, we say, throughout Europe; but there has not really been a victorious third estate anywhere, save in France. The revolution of 1789, the greatest ever seen, was the culminating point arrived at by the third estate; and France is the only country in which a man of large mind could, in a burst of burgher's pride, exclaim, "What is the third estate? Everything."
Since the explosion, and after all the changes, liberal and illiberal, due to the revolution of 1789, there has been a common-place, ceaselessly repeated, to the effect that there are no more classes in French society —there is only a nation of thirty-seven millions of persons. If it be meant that there are now no more privileges in France, no special laws and private rights for such and such families, proprietorships, and occupations, and that legislation is the same, and there is perfect freedom of movement for all, at all steps of the social ladder, it is true; oneness of laws and similarity of rights, is now the essential and characteristic fact of civil society in France, an immense, an excellent, and a novel fact in the history of human associations. But beneath the dominance of this fact, in the midst of this national unity and this civil equality, there evidently and necessarily exist numerous and important diversities and inequalities, which oneness of laws and similarity of rights neither prevent nor destroy. In point of property, real or personal, land or capital, there are rich and poor; there are the large, the middling, and the small property. Though the great proprietors may be less numerous and less rich, and the middling and the small proprietors more numerous and more powerful than they were of yore, this does not prevent the difference from being real and great enough to create, in the civil body, social positions widely different and unequal. In the professions which are called liberal, and which live by brains and knowledge, amongst barristers, doctors, scholars, and literates of all kinds, some rise to the first rank, attract to themselves practice and success, and win fame, wealth, and influence; others make enough, by hard work, for the necessities of their families and the calls of their position; others vegetate obscurely in a sort of lazy discomfort. In the other vocations, those in which the labor is principally physical and manual, there also it is according to nature that there should be different and unequal positions; some, by brains and good conduct, make capital, and get a footing upon the ways of competence and progress; others, being dull, or idle, or disorderly, remain in the straitened and precarious condition of existence depending solely on wages. Throughout the whole extent of the social structure, in the ranks of labor as well as of property, differences and inequalities of position are produced or kept up and co-exist with oneness of laws and similarity of rights. Examine any human associations, in any place and at any time, and whatever diversity there may be in point of their origin, organization, government, extent, and duration, there will be found in all three types of social position always fundamentally the same, though they may appear under different and differently distributed forms; 1st, men living on income from their properties, real or personal, land or capital, without seeking to increase them by their own personal and assiduous labor; 2d, men devoted to working up and increasing, by their own personal and assiduous labor, the real or personal properties, land or capital they possess; 3d, men living by their daily labor, without land or capital to give them an income. And these differences, these inequalities in the social position of men, are not matters of accident or violence, or peculiar to such and such a time, or such and such a country; they are matters of universal application, produced spontaneously in every human society by virtue of the primitive and general laws of human nature, in the midst of events and under the influence of social systems utterly different.
These matters exist now and in France as they did of old and elsewhere. Whether you do or do not use the name of classes, the new French social fabric contains, and will not cease to contain, social positions widely different and unequal. What constitutes its blessing and its glory is, that privilege and fixity no longer cling to this difference of positions; that there are no more special rights and advantages legally assigned to some and inaccessible to others; that all roads are free and open to all to rise to everything; that personal merit and toil have an infinitely greater share than was ever formerly allowed to them in the fortunes of men. The third estate of the old regimen exists no more; it disappeared in its victory over privilege and absolute power; it has for heirs the middle classes, as they are now called; but these classes, whilst inheriting the conquests of the old third estate, hold them on new conditions also, as legitimate as binding. To secure their own interests, as well as to discharge their public duty, they are bound to be at once conservative and liberal; they must, on the one hand, enlist and rally beneath their flag the old, once privileged superioritics, which have survived the fall of the old regimen, and, on the other hand, fully recognize the continual upward movement which is fermenting in the whole body of the nation. That, in its relations with the aristocratic classes, the third estate of the old regimen should have been and for a long time remained uneasy, disposed to take umbrage, jealous and even envious, is no more than natural; it had its rights to urge and its conquests to gain; nowadays its conquests have been won, the rights are recognized, proclaimed, and exercised; the middle classes have no longer any legitimate ground for uneasiness or envy; they can rest with full confidence in their own dignity and their own strength; they have undergone all the necessary trials, and passed all the necessary tests. In respect of the lower orders, and the democracy properly so called, the position of the middle classes is no less favorable; they have no fixed line of separation; for who can say where the middle classes begin and where they end? In the name of the principles of common rights and general liberty they were formed; and by the working of the same principles they are being constantly recruited, and are incessantly drawing new vigor from the sources whence they sprang. To maintain common rights and free movement upwards against the retrograde tendencies of privilege and absolute power, on the one hand, and on the other against the insensate and destructive pretensions of levellers and anarchists, is now the double business of the middle classes; and it is at the same time, for themselves, the sure way of preserving preponderance in the state, in the name of general interests, of which those classes are the most real and most efficient representatives.
On reaching, in our history, the period at which Philip the Handsome, by giving admission amongst the states-general to the "burghers of the good towns," substituted the third estate for the communes, and the united action of the three great classes of Frenchmen for their local struggles, we did well to halt a while, in order clearly to mark the position and part of the new actor in the great drama of national life. We will now return to the real business of the drama, that is, to the history of France, which became, in the fourteenth century, more complex, more tragic, and more grand than it had ever yet been.
CHAPTER XX.
THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR.—PHILIP VI. AND JOHN II.
We have just been spectators at the labor of formation of the French kingship and the French nation. We have seen monarchical unity and national unity rising, little by little, out of and above the feudal system, which had been the first result of barbarians settling upon the ruins of the Roman empire. In the fourteenth century, a new and a vital question arose: Will the French dominion preserve its nationality? Will the kingship remain French, or pass to the foreigner? This question brought ravages upon France, and kept her fortunes in suspense for a hundred years of war with England, from the reign of Philip of Valois to that of Charles VII.; and a young girl of Lorraine, called Joan of Arc, had the glory of communicating to France that decisive impulse which brought to a triumphant issue the independence of the French nation and kingship.
As we have seen in the preceding chapter, the elevation of Philip of Valois to the throne, as representative of the male line amongst the descendants of Hugh Capet, took place by virtue, not of any old written law, but of a traditional right, recognized and confirmed by two recent resolutions taken at the death of the two eldest sons of Philip the Handsome. The right thus promulgated became at once a fact accepted by the whole of France; Philip of Valois had for rival none but a foreign prince, and "there was no mind in France," say contemporary chroniclers, "to be subjects of the King of England." Some weeks after his accession, on the 29th of May, 1328, Philip was crowned at Rheims, in presence of a brilliant assemblage of princes and lords, French and foreign; and next year, on the 6th of June, Edward III., King of England, being summoned to fulfil a vassal's duties by doing homage to the King of France for the duchy of Aquitaine, which he held, appeared in the cathedral of Amiens, with his crown on his head, his sword at his side, and his gilded spurs on his heels. When he drew near to the throne, the Viscount de Melun, king's chamberlain, invited him to lay aside his crown, his sword, and his spurs, and go down on his knees before Philip. Not without a murmur, Edward obeyed; but when the chamberlain said to him, "Sir, you, as Duke of Aquitaine, became liegeman of my lord the king who is here, and do promise to keep towards him faith and loyalty," Edward protested, saying that he owed only simple homage, and not liege-homage—a closer bond, imposing on the vassal more stringent obligations [to serve and defend his suzerain against every enemy whatsoever]. "Cousin," said Philip to him, "we would not deceive you, and what you have now done contenteth us well until you have returned to your own country, and seen from the acts of your predecessors what you ought to do."
"Gramercy, dear sir," answered the King of England; and with the reservation he had just made, and which was added to the formula of homage, he placed his hands between the hands of the King of France, who kissed him on the mouth, and accepted his homage, confiding in Edward's promise to certify himself by reference to the archives of England of the extent to which his ancestors had been bound. The certification took place, and on the 30th of March, 1331, about two years after his visit to Amiens, Edward III. recognized, by letters express, "that the said homage which we did at Amiens to the King of France in general terms, is and must be understood as liege; and that we are bound, as Duke of Aquitaine and peer of France, to show him faith and loyalty."
The relations between the two kings were not destined to be for long so courteous and so pacific. Even before the question of the succession to the throne of France arose between them they had adopted contrary policies. When Philip was crowned at Rheims, Louis de Nevers, Count of Flanders, repaired thither with a following of eighty-six knights, and he it was to whom the right belonged of carrying the sword of the kingdom. The heralds-at-arms repeated three times, "Count of Flanders, if you are here, come and do your duty." He made no answer. The king was astounded, and bade him explain himself. "My lord," answered the count, "may it please you not to be astounded; they called the Count of Flanders, and not Louis de Nevers." "What then!" replied the king; "are you not the Count of Flanders?" "It is true, sir," rejoined the other, "that I bear the name, but I do not possess the authority; the burghers of Bruges, Ypres, and Cassel have driven me from my land, and there scarce remains but the town of Ghent where I dare show myself." "Fair cousin," said Philip, "we will swear to you by the holy oil which hath this day trickled over our brow that we will not enter Paris again before seeing you reinstated in peaceable possession of the countship of Flanders." Some of the French barons who happened to be present represented to the king that the Flemish burghers were powerful; that autumn was a bad season for a war in their country; and that Louis the Quarreller, in 1315, had been obliged to come to a stand-still in a similar expedition. Philip consulted his constable, Walter de Chatillon, who had served the kings his predecessors in their wars against Flanders. "Whoso hath good stomach for fight," answered the constable, "findeth all times seasonable." "Well, then," said the king, embracing him, "whoso loveth me will follow me." The war thus resolved upon was forthwith begun. Philip, on arriving with his army before Cassel, found the place defended by sixteen thousand Flemings under the command of Nicholas Zannequin, the richest of the burghers of Furnes, and already renowned for his zeal in the insurrection against the count. For several days the French remained inactive around the mountain on which Cassel is built, and which the knights, mounted on iron-clad horses, were unable to scale. The Flemings had planted on a tower of Cassel a flag carrying a cock, with this inscription:—
| "When the cock that is hereon shall crow, The foundling king herein shall go." |
They called Philip the foundling king because he had no business to expect to be king. Philip in his wrath gave up to fire and pillage the outskirts of the place. The Flemings marshalled at the top of the mountain made no movement. On the 24th of August, 1328, about three in the afternoon, the French knights had disarmed. Some were playing at chess; others "strolled from tent to tent in their fine robes, in search of amusement;" and the king was asleep in his tent after a long carouse, when all on a sudden his confessor, a Dominican friar, shouted out that the Flemings were attacking the camp. Zannequin, indeed, "came out full softly and without a bit of noise," says Froissart, "with his troops in three divisions, to surprise the French camp at three points. He was quite close to the king's tent, and some chroniclers say that he was already lifting his mace over the head of Philip, who had armed in hot haste, and was defended only by a few knights, of whom one was waving the oriflamme round him, when others hurried up, and Zannequin was forced to stay his hand. At two other points of the camp the attack had failed. The French gathered about the king and the Flemings about Zannequin; and there took place so stubborn a fight, that "of sixteen thousand Flemings who were there not one recoiled," says Froissart, "and all were left there dead and slain in three heaps one upon another, without budging from the spot where the battle had begun." The same evening Philip entered Cassel, which he set on fire, and, in a few days afterwards, on leaving for France, he said to Count Louis, before the French barons, Count, I have worked for you at my own and my barons' expense; I give you back your land, recovered and in peace; so take care that justice be kept up in it, and that I have not, through your fault, to return; for if I do, it will be to my own profit and to your hurt."
The Count of Flanders was far from following the advice of the King of France, and the King of France was far from foreseeing whither he would be led by the road upon which he had just set foot. It has already been pointed out to what a position of wealth, population, and power, industrial and commercial activity had in the thirteenth century raised the towns of Flanders, Bruges, Ghent, Lille, Ypres, Fumes, Courtrai, and Douai, and with what energy they had defended against their lords their prosperity and their liberties. It was the struggle, sometimes sullen, sometimes violent, of feudal lordship against municipal burgherdom. The able and imperious Philip the Handsome had tested the strength of the Flemish cities, and had not cared to push them to extremity. When, in 1322, Count Louis de Nevers, scarcely eighteen years of age, inherited from his grandfather Robert III. the countship of Flanders, he gave himself up, in respect of the majority of towns in the countship, to the same course of oppression and injustice as had been familiar to his predecessors; the burghers resisted him with the same, often ruffianly, energy; and when, after a six years' struggle amongst Flemings, the Count of Flanders, who had been conquered by the burghers, owed his return as master of his countship to the King of the French, he troubled himself about nothing but avenging himself and enjoying his victory at the expense of the vanquished. He chastised, despoiled, proscribed, and inflicted atrocious punishments; and, not content with striking at individuals, he attacked the cities themselves. Nearly all of them, save Ghent, which had been favorable to the count, saw their privileges annulled or curtailed of their most essential guarantees. The burghers of Bruges were obliged to meet the count half way to his castle of Vale, and on their knees implore his pity. At Ypres the bell in the tower was broken up. Philip of Valois made himself a partner in these severities; he ordered the fortifications of Bruges, Ypres, and Courtrai to be destroyed, and he charged French agents to see to their demolition. Absolute power is often led into mistakes by its insolence; but when it is in the hands of rash and reckless mediocrity, there is no knowing how clumsy and blind it can be. Neither the King of France nor the Count of Flanders seemed to remember that the Flemish communes had at their door a natural and powerful ally who could not do without them any more than they could do without him. Woollen stuffs, cloths, carpets, warm coverings of every sort were the chief articles of the manufactures and commerce of Flanders; there chiefly was to be found all that the active and enterprising merchants of the time exported to Sweden, Norway, Hungary, Russia, and even Asia; and it was from England that they chiefly imported their wool, the primary staple of their handiwork. "All Flanders," says Froissart, "was based upon cloth and no wool, no cloth." On the other hand it was to Flanders that England, her land-owners and farmers, sold the fleeces of their flocks; and the two countries were thus united by the bond of their mutual prosperity. The Count of Flanders forgot or defied this fact so far as in 1336, at the instigation, it is said, of the King of France, to have all the English in Flanders arrested and kept in prison. Reprisals were not long deferred. On the 5th of October in the same year the King of England ordered the arrest of all Flemish merchants in his kingdom and the seizure of their goods; and he at the same time prohibited the exportation of wool. "Flanders was given over," says her principal historian, "to desolation; nearly all her looms ceased rattling on one and the same day, and the streets of her cities, but lately filled with rich and busy workmen, were overrun with beggars who asked in vain for work to escape from misery and hunger." The English land-owners and farmers did not suffer so much, but were scarcely less angered; only it was to the King of France and the Count of Flanders rather than their own king that they held themselves indebted for the stagnation of their affairs, and their discontent sought vent only in execration of the foreigner.
When great national interests are to such a point misconceived and injured, there crop up, before long, clear-sighted and bold men who undertake the championship of them, and foment the quarrel to explosion-heat, either from personal views or patriotic feeling. The question of succession to the throne of France seemed settled by the inaction of the King of England, and the formal homage he had come and paid to the King of France at Amiens; but it was merely in abeyance. Many people both in England and in France still thought of it and spoke of it; and many intrigues bred of hope or fear were kept up with reference to it at the courts of the two kings. When the rumblings of anger were loud on both sides in consequence of affairs in Flanders, two men of note, a Frenchman and a Fleming, considering that the hour had come, determined to revive the question, and turn the great struggle which could not fail to be excited thereby to the profit of their own and their countries' cause, for it is singular how ambition and devotion, selfishness and patriotism, combine and mingle in the human soul, and even in great souls.
Philip VI. had embroiled himself with a prince of his line, Robert of Artois, great-grandson of Robert the first Count of Artois, who was a brother of St. Louis, and was killed during the crusade in Egypt, at the battle of Mansourah. As early as the reign of Philip the Handsome Robert claimed the count-ship of Artois as his heritage; but having had his pretensions rejected by a decision of the peers of the kingdom, he had hoped for more success under Philip of Valois, whose sister he had married. Philip tried to satisfy him with another domain raised to a peerage; but Robert, more and more discontented, got involved in a series of intrigues, plots, falsehoods, forgeries, and even, according to public report, imprisonments and crimes, which, in 1332, led to his being condemned by the court of peers to banishment and the confiscation of his property. He fled for refuge first to Brabant, and then to England, to the court of Edward III., who received him graciously, and whom he forthwith commenced inciting to claim the crown of France, "his inheritance," as he said, "which King Philip holds most wrongfully." Edward III., who was naturally prudent, and had been involved, almost ever since his accession, in a stubborn war with Scotland, cared but little for rushing into a fresh and far more serious enterprise. But of all human passions hatred is perhaps the most determined in the prosecution of its designs. Robert accompanied the King of England in his campaigns northward; and "Sir," said he, whilst they were marching together over the heaths of Scotland, "leave this poor country, and give your thoughts to the noble crown of France." When Edward, on returning to London, was self-complacently rejoicing at his successes over his neighbors, Robert took pains to pique his self-respect, by expressing astonishment that he did not seek more practical and more brilliant successes. Poetry sometimes reveals sentiments and processes about which history is silent. We read in a poem of the fourteenth century, entitled The vow on the heron, "In the season when summer is verging upon its decline, and the gay birds are forgetting their sweet converse on the trees, now despoiled of their verdure, Robert seeks for consolation in the pleasures of fowling, for he cannot forget the gentle land of France, the glorious country whence he is an exile. He carries a falcon, which goes flying over the waters till a heron falls its prey; then he calls two young damsels to take the bird to the king's palace, singing the while in sweet discourse: 'Fly, fly, ye honorless knights; give place to gallants on whom love smiles; here is the dish for gallants who are faithful to their mistresses. The heron is the most timid of birds, for it fears its own shadow; it is for the heron to receive the vows of King Edward, who, though lawful King of France, dares not claim that noble heritage.' At these words the king flushed, his heart was wroth, and he cried aloud, 'Since coward is thrown in my teeth, I make vow [on this heron] to the God of Paradise that ere a single year rolls by I will defy the King of Paris.' Count Robert hears and smiles; and low to his own heart he says, 'Now have I won: and my heron will cause a great war.'"
Robert's confidence in this tempter's work of his was well founded, but a little premature. Edward III. did not repel him; complained loudly of the assistance rendered by the King of France to the Scots; gave an absolute refusal to Philip's demands for the extradition of the rebel Robert, and retorted by protesting, in his turn, against the reception accorded in France to David Bruce, the rival of his own favorite Baliol for the throne of Scotland. In Aquitaine he claimed as of his own domain some places still occupied by Philip. Philip, on his side, neglected no chance of causing Edward embarrassment, and more or less overtly assisting his foes. The two kings were profoundly distrustful one of the other, foresaw, both of them, that they would one day come to blows, and prepared for it by mutually working to entangle and enfeeble one another. But neither durst as yet proclaim his wishes or his fears, and take the initiative in those unknown events which war must bring about to the great peril of their people and perhaps of themselves. From 1334 to 1337, as they continued to advance towards the issue, foreseen and at the same time deferred, of this situation, they were both of them seeking allies in Europe for their approaching struggle. Philip had a notable one under his thumb, the pope at that time settled at Avignon; and he made use of him for the purpose of proposing a new crusade, in which Edward III. should be called upon to join with him. If Edward complied, any enterprise on his part against France would become impossible; and if he declined, Christendom would cry fie upon him. Two successive popes, John XXII. and Benedict XII., preached the crusade, and offered their mediation to settle the differences between the two kings; but they were unsuccessful in both their attempts. The two kings strained every nerve to form laic alliances. Philip did all he could to secure to himself the fidelity of Count Louis of Flanders, whom the King of England several times attempted, but in vain, to win over. Philip drew into close relations with himself the Kings of Bohemia and Navarre, the Dukes of Lorraine and Burgundy, the Count of Foix, the Genoese, the Grand Prior of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, and many other lords. The two principal neighbors of Flanders, the Count of Hainault and the Duke of Brabant, received the solicitations of both kings at one and the same time. The former had to wife Joan of Valois, sister of the King of France, but he had married his daughter Philippa to the King of England; and when Edward's envoys came and asked for his support in "the great business which their master had in view." "If the king can succeed in it," said the count, "I shall be right glad. It may well be supposed that my heart is with him, him who hath my daughter, rather than with King Philip, though I have married his sister; for he hath filched from me the hand of the young Duke of Brabant, who should have wedded my daughter Isabel, and hath kept him for a daughter of his own. So help will I my dear and beloved son the King of England to the best of my power. But he must get far stronger aid than mine, for Hainault is but a little place in comparison with the kingdom of France, and England is too far off to succor us." "Dear sir," said the envoys, "advise us of what lords our master might best seek aid, and in what he might best put his trust." "By my soul," said the count, "I could not point to lord so powerful to aid him in this business as would be the Duke of Brabant, who is his cousin-german, the Duke of Gueldres, who hath his sister to wife, and Sire de Fauquemont. They are those who would have most men-at-arms in the least time, and they are right good soldiers; provided that money be given them in proportion, for they are lords and men who are glad of pay." Edward III. went for powerful allies even beyond the Rhine; he treated with Louis V. of Bavaria, Emperor of Germany; he even had a solemn interview with him at a diet assembled at Coblenz, and Louis named Edward vicar imperial throughout all the empire situated on the left bank of the Rhine, with orders to all the princes of the Low Countries to follow and obey him, for a space of seven years, in the field. But Louis of Bavaria was a tottering emperor, excommunicated by the pope, and with a formidable competitor in Frederick of Austria. When the time for action arrived, King John of Bohemia, a zealous ally of the French king, persuaded the Emperor of Germany that his dignity would be compromised if he were to go and join the army of the English king, in whose pay he would appear to have enlisted; and Louis of Bavaria withdrew from his alliance with Edward III., sending back the subsidies he had received from him.
Which side were the Flemings themselves to take in a conflict of such importance, and already so hot even before it had reached bursting point? It was clearly in Flanders that each king was likely to find his most efficient allies; and so it was there that they made the most strenuous applications. Edward III. hastened to restore between England and the Flemish communes the commercial relations which had been for a while disturbed by the arrest of the traders in both countries. He sent into Flanders, even to Ghent, ambassadors charged to enter into negotiations with the burghers; and one of the most considerable amongst these burghers, Solver of Courtrai, who had but lately supported Count Louis in his quarrels with the people of Bruges, loudly declared that the alliance of the King of England was the first requirement of Flanders, and gave apartments in his own house to one of the English envoys. Edward proposed the establishment in Flanders of a magazine for English wools; and he gave assurance to such Flemish weavers as would settle in England of all the securities they could desire. He even offered to give his daughter Joan in marriage to the son of the Count of Flanders. Philip, on his side, tried hard to reconcile the communes of Flanders to their count, and so make them faithful to himself; he let them off two years' payment of a rent due to him of forty thousand livres of Paris per annum; he promised them the monopoly of exporting wools from France; he authorized the Brugesmen to widen the moats of their city, and even to repair its ramparts. The King of England's envoys met in most of the Flemish cities with a favor which was real, but intermingled with prudent reservations, and Count Louis of Flanders remained ever closely allied with the King of France, "for he was right French and loyal," says Froissart, "and with good reason, for he had the King of France almost alone to thank for restoring him to his country by force."
Whilst, by both sides, preparations were thus being made on the Continent for war, the question which was to make it burst forth was being decided in England. In the soul of Edward temptation overcame indecision. As early as the month of June, 1336, in a Parliament assembled at Northampton, he had complained of the assistance given by the King of France to the Scots, and he had expressed a "hope that if the French and the Scots were to join, they would at last offer him battle, which the latter had always carefully avoided." In September of the same year he employed similar language in a Parliament held at Nottingham, and he obtained therefrom subsidies for the war going on not only in Scotland, but also in Aquitaine, against the French king's lieutenants. In April and May of the following year, 1337, he granted to Robert of Artois, his tempter for three years past, court favors which proved his resolution to have been already taken. On the 21st of August following he formally declared war against the King of France, and addressed to all the sheriffs, archbishops, and bishops of his kingdom a circular in which he attributed the initiative to Philip; on the 26th of August he gave his ally, the Emperor of Germany, notice of what he had just done, whilst, for the first time, insultingly describing Philip as "setting himself up for King of France." At last, on the 7th of October, 1337, he proclaimed himself King of France, as his lawful inheritance, designating as representatives and supporters of his right the Duke of Brabant, the Marquis of Juliers, the Count of Hainault, and William de Bohun, Earl of Northampton.
The enterprise had no foundation in right, and seemed to have few chances of success. If the succession to the crown of France had not been regulated beforehand by a special and positive law, Philip of Valois had on his side the traditional right of nearly three centuries past and actual possession without any disputes having arisen in France upon the subject. His title had been expressly declared by the peers of the kingdom, sanctioned by the Church, and recognized by Edward himself, who had come to pay him homage. He had the general and free assent of his people: to repeat the words of the chroniclers of the time, "There was no mind in France to be subjects of the King of England." Philip VI. was regarded in Europe as a greater and more powerful sovereign than Edward III. He had the pope settled in the midst of his kingdom; and he often traversed it with an array of valiant nobility whom he knew how to support and serve on occasion as faithfully as he was served by them. "He was highly prized and honored," says Froissart, "for the victory he had won (at Cassel) over the Flemings, and also for the handsome service he had done his cousin Count Louis. He did thereby abide in great prosperity and honor, and he greatly increased the royal state; never had there been king in France, it was said, who had kept state like King Philip, and he provided tourneys and jousts and diversions in great abundance." No national interest, no public ground, was provocative of war between the two peoples; it was a war of personal ambition, like that which in the eleventh century William the Conqueror had carried into England. The memory of that great event was still, in the fourteenth century, so fresh in France, that when the pretensions of Edward were declared, and the struggle was begun, an assemblage of Normans, barons and knights, or, according to others, the Estates of Normandy themselves, came and proposed to Philip to undertake once more, and at their own expense, the conquest of England, if he would put at their head his eldest son, John, their own duke. The king received their deputation at Vincennes, on the 23d of March, 1339, and accepted their offer. They bound themselves to supply for the expedition four thousand men-at-arms and twenty thousand foot, whom they promised to maintain for ten weeks, and even a fortnight beyond, if, when the Duke of Normandy had crossed to England, his council should consider the prolongation necessary. The conditions in detail and the subsequent course of the enterprise thus projected were minutely regulated and settled in a treaty published by Dutillet in 1588, from a copy found at Caen when Edward III. became master of that city in 1346. The events of the war, the long fits of hesitation on the part of both kings, and the repeated alternations from hostilities to truces and truces to hostilities, prevented anything from coming of this proposal, the authenticity of which has been questioned by M. Michelet amongst others, but the genuineness of which has been demonstrated by M. Adolph Despont, member of the appeal-court of Caen, in his learned Histoire du Cotentin.
Edward III., though he had proclaimed himself King of France, did not at the outset of his claim adopt the policy of a man firmly resolved and burning to succeed. From 1337 to 1340 he behaved as if he were at strife with the Count of Flanders rather than with the King of France. He was incessantly to and fro, either by embassy or in person, between England, Flanders, Hainault, Brabant, and even Germany, for the purpose of bringing the princes and people to actively co-operate with him against his rival; and during this diplomatic movement such was the hostility between the King of England and the Count of Flanders that Edward's ambassadors thought it impossible for them to pass through Flanders in safety, and went to Holland for a ship in which to return to England. Nor were their fears groundless; for the Count of Flanders had caused to be arrested, and was still detaining in prison at the castle of Rupelmonde, the Fleming Sohier of Courtrai, who had received into his house at Ghent one of the English envoys, and had shown himself favorable to their cause. Edward keenly resented these outrages, demanded, but did not obtain, the release of Sohier of Courtrai, and by way of revenge gave orders in November, 1337, to two of his bravest captains, the Earl of Derby and Walter de Manny, to go and attack the fort of Cadsand, situated between the Island of Walcheren and the town of Ecluse (or Sluys), a post of consequence to the Count of Flanders, who had confided the keeping of it to his bastard brother Guy, with five thousand of his most faithful subjects. It was a sanguinary affair. The besieged were surprised, but defended themselves bravely; the landing cost the English dear; the Earl of Derby was wounded and hurled to the ground, but his comrade, Walter de Manny, raised him up with a shout to his men of "Lancaster, for the Earl of Derby;" and at last the English prevailed. The Bastard of Flanders was made prisoner; the town was pillaged and burned; and the English returned to England, and "told their adventure," says Froissart, "to the king, who was right joyous when he saw them and learned how they had sped."
Thus began that war which was to be so cruel and so long. The Flemings bore the first brunt of it. It was a lamentable position for them; their industrial and commercial prosperity was being ruined; their security at home was going from them; their communal liberties were compromised; divisions set in amongst them; by interest and habitual intercourse they were drawn towards England, but the count, their lord, did all he could to turn them away from her, and many amongst them were loath to separate themselves entirely from France. Burghers of Ghent, as they chatted in the thoroughfares and at the cross-roads, said one to another, that they had heard much wisdom, to their mind, from a burgher who was called James Van Artevelde, and who was a brewer of beer. They had heard him say that, if he could obtain a hearing and credit, he would in a little while restore Flanders to good estate, and they would recover all their gains without standing ill with the King of France or the King of England. These sayings began to get spread abroad, insomuch that a quarter or half the city was informed thereof, especially the small folks of the commonalty, whom the evil touched most nearly. They began to assemble in the streets, and it came to pass that one day, after dinner, several went from house to house calling for their comrades, and saying, 'Come and hear the wise man's counsel.' On the 26th of December, 1337, they came to the house of the said James Van Artevelde, and found him leaning against his door.
Far off as they were when they first perceived him, they made him a deep obeisance, and 'Dear sir,' they said, 'we are come to you for counsel; for we are told that by your great and good sense you will restore the country of Flanders to good case. So tell us how.' Then James Van Artevelde came forward, and said, 'Sirs comrades, I am a native and burgher of this city, and here I have my means. Know that I would gladly aid you with all my power, you and all the country; if there were here a man who would be willing to take the lead, I would be willing to risk body and means at his side; and if the rest of ye be willing to be brethren, friends and comrades to me, to abide in all matters at my side, notwithstanding that I am not worthy of it, I will undertake it willingly.' Then said all with one voice, 'We promise you faithfully to abide at your side in all matters and to therewith adventure body and means, for we know well that in the whole countship of Flanders there is not a man but you worthy so to do.' Then Van Artevelde bound them to assemble on the next day but one in the grounds of the monastery of Biloke, which had received numerous benefits from the ancestors of Sohier of Courtrai, whose son-in-law Van Artevelde was.
This bold burgher of Ghent, who was born about 1285, was sprung from a family the name of which had been for a long while inscribed in their city upon the register of industrial corporations. His father, John Van Artevelde, a cloth-worker, had been several times over sheriff of Ghent, and his mother, Mary Van Groete, was great aunt to the grandfather of the illustrious publicist called in history Grotius. James Van Artevelde in his youth accompanied Count Charles of Valois, brother of Philip the Handsome, upon his adventurous expeditions in Italy, Sicily, and Greece, and to the Island of Rhodes; and it had been close by the spots where the soldiers of Marathon and Salamis had beaten the armies of Darius and Xerxes that he had heard of the victory of the Flemish burghers and workmen attacked in 1302, at Courtrai, by the splendid army of Philip the Handsome. James Van Artevelde, on returning to his country, had been busy with his manufactures, his fields, the education of his children, and Flemish affairs up to the day when, at his invitation, the burghers of Ghent thronged to the meeting on the 28th of December, 1337, in the grounds of the monastery of Biloke. There he delivered an eloquent speech, pointing out, unhesitatingly but temperately, the policy which he considered good for the country. "Forget not," he said, "the might and the glory of Flanders. Who, pray, shall forbid that we defend our interests by using our rights? Can the King of France prevent us from treating with the King of England? And may we not be certain that if we were to treat with the King of England, the King of France would not be the less urgent in seeking our alliance? Besides, have we not with us all the communes of Brabant, of Hainault, of Holland, and of Zealand?" The audience cheered these words; the commune of Ghent forthwith assembled, and on the 3d of January, 1337 [according to the old style, which made the year begin at the 25th of March], re-established the offices of captains of parishes according to olden usage, when the city was exposed to any pressing danger. It was carried that one of these captains should have the chief government of the city; and James Van Artevelde was at once invested with it. From that moment the conduct of Van Artevelde was ruled by one predominant idea: to secure free and fair commercial intercourse for Flanders with England, whilst observing a general neutrality in the war between the Kings of England and France, and to combine so far all the communes of Flanders in one and the same policy. And he succeeded in this twofold purpose. "On the 29th of April, 1338, the representatives of all the communes of Flanders (the city of Bruges numbering amongst them a hundred and eight deputies) repaired to the castle of Male, a residence of Count Louis, and then James Van Artevelde set before the count what had been resolved upon amongst them. The count submitted, and swore that he would thenceforth maintain the liberties of Flanders in the state in which they had existed since the treaty of Athies. In the month of May following a deputation, consisting of James Van Artevelde and other burghers appointed by the cities of Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres scoured the whole of Flanders, from Bailleul to Termonde, and from Ninove to Dunkerque, "to reconcile the good folks of the communes to the Count of Flanders, as well for the count's honor as for the peace of the country." Lastly, on the 10th of June, 1338, a treaty was signed at Anvers between the deputies of the Flemish communes and the English ambassadors, the latter declaring: "We do all to wit that we have negotiated way and substance of friendship with the good folks of the communes of Flanders, in form and manner herein-after following:—
"First, they shall be able to go and buy the wools and other merchandise which have been exported from England to Holland, Zealand, or any other place whatsoever; and all traders of Flanders who shall repair to the ports of England shall there be safe and free in their persons and their goods, just as in any other place where their ventures might bring them together.
"Item, we have agreed with the good folks and with all the common country of Flanders that they must not mix nor inter-meddle in any way, by assistance of men or arms, in the wars of our lord the king and the noble Sir Philip of Valois (who holdeth himself for King of France)."
Three articles following regulated in detail the principles laid down in the first two, and, by another charter, Edward III. ordained that "all stuffs marked with the seal of the city of Ghent might travel freely in England without being subject according to ellage and quality to the control to which all foreign merchandise was subject." (Histoire de Flandre, by M, le Baron Kerwyn de Lettenhove, t. iii. pp. 199-203.)
Van Artevelde was right in telling the Flemings that, if they treated with the King of England, the King of France would be only the more anxious for their alliance. Philip of Valois, and even Count Louis of Flanders, when they got to know of the negotiations entered into between the Flemish communes and King Edward, redoubled their offers and promises to them. But when the passions of men have taken full possession of their souls, words of concession and attempts at accommodation are nothing more than postponements or lies. Philip, when he heard about the conclusion of a treaty between the Flemish communes and the King of England, sent word to Count Louis "that this James Van Artevelde must not, on any account, be allowed to rule, or even live, for, if it were so for long, the count would lose his land." The count, very much disposed to accept such advice, repaired to Ghent and sent for Van Artevelde to come and see him at his hotel. He went, but with so large a following that the count was not at the time at all in a position to resist him. He tried to persuade the Flemish burgher that "if he would keep a hand on the people so as to keep them to their love for the King of France, he having more authority than any one else for such a purpose, much good would result to him: mingling, besides, with this address, some words of threatening import." Van Artevelde, who was not the least afraid of the threat, and who at heart was fond of the English, told the count that he would do as he had promised the communes. "Hereupon he left the count, who consulted his confidants as to what he was to do in this business, and they counselled him to let them go and assemble their people, saying that they would kill Van Artevelde secretly or otherwise. And indeed, they did lay many traps and made many attempts against the captain; but it was of no avail, since all the commonalty was for him." When the rumor of these projects and these attempts was spread abroad in the city, the excitement was extreme, and all the burghers assumed white hoods, which was the mark peculiar to the members of the commune when they assembled under their flags; so that the count found himself reduced to assuming one, for he was afraid of being kept captive at Ghent, and, on the pretext of a hunting party, he lost no time in gaining his castle of Male.
The burghers of Ghent had their minds still filled with their late alarm when they heard that, by order, it was said, of the King of France, Count Louis had sent and beheaded at the castle of Rupehuonde, in the very bed in which he was confined by his infirmities, their fellow-citizen Solver of Courtrai, Van Artevelde's father-in-law, who had been kept for many months in prison for his intimacy with the English. On the same day the Bishop of Senlis and the Abbot of St. Denis had arrived at Tournay, and had superintended the reading out in the market-place of a sentence of excommunication against the Ghentese.
It was probably at this date that Van Artevelde, in his vexation and disquietude, assumed in Ghent an attitude threatening and despotic even to tyranny. "He had continually after him," says Froissart, "sixty or eighty armed varlets, amongst whom were two or three who knew some of his secrets. When he met a man whom he had hated or had in suspicion, this man was at once killed, for Van Artevelde had given this order to his varlets: 'The moment I meet a man, and make such and such a sign to you, slay him without delay, however great he may be, without waiting for more speech.' In this way he had many great masters slain. And as soon as these sixty varlets had taken him home to his hotel, each went to dinner at his own house; and the moment dinner was over they returned and stood before his hotel, and waited in the street until that he was minded to go and play and take his pastime in the city, and so they attended him till supper-time. And know that each of these hirelings had per diem four groschen of Flanders for their expenses and wages, and he had them regularly paid from week to week. . . . And even in the case of all that were most powerful in Flanders, knights, esquires, and burghers of the good cities, whom he believed to be favorable to the Count of Flanders, them he banished from Flanders, and levied half their revenues. He had levies made of rents, of dues on merchandise, and all the revenues belonging to the count, wherever it might be in Flanders, and he disbursed them at his will, and gave them away without rendering any account. . . . And when he would borrow of any burghers on his word for payment, there was none that durst say him nay. In short, there was never in Flanders, or in any other country, duke, count, prince, or other, who can have had a country at his will as James Van Artevelde had for a long time."
It is possible that, as some historians have thought, Froissart, being less favorable to burghers than to princes, did not deny himself a little exaggeration in this portrait of a great burgher-patriot transformed by the force of events and passions into a demagogic tyrant. But some of us may have too vivid a personal recollection of similar scenes to doubt the general truth of the picture; and we shall meet before long in the history of France during the fourteenth century with an example still more striking and more famous than that of Van Artevelde.
Whilst the Count of Flanders, after having vainly attempted to excite an uprising against Van Artevelde, was being forced, in order to escape from the people of Bruges, to mount his horse in hot haste, at night and barely armed, and to flee away to St. Omer, Philip of Valois and Edward III. were preparing, on either side, for the war which they could see drawing near. Philip was vigorously at work on the pope, the Emperor of Germany, and the princes neighbors of Flanders, in order to raise obstacles against his rival or rob him of his allies. He ordered that short-lived meeting of the states-general about which we have no information left us, save that it voted the principle that "no talliage could be imposed on the people if urgent necessity or evident utility should not require it, and unless by concession of the Estates." Philip, as chief of feudal society, rather than of the nation which was forming itself little by little around the lords, convoked at Amiens all his vassals, great and small, laic or cleric, placing all his strength in their co-operation, and not caring at all to associate the country itself in the affairs of his government. Edward, on the contrary, whilst equipping his fleet and amassing treasure at the expense of the Jews and Lombard usurers, was assembling his Parliament, talking to it "of this important and costly war," for which he obtained large subsidies, and accepting without making any difficulty the vote of the Commons' House, which expressed a desire "to consult their constituents upon this subject, and begged him to summon an early Parliament, to which there should be elected, in each county, two knights taken from among the best land-owners of their counties." The king set out for the Continent; the Parliament met and considered the exigencies of the war by land and sea, in Scotland and in France; traders, ship-owners, and mariners were called and examined; and the forces determined to be necessary were voted. Edward took the field, pillaging, burning, and ravaging, "destroying all the country for twelve or fourteen leagues to extent," as he himself said in a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury. When he set foot on French territory, Count William of Hainault, his brother-in-law, and up to that time his ally, came to him and said that "he would ride with him no farther, for that his presence was prayed and required by his uncle, the King of France to whom he bore no hate, and whom he would go and serve in his own kingdom, as he had served King Edward on the territory of the emperor, whose vicar he was; and Edward wished him 'God speed!'" Such was the binding nature of feudal ties that the same lord held himself bound to pass from one camp to another, according as he found himself upon the domains of one or the other of his suzerains in a war one against the other. Edward continued his march towards St. Quentin, where Philip had at last arrived with his allies, the Kings of Bohemia, Navarre, and Scotland, "after delays which had given rise to great scandal and murmurs throughout the whole kingdom." The two armies, with a strength, according to Froissart, of a hundred thousand men on the French side, and forty-four thousand on the English, were soon facing one another, near Buironfosse, a large burgh of Picardy. A herald came from the English camp to tell the King of France that the King of England "demanded of him battle. To which demand," says Froissart, "the King of France gave willing assent, and accepted the day, which was fixed at first for Thursday the 21st, and afterwards for Saturday the 25th of October, 1339." To judge from the somewhat tangled accounts of the chroniclers and of Froissart himself, neither of the two kings was very anxious to come to blows. The forces of Edward were much inferior to those of Philip; and the former had accordingly taken up, as it appears, a position which rendered attack difficult for Philip. There was much division of opinion in the French camp. Independently of military grounds, a great deal was said about certain letters from Robert, King of Naples, "a mighty necromancer and full of mighty wisdom, it was reported, who, after having several times cast their horoscopes, had discovered by astrology and from experience, that, if his cousin, the King of France, were to fight the King of England, the former would be worsted." "In thus disputing and debating," says Froissart, "the time passed till full midday. A little afterwards a hare came leaping across the fields, and rushed amongst the French. Those who saw it began shouting and making a great halloo. Those who were behind thought that those who were in front were engaging in battle; and several put on their helmets and gripped their swords. Thereupon several knights were made; and the Count of Hainault himself made fourteen, who were thenceforth nicknamed Knights of the Hare." Whatever his motive may have been, Philip did not attack; and Edward promptly began a retreat. They both dismissed their allies; and during the early days of. November, Philip fell back upon St. Quentin, and Edward went and took up his winter quarters at Brussels.
For Edward it was a serious check not to have dared to attack the king whose kingdom he made a pretence of conquering; and he took it grievously to heart. At Brussels he had an interview with his allies, and asked their counsel. Most of the princes of the Low Countries remained faithful to him, and the Count of Hainault seemed inclined to go back to him; but all hesitated as to what he was to do to recover from the check. Van Artevelde showed more invention and more boldness. The Flemish communes had concentrated their forces not far from the spot where the two kings had kept their armies looking at one another; but they had maintained a strict neutrality, and at the invitation of the Count of Flanders, who promised them that the King of France would entertain all their claims, Artevelde and Breydel, the deputies from Ghent and Bruges, even repaired to Courtrai to make terms with him. But as they got there nothing but ambiguous engagements and evasive promises, they let the negotiation drop, and, whilst Count Louis was on his way to rejoin Philip at St. Quentin, Artevelde, with the deputies from the Flemish communes, started for Brussels. Edward, who was already living on very confidential terms with him, told him that "if the Flemings were minded to help him to keep up the war, and go with him whithersoever he would take them, they should aid him to recover Lille, Douai, and Bethune, then occupied by the King of France. Artevelde, after consulting his colleagues, returned to Edward, and, 'Dear sir,' said he, 'you have already made such requests to us, and verily if we could do so whilst keeping our honor and faith, we would do as you demand; but we be bound, by faith and oath, and on a bond of two millions of florins entered into with the pope, not to go to war with the King of France without incurring a debt to the amount of that sum, and a sentence of ex-communication; but if you do that which we are about to say to you, if you will be pleased to adopt the arms of France, and quarter them with those of England, and openly call yourself King of France, we will uphold you for true King of France; you, as King of France, shall give us quittance of our faith; and then we will obey you as King of France, and will go whithersoever you shall ordain.'"
This prospect pleased Edward mightily: but "it irked him to take the name and arms of that of which he had as yet won no tittle." He consulted his allies. Some of them hesitated; but "his most privy and especial friend," Robert d'Artois, strongly urged him to consent to the proposal. So a French prince and a Flemish burgher prevailed upon the King of England to pursue, as in assertion of his avowed rights, the conquest of the kingdom of France. King, prince, and burgher fixed Ghent as their place of meeting for the official conclusion of the alliance; and there, in January, 1340, the mutual engagement was signed and sealed. The King of England "assumed the arms of France quartered with those of England," and thenceforth took the title of King of France.
Then burst forth in reality that war which was to last a hundred years; which was to bring upon the two nations the most violent struggles, as well as the most cruel sufferings, and which, at the end of a hundred years, was to end in the salvation of France from her tremendous peril, and the defeat of England in her unrighteous attempt. In January, 1340, Edward thought he had won the most useful of allies; Artevelde thought the independence of the Flemish communes and his own supremacy in his own country secured; and Robert d'Artois thought with complacency how he had gratified his hatred for Philip of Valois. And all three were deceiving themselves in their joy and their confidence.
Edward, leaving Queen Philippa at Ghent with Artevelde for her adviser, had returned to England, and had just obtained from the Parliament, for the purpose of vigorously pushing on the war, a subsidy almost without precedent, when he heard that a large French fleet was assembling on the coasts of Zealand, near the port of Ecluse (or Sluys), with a design of surprising and attacking him when he should cross over again to the Continent. For some time past this fleet had been cruising in the Channel, making descents here and there upon English soil, at Plymouth, Southampton, Sandwich, and Dover, and everywhere causing alarm and pillage. Its strength, they said, was a hundred and forty large vessels, "without counting the smaller," having on board thirty-five thousand men, Normans, Picards, Italians, sailors and soldiers of all countries, under the command of two French leaders, Hugh Quiret, titular admiral, and Nicholas Behuchet, King Philip's treasurer, and of a famous Genoese buccaneer, named Barbavera. Edward, so soon as he received this information, resolved to go and meet their attack; and he gave orders to have his vessels and troops summoned from all parts of England to Orewell, his point of departure. His advisers, with the Archbishop of Canterbury at their head, strove, but in vain, to restrain him. "Ye are all in conspiracy against me," said he; "I shall go; and those who are afraid can abide at home." And go he did on the 22d of June, 1340, and aboard of his fleet "went with him many an English dame," says Froissart, "wives of earls, and barons, and knights, and burghers, of London, who were off to Ghent to see the Queen of England, whom for a long time past they had not seen; and King Edward guarded them carefully." "For many a long day," said he, "have I desired to fight those fellows, and now we will fight them, please God and St. George; for, verily, they have caused me so many displeasures, that I would fain take vengeance for them, if I can but get it." On arriving off the coast of Flanders, opposite Ecluse (or Sluys), he saw "so great a number of vessels that of masts there seemed to be verily a forest." He made his arrangements forthwith, "placing his strongest ships in front, and manoeuvring so as to have the wind on the starboard quarter, and the sun astern. The Normans marvelled to see the English thus twisting about, and said, 'They are turning tail; they are not men enough to fight us.'" But the Genoese buccaneer was not misled. "When he saw the English fleet approaching in such fashion, he said to the French admiral and his colleague, Behuchet, 'Sirs, here is the King of England, with all his ships, bearing down upon us: if ye will follow my advice, instead of remaining shut up in port, ye will draw out into the open sea; for, if ye abide here, they, whilst they have in their favor sun, and wind, and tide, will keep you so short of room, that ye will be helpless and unable to manoeuvre.' Whereupon answered the treasurer, Behuchet, who knew more about arithmetic than sea fights, 'Let him go hang, whoever shall go out: here will we wait, and take our chance.' 'Sir,' replied Barbavera, 'if ye will not be pleased to believe me, I have no mind to work my own ruin, and I will get me gone with my galleys out of this hole.'" And out he went, with all his squadron, engaged the English on the high seas, and took the first ship which attempted to board him. But Edward, though he was wounded in the thigh, quickly restored the battle. After a gallant resistance, Barbavera sailed off with his galleys, and the French fleet found itself alone at grips with the English. The struggle was obstinate on both sides; it began at six in the morning of June 24, 1340, and lasted to midday. It was put an end to by the arrival of the re-enforcements promised by the Flemings to the King of England. "The deputies of Bruges," says their historian, "had employed the whole night in getting under way an armament of two hundred vessels, and, before long, the French heard echoing about them the horns of the Flemish mariners sounding to quarters." These latter decided the victory, Behuchet, Philip of Valois' treasurer, fell into their hands; and they, heeding only their desire of avenging themselves for the devastation of Cadsand (in 1337), hanged him from the mast of his vessel "out of spite to the King of France." The admiral, Hugh Quieret, though he surrendered, was put to death; "and with him perished so great a number of men-at-arms that the sea was dyed with blood on this coast, and the dead were put down at quite thirty thousand men."
The very day after the battle, the Queen of England came from Ghent to join the king her husband, whom his wound confined to his ship; and at Valenciennes, whither the news of the victory speedily arrived, Artevelde, mounting a platform set up in the market-place, maintained, in the presence of a large crowd, the right which the King of England had to claim the kingdom of France. He vaunted "the puissance of the three countries, Flanders, Hainault, and Brabant, when at one accord amongst themselves, and what with his words and his great sense," says Froissart, "he did so well that all who heard him said that he had spoken mighty well, and with mighty experience, and that he was right worthy to govern the countship of Flanders." From Valenciennes he repaired to King Edward at Bruges, where all the allied princes were assembled; and there, in concert with the other deputies from the Flemish communes, Artevelde offered Edward a hundred thousand men for the vigorous prosecution of the war. "All these burghers," says the modern historian of the Flemings, "had declared that, in order to promote their country's cause, they would serve without pay, so heartily had they entered into the war." The siege of Tournay was the first operation Edward resolved to undertake. He had promised to give this place to the Flemings; the burghers were getting a taste for conquest, in company with kings.
They found Philip of Valois better informed, and also more hot for war, than perhaps they had expected. It is said that he learned the defeat of his navy at Ecluse from his court fool, who was the first to announce it, and in the following fashion. "The English are cowards," said he. "Why so?" asked the king. "Because they lacked courage to leap into the sea at Ecluse, as the French and Normans did." Philip lost no time about putting the places on his northern frontier in a state of defence, he took up his quarters first at Arras, and then three leagues from Tournay, into which his constable, Raoul d'Eu, immediately threw himself, with a considerable force, and whither his allies, the Duke of Lorraine, the Count of Savoy, the Bishops of Liege, Metz, and Verdun, and nearly all the barons of Burgundy came and joined him. On the 27th of July, 1340, he received there from his rival a challenge of portentous length, the principal terms of which are set forth as follows:
"Philip of Valois, for a long time past we have taken proceedings, by means of messages and other reasonable ways, to the end that you might restore to us our rightful heritage of France, which you have this long while withheld from us and do most wrongfully occupy. And as we do clearly see that you do intend to persevere in your wrongful withholding, we do give you notice that we are marching against you to bring our rightful claims to an issue. And, whereas so great a number of folks assembled on our side and on yours, cannot keep themselves together for long without causing great destruction to the people and the country, we desire, as the quarrel is between you and us, that the decision of our claim should be between our two bodies. And if you have no mind to this way, we propose that our quarrel should end by a battle, body to body, between a hundred persons, the most capable on your side and on ours. And, if you have no mind either to one way or to the other, that you do appoint us a fixed day for fighting before the city of Tournay, power to power. Given under our privy seal, on the field near Tournay, the 26th day of July, in the first year of our reign in France and in England the fourteenth."
Philip replied, "Philip, by the grace of God King of France to Edward, King of England. We have seen your letters brought to our court, as from you to Philip of Valois, and containing certain demands which you make upon the said Philip of Valois. And, as the said letters did not come to ourself, we make you no answer. Our intention is, when it shall seem good to us, to hurl you out of our kingdom for the benefit of our people. And of that we have firm hope in Jesus Christ, from whom all power cometh to us."
Events were not satisfactory either to the haughty pretensions of Edward or to the patriotic hopes of Philip. The war continued in the north and south-west of France without any result. In the neighborhood of Tournay some encounters in the open country were unfavorable to the English and their allies; the siege of the place was prolonged for seventy-four days without the attainment of any success by assault or investment; and the inhabitants defended themselves with so obstinate a courage, that, when at length the King of England found himself obliged to raise the siege, Philip, to testify his gratitude towards them, restored them their law, that is, their communal charter, for some time past withdrawn, and "they were greatly rejoiced," says Froissart, "at having no more royal governors, and at appointing provosts and jurymen according to their fancy." The Flemish burghers, in spite of their display of warlike zeal, soon grew tired of being so far from their business and of living under canvas. In Aquitaine the lieutenants of the King of France had the advantage over those of the King of England; they retook or delivered several places in dispute between the two crowns, and they closely pressed Bordeaux itself both by land and sea. Edward, the aggressor, was exhausting his pecuniary resources, and his Parliament was displaying but little inclination to replenish them. For Philip, who had merely to defend himself in his own dominions, any cessation of hostilities was almost a victory. A pious princess, Joan of Valois, sister of Philip and mother-in-law of Edward, issued from her convent at Fontenelle, for the purpose of urging the two kings to make peace, or at least to suspend hostilities. "The good dame," says Froissart, "saw there, on the two sides, all the flower and honor of the chivalry of the world; and many a time she had fallen at the feet of her brother, the King of France, praying him for some respite or treaty of agreement between himself and the English king. And when she had labored with them of France, she went her way to them of the Empire, to the Duke of Brabant, to the Marquis of Juliers, and to my Lord John of Hainault, and prayed them, for God's and pity's sake, that they would be pleased to hearken to some terms of accord, and would win over the King of England to be pleased to condescend thereto." In concert with the envoys of Pope Benedict XII., Joan of Valois at last succeeded in bringing the two sovereigns and their allies to a truce, which was concluded on the 25th of September, 1340, at first for nine months, and was afterwards renewed on several occasions up to the month of June, 1342. Neither sovereign, and none of their allies, gave up anything, or bound themselves to anything more than not to fight during that interval; but they were, on both sides, without the power of carrying on without pause a struggle which they would not entirely abandon.
An unexpected incident led to its recommencement in spite of the truce: not, however, throughout France or directly between the two kings, but with fiery fierceness, though it was limited to a single province, and arose not in the name of the kingship of France, but out of a purely provincial question. John III., Duke of Brittany and a faithful vassal of Philip of Valois, whom he had gone to support at Tournay "more stoutly and substantially than any of the other princes," says Froissart, died suddenly at Caen, on the 30th of April, 1341, on returning to his domain. Though he had been thrice married, he left no child. The duchy of Brittany then reverted to his brothers or their posterity, but his very next brother, Guy, Count of Penthievre, had been dead six years, and had left only a daughter, Joan, called the Cripple, married to Charles of Blois, nephew of the King of France. The third brother was still alive; he too was named John, had from his mother the title of Count of Montfort, and claimed to be heir to the duchy of Brittany in preference to his niece Joan. The niece, on the contrary, believed in her own right to the exclusion of her uncle. The question was exactly the same as that which had arisen touching the crown of France when Philip the Long had successfully disputed it with the only daughter of his brother Louis the Quarreller; but the Salic law, which had for more than three centuries prevailed in France, and just lately to the benefit of Philip of Valois, had no existence in the written code, or the traditions of Brittany. There, as in several other great fiefs, women had often been recognized as capable of holding and transmitting sovereignty. At the death of John III., his brother, the Count of Montfort, immediately put himself in possession of the inheritance, seized the principal Breton towns, Nantes, Brest, Rennes, and Vannes, and crossed over to England to secure the support of Edward III. His rival, Charles of Blois, appealed to the decision of the King of France, his uncle and natural protector. Philip of Valois thus found himself the champion of succession in the female line in Brittany, whilst he was himself reigning in France by virtue of the Salic law, and Edward III. took up in Brittany the defence of succession in the male line which he was disputing and fighting against in France. Philip and his court of peers declared on the 7th of September, 1341, that Brittany belonged to Charles of Blois, who at once did homage for it to the King of France, whilst John of Montfort demanded and obtained the support of the King of England. War broke out between the two claimants, effectually supported by the two kings, who nevertheless were not supposed to make war upon one another and in their own dominions. The feudal system sometimes entailed these strange and dangerous complications.
If the two parties had been reduced for leaders to the two claimants only, the war would not, perhaps, have lasted long.
In the first campaign the Count of Montfort was made prisoner at the siege of Nantes, carried off to Paris, and shut up in the tower of the Louvre, whence he did not escape until three years were over. Charles of Blois, with all his personal valor, was so scrupulously devout that he often added to the embarrassments and at the same time the delays of war. He never marched without being followed by his almoner, who took with him everywhere bread, and wine, and water, and fire in a pot, for the purpose of saying mass by the way. One day when Charles was accordingly hearing it and was very near the enemy, one of his officers, Auffroy de Montboucher, said to him, "Sir, you see right well that your enemies are yonder, and you halt a longer time than they need to take you." "Auffroy," answered the prince, "we shall always have towns and castles, and, if they are taken, we shall, with God's help, recover them; but if we miss hearing of mass we shall never recover it." Neither side, however, had much detriment from either the captivity or pious delays of its chief. Joan of Flanders, Countess of Montfort, was at Rennes when she heard that her husband had been taken prisoner at Nantes. "Although she made great mourning in her heart," says Froissart, "she made it not like a disconsolate woman, but like a proud and gallant man. She showed to her friends and soldiers a little boy she had, and whose name was John, even as his father's, and she said to them, 'Ah! sirs, be not discomforted and cast down because of my lord whom we have lost; he was but one man; see, here is my little boy, who, please God, shall be his avenger. I have wealth in abundance, and of it I will give you enow, and I will provide you with such a leader as shall give you all fresh heart.' She went through all her good towns and fortresses, taking her young son with her, re-enforcing the garrisons with men and all they wanted, and giving away abundantly wherever she thought it would be well laid out. Then she went her way to Hennebon-sur-Mer, which was a strong town and strong castle, and there she abode, and her son with her, all the winter." In May, 1242, Charles of Blois came to besiege her; but the attempts at assault were not successful. "The Countess of Montfort, who was cased in armor and rode on a fine steed, galloped from street to street through the town, summoned the people to defend themselves stoutly, and called on the women, dames, damoisels, and others, to pull up the roads, and carry the stones to the ramparts to throw down on the assailants." She attempted a bolder enterprise. "She sometimes mounted a tower, right up to the top, that she might see the better how her people bore themselves. She one day saw that all they of the hostile army, lords and others, had left their quarters and gone to watch the assault. She mounted her steed, all armed as she was, and summoned to horse with her about three hundred men-at-arms who were on guard at a gate which was not being assailed. She went out thereat with all her company and threw herself valiantly upon the tents and quarters of the lords of France, which were all burned, being guarded only by boys and varlets, who fled as soon as they saw the countess and her folks entering and setting fire. When the lords saw their quarters burning and heard the noise which came therefrom, they ran up all dazed and crying, 'Betrayed! betrayed!' so that none remained for the assault. When the countess saw the enemy's host running up from all parts, she re-assembled all her folks, and seeing right well that she could not enter the town again without too great loss, she went off by another road to the castle of Brest [or, more probably, d'Auray, as Brest is much more than three leagues from Hennebon], which lies as near as three leagues from thence." Though hotly pursued by the assailants, "she rode so fast and so well that she and the greater part of her folks arrived at the castle of Brest, where she was received and feasted right joyously. Those of her folks who were in Hennebon were all night in great disquietude because neither she nor any of her company returned; and the assailant lords, who had taken up quarters nearer to the town, cried, 'Come out, come out, and seek your countess; she is lost; you will not find a bit of her.' In such fear the folks in Hennebon remained five days. But the countess wrought so well that she had now full five hundred comrades armed and well mounted; then she set out from Brest about midnight and came away, arriving at sunrise and riding straight upon one of the flanks of the enemy's host; there she had the gate of Hennebon castle opened, and entered in with great joy and a great noise of trumpets and drums; whereby the besiegers were roughly disturbed and awakened."
The joy of the besieged was short. Charles of Blois pressed on the siege more rigorously every day, threatening that, when he should have taken the place, he would put all the inhabitants to the sword. Consternation spread even to the brave; and a negotiation was opened with a view of arriving at terms of capitulation. By dint of prayers Countess Joan obtained a delay of three days. The first two had expired, and the besiegers were preparing for a fresh assault, when Joan, from the top of her tower, saw the sea covered with sails: "'See, see, she cried, the aid so much desired!' Every one in the town, as best they could, rushed up at once to the windows and battlements of the walls to see what it might be," says Froissart. In point of fact it was a fleet with six thousand men brought from England to the relief of Hennebon by Amaury de Clisson and Walter de Manny; and they had been a long while detained at sea by contrary winds.
"When they had landed the countess herself went to them and feasted them and thanked them greatly, which was no wonder, for she had sore need of their coming." It was far better still when, next day, the new arrivals had attacked the besiegers and gained a brilliant victory over them. When they re-entered the place, "whoever," says Froissart, "saw the countess descend from the castle, and kiss my lord Walter de Manny and his comrades, one after another, two or three times, might well have said that it was a gallant dame."
All the while that the Count of Montfort was a prisoner in the tower of the Louvre, the countess his wife strove for his cause with the same indefatigable energy. He escaped in 1345, crossed over to England, swore fealty and homage to Edward III. for the duchy of Brittany, and immediately returned to take in hand, himself, his own cause. But in the very year of his escape, on the 26th of September, 1345, he died at the castle of Hennebon, leaving once more his wife, with a young child, alone at the head of his party and having in charge the future of his house. The Countess Joan maintained the rights and interests of her son as she had maintained those of her husband. For nineteen years, she, with the help of England, struggled against Charles of Blois, the head of a party growing more and more powerful, and protected by France. Fortune shifted her favors and her asperities from one camp to the other. Charles of Blois had at first pretty considerable success; but on the 18th of June, 1347, in a battle in which he personally displayed a brilliant courage, he was in his turn made prisoner, carried to England, and immured in the Tower of London. There he remained nine years. But he too had a valiant and indomitable wife, Joan of Penthievre, the Cripple. She did for her husband all that Joan of Montfort was doing for hers. All the time that he was a prisoner in the Tower of London, she was the soul and the head of his party, in the open country as well as in the towns, turning to profitable account the inclinations of the Breton population, whom the presence and the ravages of the English had turned against John of Montfort and his cause. She even convoked at Dinan, in 1352, a general assembly of her partisans, which is counted by the Breton historians as the second holding of the states of their country. During nine years, from 1347 to 1356, the two Joans were the two heads of their parties in politics and in war. Charles of Blois at last obtained his liberty from Edward III. on hard conditions, and returned to Brittany to take up the conduct of his own affairs. The struggle between the two claimants still lasted eight years, with vicissitudes ending in nothing definite. In 1363 Charles of Blois and young John of Montfort, weary of their fruitless efforts and the sufferings of their countries, determined both of them to make peace and share Brittany between them. Rennes was to be Charles's capital, and Nantes that of his rival. The treaty had been signed, an altar raised between the two armies, and an oath taken on both sides; but when Joan of Penthivre was informed of it she refused downright to ratify it. "I married you," she said to her husband, "to defend my inheritance, and not to yield the half of it; I am only a woman, but I would lose my life, and two lives if I had them, rather than consent to any cession of the kind." Charles of Blois, as weak before his wife as brave before the enemy, broke the treaty he had but just sworn to, and set out for Nantes to resume the war. "My lord," said Countess Joan to him in presence of all his knights, "you are going to defend my inheritance and yours, which my lord of Montfort—wrongfully, God knows—doth withhold from us, and the barons of Brittany who are here present know that I am rightful heiress of it. I pray you affectionately not to make any ordinance, composition, or treaty whereby the duchy corporate remain not ours." Charles set out; and in the following year, on the 29th of September, 1364, the battle of Auray cost him his life and the countship of Brittany. When he was wounded to death he said, "I have long been at war against my conscience." At sight of his dead body on the field of battle young John of Montfort, his conqueror, was touched, and cried out, "Alas my cousin, by your obstinacy you have been the cause of great evils in Brittany: may God forgive you! It grieves me much that you are come to so sad an end." After this outburst of generous compassion came the joy of victory, which Montfort owed above all to his English allies and to John Chandos their leader, to whom, "My Lord John," said he, "this great fortune path come to me through your great sense and prowess: wherefore, I pray you, drink out of my cup." "Sir," answered Chandos, "let us go hence, and render you your thanks to God for this happy fortune you have gotten, for, without the death of yonder warrior, you could not have come into the inheritance of Brittany." From that day forth John of Monfort remained in point of fact Duke of Brittany, and Joan of Penthievre, the Cripple, the proud princess who had so obstinately defended her rights against him, survived for full twenty years the death of her husband and the loss of her duchy.
Whilst the two Joans were exhibiting in Brittany, for the preservation or the recovery of their little dominion, so much energy and persistency, another Joan, no princess, but not the less a heroine, was, in no other interest than the satisfaction of her love and her vengeance, making war, all by herself, on the same territory. Several Norman and Breton lords, and amongst others Oliver de Clisson and Godfrey d'Harcourt, were suspected, nominally attached as they were to the King of France, of having made secret overtures to the King of England. Philip of Valois had them arrested at a tournament, and had them beheaded without any form of trial, in the middle of the market-place at Paris, to the number of fourteen. The head of Clisson was sent to Nantes and exposed on one of the gates of the city. At the news thereof, his widow, Joan of Belleville, attended by several men of family, her neighbors and friends, set out for a castle occupied by the troops of Philip's candidate, Charles of Blois. The fate of Clisson was not yet known there; it was supposed that his wife was on a hunting excursion; and she was admitted without distrust. As soon as she was inside, the blast of a horn gave notice to her followers, whom she had left concealed in the neighboring woods. They rushed up, and took possession of the castle, and Joan de Clisson had all the inhabitants—but one—put to the sword. But this was too little for her grief and her zeal. At the head of her troops, augmented, she scoured the country and seized several places, everywhere driving out or putting to death the servants of the King of France. Philip confiscated the property of the house of Clisson. Joan moved from land to sea. She manned several vessels, attacked the French ships she fell in with, ravaged the coasts, and ended by going and placing at the service of the Countess of Montfort her hatred and her son, a boy of seven years of age, whom she had taken with her in all her expeditions, and who was afterwards the great constable, Oliver de Clisson. We shall find him under Charles V. and Charles VI. as devoted to France and her kings as if he had not made his first essays in arms against the candidate of their ancestor, Philip. His mother had sent him to England, to be brought up at the court of Edward III., but, shortly after taking a glorious part with the English in the battle of Auray, in which he lost an eye, and which secured the duchy of Brittany to the Count of Montfort, De Clisson got embroiled none the less with his suzerain, who had given John Chandos the castle of Gavre, near Nantes. "Devil take me, my lord," said Oliver to him, "if ever Englishman shall be my neighbor;" and he went forthwith and attacked the castle, which he completely demolished. The hatreds of women whose passions have made them heroines of war are more personal and more obstinate than those of the roughest warriors. Accordingly the war for the duchy of Brittany, in the fourteenth century, has been called, in history, the war of the three Joans.
This war was, on both sides, remarkable for cruelty. If Joan de Clisson gave to the sword all the people in a castle, belonging to Charles of Blois, to which she had been admitted on a supposition of pacific intentions, Charles of Blois, on his side, finding in another castle thirty knights, partisans of the Count of Montfort, had their heads shot from catapults over the walls of Nantes, which he was besieging, and, at the same time that he saved from pillage the churches of Quimper, which he had just taken, he allowed his troops to massacre fourteen hundred inhabitants, and had his principal prisoners beheaded. One of them, being a deacon, he caused to be degraded, and then handed over to the populace, who stoned him. It is characteristic of the middle ages that in them the ferocity of barbaric times existed side by side with the sentiments of chivalry and the fervor of Christianity: so slow is the race of man to eschew evil, even when it has begun to discern and relish good. War was then the passion and habitual condition of men. They made it without motive as well as without prevision, in a transport of feeling or for the sake of pastime, to display their strength or to escape from listlessness; and, whilst making it, they abandoned themselves without scruple to all those deeds of violence, vengeance, brutal anger, or fierce delight, which war provokes. At the same time, however, the generous impulses of feudal chivalry, the sympathies of Christian piety, tender affections, faithful devotion, noble tastes, were fermenting in their souls; and human nature appeared with all its complications, its inconsistencies, and its irregularities, but also with all its wealth of prospective development. The three Joans of the fourteenth century were but eighty years in advance of the Joan of Arc of the fifteenth; and the knights of Charles V., Du Guesclin and De Clisson, were the forerunners of the Bayard of Francis I.
An incident which has retained its popularity in French history, to wit, the fight between thirty Bretons and thirty English during the just now commemorated war in Brittany, will give a better idea than any general observations could of the real, living characteristics of facts and manners, barbaric and at the same time chivalric, at that period. No apology is needed for here reproducing the chief details as they have been related by Froissart, the dramatic chronicler of the middle ages.
In 1351, "it happened on a day that Sir Robert de Beaumanoir, a valiant knight and commandant of the castle which is called Castle Josselin, came before the town and castle of Ploermel, whereof the captain, called Brandebourg [or Brembro, probably Bremborough], had with him a plenty of soldiers of the Countess of Montfort. 'Brandebourg,' said Robert, 'have ye within there never a man-at-arms, or two or three, who would fain cross swords with other three for love of their ladies?' Brandebourg answered that their ladies would not have them lose their lives in so miserable an affair as single combat, whereby one gained the name of fool rather than honorable renown. 'I will tell you what we will do, if it please you. You shall take twenty or thirty of your comrades, as I will take as many of ours. We will go out into a goodly field where none can hinder or vex us, and there will we do so much that men shall speak thereof in time to come in hall, and palace, and highway, and other places of the world.' 'By my faith,' said Beaumanoir, 'tis bravely said, and I agree: be ye thirty, and we will be thirty, too.' And thus the matter was settled. When the day had come, the thirty comrades of Brandebourg, whom we shall call English, heard mass, then got on their arms, went off to the place where the battle was to be, dismounted, and waited a long while for the others, whom we shall call French. When the thirty French had come, and they were in front one of another, they parleyed a little together, all the sixty; then they fell back, and made all their fellows go far away from the place. Then one of them made a sign, and forthwith they set on and fought stoutly all in a heap, and they aided one another handsomely when they saw their comrades in evil case. Pretty soon after they had come together, one of the French was slain, but the rest did not slacken the fight one whit, and they bore themselves as valiantly all as if they had all been Rolands and Olivers. At last they were forced to stop, and they rested by common accord, giving themselves truce until they should be rested, and the first to get up again should recall the others. They rested long, and there were some who drank wine which was brought to them in bottles. They rebuckled their armor, which had got undone, and dressed their wounds. Four French and two English were dead already."
It was no doubt during this interval that the captain of the Bretons, Robert de Beaumanoir, grievously wounded and dying of fatigue and thirst, cried out for a drink. "Drink thy blood, Beaumanoir," said one of his comrades, Geoffrey de Bois, according to some accounts, and Sire de Tinteniac, according to others. From that day those words became the war-cry of the Beaumanoirs. Froissart says nothing of this incident. Let us return to his narrative.
"When they were refreshed, the first to get up again made a sign, and recalled the others. Then the battle recommenced as stoutly as before, and lasted a long while. They had short swords of Bordeaux, tough and sharp, and boar-spears and daggers, and some had axes, and therewith they dealt one another marvellously great dings, and some seized one another by the arms a-struggling, and they struck one another, and spared not. At last the English had the worst of it; Brandebourg, their captain, was slain, with eight of his comrades, and the rest yielded themselves prisoners when they saw that they could no longer defend themselves, for they could not and must not fly. Sir Robert de Beaumanoir and his comrades, who remained alive, took them and carried them off to Castle Josselin as their prisoners; and then admitted them to ransom courteously when they were all cured, for there was none that was not grievously wounded, French as well as English. I saw afterwards, sitting at the table of King Charles of France, a Breton knight who had been in it, Sir Yvon Charnel, and he had a face so carved and cut that he showed full well how good a fight had been fought. The matter was talked of in many places, and some set it down as a very poor, and others as a very swaggering business."
The most modern and most judicious historian of Brittany, Count Daru, who has left a name as honorable in literature as in the higher administration of the First Empire, says, very truly, in recounting this incident, "It is not quite certain whether this was an act of patriotism or of chivalry." He might have gone farther, and discovered in this exploit not only the characteristics he points out, but many others besides. Local patriotism, the honor of Brittany, party spirit, the success of John of Montfort or Charles of Blois, the sentiment of gallantry, the glorification of the most beautiful one amongst their lady-loves, and, chiefly, the passion for war amongst all and sundry— there was something of all this mixed up with the battle of the Thirty, a faithful reflex of the complication and confusion of minds, of morals, and of wants at that forceful period. It is this very variety of the ideas, feelings, interests, motives, and motive tendencies involved in that incident which accounts for the fact that the battle of the Thirty has remained so vividly remembered, and that in 1811 a monument, unpretentious but national, replaced the simple stone at first erected on the field of battle, on the edge of the road from Ploermel to Josselin, with this inscription: "To the immortal memory of the battle of the Thirty, gained by Marshal Beaumanoir, on the 26th of March, 1350 (1351)."
With some fondness, and at some length, this portion of Brittany's history in the fourteenth century has been dwelt upon, not only because of the dramatic interest attaching to the events and the actors, but also for the sake of showing, by that example, how many separate associations, diverse and often hostile, were at that time developing themselves, each on its own account, in that extensive and beautiful country which became France. We will now return to Philip of Valois and Edward III., and to the struggle between them for a settlement of the question whether France should or should not preserve its own independent kingship, and that national unity of which she already had the name, but of which she was still to undergo so much painful travail in acquiring the reality.
Although Edward III. by supporting with troops and officers, and sometimes even in person, the cause of the Countess of Montfort, and Philip of Valois by assisting in the same way Charles of Blois and Joan of Penthievre, took a very active, if indirect, share in the war in Brittany, the two kings persisted in not calling themselves at war; and when either of them proceeded to acts of unquestionable hostility, they eluded the consequences of them by hastily concluding truces incessantly violated and as incessantly renewed. They had made use of this expedient in 1340; and they had recourse to it again in 1342, 1343, and 1344. The last of these truces was to have lasted up to 1346; but, in the spring of 1345, Edward resolved to put an end to this equivocal position, and to openly recommence war. He announced his intention to Pope Clement IV., to his own lieutenants in Brittany, and to all the cities and corporations of his kingdom. He accused Philip of having "violated, without even sending us a challenge, the truce which, out of regard to the sovereign pontiff, we had agreed upon with him, and which he had taken an oath, upon his soul, to keep. On account whereof we have resolved to proceed against him, him and all his adherents, by land and sea, by all means possible, in order to recover our just rights." It is not quite clear what pressing reasons urged Edward to this decisive resolution. The English Parliament and people, it is true, showed more disposition to support their king in his pretensions to the throne of France, and the cause of the Count of Montfort was maintaining itself stubbornly in Brittany, but nothing seemed to call for so startling a rupture, or to promise Edward any speedy and successful issue. He had lost his most energetic and warlike adviser; for Robert d'Artois, the deadly enemy of Philip of Valois, had been so desperately wounded in the defence of Vannes against Robert de Beaumanoir, that he had returned to England only to die. Edward felt this loss severely, gave Robert a splendid funeral in St. Paul's church, and declared that "he would listen to nought until he had avenged him, and that he would reduce the country of Brittany to such plight that, for forty years, it should not recover." Philip of Valois, on his side, gave signs of getting ready for war. In 1343 he had convoked at Paris one of those assemblies which were beginning to be called the states-general of the kingdom, and he obtained from it certain subventions. It was likewise in 1343 and at the beginning of 1344, that he ordered the arrest, at a tournament to which he had invited them, and the decapitation, without any form of trial, of fourteen Breton and three Norman lords whom he suspected of intriguing against him with the King of England. And so Edward might have considered himself threatened with imminent peril; and, besides, he had friends to avenge. But it is not unreasonable to suppose that his fiery ambition, and his impatience to decide, once for all, that question of the French kingship which had been for five years in suspense between himself and his rival, were the true causes of his warlike resolve. However that may be, he determined to push the war vigorously forward at the three points at which he could easily wage it. In Brittany he had a party already engaged in the struggle; in Aquitaine, possessions of importance to defend or recover; in Flanders, allies with power to back him, and as angry as he himself. To Brittany he forwarded fresh supplies for the Count of Montfort; to Aquitaine he sent Henry of Lancaster, Earl of Derby, his own cousin, and the ablest of his lieutenants; and he himself prepared to cross over with a large army to Flanders.
The Earl of Derby met with solid and brilliant success in Aquitaine. He attacked and took in rapid succession Bergerac, La Reole, Aiguillon, Montpezat, Villefranche, and Angouleme. None of those places was relieved in time; the strict discipline of Derby's troops and the skill of the English archers were too much for the bravery of the men-at-arms, and the raw levies, ill organized and ill paid, of the King of France; and, in a word, the English were soon masters of almost the whole country between the Garonne and the Charente. Under such happy auspices Edward III. arrived on the 7th of July, 1345, at the port of Ecluse (Sluys), anxious to put himself in concert with the Flemings touching the campaign he proposed to commence before long in the north of France. Artevelde, with the consuls of Bruges and Ypres, was awaiting him there. According to some historians, Edward invited them aboard of his galley, and represented to them that the time had come for renouncing imperfect resolves and half-measures; told them that their count, Louis of Flanders, and his ancestors, had always ignored and attacked their liberties, and that the best thing they could do would be to sever their connection with a house they could not trust; and offered them for their chieftain his own son, the young Prince of Wales, to whom he would give the title of Duke of Flanders. According to other historians, it was not King Edward, but Artevelde himself, who took the initiative in this proposition. The latter had for some time past felt his own dominion in Flanders attacked and shaken; and he had been confronted, in his own native city, by declared enemies, who had all but come to blows with his own partisans. The different industrial corporations of Ghent were no longer at one amongst themselves; the weavers had quarrelled with the fullers. Division was likewise reaching a great height amongst the Flemish towns. The burghers of Poperinghe had refused to continue recognizing the privileges of those of Ypres; and the Ypres men, enraged, had taken up arms, and, after a sanguinary melley, had forced the folks of Poperinghe to give in. Then the Ypres men, proud of their triumph, had gone and broken the weavers' machinery at Bailleul, and in some other towns. Artevelde, constrained to take part in these petty civil wars, had been led on to greater and greater abuse, in his own city itself, of his municipal despotism, already grown hateful to many of his fellow-citizens. Whether he himself proposed to shake off the yoke of Count Louis of Flanders, and take for duke the Prince of Wales, or merely accepted King Edward's proposal, he set resolutely to work to get it carried. The most able men, swayed by their own passions and the growing necessities of the struggle in which they may be engaged, soon forget their first intentions, and ignore their new perils. The consuls of Bruges and Ypres, present with Artevelde at his interview with King Edward in the port of Ecluse (Sluys), answered that "they could not decide so great a matter unless the whole community of Flanders should agree thereto," and so returned to their cities. Artevelde followed them thither, and succeeded in getting the proposed resolution adopted by the people of Ypres and Bruges. But when he returned to Ghent, on the 24th of July, 1345, "those in the city who knew of his coming," says Froissart, "had assembled in the street whereby he must ride to his hostel. So soon as they saw him they began to mutter, saying, 'There goes he who is too much master, and would fain do with the countship of Flanders according to his own will; which cannot be borne.' It had, besides this, been spread about the city that James Van Artevelde had secretly sent to England the great treasure of Flanders, which he had been collecting for the space of the nine years and more during which he had held the government. This was a matter which did greatly vex and incense them of Ghent. As James Van Artevelde rode along the street, he soon perceived that there was something fresh against him, for those who were wont to bow down and take off their caps to him turned him a cold shoulder, and went back into their houses. Then he began to be afraid; and so soon as he had dismounted at his house, he had all the doors and windows shut and barred. Scarcely had his varlets done so, when the street in which he lived was covered, front and back, with folk, and chiefly small crafts-folk. His hostel was surrounded and beset, front and back, and broken into by force. Those within defended themselves a long while, and overthrew and wounded many; but at last they could not hold out, for they were so closely assailed that nearly three quarters of the city were at this assault. When Artevelde saw the efforts a-making, and how hotly he was pressed, he came to a window over the street, and began to abase himself, and say with much fine language, 'Good folks, what want ye? What is it that doth move ye? Wherefore are ye so vexed at me? In what way can I have angered ye? Tell me, and I will mend it according to your wishes.' Then all those who had heard him answered with one voice, 'We would have an account of the great treasure of Flanders, which you have sent to England without right or reason.' Artevelde answered full softly, 'Of a surety, sirs, I have never taken a denier from the treasury of Flanders; go ye back quietly home, I pray you, and come again to-morrow morning; I shall be so well prepared to render you a good account, that, according to reason, it cannot but content ye.' 'Nay, nay,' they answered, with one voice, 'but we would have it at once; you shall not escape us so; we do know of a verity that you have taken it out and sent it away to England, without our wit; for which cause you must needs die.' When Artevelde heard this word, he began to weep right piteously, and said, 'Sirs, ye have made me what I am, and ye did swear to me aforetime that ye would guard and defend me against all men; and now ye would kill me, and without a cause. Ye can do so an if it please you, for I am but one single man against ye all, without any defence. Think hereon, for God's sake, and look back to bygone times. Consider the great courtesies and services that I have done ye. Know ye not how all trade had perished in this country? It was I who raised it up again. Afterwards I governed ye in peace so great, that, during the time of my government, ye have had everything to your wish, grains, wools, and all sorts of merchandise, wherewith ye are well provided and in good case.' Then they began to shout, 'Come down, and preach not to us from such a height; we would have account and reckoning of the great treasure of Flanders which you have too long had under control without rendering an account, which it appertaineth not to any officer to do.' When Artevelde saw that they would not cool down, and would not restrain themselves, he closed the window, and bethought him that he would escape by the back, and get him gone to a church adjoining his hostel; but his hostel was already burst open and broken into behind, and there were more than four hundred persons who were all anxious to seize him. At last he was caught amongst them, and killed on the spot without mercy. A weaver, called Thomas Denis, gave him his death-blow. This was the end of Artevelde, who in his time was so great a master in Flanders. Poor folk exalted him at first, and wicked folk slew him at the last."
It was a great loss for King Edward. Under Van Artevelde's bold dominance, and in consequence of his alliance with England, the warlike renown of Flanders had made some noise in Europe, to such an extent that Petrarch exclaimed, "List to the sounds, still indistinct, that reach us from the world of the West; Flanders is plunged in ceaseless war; all the country stretching from the restless Ocean to the Latin Alps is rushing forth to arms. Would to Heaven that there might come to us some gleams of salvation from thence! O Italy, poor father-land, thou prey to sufferings without relief, thou who wast wont with thy deeds of arms to trouble the peace of the world, now art thou motionless when the fate of the world hangs on the chances of battle!" The Flemings spared no effort to re-assure the King of England. Their envoys went to Westminster to deplore the murder of Van Artevelde, and tried to persuade Edward that his policy would be perpetuated throughout their cities, and "to such purpose," says Froissart, "that in the end the king was fairly content with the Flemings, and they with him, and, between them, the death of James Van Artevelde was little by little forgotten." Edward, however, was so much affected by it that he required a whole year before he could resume with any confidence his projects of war; and it was not until the 2d of July, 1346, that he embarked at Southampton, taking with him, besides his son, the Prince of Wales, hardly sixteen years of age, an army which comprised, according to Froissart, seven earls, more than thirty-five barons, a great number of knights, four thousand men-at-arms, ten thousand English archers, six thousand Irish, and twelve thousand Welsh infantry, in all something more than thirty-two thousand men, troops even more formidable for their discipline and experience of war than for their numbers. When they were out at sea none knew, not even the king himself, for what point of the Continent they were to make, for the south or the north, for Aquitaine or Normandy. "Sir," said Godfrey d'Harcourt, who had become one of the king's most trusted counsellors, "the country of Normandy is one of the fattest in the world, and I promise you, at the risk of my head, that if you put in there you shall take possession of land at your good pleasure, for the folk there never were armed, and all the flower of their chivalry is now at Aiguillon with their duke; for certain, we shall find there gold, silver, victual, and all other good things in great abundance." Edward adopted this advice; and on the 12th of July, 1346, his fleet anchored before the peninsula of Cotentin, at Cape La Hogue. Whilst disembarking, at the very first step he made on shore, the king fell "so roughly," says Froissart, "that blood spurted from his nose. 'Sir,' said his knights to him, 'go back to your ship, and come not now to land, for here is an ill sign for you.' 'Nay, verily,' quoth the king, full roundly, 'it is a right good sign for me, since the land doth desire me.'" Caesar did and said much the same on disembarking in Africa, and William the Conqueror on landing in England. In spite of contemporary accounts, there is a doubt about the authenticity of these striking expressions, which become favorites, and crop up again on all similar occasions.
For a month Edward marched his army over Normandy, "finding on his road," says Froissart, "the country fat and plenteous in everything, the garners full of corn, the houses full of all manner of riches, carriages, wagons and horses, swine, ewes, wethers, and the finest oxen in the world." He took and plundered on his way Barfleur, Cherbourg, Valognes, Carentan, and St. Lo. When, on the 26th of July, he arrived before Caen, "a city bigger than any in England save London, and full of all kinds of merchandise, of rich burghers, of noble dames, and of fine churches," the population attempted to resist. Philip had sent to them the constable, Raoul d'Eu, and the Count of Tancarville; but, after three days of petty fighting around the city and even in the streets themselves, Edward became master of it, and on the entreaty, it is said, of Godfrey d'Harcourt, exempted it from pillage. Continuing his march, he occupied Louviers, Vernon, Verneuil, Mantes, Meulan, and Poissy, where he took up his quarters in the old residence of King Robert; and thence his troops advanced and spread themselves as far as Ruel, Neuilly, Boulogne, St. Cloud, Bourg-la-Reine, and almost to the gates of Paris, whence could be seen "the fire and smoke from burning villages." "We ourselves," says a contemporary chronicler, "saw these things; and it was a great dishonor that in the midst of the kingdom of France the King of England should squander, spoil, and consume the king's wines and other goods." Great was the consternation at Paris. And it was redoubled when Philip gave orders for the demolition of the houses built along by the walls of circumvallation, on the ground that they embarrassed the defence. The people believed that they were on the eve of a siege. The order was revoked; but the feeling became even more intense when it was known that the king was getting ready to start for St. Denis, where his principal allies, the King of Bohemia, the Dukes of Hainault and of Lorraine, the Counts of Flanders and of Blois, "and a very great array of baronry and chivalry," were already assembled. "Ah! dear sir and noble king," cried the burghers of Paris as they came to Philip and threw themselves on their knees before him, "what would you do? Would you thus leave your good city of Paris? Your enemies are already within two leagues, and will soon be in our city when they know that you are gone; and we have and shall have none to defend us against them. Sir, may it please you to remain and watch over your good city." "My good people," answered the king, "have ye no fear; the English shall come no nigher to you; I am away to St. Denis to my men-at-arms, for I mean to ride against these English, and fight them, in such fashion as I may." Philip recalled in all haste his troops from Aquitaine, commanded the burgher-forces to assemble, and gave them, as he had given all his allies, St. Denis for the rallying-point. At sight of so many great lords and all sorts of men of war flocking together from all points, the Parisians took fresh courage. "For many a long day there had not been seen at St. Denis a king of France in arms and fully prepared for battle."
Edward began to be afraid of having pushed too far forward, and of finding himself endangered in the heart of France, confronted by an army which would soon be stronger than his own. Some chronicles say that Philip, in his turn, sent a challenge either for single combat or for a battle on a fixed day, in a place assigned, and that Edward, in his turn also, declined the proposition he had but lately made to his rival. It appears, further, that at the moment of commencing his retreat away from Paris, he tried ringing the changes on Philip with respect to the line he intended to take, and that Philip was led to believe that the English army would fall back in a westerly direction, by Orleans and Tours, whereas it marched northward, where Edward flattered himself he would find partisans, counting especially on the help of the Flemings, who, in fulfilment of their promise, had already advanced as far as Bethune to support him. Philip was soon better informed, and moved with all his army into Picardy in pursuit of the English army, which was in a hurry to reach and cross the Somme, and so continue its march northward. It was more than once forced to fight on its march with the people of the towns and country through which it was passing; provisions were beginning to fall short; and Edward sent his two marshals, the Earl of Warwick and Godfrey d'Harcourt, to discover where it was practicable to cross the river, which, at this season of the year and so near its mouth, was both broad and deep. They returned without having any satisfactory information to report; "whereupon," says Froissart, "the king was not more joyous or less pensive, and began to fall into a great melancholy." He had halted three or four days at Airaines, some few leagues from Amiens, whither the King of France had arrived in pursuit with an army, it is said, more than a hundred thousand strong. Philip learned through his scouts that the King of England would evacuate Airaines the next morning, and ride to Abbeville in hopes of finding some means of getting over the Somme. Philip immediately ordered a Norman baron, Godemar du Fay, to go with a body of troops and guard the ford of Blanche-Tache, below Abbeville, the only point at which, it was said, the English could cross the river; and on the same day he himself moved with the bulk of his army from Amiens on Airaines. There he arrived about midday, some few hours after that the King of England had departed with such precipitation that the French found in it "great store of provisions, meat ready spitted, bread and pastry in the oven, wines in barrel, and many tables which the English had left ready set and laid out." "Sir," said Philip's officers to him, as soon as he was at Airaines, "rest you here and wait for your barons and their folk, for the English cannot escape you." It was concluded, in point of fact, that Edward and his troops, not being able to cross the Somme, would find themselves hemmed in between the French army and the strong places of Abbeville, St. Valery, and Le Crotoi, in the most evil case and perilous position possible. But Edward, on arriving at the little town of Oisemont, hard by the Somme, set out in person in quest of the ford he was so anxious to discover. He sent for some prisoners he had made in the country, and said to them, "right courteously," according to Froissart, "'Is there here any man who knows of a passage below Abbeville, where-by we and our army might cross the river without peril?' And a varlet from a neighboring mill, whose name history has preserved as that of a traitor, Gobin Agace, said to the king, 'Sir, I do promise you, at the risk of my head, that I will guide you to such a spot, where you shall cross the River Somme without peril, you and your army.' 'Comrade,' said the king to him, 'if I find true that which thou tellest us, I will set thee free from thy prison, thee and all thy fellows for love of thee, and I will cause to be given to thee a hundred golden nobles and a good stallion.'" The varlet had told the truth; the ford was found at the spot called Blanche-Tache, whither Philip had sent Godemar du Fay with a few thousand men to guard it. A battle took place; but the two marshals of England, "unfurling their banners in the name of God and St. George, and having with them the most valiant and best mounted, threw themselves into the water at full gallop, and there, in the river, was done many a deed of battle, and many a man was laid low on one side and the other, for Sir Godemar and his comrades did valiantly defend the passage; but at last the English got across, and moved forward into the fields as fast as ever they landed. When Sir Godemar saw the mishap, he made off as quickly as he could, and so did a many of his comrades." The King of France, when he heard the news, was very wroth, "for he had good hope of finding the English on the Somme and fighting them there. 'What is it right to do now?' asked Philip of his marshals. 'Sir,' answered they, 'you cannot now cross in pursuit of the English, for the tide is already up.'" Philip went disconsolate to lie at Abbeville, whither all his men followed him. Had he been as watchful as Edward was, and had he, instead of halting at Airaines "by the ready-set tables which the English had left," marched at once in pursuit of them, perhaps he would have caught and beaten them on the left bank of the Somme, before they could cross and take up position on the other side. This was the first striking instance of that extreme inequality between the two kings in point of ability and energy which was before long to produce results so fatal for Philip.
When Edward, after passing the Somme, had arrived near Crecy, five leagues from Abbeville, in the countship of Ponthieu which had formed part of his mother Isabel's dowry, "'Halt we here,' said he to his marshals; 'I will go no farther till I have seen the enemy; I am on my mother's rightful inheritance which was given her on her marriage; I will defend it against mine adversary, Philip of Valois;' and he rested in the open fields, he and all his men, and made his marshals mark well the ground where they would set their battle in array." Philip, on his side, had moved to Abbeville, where all his men came and joined him, and whence he sent out scouts "to learn the truth about the English. When he knew that they were resting in the open fields near Crecy and showed that they were awaiting their enemies, the King of France was very joyful, and said that, please God, they should fight him on the morrow [the day after Friday, August 25, 1346]. He that day bade to supper all the high-born princes who were at Abbeville. They were all in great spirits and had great talk of arms, and after supper the king prayed all the lords to be all of them, one toward another, friendly and courteous, without envy, hatred, and pride, and every one made him a promise thereof. On the same day of Friday the King of England also gave a supper to the earls and barons of his army, made them great cheer, and then sent them away to rest, which they did. When all the company had gone, he entered into his oratory, and fell on his knees before the altar, praying devoutly that God would permit him on the morrow, if he should fight, to come out of the business with honor; after which, about midnight, he went and lay down. On the morrow he rose pretty early, for good reason, heard mass with the Prince of Wales, his son, and both of them communicated. The majority of his men confessed and put themselves in good ease. After mass the king commanded all to get on their arms and take their places in the field according as he had assigned them the day before." Edward had divided his army into three bodies; he had put the first, forming the van, under the orders of the young Prince of Wales, having about him the best and most tried warriors; the second had for commanders earls and barons in whom the king had confidence; and the third, the reserve, he commanded in person. Having thus made his arrangements, Edward, mounted on a little palfrey, with a white staff in his hand and his marshals in his train, rode at a foot-pace from rank to rank, exhorting all his men, officers and privates, to stoutly defend his right and do their duty; and "he said these words to them," says Froissart, "with so bright a smile and so joyous a mien that whoso had before been disheartened felt reheartened on seeing and hearing him." Having finished his ride, Edward went back to his own division, giving orders for all his folk to eat their fill and drink one draught: which they did. "And then they sat down all of them on the ground, with their head-pieces and their bows in front of them, resting themselves in order to be more fresh and cool when the enemy should come."
Philip also set himself in motion on Saturday, the 26th of August, and, after having heard mass, marched out from Abbeville with all his barons. "There was so great a throng of men-at-arms there," says Froissart, "that it were a marvel to think on, and the king rode mighty gently to wait for all his folk." When they were two leagues from Abbeville, one of them that were with him said, "Sir, it were well to put your lines in order of battle, and to send three or four of your knights to ride forward and observe the enemy and in what condition they be." So four knights pushed forward to within sight of the English, and, returning immediately to the king, whom they could not approach without breaking the host that encompassed him, they said by the mouth of one of them, "Know, sir, that the English be halted, well and regularly, in three lines of battle, and show no sign of meaning to fly, but await your coming. For my part, my counsel is that you halt all your men, and rest them in the fields throughout this day. Before the hindermost can come up, and before your lines of battle are set in order, it will be late; your men will be tired and in disarray; and you will find the enemy cool and fresh. To-morrow morning you will be better able to dispose your men and determine in what quarter it will be expedient to attack the enemy. Sure may you be that they will await you." This counsel was well pleasing to the King of France, and he commanded that thus it should be. "The two marshals rode one to the front and the other to the rear with orders to the bannerets, 'Halt, banners, by command of the king, in the name of God and St. Denis!' At this order those who were foremost halted, but not those who were hindermost, continuing to ride forward and saying that they would not halt until they were as much to the front as the foremost were. Neither the king nor his marshals could get the mastery of their men, for there was so goodly a number of great lords that each was minded to show his own might. There was, besides, in the fields, so goodly a number of common people that all the roads between Abbeville and Crecy were covered with them; and when these folk thought themselves near the enemy, they drew their swords, shouting, 'Death! death!' And not a soul did they see."
"When the English saw the French approaching, they rose up in fine order and ranged themselves in their lines of battle, that of the Prince of Wales right in front, and the Earls of Northampton and Arundel, who commanded the second, took up their place on the wing, right orderly and all ready to support the prince, if need should be. Well, the lords, kings, dukes, counts, and barons of the French came not up all together, but one in front and another behind, without plan or orderliness. When King Philip arrived at the spot where the English were thus halted, and saw them, the blood boiled within him, for he hated them, and he said to his marshals, 'Let our Genoese pass to the front and begin the battle, in the name of God and St. Denis.' There were there fifteen thousand of these said Genoese bowmen; but they were sore tired with going a-foot that day more than six leagues and fully armed, and they said to their commanders that they were not prepared to do any great feat of battle. 'To be saddled with such a scum as this that fails you in the hour of need!' said the Duke d'Alencon on hearing those words. Whilst the Genoese were holding back, there fell from heaven a rain, heavy and thick, with thunder and lightning very mighty and terrible. Before long, however, the air began to clear and the sun to shine. The French had it right in their eyes and the English at their backs. When the Genoese had recovered themselves and got together, they advanced upon the English with loud shouts, so as to strike dismay; but the English kept quite quiet, and showed no sign of it. Then the Genoese bent their cross-bows and began to shoot. The English, making one step forward, let fly their arrows, which came down so thick upon the Genoese that it looked like a fall of snow. The Genoese, galled and discomfited, began to fall back. Between them and the main body of the French was a great hedge of men-at-arms who were watching their proceedings. When the King of France saw his bowmen thus in disorder he shouted to the men-at-arms, 'Up now and slay all this scum, for it blocks our way and hinders us from getting forward.'" Then the French, on every side, struck out at the Genoese, at whom the English archers continued to shoot.
"Thus began the battle between Broye and Crecy, at the hour of vespers." The French, as they came up, were already tired and in great disorder: "howbeit so many valiant men and good knights kept ever riding forward for their honor's sake, and preferred rather to die than that a base flight should be cast in their teeth." A fierce combat took place between them and the division of the Prince of Wales. Thither penetrated the Count d'Alencon and the Count of Flanders with their followers, round the flank of the English archers; and the King of France, who was foaming with displeasure and wrath, rode forward to join his brother D'Alencon, but there was so great a hedge of archers and men-at-arms mingled together that he could never get past. Thomas of Norwich, a knight serving under the Prince of Wales, was sent to the King of England to ask him for help. "'Sir Thomas,' said the king, 'is my son dead or unhorsed, or so wounded that he cannot help himself?' 'Not so, my lord, please God; but he is fighting against great odds, and is like to have need of your help.' 'Sir Thomas,' replied the king, 'return to them who sent you, and tell them from me not to send for me, whatever chance befall them, so long as my son is alive, and tell them that I bid them let the lad win his spurs; for I wish, if God so deem, that the day should be his, and the honor thereof remain to him and to those to whom I have given him in charge.' The knight returned with this answer to his chiefs; and it encouraged them greatly, and they repented within themselves for that they had sent him to the king." Warlike ardor, if not ability and prudence, was the same on both sides. Philip's faithful ally, John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia, had come thither, blind as he was, with his son Charles and his knights; and when he knew that the battle had begun he asked those who were near him how it was going on. "'My lord,' they said, 'the Genoese are discomfited, and the king has given orders to slay them all; and all the while between our folk and them there is so great disorder that they stumble one over another and hinder us greatly.' 'Ha!' said the king, 'that is an ill sign for us; where is Sir Charles, my son?' 'My lord, we know not; we have reason to believe that he is elsewhere in the fight.' 'Sirs,' replied the old king, 'ye are my liegemen, my friends, and my comrades; I pray you and require you to lead me so far to the front in the work of this day that I may strike a blow with my sword; it shall not be said that I came hither to do nought.' So his train, who loved his honor and their own advancement," says Froissart, "did his bidding. For to acquit themselves of their duty, and that they might not lose him in the throng, they tied themselves all together by the reins of their horses, and set the king, their lord, right in front, that he might the better accomplish his desire, and thus they bore down on the enemy. And the king went so far forward that he struck a good blow, yea, three and four; and so did all those who were with him. And they served him so well and charged so well forward upon the English, that all fell there and were found next day on the spot around their lord, and their horses tied together."
"The King of France," continues Froissart, "had great anguish at heart when he saw his men thus discomfited and falling one after another before a handful of folk as the English were. He asked counsel of Sir John of Hainault, who was near him and who said to him, 'Truly, sir, I can give you no better counsel than that you should withdraw and place yourself in safety, for I see no remedy here. It will soon be late; and then you would be as likely to ride upon your enemies as amongst your friends, and so be lost.' Late in the evening, at nightfall, King Philip left the field with a heavy heart—and for good cause; he had just five barons with him, and no more! He rode, quite broken-hearted, to the castle of Broye. When he came to the gate, he found it shut and the bridge drawn up, for it was fully night, and was very dark and thick. The king had the castellan summoned, who came forward on the battlements and cried aloud, 'Who's there? who knocks at such an hour?' 'Open, castellan,' said Philip; 'it is the unhappy King of France.' The castellan went out as soon as he recognized the voice of the King of France; and he well knew already that they had been discomfited, from some fugitives who had passed at the foot of the castle. He let down the bridge and opened the gate. Then the king, with his following, went in, and remained there up to midnight, for the king did not care to stay and shut himself up therein. He drank a draught, and so did they who were with him; then they mounted to horse, took guides to conduct them, and rode in such wise that at break of day they entered the good city of Amiens. There the king halted, took up his quarters in an abbey, and said that he would go no farther until he knew the truth about his men, which of them were left on the field and which had escaped."
Whilst Philip, with all speed, was on the road back to Paris with his army as disheartened as its king, and more disorderly in retreat than it had been in battle, Edward was hastening, with ardor and intelligence, to reap the fruits of his victory. In the difficult war of conquest he had undertaken, what was clearly of most importance to him was to possess on the coast of France, as near as possible to England, a place which he might make, in his operations by land and sea, a point of arrival and departure, of occupancy, of provisioning, and of secure refuge. Calais exactly fulfilled these conditions. It was a natural harbor, protected, for many centuries past, by two huge towers, of which one, it is said, was built by the Emperor Caligula and the other by Charlemagne; it had been deepened and improved, at the end of the tenth century, by Baldwin IV., Count of Flanders, and in the thirteenth by Philip of France, called Toughskin (Hurepel), Count of Boulogne; and, in the fourteenth, it had become an important city, surrounded by a strong wall of circumvallation, and having erected in its midst a huge keep, furnished with bastions and towers, which was called the Castle. On arriving before the place, September 3, 1346, Edward "immediately had built all round it," says Froissart, "houses and dwelling-places of solid carpentry, and arranged in streets as if he were to remain there for ten or twelve years, for his intention was not to leave it winter or summer, whatever time and whatever trouble he must spend and take. He called this new town Villeneuve la Hardie; and he had therein all things necessary for an army, and more too, as a place appointed for the holding of a market on Wednesday and Saturday; and therein were mercers' shops, and butchers' shops, and stores for the sale of cloth, and bread, and all other necessaries. King Edward did not have the city of Calais assaulted by his men, well knowing that he would lose his pains, but said he would starve it out, however long a time it might cost him, if King Philip of France did not come to fight him again, and raise the siege."
Calais had for its governor John de Vienne, a valiant and faithful Burgundian knight, "the which, seeing," says Froissart, "that the King of England was making every sacrifice to keep up the siege, ordered that all sorts of small folk, who had no provisions, should quit the city without further notice. They went forth on a Wednesday morning, men, women, and children, more than seventeen hundred of them, and passed through King Edward's army. They were asked why they were leaving; and they answered, because they had no means of living. Then the king permitted them to pass, and caused to be given to all of them, male and female, a hearty dinner, and after dinner two shillings apiece, the which grace was commended as very handsome; and so indeed it was." Edward probably hoped that his generosity would produce, in the town itself which remained in a state of siege, a favorable impression; but he had to do with a population ardently warlike and patriotic, burghers as well as knights. They endured for eleven months all the sufferings arising from isolation and famine; though, from time to time, fishermen and seamen in their neighborhood, and amongst others two seamen of Abbeville, the names of whom have been preserved in history, Marant and Mestriel, succeeded in getting victuals in to them. The King of France made two attempts to relieve them. On the 20th of May, 1347, he assembled his troops at Amiens; but they were not ready to march till about the middle of July, and as long before as the 23d of June a French fleet of ten galleys and thirty-five transports had been driven off by the English. John de Vienne wrote to Philip, "Everything has been eaten, cats, dogs, and horses, and we can no longer find victual in the town unless we eat human flesh. . . . If we have not speedy succor, we will issue forth from the town to fight, whether to live or die, for we would rather die honorably in the field than eat one another. . . . If a remedy be not soon applied, you will never more have letter from me, and the town will be lost as well as we who are in it. May our Lord grant you a happy life and a long, and put you in such a disposition that, if we die for your sake, you may settle the account therefor with our heirs!" On the 27th of July Philip arrived in person before Calais. If Froissart can be trusted, "he had with him full two hundred thousand men, and these French rode up with banners flying as if to fight, and it was a fine sight to see such puissant array; and so, when they of Calais who were on the walls saw them appear and their banners floating on the breeze, they had great joy, and believed that they were going to be soon delivered! But when they saw camping and tenting going forward they were more angered than before, for it seemed to them an evil sign." The marshals of France went about everywhere looking for a passage, and they reported that it was nowhere possible to open a road without exposing the army to loss, so well all the approaches to the place, by sea and land, were guarded by the English. The pope's two legates, who had accompanied King Philip, tried in vain to open negotiations. Philip sent four knights to the King of England to urge him to appoint a place where a battle might be fought without advantage on either side; but, "Sirs," answered Edward, "I have been here nigh upon a year, and have been at heavy charges by it; and having done so much that before long I shall be master of Calais. I will by no means retard my conquest which I have so much desired. Let mine adversary and his people find out a way, as they please, to fight me."
Other testimony would have us believe that Edward accepted Philip's challenge, and that it was the King of France who raised fresh difficulties in consequence of which the proposed battle did not take place. Froissart's account, however, seems the more truth-like in itself, and more in accordance with the totality of facts. However that may be, whether it were actual powerlessness or want of spirit both on the part of the French army and of the king, Philip, on the 2d of August, 1347, took the road back to Amiens, and dismissed all those who had gone with him, men-at-arms and common folk.
When the people of Calais saw that all hope of a rescue had slipped from them, they held a council, resigned themselves to offer submission to the King of England rather than die of hunger, and begged their governor, John de Vienne, to enter into negotiations for that purpose with the besiegers. Walter de Manny, instructed by Edward to reply to these overtures, said to John de Vienne, "The king's intent is, that ye put yourselves at his free will to ransom or put to death such as it shall please him; the people of Calais have caused him so great displeasure, cost him so much money, and lost him so many men, that it is not astonishing if that weighs heavily upon him." "Sir Walter," answered John de Vienne, "it would be too hard a matter for us if we were to consent to what you say. There are within here but a small number of us knights and squires who have loyally served our lord the King of France even as you would serve yours in like case; but we would suffer greater evils than ever men have had to endure rather than consent that the meanest 'prentice-boy or varlet of the town should have other evil than the greatest of us. We pray you be pleased to return to the King of England, and pray him to have pity upon us; and you will do us courtesy." "By my faith," answered Walter de Manny, "I will do it willingly, Sir John; and I would that, by God's help, the king might be pleased to listen unto me." And the brave English knight reported to the king the prayer of the French knights in Calais, saying, "My lord, Sir John de Vienne told me that they were in very sore extremity and famine, but that, rather than surrender all to your will, to live or die as it might please you, they would sell themselves so dearly as never did men-at-arms." "I will not do otherwise than I have said," answered the king. "My lord," replied Walter, "you will perchance be wrong, for you will give us a bad example; if you should be pleased to send us to defend any of your fortresses, we should of a surety not go willingly if you have these people put to death, for thus would they do to us in like case." These words caused Edward to reflect; and the greater part of the English barons came to the aid of Walter de Manny. "Sirs," said the king, "I would not be all alone against you all. Go, Walter, to them of Calais, and say to the governor that the greatest grace they can find in my sight is that six of the most notable burghers come forth from their town, bare-headed, bare-footed, with ropes round their necks, and with the keys of the town and castle in their hands. With them I will do according to my will, and the rest I will receive to mercy." "My lord," said Walter, "I will do it willingly." He returned to Calais, where John de Vienne was awaiting him, and reported the king's decision. The governor immediately left the ramparts, went to the market-place, and had the bell rung to assemble the people. At sound of the bell men and women came hurrying up hungering for news, as was natural for people so hard-pressed by famine that they could not hold out any longer. John de Vienne then repeated to them what he had just been told, adding that there was no other way, and that they would have to make short answer. On this they all fell a-weeping and crying out so bitterly that no heart in the world, however hard, could have seen and heard them without pity. Even John de Vienne shed tears. Then rose up to his feet the richest burgher of the town, Eustace de St. Pierre, who, at the former council, had been for capitulation. "Sir," said he, "it would be great pity to leave this people to die, by famine or otherwise, when any remedy can be found against it; and he who should keep them from such a mishap would find great favor in the eyes of our Lord. I have great hope to find favor in the eyes of our Lord if I die to save this people; I would fain be the first herein, and I will willingly place myself in my shirt and bare-headed and with a rope round my neck, at the mercy of the King of England." At this speech, men and women cast themselves at the feet of Eustace de St. Pierre, weeping piteously. Another right-honorable burgher, who had great possessions and two beautiful damsels for daughters, rose up and said that he would act comrade to Eustace de St. Pierre: his name was John d'Aire. Then, for the third, James de Vissant, a rich man in personalty and realty; then his brother Peter de Vissant; and then the fifth and sixth, of whom none has told the names. On the 5th of August, 1347, these six burghers, thus apparelled, with cords round their necks and each with a bunch of the keys of the city and of the castle, were conducted outside the gates by John de Vienne, who rode a small hackney, for he was in such ill plight that he could not go a-foot. He gave them up to Sir Walter, who was awaiting him, and said to him, "As captain of Calais I deliver to you, with the consent of the poor people of the town, these six burghers, who are, I swear to you, the most honorable and notable in person, in fortune, and in ancestry, in the town of Calais. I pray you be pleased to pray the King of England that these good folks be not put to death." "I know not," answered De Manny, "what my lord the king may mean to do with them; but I promise you that I will do mine ability." When Sir Walter brought in the six burghers in this condition, King Edward was in his chamber with a great company of earls, barons, and knights. As soon as he heard that the folks of Calais were there as he had ordered, he went out and stood in the open space before his hostel and all those lords with him; and even Queen Philippa of England, who was with child, followed the king her lord. He gazed most cruelly on those six poor men, for he had his heart possessed with so much rage that at first he could not speak. When he spoke, he commanded them to be straightway beheaded, All the barons and knights who were there prayed him to show them mercy. "Gentle sir," said Walter de Manny, "restrain your wrath; you have renown for gentleness and nobleness; be pleased to do nought whereby it may be diminished; if you have not pity on yonder folk, all others will say that it was great cruelty on your part to put to death these six honorable burghers, who of their own free will have put themselves at your mercy to save the others." The king gnashed his teeth, saying, "Sir Walter, hold your peace; let them fetch hither my headsman; the people of Calais have been the death of so many of my men that it is but meet that yon fellows die also." Then, with great humility, the noble queen, who was very nigh her delivery, threw herself on her knees at the feet of the king, saying, "Ah gentle sir, if, as you know, I have asked nothing of you from the time that I crossed the sea in great peril, I pray you humbly that as a special boon, for the sake of Holy Mary's Son and for the love of me, you will please to have mercy on these six men."
The king did not speak at once, and fixed his eyes on the good dame his wife, who was weeping piteously on her knees. She softened his stern heart, for he would have been loath to vex her in the state in which she was; and he said to her, "Ha! dame, I had much rather you had been elsewhere than here; but you pray me such prayers that I dare not refuse you, and though it irks me much to do so, there! I give them up to you; do with them as you will." "Thanks, hearty thanks, my lord," said the good queen. Then she rose up and raised up the six burghers, had the ropes taken off their necks, and took them with her to her chamber, where she had fresh clothes and dinner brought to them. Afterwards she gave them six nobles apiece, and had them led out of the host in all safety.
Edward was choleric and stern in his choler, but judicious and politic. He had sense enough to comprehend the impressions exhibited around him and to take them into account. He had yielded to the free-spoken representations of Walter de Manny and to the soft entreaties of his royal wife. When he was master of Calais he did not suffer himself to be under any illusion as to the sentiments of the population he had conquered, and, without excluding the French from the town, he took great care to mingle with them an English population. He had allowed a free passage to the poor Calaisians driven out by famine; he now fetched from London thirty-six burghers of position and three hundred others of inferior condition, with their wives and children, and he granted to the town thus depeopled and repeopled all such municipal and commercial privileges as were likely to attract new inhabitants thither. But, at the same time, he felt what renown and importance a devotion like that of the six burghers of Calais could not fail to confer upon such men, and not only did he trouble himself to get them back to their own hearths, but on the 8th of October, 1347, two months after the surrender of Calais, he gave Eustace de St. Pierre a considerable pension "on account of the good services he was to render in the town by maintaining good order there," and he re-instated him, him and his heirs, in possession of the properties that had belonged to him. Eustace, more concerned for the interests of his own town than for those of France, and being more of a Calaisian burgher than a national patriot, showed no hesitation, for all that appears, in accepting this new fashion of serving his native city, for which he had shown himself so ready to die. He lived four years as a subject of the King of England. At his death, which happened in 1351, his heirs declared themselves faithful subjects of the King of France, and Edward confiscated away from them the possessions he had restored to their predecessor. Eustace de St. Pierre's cousin and comrade in devotion to their native town, John d'Aire, would not enter Calais again; his property was confiscated, and his house, the finest, it is said, in the town, was given by King Edward to Queen Philippa, who showed no more hesitation in accepting it than Eustace in serving his new king. Long-lived delicacy of sentiment and conduct was rarer in those rough and rude times than heroic bursts of courage and devotion.
Philip of Valois tried to afford some consolation and supply some remedy for the misfortune of the Calaisians banished from their town. He secured to them exemption from certain imposts, no matter whither they removed, and the possession of all property and inheritances that might fall to them, and he promised to confer upon them all vacant offices which it might suit them to fill. But it was not in his gift to repair. even superficially and in appearance, the evils he had not known how to prevent or combat to any purpose. The outset of his reign had been brilliant and prosperous; but his victory at Cassel over the Flemings brought more cry than wool. He had vanity enough to flaunt it rather than wit enough to turn it to account. He was a prince of courts, and tournaments, and trips, and galas, whether regal or plebeian; he was volatile, imprudent, haughty, and yet frivolous, brave without ability, and despotic without anything to show for it. The battle of Crecy and the loss of Calais were reverses from which he never even made a serious attempt to recover; he hastily concluded with Edward a truce, twice renewed, which served only to consolidate the victor's successes. A calamity of European extent came as an addition to the distresses of France. From 1347 to 1349 a frightful disease, brought from Egypt and Syria through the ports of Italy, and called the black plague or the plague of Florence, ravaged Western Europe, especially Provence and Languedoc, where it carried off, they say, two thirds of the inhabitants. Machiavelli and Boccaccio have described with all the force of their genius the material and moral effects of this terrible plague. The court of France suffered particularly from it, and the famous object of Petrarch's tender sonnets, Laura de Noves, married to Hugh de Sade, fell a victim to it at Avignon. When the epidemic had well nigh disappeared, the survivors, men and women, princes and subjects, returned passionately to their pleasures and their galas; to mortality, says a contemporary chronicler, succeeded a rage for marriage; and Philip of Valois himself, now fifty-eight years of age, took for his second wife Blanche of Navarre, who was only eighteen. She was a sister of that young King of Navarre, Charles II., who was soon to get the name of Charles the Bad, and to become so dangerous an enemy for Philip's successors. Seven months after his marriage, and on the 22d of August, 1350, Philip died at Nogent-le-Roi in the Haute-Marne, strictly enjoining his son John to maintain with vigor his well-ascertained right to the crown he wore, and leaving his people bowed down beneath a weight "of extortions so heavy that the like had never been seen in the kingdom of France."
Only one happy event distinguished the close of this reign. As early as 1343 Philip had treated, on a monetary basis, with Humbert II., Count and Dauphin of Vienness, for the cession of that beautiful province to the crown of France after the death of the then possessor. Humbert, an adventurous and fantastic prince, plunged, in 1346, into a crusade against the Turks, from which he returned in the following year without having obtained any success. Tired of seeking adventures as well as of reigning, he, on the 16th of July, 1349, before a solemn assembly held at Lyons, abdicated his principality in favor of Prince Charles of France, grandson of Philip of Valois, and afterwards Charles V. The new dauphin took the oath, between the hands of the Bishop of Grenoble, to maintain the liberties, franchises, and privileges of the Dauphiny; and the ex-dauphin, after having taken holy orders and passed successively through the Archbishopric of Rheims and the Bishopric of Paris, both of which he found equally unpalatable, went to die at Clermont in Auvergne, in a convent belonging to the order of Dominicans, whose habit he had donned.
In the same year, on the 18th of April, 1349, Philip of Valois bought of Jayme of Arragon, the last king of Majorca, for one hundred and twenty thousand golden crowns, the lordship and town of Montpellier, thus trying to repair to some extent, for the kingdom of France, the losses he had caused it.
His successor, John II., called the Good, on no other ground than that he was gay, prodigal, credulous, and devoted to his favorites, did nothing but reproduce, with aggravations, the faults and reverses of his father. He had hardly become king when he witnessed the arrival in Paris of the Constable of France, Raoul, Count of Eu and of Guines, whom Edward III. had made prisoner at Caen, and who, after five years' captivity, had just obtained, that is, purchased, his liberty. Raoul lost no time in hurrying to the side of the new king, by whom he believed himself to be greatly beloved. John, as soon as he perceived him, gave him a look, saying, "Count, come this way with me; I have to speak with you aside." "Right willingly, my lord." The king took him into an apartment, and showing him a letter, asked, "Have you ever, count, seen this letter anywhere but here?" The constable appeared astounded and troubled. "Ah! wicked traitor," said the king, "you have well deserved death, and, by my father's soul, it shall assuredly not miss you;" and he sent him forthwith to prison in the tower of the Louvre. "The lords and barons of France were sadly astonished," says Froissart, "for they held the count to be a good man and true, and they humbly prayed the king that he would be pleased to say wherefore he had imprisoned their cousin, so gentle a knight, who had toiled so much and so much lost for him and for the kingdom. But the king would not say anything, save that he would never sleep so long as the Count of Guines was living; and he had him secretly beheaded in the castle of the Louvre, whether rightly or wrongly; for which the king was greatly blamed, behind his back, by many of the barons of high estate in the kingdom of France, and the dukes and counts of the border." Two months after this execution, John gave the office of constable and a large portion of Count Raoul's property to his favorite, Charles of Spain, a descendant of King Alphonso of Castille and naturalized in France; and he added thereto before long some lands claimed by the King of Navarre, Charles the Bad, a nickname which at eighteen years of age he had already received from his Navarrese subjects, but which had not prevented King John from giving him in marriage his own daughter, Joan of France. From that moment a deep hatred sprang up between the King of Navarre and the favorite. The latter was sometimes disquieted thereby. "Fear nought from my son of Navarre," said John; "he durst not vex you, for, if he did, he would have no greater enemy than myself." John did not yet know his son-in-law. Two years later, in 1354, his favorite, Charles of Spain, arrived at Laigle in Normandy. The King of Navarre, having notice thereof, instructed one of his agents, the Bastard de Mareuil, to go with a troop of men-at-arms and surprise him in that town; and he himself remained outside the walls, awaiting the result of his design. At break of day, he saw galloping up the Bastard de Mareuil, who shouted to him from afar, "'Tis done." "What is done?" asked Charles. "He is dead," answered Mareuil. King John's favorite had been surprised and massacred in his bed. John burst out into threats; he swore he would have vengeance, and made preparations for war against his son-in-law. But the King of England promised his support to the King of Navarre. Charles the Bad was a bold and able intriguer; he levied troops and won over allies amongst the lords; dread of seeing the recommencement of a war with England gained ground; and amongst the people, and even in the king's council, there was a cry of "Peace with the King of Navarre!" John took fright and pretended to give up his ideas of vengeance; he received his son-in-law, who thanked him on bended knee. But the king gave him never a word. The King of Navarre, uneasy but bold as ever, continued his intrigues for obtaining partisans and for exciting troubles and enmities against the king. "I will have no master in France but myself," said John to his confidant: "I shall have no joy so long as he is living." His eldest son, the young Duke of Normandy, who was at a later period Charles V., had contracted friendly relations with the King of Navarre. On the 16th of April, 1356, the two princes were together at a banquet in the castle of Rouen, as well as the Count d'Harcourt and some other lords. All on a sudden King John, who had entered the castle by a postern with a troop of men-at-arms, strode abruptly into the hall, preceded by the Marshal Arnoul d'Audenham, who held a naked sword in his hand, and said, "Let none stir, whatever he may see, unless he wish to fall by this sword." The king went up to the table; and all rose as if to do him reverence. John seized the King of Navarre roughly by the arm, and drew him towards him, saying, "Get up, traitor; thou art not worthy to sit at my son's table; by my father's soul I cannot think of meat or drink so long as thou art living." A servant of the King of Navarre, to defend his master, drew his cutlass, and pointed it at the breast of the King of France, who thrust him back, saying to his sergeants, "Take me this fellow and his master too." The King of Navarre dissolved in humble protestations and repentant speeches over the assassination of the Constable Charles of Spain. "Go, traitor, go," answered John: "you will need to learn good rede or some infamous trick to escape from me." The young Duke of Normandy had thrown himself at the feet of the king his father, crying, "Ah! my lord, for God's sake have mercy; you do me dishonor; for what will be said of me, having prayed King Charles and his barons to dine with me, if you do treat me thus? It will be said that I betrayed them." "Hold your peace, Charles," answered his father: "you know not all I know." He gave orders for the instant removal of the King of Navarre, and afterwards of the Count d'Harcourt and three others of those present under arrest. "Rid us of these men," said he to the captain of the Ribalds, forming the soldiers of his guard; and the four prisoners were actually beheaded in the king's presence outside Rouen, in a field called the Field of Pardon. John was with great difficulty prevailed upon not to mete out the same measure to the King of Navarre, who was conducted first of all to Gaillard Castle, then to the tower of the Louvre, and then to the prison of the Chatelet: "and there," says Froissart, "they put him to all sorts of discomforts and fears, for every day and every night they gave him to understand that his head would be cut off at such and such an hour, or at such and such another he would be thrown into the Seine . . . whereupon he spoke so finely and so softly to his keepers that they who were so entreating him by the command of the King of France had great pity on him."
With such violence, such absence of all legal procedure, such a mixture of deceptive indulgence and thoughtless brutality, did King John treat his son-in-law, his own daughter, some of his principal barons, their relations, their friends, and the people with whom they were in good credit. He compromised more and more seriously every day his own safety and that of his successor, by vexing more and more, without destroying, his most dangerous enemy. He showed no greater prudence or ability in the government of his kingdom. Always in want of money, because he spent it foolishly on galas or presents to his favorites, he had recourse, for the purpose of procuring it, at one time to the very worst of all financial expedients, debasement of the coinage; at another, to disreputable imposts, such as the tax upon salt, and upon the sale of all kinds of merchandise. In the single year of 1352 the value of a silver mark varied sixteen times, from four livres ten sous to eighteen livres. To meet the requirements of his government and the greediness of his courtiers, John twice, in 1355 and 1356, convoked the states-general, to the consideration of which we shall soon recur in detail, and which did not refuse him their support; but John had not the wit either to make good use of the powers with which he was furnished, or to inspire the states-general with that confidence which alone could decide them upon continuing their gifts. And, nevertheless, King John's necessities were more evident and more urgent than ever: war with England had begun again.
The truth is that, in spite of the truce still existing, the English, since the accession of King John, had at several points resumed hostilities. The disorders and dissensions to which France was a prey, the presumptuous and hare-brained incapacity of her new king, were, for so ambitious and able a prince as Edward III., very strong temptations. Nor did opportunities for attack, and chances of success, fail him any more than temptations. He found in France, amongst the grandees of the kingdom, and even at the king's court, men disposed to desert the cause of the king and of France to serve a prince who had more capacity, and who pretended to claim the crown of France as his lawful right. The feudal system lent itself to ambiguous questions and doubts of conscience: a lord who had two suzerains, and who, rightly or wrongly, believed that he had cause of complaint against one of them, was justified in serving that one who could and would protect him. Personal interest and subtle disputes soon make traitors; and Edward had the ability to discover them and win them over. The alternate outbursts and weaknesses of John in the case of those whom he suspected; the snares he laid for them; the precipitancy and cruel violence with which he struck them down, without form of trial, and almost with his own hand, forbid history to receive his suspicious and his forcible proceedings as any kind of proof; but amongst those whom he accused there were undoubtedly traitors to the king and to France. There is one about whom there can be no doubt at all. As early as 1351, amidst all his embroilments and all his reconciliations with his father-in-law, Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, had concluded with Edward III. a secret treaty, whereby, in exchange for promises he received, he recognized his title as King of France. In 1355 his treason burst forth. The King of Navarre, who had gone for refuge to Avignon, under the protection of Pope Clement VI., crossed France by English Aquitaine, and went and landed at Cherbourg, which he had an idea of throwing open to the King of England. He once more entered into communications with King John, once more obtained forgiveness from him, and for a while appeared detached from his English alliance. But Edward III. had openly resumed his hostile attitude; and he demanded that Aquitaine and the courtship of Ponthieu, detached from the kingdom of France, should be ceded to him in full sovereignty, and that Brittany should become all but independent. John haughtily rejected these pretensions, which were merely a pretext for recommencing war. And it recommenced accordingly, and the King of Navarre resumed his course of perfidy. He had lands and castles in Normandy, which John put under sequestration, and ordered the officers commanding in them to deliver up to him. Six of them, the commandants of the castles of Cherbourg and Evreux, amongst others, refused, believing, no doubt, that in betraying France and her king, they were remaining faithful to their own lord.
At several points in the kingdom, especially in the northern provinces, the first fruits of the war were not favorable for the English. King Edward, who had landed at Calais with a body of troops, made an unsuccessful campaign in Artois and Picardy, and was obliged to re-embark for England, falling back before King John, whom he had at one time offered and at another refused to meet and fight at a spot agreed upon. But in the south-west and south of France, in 1355 and 1356, the Prince of Wales, at the head of a small picked army, and with John Chandos for comrade, victoriously overran Limousin, Perigord, Languedoc, Auvergne, Berry, and Poitou, ravaging the country and plundering the towns into which he could force an entrance, and the environs of those that defended themselves behind their walls. He met with scarcely any resistance, and he was returning by way of Berry and Poitou back again to Bordeaux, when he heard that King John, starting from Normandy with a large army, was advancing to give him battle. John, in fact, with easy self-complacency, and somewhat proud of his petty successes against King Edward in Picardy, had been in a hurry to move against the Prince of Wales, in hopes of forcing him also to re-embark for England. He was at the head of forty or fifty thousand men, with his four sons, twenty-six dukes or counts, and nearly all the baronage of France; and such was his confidence in this noble army, that on crossing the Loire he dismissed the burgher forces, "which was madness in him and in those who advised him," said even his contemporaries. John, even more than his father Philip, was a king of courts, ever surrounded by his nobility, and caring little for his people. Jealous of the order of the Garter, lately instituted by Edward III. in honor of the beautiful Countess of Salisbury, John had created, in 1351, by way of following suit, a brotherhood called Our Lady of the Noble House, or of the Star, the knights of which, to the number of five hundred, had to swear, that if they were forced to recoil in a battle they would never yield to the enemy more than four acres of ground, and would be slain rather than retreat. John was destined to find out before long that neither numbers nor bravery can supply the place of prudence, ability, and discipline. When the two armies were close to one another, on the platform of Maupertuis, two leagues to the north of Poitiers, two legates from the pope came hurrying up from that town, with instructions to negotiate peace between the Kings of France, England, and Navarre. John consented to an armistice of twenty-four hours. The Prince of Wales, seeing himself cut off from Bordeaux by forces very much superior to his own,—for he had but eight or ten thousand men,—offered to restore to the King of France "all that he had conquered this bout, both towns and castles, and all the prisoners that he and his had taken, and to swear that, for seven whole years, he would bear arms no more against the King of France;" but King John and his council would not accept anything of the sort, saying that "the prince and a hundred of his knights must come and put themselves as prisoners in the hands of the King of France." Neither the Prince of Wales nor Chandos had any hesitation in rejecting such a demand: "God forbid," said Chandos, "that we should go without a fight! If we be taken or discomfited by so many fine men-at-arms, and in so great a host, we shall incur no blame; and if the day be for us, and fortune be pleased to consent thereto, we shall be the most honored folk in the world." The battle took place on the 19th of September, 1356, in the morning. There is no occasion to give the details of it here, as was done but lately in the case of Crecy; we should merely have to tell an almost perfectly similar story. The three battles which, from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century, were decisive as to the fate of France, to wit, Crecy, on the 26th of August, 1346; Poictiers, on the 19th of September, 1356; and Azincourt, on the 25th of October, 1415, considered as historical events, were all alike, offering a spectacle of the same faults and the same reverses, brought about by the same causes. In all three, no matter what was the difference in date, place, and persons engaged, it was a case of undisciplined forces, without co-operation or order, and ill-directed by their commanders, advancing, bravely and one after another, to get broken against a compact force, under strict command, and as docile as heroic. From the battle of Poictiers we will cull but that glorious feat which was peculiar to it, and which might be called as unfortunate as glorious if the captivity of King John had been a misfortune for France. Nearly all his army had been beaten and dispersed; and three of his sons, with the eldest, Charles, Duke of Normandy, at their head, had left the field of battle with the wreck of the divisions they commanded. John still remained there with the knights of the Star, a band of faithful knights from Picardy, Burgundy, Normandy, and Poitou, his constable, the Duke of Artois, his standard-bearer, Geoffrey de Charny, and his youngest son Philip, a boy of fourteen, who clung obstinately to his side, saying, every instant, "Father, ware right! Father, ware left!"
The king was surrounded by assailants, of whom some did and some did not know him, and all of whom kept shouting, "Yield you! yield you! else you die." The banner of France fell at his side; for Geoffrey de Charny was slain. Denis de Morbecque, a knight of St. Omer, made his way up to the king, and said to him, in good French, "Sir, sir, I pray you, yield!" "To whom shall I yield me?" said John: "where is my cousin, the Prince of Wales?" "Sir, yield you to me; I will bring you to him." "Who are you?" "Denis de Morbecque, a knight of Artois; I serve the King of England, not being able to live in the kingdom of France, for I have lost all I possessed there." "I yield me to you," said John: and he gave his glove to the knight, who led him away "in the midst of a great press, for every one was dragging the king, saying, 'I took him!' and he could not get forward, nor could my lord Philip, his young son. . . . The king said to them all, Sirs, conduct me courteously, and quarrel no more together about the taking of me, for I am rich and great enough to make every one of you rich.'" Hereupon, the two English marshals, the Earl of Warwick and the Earl of Suffolk, "seeing from afar this throng, gave spur to their steeds, and came up, asking, 'What is this yonder?' And answer was made to them, 'It is the King of France who is taken, and more than ten knights and squires would fain have him.' Then the two barons broke through the throng by dint of their horses, dismounted and bowed full low before the king, who was very joyful at their coming, for they saved him from great danger." A very little while afterwards, the two marshals "entered the pavilion of the Prince of Wales, and made him a present of the King of France; the which present the prince could not but take kindly as a great and noble one, and so truly he did, for he bowed full low before the king, and received him as king, properly and discreetly, as he well knew how to do. . . . When evening came, the Prince of Wales gave a supper to the King of France, and to my lord Philip, his son, and to the greater part of the barons of France, who were prisoners. . . . And the prince would not sit at the king's table for all the king's entreaty, but waited as a serving-man at the king's table, bending the knee before him, and saying, 'Dear sir, be pleased not to put on so sad a countenance because it hath not pleased God to consent this day to your wishes, for assuredly my lord and father will show you all the honor and friendship he shall be able, and he will come to terms with you so reasonably that ye shall remain good friends forever."
Henceforth it was, fortunately, not on King John, or on peace or war between him and the King of England, that the fate of France depended.
CHAPTER XXI.
THE STATES GENERAL OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
Let us turn back a little, in order to understand the government and position of King John before he engaged in the war which, so far as he was concerned, ended with the battle of Poitiers and imprisonment in England.
A valiant and loyal knight, but a frivolous, hare-brained, thoughtless, prodigal, and obstinate as well as impetuous prince, and even more incapable than Philip of Valois in the practice of government, John, after having summoned at his accession, in 1351, a states-assembly concerning which we have no explicit information left to us, tried for a space of four years to suffice in himself for all the perils, difficulties, and requirements of the situation he had found bequeathed to him by his father. For a space of four years, in order to get money, he debased the coinage, confiscated the goods and securities of foreign merchants, and stopped payment of his debts; and he went through several provinces, treating with local councils or magistrates in order to obtain from them certain subsidies which he purchased by granting them new privileges. He hoped by his institution of the order of the Star to resuscitate the chivalrous zeal of his nobility. All these means were vain or insufficient. The defeat of Crecy and the loss of Calais had caused discouragement in the kingdom and aroused many doubts as to the issue of the war with England. Defection and even treason brought trouble into the court, the councils, and even the family of John. To get the better of them he at one time heaped favors upon the men he feared, at another he had them arrested, imprisoned, and even beheaded in his presence. He gave his daughter Joan in marriage to Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, and, some few months afterwards, Charles himself, the real or presumed head of all the traitors, was seized, thrown into prison, and treated with extreme rigor, in spite of the supplications of his wife, who vigorously took the part of her husband against her father. After four years thus consumed in fruitless endeavors, by turns violently and feebly enforced, to reorganize an army and a treasury, and to purchase fidelity at any price or arbitrarily strike down treason, John was obliged to recognize his powerlessness and to call to his aid the French nation, still so imperfectly formed, by convoking at Paris, for the 30th of November, 1355, the states-general of Langue d'oil. that is, Northern France, separated by the Dordogne and the Garonne from Langue d'oc, which had its own assembly distinct. Auvergne belonged to Langue d'oil.
It is certain that neither this assembly nor the king who convoked it had any clear and fixed idea of what they were meeting together to do. The kingship was no longer competent for its own government and its own perils; but it insisted none the less, in principle, on its own all but unregulated and unlimited power. The assembly did not claim for the country the right of self-government, but it had a strong leaven of patriotic sentiment, and at the same time was very much discontented with the king's government: it had equally at heart the defence of France against England and against the abuses of the kingly power. There was no notion of a social struggle and no systematic idea of political revolution; a dangerous crisis and intolerable sufferings constrained king and nation to come together in order to make an attempt at an understanding and at a mutual exchange of the supports and the reliefs of which they were in need.
On the 2d of December, 1355, the three orders, the clergy, the nobility, and the deputies from the towns assembled at Paris in the great hall of the Parliament. Peter de la Forest, Archbishop of Rouen and Chancellor of France, asked them in the king's name "to consult together about making him a subvention which should suffice for the expenses of the war," and the king offered to "make a sound and durable coinage." The tampering with the coinage was the most pressing of the grievances for which the three orders solicited a remedy. They declared that "they were ready to live and die with the king, and to put their bodies and what they had at his service;" and they demanded authority to deliberate together—which was granted them. John de Craon, Archbishop of Rheims; Walter de Brienne, Duke of Athens; and Stephen Marcel, provost of the tradesmen of Paris, were to report the result, as presidents, each of his own order. The session of the states lasted not more than a week. They replied to the king "that they would give him a subvention of thirty thousand men-at-arms every year," and, for their pay, they voted an impost of fifty hundred thousand livres (five millions of livres), which was to be levied "on all folks, of whatever condition they might be, Church folks, nobles, or others," and the gabel or tax on salt "over the whole kingdom of France." On separating, the states appointed beforehand two fresh sessions at which they would assemble, one, in the month of March, to estimate the sufficiency of the impost, and to hear, on that subject, the report of the nine superintendents charged with the execution of their decision; the other, in the month of November following, "to examine into the condition of the kingdom."
They assembled, in fact, on the 1st of March, and on the 8th of May, 1356 [N. B. As the year at that time began with Easter, the 24th of April was the first day of the year 1356: the new style, however, is here in every case adopted]; but they had not the satisfaction of finding their authority generally recognized and their patriotic purpose effectually accomplished. The impost they had voted, notably the salt-tax, had met with violent opposition. "When the news thereof reached Normandy," says Froissart, "the country was very much astounded at it, for they had not learned to pay any such thing. The Count d'Harcourt told the folks of Rouen, where he was puissant, that they would be very serfs and very wicked if they agreed to this tax, and that, by God's help, it should never be current in his country." The King of Navarre used much the same language in his countship of Evreux. At other spots the mischief was still more serious. Close to Paris itself, at Malun, payment was peremptorily refused; and at Arras, on the 5th of March, 1356, "the commonalty of the town," says Froissart, "rose upon the rich burghers and slew fourteen of the most substantial, which was a pity and loss; and so it is when wicked folk have the upper hand of valiant men. However, the people of Arras paid for it afterwards, for the king sent thither his cousin, my lord James of Bourbon, who gave orders to take all them by whom the sedition had been caused, and, on the spot, had their heads cut off."
The states-general at their re-assembly on the 1st of March, 1356, admitted the feebleness of their authority and the insufficiency of their preceding votes for the purpose of aiding the king in the war. They abolished the salt-tax and the sales-duty, which had met with such opposition; but, stanch in their patriotism and loyalty, they substituted therefor an income-tax, imposed on every sort of folk, nobles or burghers, ecclesiastical or lay, which was to be levied "not by the high justiciers of the king, but by the folks of the three estates themselves." The king's ordinance, dated the 12th of March, 1356, which regulates the execution of these different measures, is (article 10) to this import: "there shall be, in each city, three deputies, one for each estate. These deputies shall appoint, in each parish, collectors, who shall go into the houses to receive the declaration which the persons who dwell there shall make touching their property, their estate, and their servants. When a declaration shall appear in conformity with truth, they shall be content therewith; else they shall have him who has made it sent before the deputies of the city in the district whereof he dwells, and the deputies shall cause him to take, on this subject, such oaths as they shall think proper. . . . The collectors in the villages shall cause to be taken therein, in the presence of the pastor, suitable oaths on the subject of the declarations. If, in the towns or villages, any one refuse to take the oaths demanded, the collectors shall assess his property according to general opinion, and on the deposition of his neighbors." (Ordonnances des Bois de France, t. iv. pp. 171 175.)
In return for so loyal and persevering a co-operation on the part of the states-general, notwithstanding the obstacles en-countered by their votes and their agents, King John confirmed expressly, by an ordinance of May 26, 1356 [art. 9: Ordonnances des Bois de France, t. iii. p. 55], all the promises he had made them and all the engagements he had entered into with them by his ordinance of December 28, 1355, given immediately after their first session (Ibidem, t. iii. pp. 19 37): a veritable reformatory ordinance, which enumerated the various royal abuses, administrative, judicial, financial, and military, against which there had been a public clamor, and regulated the manner of redressing them.
After these mutual concessions and promises the states-general broke up, adjourning until the 30th of November following (1356); but two months and a half before this time King John, proud of some success obtained by him in Normandy and of the brilliant army of knights remaining to him after he had dismissed the burgher-forces, rushed, as has been said, with conceited impetuosity to encounter the Prince of Wales, rejected with insolent demands the modest proposals of withdrawal made to him by the commander of the little English army, and, on the 19th of September, lost, contrary to all expectation, the lamentable battle of Poitiers. We have seen how he was deserted before the close of the action by his eldest son, Prince Charles, with his body of troops, and how he himself remained with his youngest son, Prince Philip, a boy of fourteen years, a prisoner in the hands of his victorious enemies. "At this news," says Froissart, "the kingdom of France was greatly troubled and excited, and with good cause, for it was a right grievous blow and vexatious for all sorts of folk. The wise men of the kingdom might well predict that great evils would come of it, for the king, their head, and all the chivalry of the kingdom were slain or taken; the knights and squires who came back home were on that account so hated and blamed by the commoners that they had great difficulty in gaining admittance to the good towns; and the king's three sons who had returned, Charles, Louis, and John, were very young in years and experience, and there was in them such small resource that none of the said lads liked to undertake the government of the said kingdom."
The eldest of the three, Prince Charles, aged nineteen, who was called the Dauphin after the cession of Dauphiny to France, nevertheless assumed the office, in spite of his youth and his anything but glorious retreat from Poitiers. He took the title of lieutenant of the king, and had hardly re-entered Paris, on the 29th of September, when he summoned, for the 15th of October, the states-general of Langue d'oil, who met, in point of fact, on the 17th, in the great chamber of parliament. "Never was seen," says the report of their meeting, "an assembly so numerous, or composed of wiser folk." The superior clergy were there almost to a man; the nobility had lost too many in front of Poitiers to be abundant at Paris, but there were counted at the assembly four hundred deputies from the good towns, amongst whom special mention is made, in the documents, of those from Amiens, Tournay, Lille, Arras, Troyes, Auxerre, and Sens. The total number of members at the assembly amounted to more than eight hundred.
The session was opened by a speech from the chancellor, Peter de la Forest, who called upon the estates to aid the dauphin with their counsels under the serious and melancholy circumstances of the kingdom. The three orders at first attempted to hold their deliberations each in a separate hall; but it was not long before they felt the inconveniences arising from their number and their separation, and they resolved to choose from amongst each order commissioners who should examine the questions together, and afterwards make their report and their proposals to the general meeting of the estates. Eighty commissioners were accordingly elected, and set themselves to work. The dauphin appointed some of his officers to be present at their meetings, and to furnish them with such information as they might require. As early as the second day "these officers were given to understand that the deputies would not work whilst anybody belonging to the king's council was with them." So the officers withdrew; and a few days afterwards, towards the end of October, 1356, the commissioners reported the result of their conferences to each of the three orders. The general assembly adopted their proposals, and had the dauphin informed that they were desirous of a private audience. Charles repaired, with some of his councillors, to the monastery of the Cordeliers, where the estates were holding their sittings, and there he received their representations. They demanded of him "that he should deprive of their offices such of the king's councillors as they should point out, have them arrested, and confiscate all their property. Twenty-two men of note, the chancellor, the premier president of the Parliament, the king's stewards, and several officers in the household of the dauphin himself, were thus pointed out. They were accused of having taken part to their own profit in all the abuses for which the government was reproached, and of having concealed from the king the true state of things and the misery of the people. The commissioners elected by the estates were to take proceedings against them: if they were found guilty, they were to be punished; and if they were innocent, they were at the very least to forfeit their offices and their property, on account of their bad counsels and their bad administration."
The chronicles of the time are not agreed as to these last demands. We have, as regards the events of this period, two contemporary witnesses, both full of detail, intelligence, and animation in their narratives, namely, Froissart and the continuer of William of Nangis' Latin Chronicle. Froissart is in general favorable to kings and princes; the anonymous chronicler, on the contrary, has a somewhat passionate bias towards the popular party. Probably both of them are often given to exaggeration in their assertions and impressions; but, taking into account none but undisputed facts, it is evident that the claims of the states-general, though they were, for the most part, legitimate enough at bottom, by reason of the number, gravity, and frequent recurrence of abuses, were excessive and violent, and produced the effect of complete suspension in the regular course of government and justice. The dauphin, Charles, was a young man, of a naturally sound and collected mind, but without experience, who had hitherto lived only in his father's court, and who could not help being deeply shocked and disquieted by such demands. He was still more troubled when the estates demanded that the deputies, under the title of reformers, should traverse the provinces as a check upon the malversations of the royal officials, and that twenty-eight delegates, chosen from amongst the three orders, four prelates, twelve knights, and twelve burgesses, should be constantly placed near the king's person, "with power to do and order everything in the kingdom, just like the king himself, as well for the purpose of appointing and removing public officers as for other matters." It was taking away the entire government from the crown, and putting it into the hands of the estates.
The dauphin's surprise and suspicion were still more vivid when the deputies spoke to him about setting at liberty the King of Navarre, who had been imprisoned by King John, and told him that "since this deed of violence no good had come to the king or the kingdom, because of the sin of having imprisoned the said King of Navarre." And yet Charles the Bad was already as infamous as he has remained in history; he had labored to embroil the dauphin with his royal father; and there was no plot or intrigue, whether with the malcontents in France or with the King of England, in which he was not, with good reason, suspected of having been mixed up, and of being ever ready to be mixed up. He was clearly a dangerous enemy for the public peace, as well as for the crown, and, for the states-general who were demanding his release, a bad associate.
In the face of such demands and such forebodings, the dauphin did all he could to gain time. Before he gave an answer he must know, he said, what subvention the states-general would be willing to grant him. The reply was a repetition of the promise of thirty thousand men-at-arms, together with an enumeration of the several taxes whereby there was a hope of providing for the expense. But the produce of these taxes was so uncertain, that both parties doubted the worth of the promise. Careful calculation went to prove that the subvention would suffice, at the very most, for the keep of no more than eight or nine thousand men. The estates were urgent for a speedy compliance with their demands. The dauphin persisted in his policy of delay. He was threatened with a public and solemn session, at which all the questions should be brought before the people, and which was fixed for the 3d of November. Great was the excitement in Paris; and the people showed a disposition to support the estates at any price. On the 2d of November, the dauphin summoned at the Louvre a meeting of his councillors and of the principal deputies; and there he announced that he was obliged to set out for Metz, where he was going to follow up the negotiations entered into with the Emperor Charles IV. and Pope Innocent VI. for the sake of restoring peace between France and England. He added that the deputies, on returning for a while to their provinces, should get themselves enlightened as to the real state of affairs, and that he would not fail to recall them so soon as he had any important news to tell them, and any assistance to request of them.
It was not without serious grounds that the dauphin attached so much importance to gaining time. When, in the preceding month of October, he had summoned to Paris the states-general of Langue d'oil, he had likewise convoked at Toulouse those of Langue d'oc, and he was informed that the latter had not only just voted a levy of fifty thousand men-at-arms, with an adequate subsidy, but that, in order to show their royalist sentiments, they had decreed a sort of public mourning, to last for a year, if King John were not released from his captivity. The dauphin's idea was to summon other provincial assemblies, from which he hoped for similar manifestations. It was said, moreover, that several deputies, already gone from Paris, had been ill received in their towns, at Soissons amongst others, on account of their excessive claims, and their insulting language towards all the king's councillors. Under such flattering auspices the dauphin set out, according to the announcement he had made, from Paris, on the 5th of December, 1356, to go and meet the Emperor Charles IV. at Metz; but, at his departure, he committed exactly the fault which was likely to do him the most harm at Paris: being in want of money for his costly trip, he subjected the coinage to a fresh adulteration, which took effect five days after his departure.
The leaders in Paris seized eagerly upon so legitimate a grievance for the support of their claims. As early as the 3d of the preceding November, when they were apprised of the dauphin's approaching departure for Metz, and the adjournment of their sittings, the states-general had come to a decision that their remonstrances and demands, summed up in twenty-one articles, should be read in general assembly, and that a recital of the negotiations which had taken place on that subject between the estates and the dauphin should be likewise drawn up, "in order that all the deputies might be able to tell in their districts wherefore the answers had not been received." When, after the dauphin's departure, the new debased coins were put in circulation, the people were driven to an outbreak thereby, and the provost of tradesmen, "Stephen Marcel, hurried to the Louvre to demand of the Count of Anjou, the dauphin's brother and lieutenant, a withdrawal of the decree. Having obtained no answer, he returned the next day, escorted by a throng of the inhabitants of Paris. At length, on the third day, the numbers assembled were so considerable that the young prince took alarm, and suspended the execution of the decree until his brother's return. For the fist time Stephen Marcel had got himself supported by an outbreak of the people; for the first time the mob had imposed its will upon the ruling power; and from this day forth pacific and lawful resistance was transformed into a violent struggle."
At his re-entry into Paris, on the 19th of January, 1357, the dauphin attempted to once more gain possession of some sort of authority. He issued orders to Marcel and the sheriffs to remove the stoppage they had placed on the currency of the new coinage. This was to found his opposition on the worst side of his case. "We will do nothing of the sort," replied Marcel; and in a few moments, at the provost's orders, the work-people left their work, and shouts of "To arms!" resounded through the streets. The prince's councillors were threatened with death. The dauphin saw the hopelessness of a struggle; for there were hardly a handful of men left to guard the Louvre. On the morrow, the 20th of January, he sent for Marcel and the sheriffs into the great hall of parliament, and giving way on almost every point, bound himself to no longer issue new coin, to remove from his council the officers who had been named to him, and even to imprison them until the return of his father, who would do full justice to them. The estates were at the same time authorized to meet when they pleased: on all which points the provost of tradesmen requested letters, which were granted him; "and he demanded that the dauphin should immediately place sergeants in the houses of those of his councillors who still happened to be in Paris, and that proceedings should be taken without delay for making an inventory of their goods, with a view to confiscation of them."
The estates met on the 5th of February. It was not without surprise that they found themselves less numerous than they had hitherto been. The deputies from the duchy of Burgundy, from the countships of Flanders and Alencon, and several nobles and burghers from other provinces, did not repair to the session. The kingdom was falling into anarchy; bands of plunderers roved hither and thither, threatening persons and ravaging lands; the magistrates either could not or would not exercise their authority; disquietude and disgust were gaining possession of many honest folks. Marcel and his partisans, having fallen into somewhat of disrepute and neglect, keenly felt how necessary, and also saw how easy, it was for them to become completely masters. They began by drawing up a series of propositions, which they had distributed and spread abroad far and wide in the provinces. On the 3d of March, they held a public meeting, at which the dauphin and his two brothers were present. A numerous throng filled the hall. The Bishop of Laon, Robert Lecoeq, the spokesman of the party, made a long and vehement statement of all the public grievances, and declared that twenty-two of the king's officers should be deprived forever of all offices, that all the officers of the kingdom should be provisionally suspended, and that reformers, chosen by the estates, and commissioned by the dauphin himself, should go all over France, to hold inquiries as to these officers, and, according to their deserts, either reinstate them in their offices or condemn them. At the same time, the estates bound themselves to raise thirty thousand men-at-arms, whom they themselves would pay and keep; and as the produce of the impost voted for this purpose was very uncertain, they demanded their adjournment to the fortnight of Easter, and two sessions certain, for which they should be free to fix the time, before the 15th of February in the following year. This was simply to decree the permanence of their power. To all these demands the dauphin offered no resistance. In the month of March following, a grand ordinance, drawn up in sixty-one articles, enumerated all the grievances which had been complained of, and prescribed the redress for them. A second ordinance, regulating all that appertained to the suspension of the royal officers, was likewise, as it appears, drawn up at the same time, but has not come down to us. At last a grand commission was appointed, composed of thirty-six members, twelve elected by each of the three orders. "These thirty-six persons," says Froissart, "were bound to often meet together at Paris, for to order the affairs of the kingdom, and all kinds of matters were to be disposed of by these three estates, and all prelates, all lords, and all commonalties of the cities and good towns were bound to be obedient to what these three estates should order." Having their power thus secured in their absence, the estates adjourned to the 25th of April.
The rumor of these events reached Bordeaux, where, since the defeat at Poitiers, King John had been living as the guest of the Prince of Wales, rather than as a prisoner of the English. Amidst the galas and pleasures to which he abandoned himself, he was indignant to learn that at Paris the royal authority was ignored, and he sent three of his comrades in captivity to notify to the Parisians that he rejected all the claims of the estates, that he would not have payment made of the subsidy voted by them, and that he forbade their meeting on the 25th of April following. This strange manifesto on the part of imprisoned royalty excited in Paris such irritation amongst the people, that the dauphin hastily sent out of the city the king's three envoys, whose lives might have been threatened, and declared to the thirty-six commissioners of the estates that the subsidy should be raised, and that the general assembly should be perfectly free to meet at the time it had appointed.
And it did meet towards the end of April, but in far fewer numbers than had been the case hitherto, and with more and more division from day to day. Nearly all the nobles and ecclesiastics were withdrawing from it; and amongst the burgesses themselves many of the more moderate spirits were becoming alarmed at the violent proceedings of the commission of the thirty-six delegates, who, under the direction of Stephen Marcel, were becoming a small oligarchy, little by little usurping the place of the great national assembly. A cry was raised in the provinces "against the injustice of those chief governors who were no more than ten or a dozen;" and there was a refusal to pay the subsidy voted. These symptoms and the disorganization which was coming to a head throughout the whole kingdom made the dauphin think that the moment had arrived for him to seize the reins again. About the middle of August, 1357, he sent for Marcel and three sheriffs, accustomed to direct matters at Paris, and let them know "that he intended thence-forward to govern by himself, without curators." He at the same time restored to office some of the lately dismissed royal officers. The thirty-six commissioners made a show of submission; and their most faithful ecclesiastical ally, Robert Lecocq, Bishop of Laon, returned to his diocese. The dauphin left Paris and went a trip into some of the provinces, halting at the principal towns, such as Rouen and Chartres, and everywhere, with intelligent but timid discretion, making his presence and his will felt, not very successfully, however, as regarded the re-establishment of some kind of order on his route in the name of the kingship.
Marcel and his partisans took advantage of his absence to shore up their tottering supremacy. They felt how important it was for them to have a fresh meeting of the estates, whose presence alone could restore strength to their commissioners; but the dauphin only could legally summon them. They, therefore, eagerly pressed him to return in person to Paris, giving him a promise that, if he agreed to convoke there the deputies from twenty or thirty towns, they would supply him with the money of which he was in need, and would say no more about the dismissal of royal officers, or about setting at liberty the king of Navarre. The dauphin, being still young and trustful, though he was already discreet and reserved, fell into the snare. He returned to Paris, and summoned thither, for the 7th of November following, the deputies from seventy towns, a sufficient number to give their meeting a specious resemblance to the states-general. One circumstance ought to have caused him some glimmering of suspicion. At the same time that the dauphin was sending to the deputies his letters of convocation, Marcel himself also sent to them, as if he possessed the right, either in his own name or in that of the thirty-six delegate-commissioners, of calling them together. But a still more serious matter came to open the dauphin's eyes to the danger he had fallen into. During the night between the 8th and 9th of November, 1357, immediately after the re-opening of the states, Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, was carried off by a surprise from the castle of Arleux in Cambresis, where he had been confined; and his liberators removed him first of all to Amiens and then to Paris itself, where the popular party gave him a triumphant reception. Marcel and his sheriffs had decided upon and prepared, at a private council, this dramatic incident, so contrary to the promises they had but lately made to the dauphin. Charles the Bad used his deliverance like a skilful workman; the very day after his arrival in Paris he mounted a platform set against the walls of St. Germain's abbey, and there, in the presence of more than ten thousand persons, burgesses and populace, he delivered a long speech, "seasoned with much venom," says a chronicler of the time. After having denounced the wrongs which he had been made to endure, he said, for eighteen months past, he declared that the would live and die in defence of the kingdom of France, giving it to be understood that "if he were minded to claim the crown, he would soon show by the laws of right and wrong that he was nearer to it than the King of England was." He was insinuating, eloquent, and an adept in the art of making truth subserve the cause of falsehood. The people were moved by his speech. The dauphin was obliged not only to put up with the release and the triumph of his most dangerous enemy, but to make an outward show of reconciliation with him, and to undertake not only to give him back the castles confiscated after his arrest, but "to act towards him as a good brother towards his brother." These were the exact words made use of in the dauphin's name, "and without having asked his pleasure about it," by Robert Lecocq, Bishop of Laon, who himself also had returned from his diocese to Paris at the time of the recall of the estates.
The consequences of this position were not slow to exhibit themselves. Whilst the King of Navarre was re-entering Paris and the dauphin submitting to the necessity of a reconciliation with him, several of the deputies who had but lately returned to the states-general, and amongst others nearly all those from Champagne and Burgundy, were going away again, being unwilling either to witness the triumphal re-entry of Charles the Bad or to share the responsibility for such acts as they foresaw. Before long the struggle, or rather the war, between the King of Navarre and the dauphin broke out again; several of the nobles in possession of the castles which were to have been restored to Charles the Bad, and especially those of Breteuil, Pacy-sur-Eure, and Pont-Audemer, flatly refused to give them back to him; and the dauphin was suspected, probably not without reason, of having encouraged them in their resistance. Without the walls of Paris it was really war that was going on between the two princes. Philip of Navarre, brother of Charles the Bad, went marching with bands of pillagers over Normandy and Anjou, and within a few leagues of Paris, declaring that he had not taken, and did not intend to take, any part in his brother's pacific arrangements, and carrying fire and sword all through the country. The peasantry from the ravaged districts were overflowing Paris. Stephen Marcel had no mind to reject the support which many of them brought him; but they had to be fed, and the treasury was empty. The wreck of the states-general, meeting on the 2d of January, 1358, themselves had recourse to the expedient which they had so often and so violently reproached the king and the dauphin with employing: they notably depreciated the coinage, allotting a fifth of the profit to the dauphin, and retaining the other four fifths for the defence of the kingdom. What Marcel and his party called the defence of the kingdom was the works of fortification round Paris, begun in October, 1356, against the English, after the defeat of Poitiers, and resumed in 1358 against the dauphin's party in the neighboring provinces, as well as against the robbers that were laying them waste. Amidst all this military and popular excitement the dauphin kept to the Louvre, having about him two thousand men-at-arms, whom he had taken into his pay, he said, solely "on account of the prospect of a war with the Navarrese." Before he went and plunged into a civil war outside the gates of Paris, he resolved to make an effort to win back the Parisians themselves to his cause. He sent a crier through the city to bid the people assemble in the market-place, and thither he repaired on horseback, on the 11th of January, with five or six of his most trusty servants. The astonished mob thronged about him, and he addressed them in vigorous language. He meant, he said, to live and die amongst the people of Paris; if he was collecting his men-at-arms, it was not for the purpose of plundering and oppressing Paris, but that he might march against their common enemies; and if he had not done so sooner, it was because "the folks who had taken the government gave him neither money nor arms; but they would some day be called to strict account for it." The dauphin was small, thin, delicate, and of insignificant appearance; but at this juncture he displayed unexpected boldness and eloquence; the people were deeply moved; and Marcel and his friends felt that a heavy blow had just been dealt them.
They hastened to respond with a blow of another sort. It was everywhere whispered abroad that if Paris was suffering so much from civil war and the irregularities and calamities which were the concomitants of it, the fault lay with the dauphin's surroundings, and that his noble advisers deterred him from measures which would save the people from their miseries.
"Provost Marcel and the burgesses of Paris took counsel together and decided that it would be a good thing if some of those attendants on the regent were to be taken away from the midst of this world. They all put on caps, red on one side and blue on the other, which they wore as a sign of their confederation in defence of the common weal. This done, they reassembled in large numbers on the 22d of February, 1358, with the provost at their head, and marched to the palace where the duke was lodged." This crowd encountered on its, way, in the street called Juiverie (Jewry), the advocate-general Regnault d'Aci, one of the twenty-two royal officers denounced by the estates in the preceding year; and he was massacred in a pastry-cook's shop. Marcel, continuing his road, arrived at the palace, and ascended, followed by a band of armed men, to the apartments of the dauphin, "whom he requested very sharply," says Froissart, "to restrain so many companies from roving about on all sides, damaging and plundering the country. The duke replied that he would do so willingly if he had the wherewithal to do it, but that it was for him who received the dues belonging to the kingdom to discharge that duty. I know not why or how," adds Froissart, "but words were multiplied on the part of all, and became very high." "My lord duke," suddenly said the provost, "do not alarm yourself; but we have somewhat to do here;" and turning towards his fellows in the caps, he said, "Dearly beloved, do that for the which ye are come." Immediately the Lord de Conflans, Marshal of Champagne, and Robert de Clermont, Marshal of Normandy, noble and valiant gentlemen, and both at the time unarmed, were massacred so close to the dauphin and his couch, that his robe was covered with their blood. The dauphin shuddered; and the rest of his officers fled. "Take no heed, lord duke," said Marcel; "you have nought to fear." He handed to the dauphin his own red and blue cap, and himself put on the dauphin's, which was of black stuff with golden fringe. The corpses of the two marshals were dragged into the court-yard of the palace, where they remained until evening without any one's daring to remove them; and Marcel with his fellows repaired to the mansion-house, and harangued from an open window the mob collected on the Place de Greve. "What has been done is for the good and the profit of the kingdom," said he; "the dead were false and wicked traitors." "We do own it, and will maintain it!" cried the people who were about him.
The house from which Marcel thus addressed the people was his own property, and was called the Pillar-house. There he accommodated the town-council, which had formerly held its sittings in divers parlors.
For a month after this triple murder, committed with such official parade, Marcel reigned dictator in Paris. He removed from the council of thirty-six deputies such members as he could not rely upon, and introduced his own confidants. He cited the council, thus modified, to express approval of the blow just struck; and the deputies, "some from conviction and others from doubt (that is, fear), answered that they believed that for what had been done there had been good and just cause." The King of Navarre was recalled from Nantes to Paris, and the dauphin was obliged to assign to him, in the king's name, "as a make-up for his losses," ten thousand livres a year on landed property in Languedoc. Such was the young prince's condition that, almost every day, he was reduced to the necessity of dining with his most dangerous and most hypocritical enemy. A man of family, devoted to the dauphin, who was now called regent, Philip de Repenti by name, lost his head on the 19th of March, 1358, on the market-place, for having attempted, with a few bold comrades, "to place the regent beyond the power and the reach of the people of Paris." Six days afterwards, however, on the 25th of March, the dauphin succeeded in escaping, and repaired first of all to Senlis, and then to Provins, where he found the estates of Champagne eager to welcome him. Marcel at once sent to Provins two deputies with instructions to bind over the three orders of Champagne "to be at one with them of Paris, and not to be astounded at what had been done." Before answering, the members of the estates withdrew into a garden to parley together, and sent to pray the regent to come and meet them. "My lord," said the Count de Braine to him in the name of the nobility, "did you ever suffer any harm or villany at the hands of De Conflans, Marshal of Champagne, for which he deserved to be put to death as he hath been by them of Paris?" The prince replied that he firmly held and believed that the said marshal and Robert de Clermont had well and loyally served and advised him. "My lord," replied the Count de Braine, "we Champagnese who are here do thank you for that which you have just said, and do desire you to do full justice on those who have put our friend to death without cause;" and they bound themselves to support him with their persons and their property, for the chastisement of them who had been the authors of the outrage.
The dauphin, with full trust in this manifestation and this promise, convoked at Compiegne, for the 4th of May, 1858, no longer the estates of Champagne only, but the states-general in their entirety, who, on separating at the close of their last session, had adjourned to the 1st of May following. The story of this fresh session, and of the events determined by it, is here reproduced textually, just as it has come down to us from the last continuer of the Chronicle of William of Nangis, the most favorable amongst all the chroniclers of the time to Stephen Marcel and the popular party in Paris. "All the deputies, and especially the friends of the nobles slain, did with one heart and one mind counsel the lord Charles, Duke of Normandy, to have the homicides stricken to death; and, if he could not do so by reason of the number of their defenders, they urged him to lay vigorous siege to the city of Paris, either with an armed force or by forbidding the entry of victuals thereinto, in such sort that it should understand and perceive for a certainty that the death of the provost of tradesmen and of his accomplices was intended. The said provost and those who, after the regent's departure, had taken the government of the city, clearly understood this intention, and they then implored the University of studies at Paris to send deputies to the said lord-regent, to humbly adjure him, in their name and in the name of the whole city, to banish from his heart the wrath he had conceived against their fellow-citizens, offering and promising, moreover, a suitable reparation for the offence, provided that the lives of the persons were spared. The University, concerned for the welfare of the city, sent several deputies of weight to treat about the matter. They were received by the lord Duke Charles and the other lords with great kindness; and they brought back word to Paris that the demand made at Compiegne was, that ten or a dozen, or even only five or six, of the men suspected of the crime lately committed at Paris should be sent to Compiegne, where there was no design of putting them to death, and, if this were done, the duke-regent would return to his old and intimate friendship with the Parisians. But Provost Marcel and his accomplices, who were afeard for themselves, did not believe that if they fell into the hands of the lord duke they could escape a terrible death, and they had no mind to run such a risk. Taking, therefore, a bold resolution, they desired to be treated as all the rest of the citizens, and to that end sent several deputations to the lord-regent either to Compiegne or to Meaux, whither he sometimes removed; but they got no gracious reply, and rather words of bitterness and threatening. Thereupon, being seized with alarm for their city, into the which the lord-regent and his noble comrades were so ardently desirous of re-entering, and being minded to put it out of reach from the peril which threatened it, they began to fortify themselves therein, to repair the walls, to deepen the ditches, to build new ramparts on the eastern side, and to throw up barriers at all the gates. . . . As they lacked a captain, they sent to Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, who was at that time in Normandy, and whom they knew to be freshly embroiled with the regent; and they requested him to come to Paris with a strong body of men-at-arms, and to be their captain there and their defender against all their foes, save the lord John, King of, France, a prisoner in England. The King of Navarre, with all his men, was received in state, on the 15th of June, by the Parisians, to the great indignation of the prince-regent, his friends, and many others. The nobles thereupon began to draw near to Paris, and to ride about in the fields of the neighborhood, prepared to fight if there should be a sortie from Paris to attack them. . . . On a certain day the besiegers came right up to the bridge of Charenton, as if to draw out the King of Navarre and the Parisians to battle. The King of Navarre issued forth, armed, with his men, and drawing near to the besiegers, had long conversations with them without fighting, and afterwards went back into Paris. At sight hereof the Parisians suspected that this king, who was himself a noble, was conspiring with the besiegers, and was preparing to deal some secret blow to the detriment of Paris; so they conceived mistrust of him and his, and stripped him of his office of captain. He went forth sore vexed from Paris, he and his; and the English especially, whom he had brought with him, insulted certain Parisians, whence it happened that before they were out of the city several of them were massacred by the folks of Paris, who afterwards confined themselves within their walls, carefully guarding the gates by day, and by night keeping up strong patrols on the ramparts."
Whilst Marcel inside Paris, where he reigned supreme, was a prey, on his own account and that of his besieged city, to these anxieties and perils, an event occurred outside which seemed to open to him a prospect of powerful aid, perhaps of decisive victory. Throughout several provinces the peasants, whose condition, sad and hard as it already was under the feudal system, had been still further aggravated by the outrages and irregularities of war, not finding any protection in their lords, and often being even oppressed by them as if they had been foes, had recourse to insurrection in order to escape from the evils which came down upon them every day and from every quarter.
They bore and would bear anything, it was said, and they got the name of Jacques Bonhomme (Jack Goodfellow); but this taunt they belied in a terrible manner. We will quote from the last continuer of William of Nangis, the least declamatory and the least confused of all the chroniclers of that period: "In this same year 1358," says he, "in the summer [the first rising took place on the 28th of May], the peasants in the neighborhood of St. Loup de Cerent and Clermont, in the diocese of Beauvais, took up arms against the nobles of France. They assembled in great numbers, set at their head a certain peasant named William Karle [or Cale, or Callet], of more intelligence than the rest, and marching by companies under their own flag, roamed over the country, slaying and massacring all the nobles they met, even their own lords. Not content with that, they demolished the houses and castles of the nobles; and, what is still more deplorable, they villanously put to death the noble dames and little children who fell into their hands; and afterwards they strutted about, they and their wives, bedizened with the garments they had stripped from their victims. The number of men who had thus risen amounted to five thousand, and the rising extended to the outskirts of Paris. They had begun it from sheer necessity and love of justice, for their lords oppressed instead of defending them; but before long they proceeded to the most hateful and criminal deeds. They took and destroyed from top to bottom the strong castle of Ermenonville, where they put to death a multitude of men and dames of noble family who had taken refuge there. For some time the nobles no longer went about as before; none of them durst set a foot outside the fortified places." Jacquery had taken the form of a fit of demagogic fury, and the Jacks [or Goodfellows] swarming out of their hovels were the terror of the castles.
Had Marcel provoked this bloody insurrection? There is strong presumption against him; many of his contemporaries say he had; and the dauphin himself wrote on the 30th of August, 1359, to the Count of Savoy, that one of the most heinous acts of Marcel and his partisans was exciting the folks of the open country in France, of Beauvaisis and Champagne, and other districts, against the nobles of the said kingdom; "whence so many evils have proceeded as no man should or could conceive." It is quite certain, however, that, the insurrection having once broken out, Marcel hastened to profit by it, and encouraged and even supported it at several points. Amongst other things he sent from Paris a body of three hundred men to the assistance of the peasants who were besieging the castle of Ermenonville. It is the due penalty paid by reformers who allow themselves to drift into revolution, that they become before long accomplices in mischief or crime which their original design and their own personal interest made it incumbent on them to prevent or repress.
The reaction against Jaequery was speedy and shockingly bloody. The nobles, the dauphin, and the King of Navarre, a prince and a noble at the same time that he was a scoundrel, made common cause against the Goodfellows, who were the more disorderly in proportion as they had become more numerous, and believed themselves more invincible. The ascendency of the masters over the rebels was soon too strong for resistance. At Meaux, of which the Goodfellows had obtained possession, they were surprised and massacred to the number, it is said, of seven thousand, with the town burning about their ears. In Beauvaisis, the King of Navarre, after having made a show of treating with their chieftain, William Karle or Callet, got possession of him, and had him beheaded, wearing a trivet of red-hot iron, says one of the chroniclers, by way of crown. He then moved upon a camp of Goodfellows assembled near Montdidier, slew three thousand of them, and dispersed the remainder. These figures are probably very much exaggerated, as nearly always happens in such accounts; but the continuer of William of Nangis, so justly severe on the outrages and barbarities of the insurgent peasants, is not less so on those of their conquerors. "The nobles of France," he says, "committed at that time such ravages in the district of Meaux that there was no need for the English to come and destroy our country those mortal enemies of the kingdom could not have done what was done by the nobles at home."
Marcel from that moment perceived that his cause was lost, and no longer dreamed of anything but saving himself and his, at any price; "for he thought," says Froissart, "that it paid better to slay than to be slain." Although he had more than once experienced the disloyalty of the King of Navarre, he entered into fresh negotiation with him, hoping to use him as an intermediary between himself and the dauphin, in order to obtain either an acceptable peace or guarantees for his own security in case of extreme danger. The King of Navarre lent a ready ear to these overtures; he had no scruple about negotiating with this or that individual, this or that party, flattering himself that he would make one or the other useful for his own purposes. Marcel had no difficulty in discovering that the real design of the King of Navarre was to set aside the house of Valois and the Plantagenets together, and to become King of France himself, as a descendant, in his own person, of St. Louis, though one degree more remote. An understanding was renewed between the two, such as it is possible to have between two personal interests fundamentally different, but capable of being for the moment mutually helpful. Marcel, under pretext of defence against the besiegers, admitted into Paris a pretty large number of English in the pay of the King of Navarre. Before long, quarrels arose between the Parisians and these unpopular foreigners; on the 21st of July, 1358, during one of these quarrels, twenty-four English were massacred by the people; and four hundred others, it is said, were in danger of undergoing the same fate, when Marcel came up and succeeded in saving their lives by having them imprisoned in the Louvre. The quarrel grew hotter and spread farther. The people of Paris went and attacked other mercenaries of the King of Navarre, chiefly English, who were occupying St. Denis and St. Cloud. The Parisians were beaten; and the King of Navarre withdrew to St. Denis. On the 27th of July, Marcel boldly resolved to set at liberty and send over to him the four hundred English imprisoned in the Louvre. He had them let out, accordingly, and himself escorted them as far as the gate St. Honore, in the midst of a throng that made no movement for all its irritation. Some of Marcel's satellites who formed the escort cried out as they went, "Has anybody aught to say against the setting of these prisoners at liberty?" The Parisians remembered their late reverse, and not a voice was raised. "Strongly moved as the people of Paris were in their hearts against the provost of tradesmen," says a contemporary chronicle, "there was not a man who durst commence a riot."
Marcel's position became day by day more critical. The dauphin, encamped with his army around Paris, was keeping up secret but very active communications with it; and a party, numerous and already growing in popularity, was being formed there in his favor. Men of note, who were lately Marcel's comrades, were now pronouncing against him; and John Maillart, one of the four chosen captains of the municipal forces, was the most vigilant. Marcel, at his wit's end, made an offer to the King of Navarre to deliver Paris up to him on the night between the 31st of July and the 1st of August. All was ready for carrying out this design. During the day of the 31st of July, Marcel would have changed the keepers of the St. Denis gate, but Maillart opposed him, rushed to the Hotel de Ville, seized the banner of France, jumped on horseback and rode through the city shouting, "Mountjoy St. Denis, for the king and the duke!" This was the rallying-cry of the dauphin's partisans. The day ended with a great riot amongst the people. Towards eleven o'clock at night Marcel, followed by his people armed from head to foot, made his way to the St. Anthony gate, holding in his hands, it is said, the keys of the city. Whilst he was there, waiting for the arrival of the King of Navarre's men, Maillart came up "with torches and lanterns and a numerous assemblage. He went straight to the provost and said to him, 'Stephen, Stephen, what do you here at this hour?' 'John, what business have you to meddle? I am here to take the guard of the city of which I have the government.' 'By God,' rejoined Maillart, 'that will not do; you are not here at this hour for any good, and I'll prove it to you,' said he, addressing his comrades. 'See, he holds in his hands the keys of the gates, to betray the city.'"
"'You lie, John,' said Marcel. 'By God, you traitor, 'tis you who lie,' replied Maillart: 'death! death! to all on his side!' "And he raised his battle-axe against Marcel. Philippe Giffard, one of the provost's friends, threw himself before Marcel and covered him for a moment with his own body; but the struggle had begun in earnest. Maillart plied his battle-axe upon Marcel, who fell pierced with many wounds. Six of his comrades shared the same fate; and Robert Lecocq, Bishop of Laon, saved himself by putting on a Cordelier's habit. Maillart's company divided themselves into several bands, and spread themselves all over the city, carrying the news everywhere, and despatching or arresting the partisans of Marcel. The next morning, the 1st of August, 1358, "John Maillart brought together in the market-place the greater part of the community of Paris, explained for what reason he had slain the provost of tradesmen and in what offence he had detected him, and pointed out quietly and discreetly how that on this very night the city of Paris must have been overrun and destroyed if God of His grace had not applied a remedy. When the people who were present heard these news they were much astounded at the peril in which they had been, and the greater part thanked God with folded hands for the grace He had done them." The corpse of Stephen Marcel was stripped and exposed quite naked to the public gaze, in front of St. Catherine du Val des Beoliers, on the very spot where, by his orders, the corpses of the two marshals, Robert de Clermont and John de Conflans, had been exposed five months before. He was afterwards cast into the river in the presence of a great concourse. "Then were sentenced to death by the council of prud'hommes of Paris, and executed by divers forms of deadly torture, several who had been of the sect of the provost," the regent having declared that he would not re-enter Paris until these traitors had ceased to live.
Thus perished, after scarcely three years' political life, and by the hands of his former friends, a man of rare capacity and energy, who at the outset had formed none but patriotic designs, and had, no doubt, promised himself a better fate. When, in December, 1355, at the summons of a deplorably incapable and feeble king, Marcel, a simple burgher of Paris and quite a new man, entered the assembly of the states-general of France, itself quite a new power, he was justly struck with the vices and abuses of the kingly government, with the evils and the dangers being entailed thereby upon France, and with the necessity for applying some remedy. But, notwithstanding this perfectly honest and sound conviction, he fell into a capital error; he tried to abolish, for a time at least, the government he desired to reform, and to substitute for the kingship and its agents the people and their elect. For more than three centuries the kingship had been the form of power which had naturally assumed shape and development in France, whilst seconding the natural labor attending the formation and development of the French nation; but this labor had as yet advanced but a little way, and the nascent nation was not in a condition to take up position at the head of its government. Stephen Marcel attempted by means of the states-general of the fourteenth century to bring to pass what we in the nineteenth, and after all the advances of the French nation, have not yet succeeded in getting accomplished, to wit, the government of the country by the country itself. Marcel, going from excess to excess and from reverse to reverse in the pursuit of his impracticable enterprise, found himself before long engaged in a fierce struggle with the feudal aristocracy, still so powerful at that time, as well as with the kingship. Being reduced to depend entirely during this struggle upon such strength as could be supplied by a municipal democracy incoherent, inexperienced, and full of divisions in its own ranks, and by a mad insurrection in the country districts, he rapidly fell into the selfish and criminal condition of the man whose special concern is his own personal safety. This he sought to secure by an unworthy alliance with the most scoundrelly amongst his ambitious contemporaries, and he would have given up his own city as well as France to the King of Navarre and the English had not another burgher of Paris, John Maillart, stopped him, and put him to death at the very moment when the patriot of the states-general of 1355 was about to become a traitor to his country. Hardly thirteen years before, when Stephen Marcel was already a full-grown man, the great Flemish burgher, James Van Artevelde, had, in the cause of his country's liberties, attempted a similar enterprise, and, after a series of great deeds at the outset and then of faults also similar to those of Marcel, had fallen into the same abyss, and had perished by the hand of his fellow-citizens, at the very moment when he was laboring to put Flanders, his native country, into the hands of a foreign master, the Prince of Wales, son of Edward III., King of England. Of all political snares the democratic is the most tempting, but it is also the most demoralizing and the most deceptive when, instead of consulting the interests of the democracy by securing public liberties, a man aspires to put it in direct possession of the supreme power, and with its sole support to take upon himself the direction of the helm.
One single result of importance was won for France by the states-general of the fourteenth century, namely, the principle of the nation's right to intervene in their own affairs, and to set their government straight when it had gone wrong or was incapable of performing that duty itself. Up to that time, in the thirteenth century and at the opening of the fourteenth, the states-general had been hardly anything more than a temporary expedient employed by the kingship itself to solve some special question, or to escape from some grave embarrassment. Starting from King John, the states-general became one of the principles of national right; a principle which did not disappear even when it remained without application, and the prestige of which survived even its reverses. Faith and hope fill a prominent place in the lives of peoples as well as of individuals; having sprung into real existence in 1355, the states-general of France found themselves alive again in 1789; and we may hope that, after so long a trial, their rebuffs and their mistakes will not be more fatal to them in our day.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR.—CHARLES V.
So soon as Marcel and three of his chief confidants had been put to death at the St. Anthony gate, at the very moment when they were about to open it to the English, John Maillart had information sent to the regent, at that time at Charenton, with an urgent entreaty that he would come back to Paris without delay. "The news, at once spread abroad through the city, was received with noisy joy there, and the red caps, which had been worn so proudly the night before, were everywhere taken off and hidden. The next morning a proclamation ordered that whosoever knew any of the faction of Marcel should arrest them and take them to the Chatelet, but without laying hands on their goods and without maltreating their wives or children. Several were taken, put to the question, brought out into the public square, and beheaded by virtue of a decree. They were the men who but lately had the government of the city and decided all matters. Some were burgesses of renown, eloquent and learned, and one of them, on arriving at the square, cried out, 'Woe is me! Would to Heaven, O King of Navarre, that I had never seen thee or heard thee!'" On the 2d of August, 1358, in the evening, the dauphin, Charles, re-entered Paris, and was accompanied by John Maillart, who "was mightily in his grace and love." On his way a man cried out, "By God, sir, if I had been listened to, you would never have entered in here; but, after all, you will get but little by it." The Count of Tancarville, who was in the prince's train, drew his sword, and "spurred his horse upon this rascal;" but the dauphin restrained him, and contented himself with saying smilingly to the man, "You will not be listened to, fair sir." Charles had the spirit of coolness and discretion; and "he thought," says his contemporary, Christine de Pisan, "that if this fellow had been slain, the city which had been so rebellious might probably have been excited thereby." Charles, on being resettled in Paris, showed neither clemency nor cruelty. He let the reaction against Stephen Marcel run its course, and turned it to account without further exciting it or prolonging it beyond measure. The property of some of the condemned was confiscated; some attempts at a conspiracy for the purpose of avenging the provost of trades-men were repressed with severity, and John Maillart and his family were loaded with gifts and favors. On becoming king, Charles determined himself to hold his son at the baptismal font; but Robert Lecocq, Bishop of Laon, the most intimate of Marcel's accomplices, returned quietly to his diocese; two of Marcel's brothers, William and John, owing their protection, it is said, to certain youthful reminiscences on the prince's part, were exempted from all prosecution; Marcels widow even recovered a portion of his property; and as early as the 10th of August, 1358, Charles published an amnesty, from which he excepted only "those who had been in the secret council of the provost of tradesmen in respect of the great treason;" and on the same day another amnesty quashed all proceedings for deeds done during the Jacquery, "whether by nobles or ignobles." Charles knew that in acts of rigor or of grace impartiality conduces to the strength and the reputation of authority.
The death of Stephen Marcel and the ruin of his party were fatal to the plots and ambitious hopes of the King of Navarre. At the first moment he hastened to renew his alliance with the King of England, and to recommence war in Normandy, Picardy, and Champagne against the regent of France. But several of his local expeditions were unsuccessful; the temperate and patient policy of the regent rallied round him the populations aweary of war and anarchy; negotiations were opened between the two princes; and their agents were laboriously discussing conditions of peace when Charles of Navarre suddenly interfered in person, saying, "I would fain talk over matters with the lord duke regent, my brother." We know that his wife was Joan of France, the dauphin's sister. "Hereat there was great joy," says the chronicler, "amongst their councillors. The two princes met, and the King of Navarre with modesty and gentleness addressed the regent in these terms: 'My lord duke and brother, know that I do hold you to be my proper and especial lord; though I have for a long while made war against you and against France, our country, I wish not to continue or to foment it; I wish henceforth to be a good Frenchman, your faithful friend and close ally, your defender against the English and whoever it may be: I pray you to pardon me thoroughly, me and mine, for all that I have done to you up to this present. I wish for neither the lands nor the towns which are offered to me or promised to me; if I order myself well, and you find me faithful in all matters, you shall give me all that my deserts shall seem to you to justify.' At these words the regent arose and thanked the king with much sweetness; they, one and the other, proffered and accepted wine and spices; and all present rejoiced greatly, rendering thanks to God, who doth blow where He listeth, and doth accomplish in a moment that which men with their own sole intelligence have nor wit nor power to do in a long while. The town of Melun was restored to the lord duke; the navigation of the river once more became free up stream and down; great was the satisfaction in Paris and throughout the whole country; and peace being thus made, the two princes returned both of them home."
The King of Navarre knew how to give an appearance of free will and sincerity to changes of posture and behavior which seemed to be pressed upon him by necessity; and we may suppose that the dauphin, all the while that he was interchanging graceful acts, was too well acquainted by this time with the other to become his dupe; but, by their apparent reconciliation, they put an end, for a few brief moments, between themselves to a position which was burdensome to both.
Whilst these events, from the battle of Poitiers to the death of Stephen Marcel (from the 19th of September, 1356, to the 1st of August, 1358), were going on in France, King John was living as a prisoner in the hands of the English, first at Bordeaux, and afterwards in London, and was much more concerned about the reception he met with, and the galas he was present at, than about the affairs of his kingdom. When, after his defeat, he was conducted to Bordeaux by the Prince of Wales, who was governor of English Aquitaine, he became the object of the most courteous attentions, not only on the part of his princely conqueror, but of all Gascon society, "dames and damsels, old and young, and their fair attendants, who took pleasure in consoling him by providing him with diversion." Thus he passed the winter of 1356; and in the spring the Prince of Wales received from his father, King Edward III., the instructions and the vessels he had requested for the conveyance of his prisoner to England. In the month of May, 1357, "he summoned," says Froissart, "all the highest barons of Gascony, and told them that he had made up his mind to go to England, whither he would take some of them, leaving the rest in the country of Bordelais and Gascony, to keep the land and the frontiers against the French. When the Gaseous heard that the Prince of Wales would carry away out of their power the King of France, whom they had helped to take, they were by no means of accord therewith, and said to the prince, 'Dear sir, we owe you, in all that is in our power, all honor, obedience, and loyal service; but it is not our desire that you should thus remove from us the King of France, in respect of whom we have had great trouble to put him in the place where he is; for, thank God, he is in a good strong city, and we are strong and men enough to keep him against the French, if they by force would take him from you.' The prince answered, 'Dear sirs, I grant it heartily; but my lord my father wishes to hold and behold him; and with the good service that you have done my father, and me also, we are well pleased, and it shall be handsomely requited.' Nevertheless, these words did not suffice to appease the Gascons, until a means thereto was found by Sir Reginald de Cobham and Sir John Chandos; for they knew the Gascons to be very covetous. So they said to the prince, 'Sir, offer them a sum of florins, and you will see them come down to your demands.' The prince offered them sixty thousand florins; but they would have nothing to do with them. At last there was so much haggling that an agreement was made for a hundred thousand francs, which the prince was to hand over to the barons of Gascony to share between them. He borrowed the money; and the said sum was paid and handed over to them before the prince started. When these matters were done, the prince put to sea with a fine fleet, crammed with men-at-arms and archers, and put the King of France in a vessel quite apart, that he might be more at his ease."
"They were at sea eleven days and eleven nights," continues Froissart, and on the 12th they arrived at Sandwich harbor, where they landed, and halted two days to refresh themselves and their horses. On the third day they set out and came to St. Thomas of Canterbury."
"When the news reached the King and Queen of England that the prince their son had arrived and had brought with him the King of France, they were greatly rejoiced thereat, and gave orders to the burgesses of London to get themselves ready in as splendid fashion as was beseeming to receive the King of France. They of the city of London obeyed the king's commandment, and arrayed themselves by companies most richly, all the trades in cloth of different kinds." According to the poet herald-at-arms of John Chandos, King Edward III. went in person, with his barons and more than twenty counts, to meet King John, who entered London "mounted on a tall white steed right well harnessed and accoutred at all points, and the Prince of Wales, on a little black hackney, at his side." King John was first of all lodged in London at the Savoy hotel, and shortly afterwards removed, with all his people, to Windsor; "there," says Froissart, "to hawk, hunt, disport himself, and take his pastime according to his pleasure, and Sir Philip, his son, also; and all the rest of the other lords, counts, and barons, remained in London, but they went to see the king when it pleased them, and they were put upon their honor only." Chandos's poet adds, "Many a dame and many a damsel, right amiable, gay, and lovely, came to dance there, to sing, and to cause great galas and jousts, as in the days of King Arthur."
In the midst of his pleasures in England King John sometimes also occupied himself at Windsor with his business in France, but with no more wisdom or success than had been his wont during his actual reign. Towards the end of April, 1359, the dauphin-regent received at Paris the text of a treaty which the king his father had concluded, in London, with the King of England. "The cession of the western half of France, from Calais to Bayonne, and the immediate payment of four million golden crowns," such was, according to the terms of this treaty, the price of King John's ransom, says M. Picot, in his work concerning the History of the States-General, which was crowned in 1869 by the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, and the regent resolved to leave to the judgment of France the acceptance or refusal of such exorbitant demands. He summoned a meeting, to be held at Paris on the 19th of May, of churchmen, nobles, and deputies from the good towns; but "there came but few deputies, as well because full notice had not by that time been given of the said summons, as because the roads were blocked by the English and the Navarrese, who occupied fortresses in all parts whereby it was possible to get to Paris." The assembly had to be postponed from day to day. At last, on the 25th of May, the regent repaired to the palace. He halted on the marble staircase; around him were ranged the three estates; and a numerous multitude filled the court-yard. In presence of all the people, William de Dormans, king's advocate in parliament, read the treaty of peace, which was to divide the kingdom into two parts, so as to hand over one to the foes of France. The reading of it roused the indignation of the people. The estates replied that the treaty was not "tolerable or feasible," and in their patriotic enthusiasm "decreed to make fair war on the English." But it was not enough to spare the kingdom the shame of such a treaty; it was necessary to give the regent the means of concluding a better. On the 2d of June, the nobles announced to the dauphin that they would serve for a month at their own expense, and that they would pay besides such imposts as should be decreed by the good towns. The churchmen also offered to pay them. The city of Paris undertook to maintain "six hundred swords, three hundred archers, and a thousand brigands." The good towns offered twelve thousand men; but they could not keep their promise, the country being utterly ruined.
When King John heard at Windsor that the treaty, whereby he had hoped to be set at liberty, had been rejected at Paris, he showed his displeasure by a single outburst of personal animosity, saying, "Ah! Charles, fair son, you were counselled by the King of Navarre, who deceives you, and would deceive sixty such as you!" Edward III., on his side, at once took measures for recommencing the war; but before engaging in it he had King John removed from Windsor to Hertford Castle, and thence to Somerton, where he set a strong guard. Having thus made certain that his prisoner would not escape from him, he put to sea, and, on the 28th of October, 1359, landed at Calais with a numerous and well-supplied army. Then, rapidly traversing Northern France, he did not halt till he arrived before Rheims, which he was in hopes of surprising, and where, it is said, he purposed to have himself, without delay, crowned King of France. But he found the place so well provided, and the population so determined to make a good defence, that he raised the siege and moved on Chalons, where the same disappointment awaited him. Passing from Champagne to Burgundy, he then commenced the same course of scouring and ravaging; but the Burgundians entered into negotiations with him, and by a treaty concluded on the 10th of March, 1360, and signed by Joan of Auvergne, Queen of France, second wife of King John, and guardian of the young Duke of Burgundy, Philip de Rouvre, they obtained, at the cost of two hundred thousand golden sheep (moutons), an agreement that for three years Edward and his army "would not go scouring and burning" in Burgundy, as they were doing in the other parts of France. Such was the powerlessness, or rather absence, of all national government, that a province made a treaty all alone, and on its own account, without causing the regent to show any surprise, or to dream of making any complaint.
As a make-weight, at this same time, another province, Picardy, aided by many Normans and Flemings, its neighbors, "nobles, burgesses, and common-folk," was sending to sea an expedition which was going to "try, with God's help, to deliver King John from his prison in England, and bring him back in triumph to his kingdom." "Thus," says the chronicler, "they who, God-forsaken or through their own faults, could not defend themselves on the soil of their fathers, were going abroad to seek their fortune and their renown, to return home covered with honor and boasting of divine succor! The Picard expedition landed in England on the 14th of March, 1360; it did not deliver King John, but it took and gave over to flames and pillage for two days the town of Winchelsea, after which it put to sea again, and returned to its hearths." (The Continuer of William of Nangis, t. ii. p. 298.)
Edward III., weary of thus roaming with his army over France without obtaining any decisive result, and without even managing to get into his hands any one "of the good towns which he had promised himself," says Froissart, "that he would tan and hide in such sort that they would be glad to come to some accord with him," resolved to direct his efforts against the capital of the kingdom, where the dauphin kept himself close. On the 7th of April, 1360, he arrived hard by Montrouge, and his troops spread themselves over the outskirts of Paris in the form of an investing or besieging force. But he had to do with a city protected by good ramparts, and well supplied with provisions, and with a prince cool, patient, determined, free from any illusion as to his danger or his strength, and resolved not to risk any of those great battles of which he had experienced the sad issue. Foreseeing the advance of the English, he had burned the villages in the neighborhood of Paris, where they might have fixed their quarters; he did the same with the suburbs of St. Germain, St. Marcel, and Notre-Dame-des-Champs; he turned a deaf ear to all King Edward's warlike challenges; and some attempts at an assault on the part of the English knights, and some sorties on the part of the French knights, impatient of their inactivity, came to nothing. At the end of a week Edward, whose "army no longer found aught to eat," withdrew from Paris by the Chartres road, declaring his purpose of entering "the good country of Beauce, where he would recruit himself all the summer," and whence he would return after vintage to resume the siege of Paris, whilst his lieutenants would ravage all the neighboring provinces. When he was approaching Chartres, "there burst upon his army," says Froissart, "a tempest, a storm, an eclipse, a wind, a hail, an upheaval so mighty, so wondrous, so horrible, that it seemed as if the heaven were all a-tumble, and the earth were opening to swallow up everything; the stones fell so thick and so big that they slew men and horses, and there was none so bold but that they were all dismayed. There were at that time in the army certain wise men, who said that it was a scourge of God, sent as a warning, and that God was showing by signs that He would that peace should be made." Edward had by him certain discreet friends, who added their admonitions to those of the tempest. His cousin, the Duke of Lancaster, said to him, "My lord, this war that you are waging in the kingdom of France is right wondrous, and too costly for you; your men gain by it, and you lose your time over it to no purpose; you will spend your life on it, and it is very doubtful whether you will attain your desire; take the offers made to you now, whilst you can come out with honor; for, my lord, we may lose more in one day than we have won in twenty years." The Regent of France, on his side, indirectly made overtures for peace; the Abbot of Cluny, and the General of the Dominicans, legates of Pope Innocent VI., warmly seconded them; and negotiations were opened at the hamlet of Bretigny, close to Chartres. "The King of England was a hard nut to crack," says Froissart; he yielded a little, however, and on the 8th of May, 1360, was concluded the treaty of Bretigny, a peace disastrous indeed, but become necessary. Aquitaine ceased to be a French fief, and was exalted, in the King of England's interest, to an independent sovereignty, together with the provinces attached to Poitou, Saintonge, Aunis, Agenois, Perigord, Limousin, Quercy, Bigorre, Angoumois, and Rouergue. The King of England, on his side, gave up completely to the King of France Normandy, Maine, and the portion of Touraine and Anjou situated to the north of the Loire. He engaged, further, to solemnly renounce all pretensions to the crown of France so soon as King John had renounced all rights of suzerainty over Aquitaine. King John's ransom was fixed at three millions of golden crowns, payable in six years, and John Galeas Visconti, Duke of Milan, paid the first instalment of it (six hundred thousand florins) as the price of his marriage with Isabel of France, daughter of King John. Hard as these conditions were, the peace was joyfully welcomed in Paris, and throughout Northern France; the bells of the country churches, as well as of Notre-Dame in Paris, songs and dances amongst the people, and liberty of locomotion and of residence secured to the English in all places, "so that none should disquiet them or insult them," bore witness to the general satisfaction. But some of the provinces ceded to the King of England had great difficulty in resigning themselves to it. "In Poitou, and in all the district of Saintonge," says Froissart, "great was the displeasure of barons, knights, and good towns when they had to be English. The town of La Rochelle was especially unwilling to agree thereto; it is wonderful what sweet and piteous words they wrote, again and again, to the King of France, begging him, for God's sake, to be pleased not to separate them from his own domains, or place them in foreign hands, and saying that they would rather be clipped every year of half their revenue than pass into the hands of the English. And when they saw that neither excuses, nor remonstrances, nor prayers were of any avail, they obeyed, but the men of most mark in the town said, 'We will recognize the English with the lips, but the heart shall beat to it never.'" Thus began to grow in substance and spirit, in the midst of war and out of disaster itself [per damna, per caedes ab ipso Duxit opes animumque ferro], that national patriotism which had hitherto been such a stranger to feudal France, and which was so necessary for her progress towards unity—the sole condition for her of strength, security, and grandeur, in the state characteristic of the European world since the settlement of the Franks in Gaul.
Having concluded the treaty of Bretigny, the King of England returned on the 18th of May, 1360, to London; and, on the 8th of July following, King John, having been set at liberty, was brought over by the Prince of Wales to Calais, where Edward III. came to meet him. The two kings treated one another there with great courtesy. "The King of England," says Froissart, "gave the King of France at Calais Castle a magnificent supper, at which his own children, and the Duke of Lancaster, and the greatest barons of England, waited at table, bareheaded." Meanwhile the Prince-Regent of France was arriving at Amiens, and there receiving from his brother-in-law, Galdas Visconti, Duke of Milan, the sum necessary to pay the first instalment of his royal father's ransom. Payment having been made, the two kings solemnly ratified at Calais the treaty of Britigny. Two sons of King John, the Duke of Anjou and the Duke of Berry, with several other personages of consideration, princes of the blood, barons, and burgesses of the principal good towns, were given as hostages to the King of England for the due execution of the treaty; and Edward III. negotiated between the King of France and Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, a reconciliation precarious as ever. The work of pacification having been thus accomplished, King John departed on foot for Boulogne, where he was awaited by the dauphin, his son, and where the Prince of Wales and his two brothers, like-wise on foot, came and joined him. All these princes passed two days together at Boulogne in religious ceremonies and joyous galas; after which the Prince of Wales returned to Calais, and King John set out for Paris, which he once more entered, December 13, 1360. "He was welcomed there," says Froissart, "by all manner of folk, for he had been much desired there. Rich presents were made him; the prelates and barons of his kingdom came to visit him; they feasted him and rejoiced with him, as it was seemly to do; and the king received them sweetly and handsomely, for well he knew how."
And that was all King John did know. When he was once more seated on his throne, the counsels of his eldest son, the late regent, induced him to take some wise and wholesome administrative measures. All adulteration of the coinage was stopped; the Jews were recalled for twenty years, and some securities were accorded to their industry and interests; and an edict renewed the prohibition of private wars. But in his personal actions, in his bearing and practices as a king, the levity, frivolity, thoughtlessness, and inconsistency of King John were the same as ever. He went about his kingdom, especially in Southern France, seeking everywhere occasions for holiday-making and disbursing, rather than for observing and reforming the state of the country. During the visit he paid in 1362 to the new pope, Urban V., at Avignon, he tried to get married to Queen Joan of Naples, the widow of two husbands already, and, not being successful, he was on the point of involving himself in a new crusade against the Turks. It was on his return from this trip that he committed the gravest fault of his reign, a fault which was destined to bring upon France and the French kingship even more evils and disasters than those which had made the treaty of Bretigny a necessity. In 1362, the young Duke of Burgundy, Philip de Louvre, the last of the first house of the Dukes of Burgundy, descendants of King Robert, died without issue, leaving several pretenders to his rich inheritance. King John was, according to the language of the genealogists, the nearest of blood, and at the same time the most powerful; and he immediately took possession of the duchy, went, on the 23d of December, 1362, to Dijon, swore on the altar of St. Benignus that he would maintain the privileges of the city and of the province, and, nine months after, on the 6th of September, 1363, disposed of the duchy of Burgundy in the following terms: "Recalling again to memory the excellent and praise-worthy services of our right dearly beloved Philip, the fourth of our sons, who freely exposed himself to death with us, and, all wounded as he was, remained unwavering and fearless at the battle of Poitiers . . . we do concede to him and give him the duchy and peerage of Burgundy, together with all that we may have therein of right, possession, and proprietorship . . . for the which gift our said son hath done us homage as duke and premier peer of France." Thus was founded that second house of the Dukes of Burgundy which was destined to play, for more than a century, so great and often so fatal a part in the fortunes of France.
Whilst he was thus preparing a gloomy future for his country and his line, King John heard that his second son, the Duke of Anjou, one of the hostages left in the hands of the King of England as security for the execution of the treaty of Bretigny, had broken his word of honor and escaped from England, in order to go and join his wife at Guise Castle. Knightly faith was the virtue of King John; and it was, they say, on this occasion, that he cried, as he was severely upbraiding his son, that "if good faith were banished from the world, it ought to find an asylum in the hearts of kings." He announced to his councillors, assembled at Amiens, his intention of going in person to England. An effort was made to dissuade him; and "several prelates and barons of France told him that he was committing great folly when he was minded to again put himself in danger from the King of England. He answered that he had found in his brother, the King of England, in the Queen, and in his nephews, their children, so much loyalty, honor, and courtesy, that he had no doubt but that they would be courteous, loyal, and amiable to him, in any case. And so he was minded to go and make the excuses of his son, the Duke of Anjou, who had returned to France." According to the most intelligent of the chroniclers of the time, the Continuer of William of Nangis, "some persons said that the king was minded to go to England in order to amuse himself;" and they were probably right, for kingly and knightly amusements were the favorite subject of King John's meditations. This time he found in England something else besides galas; he before long fell seriously ill, "which mightily disconcerted the King and Queen of England, for the wisest in the country judged him to be in great peril." He died, in fact, on the 8th of April, 1364, at the Savoy Hotel, in London; "whereat the King of England, the Queen, their children, and many English barons were much moved," says Froissart, "for the honor of the great love which the King of France, since peace was made, had shown them." France was at last about to have in Charles V. a practical and an effective king.
In spite of the discretion he had displayed during his four years of regency (from 1356 to 1360), his reign opened under the saddest auspices. In 1363, one of those contagious diseases, all at that time called the plague, committed cruel ravages in France. "None," says the contemporary chronicler, "could count the number of the dead in Paris, young or old, rich or poor; when death entered a house, the little children died first, then the menials, then the parents. In the smallest villages, as well as in Paris, the mortality was such that at Argenteuil, for example, where there were wont to be numbered seven hundred hearths, there remained no more than forty or fifty." The ravages of the armed thieves, or bandits, who scoured the country added to those of the plague. Let it suffice to quote one instance. "In Beauce, on the Orleans and Chartres side, some brigands and prowlers, with hostile intent, dressed as pig-dealers or cow-drivers, came to the little castle of Murs, close to Corbeil, and finding outside the gate the master of the place, who was a knight, asked him to get them back their pigs, which his menials, they said, had the night before taken from them, which was false. The master gave them leave to go in, that they might discover their pigs and move them away. As soon as they had crossed the drawbridge they seized upon the master, threw off their false clothes, drew their weapons, and blew a blast upon the bagpipe; and forthwith appeared their comrades from their hiding-places in the neighboring woods. They took possession of the castle, its master and mistress, and all their folk; and, settling themselves there, they scoured from thence the whole country, pillaging everywhere, and filling the castle with the provisions they carried off. At the rumor of this thievish capture, many men-at-arms in the neighborhood rushed up to expel the thieves and retake from them the castle. Not succeeding in their assault, they fell back on Corbeil, and then themselves set to ravaging the country, taking away from the farm-houses provisions and wine without paying a dolt, and carrying them off to Corbeil for their own use. They became before long as much feared and hated as the brigands; and all the inhabitants of the neighboring villages, leaving their homes and their labor, took refuge, with their children and what they had been able to carry off, in Paris, the only place where they could find a little security." Thus the population was without any kind of regular force, anything like effectual protection; the temporary defenders of order themselves went over, and with alacrity too, to the side of disorder when they did not succeed in repressing it; and the men-at-arms set readily about plundering, in their turn, the castles and country-places whence they had been charged to drive off the plunderers.
Let us add a still more striking example of the absence of all publicly recognized power at this period, and of the necessity to which the population was nearly everywhere reduced of defending itself with its own hands, in order to escape ever so little from the evils of war and anarchy. It was a little while ago pointed out why and how, after the death of Marcel and the downfall of his faction, Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, suddenly determined upon making his peace with the regent of France. This peace was very displeasing to the English, allies of the King of Navarre, and they continued to carry on war, ravaging the country here and there, at one time victorious and at another vanquished in a multiplication of disconnected encounters. "I will relate," says the Continuer of William of Nangis, "one of those incidents just as it occurred in my neighborhood, and as I have been truthfully told about it. The struggle there was valiantly maintained by peasants, Jacques Bonhomme (Jack Goodfellows), as they are called. There is a place pretty well fortified in a little town named Longueil, not far from Compiegne, in the diocese of Beauvais, and near to the banks of the Oise. This place is close to the monastery of St. Corneille-de-Compiegne. The inhabitants perceived that there would be danger if the enemy occupied this point; and, after having obtained authority from the lord-regent of France and the abbot of the monastery, they settled themselves there, provided themselves with arms and provisions, and appointed a captain taken from among themselves, promising the regent that they would defend this place to the death. Many of the villagers came thither to place themselves in security, and they chose for captain a tall, fine man, named William a-Larks (aux Alouettes). He had for servant, and held as with bit and bridle, a certain peasant of lofty stature, marvellous bodily strength, and equal boldness, who had joined to these advantages an extreme modesty: he was called Big Ferre. These folks settled themselves at this point to the number of about two hundred men, all tillers of the soil, and getting a poor livelihood by the labor of their hands. The English, hearing it said that these folks were there and were determined to resist, held them in contempt, and went to them, saying, 'Drive we hence these peasants, and take we possession of this point so well fortified and well supplied.' They went thither to the number of two hundred. The folks inside had no suspicion thereof, and had left their gates open. The English entered boldly into the place, whilst the peasants were in the inner courts or at the windows, a-gape at seeing men so well armed making their way in. The captain, William a-Larks, came down at once with some of his people, and bravely began the fight; but he had the worst of it, was surrounded by the English, and himself stricken with a mortal wound. At sight hereof, those of his folk who were still in the courts, with Big Ferre at their head, said one to another, 'Let us go down and sell our lives clearly, else they will slay us without mercy.' Gathering themselves discreetly together, they went down by different gates, and struck out with mighty blows at the English, as if they had been beating out their corn on the threshing-floor; their arms went up and down again, and every blow dealt out a deadly wound. Big Ferre, seeing his captain laid low and almost dead already, uttered a bitter cry, and advancing upon the English he topped them all, as he did his own fellows, by a head and shoulders. Raising his axe, he dealt about him deadly blows, insomuch that in front of him the place was soon a void; he felled to the earth all those whom he could reach; of one he broke the head, of another he lopped off the arms; he bore himself so valiantly that in an hour he had with his own hand slain eighteen of them, without counting the wounded; and at this sight his comrades were filled with ardor. What more shall I say? All that band of English were forced to turn their backs and fly; some jumped into the ditches full of water; others tried with tottering steps to regain the gates. Big Ferre, advancing to the spot where the English had planted their flag, took it, killed the bearer, and told one of his own fellows to go and hurl it into a ditch where the wall was as not yet finished. 'I cannot,' said the other, 'there are still so many English yonder.' 'Follow me with the flag,' said Big Ferre; and marching in front, and laying about him right and left with his axe, he opened and cleared the way to the point indicated, so that his comrade could freely hurl the flag into the ditch. After he had rested a moment, he returned to the fight, and fell so roughly on the English who remained, that all those who could fly hastened to profit thereby. It is said that on that day, with the help of God and Big Ferre, who, with his own hand, as is certified, laid low more than forty, the greater part of the English who had come to this business never went back from it. But the captain on our side, William a-Larks, was there stricken mortally: he was not yet dead when the fight ended; he was carried away to his bed; he recognized all his comrades who were there, and soon afterwards sank under his wounds. They buried him in the midst of weeping, for he was wise and good."
"At the news of what had thus happened at Longueil the English were very disconsolate, saying that it was a shame that so many and such brave warriors should have been slain by such rustics. Next day they came together again from all their camps in the neighborhood, and went and made a vigorous attack at Longueil on our folks, who no longer feared them hardly at all, and went out of their walls to fight them. In the first rank was Big Ferre, of whom the English had heard so much talk. When they saw him, and when they felt the weight of his axe and his arm, many of those who had come to this fight would have been right glad not to be there. Many fled or were grievously wounded or slain. Some of the English nobles were taken. If our folks had been willing to give them up for money, as the nobles do, they might have made a great deal; but they would not.
"When the fight was over, Big Ferre, overcome with heat and fatigue, drank a large quantity of cold water, and was forthwith seized of a fever. He put himself to bed without parting from his axe, which was so heavy that a man of the usual strength could scarcely lift it from the ground with both hands. The English, hearing that Big Ferre was sick, rejoiced greatly, and for fear he should get well they sent privily, round about the place where he was lodged, twelve of their men bidden to try and rid them of him. On espying them from afar, his wife hurried up to his bed where he was laid, saying to him, 'My dear Ferre, the English are coming, and I verily believe it is for thee they are looking; what wilt thou do?' Big Ferre, forgetting his sickness, armed himself in all haste, took his axe which had already stricken to death so many foes, went out of his house, and entering into his little yard, shouted to the English as soon as he saw them, 'Ah! scoundrels, you are coming to take me in my bed; but you shall not get me.' He set himself against a wall to be in surety from behind, and defended himself manfully with his good axe and his great heart. The English assailed him, burning to slay or to take him; but he resisted them so wondrously, that he brought down five much wounded to the ground, and the other seven took to flight. Big Ferre, returning in triumph to his bed, and heated again by the blows he had dealt, again drank cold water in abundance, and fell sick of a more violent fever. A few days afterwards, sinking under his sickness, and after having received the holy sacraments, Big Ferre went out of this world, and was buried in the burial-place of his own village. All his comrades and his country wept for him bitterly, for, so long as he lived, the English would not have come nigh this place."
There is probably some exaggeration about the exploits of Big Ferre and the number of his victims. The story just quoted is not, however, a legend; authentic and simple, it has all the characteristics of a real and true fact, just as it was picked up, partly from eye-witnesses and partly from hearsay, by the contemporary narrator. It is a faithful picture of the internal state of the French nation in the fourteenth century; a nation in labor of formation, a nation whose elements, as yet scattered and incohesive, though under one and the same name, were fermenting each in its own quarter and independently of the rest, with a tendency to mutual coalescence in a powerful unity, but, as yet, far from succeeding in it.
Externally, King Charles V. had scarcely easier work before him. Between himself and his great rival, Edward III., King of England, there was only such a peace as was fatal and hateful to France. To escape some day from the treaty of Bretigny, and recover some of the provinces which had been lost by it—this was what king and country secretly desired and labored for. Pending a favorable opportunity for promoting this higher interest, war went on in Brittany between John of Montfort and Charles of Blois, who continued to be encouraged and patronized, covertly, one by the King of England, the other by the King of France. Almost immediately after the accession of Charles V. it broke out again between him and his brother-in-law, Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, the former being profoundly mistrustful, and the latter brazen-facedly perfidious, and both detesting one another, and watching to seize the moment for taking advantage one of the other. The states bordering on France, amongst others Spain and Italy, were a prey to discord and even civil wars, which could not fail to be a source of trouble or serious embarrassment to France. In Spain two brothers, Peter the Cruel and Henry of Transtamare, were disputing the throne of Castile. Shortly after the accession of Charles V., and in spite of his lively remonstrances, in 1267, Pope Urban V. quitted Avignon for Rome, whence he was not to return to Avignon till three years afterwards, and then only to die. The Emperor of Germany was, at this period, almost the only one of the great sovereigns of Europe who showed for France and her kings a sincere good will. When, in 1378, he went to Paris to pay a visit to Charles V., he was pleased to go to St. Denis to see the tombs of Charles the Handsome and Philip of Valois. "In my young days," he said to the abbot, "I was nurtured at the homes of those good kings, who showed me much kindness; I do request you affectionately to make good prayer to God for them." Charles V., who had given him a very friendly reception, was, no doubt, included in this pious request.
In order to maintain the struggle against these difficulties, within and without, the means which Charles V. had at his disposal were of but moderate worth. He had three brothers and three sisters calculated rather to embarrass and sometimes even injure him than to be of any service to him. Of his brothers, the eldest, Louis, Duke of Anjou, was restless, harsh, and bellicose. He upheld authority with no little energy in Languedoc, of which Charles had made him governor, but at the same time made it detested; and he was more taken up with his own ambitious views upon the kingdom of Naples, which Queen Joan of Hungary had transmitted to him by adoption, than with the interests of France and her king. The second, John, Duke of Berry, was an insignificant prince, who has left no strong mark on history. The third, Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, after having been the favorite of his father, King John, was likewise of his brother Charles V., who did not hesitate to still farther aggrandize this vassal, already so great, by obtaining for him in marriage the hand of Princess Marguerite, heiress to the countship of Flanders; and this marriage, which was destined at a later period to render the Dukes of Burgundy such formidable neighbors for the Kings of France, was even in the lifetime of Charles V. a cause of unpleasant complications both for France and Burgundy. Of King Charles's three sisters, the eldest, Joan, was married to the King of Navarre, Charles the Bad, and much more devoted to her husband than to her brother; the second, Mary, espoused Robert, Duke of Bar, who caused more annoyance than he rendered service to his brother-in-law, the king of France; and the third, Isabel, wife of Galas Visconti, Duke of Milan, was of no use to her brother beyond the fact of contributing, as we have seen, by her marriage, to pay a part of King John's ransom. Charles V., by kindly and judicious behavior in the bosom of his family, was able to keep serious quarrels or embarrassments from arising thence; but he found therein neither real strength nor sure support.
His civil councillors, his chancellor, William de Dormans, cardinal-bishop of Beauvais, his minister of finance, John de la Grange, cardinal-bishop of Amiens; his treasurer, Philip de Savoisy; and his chamberlain and private secretary, Bureau de la Riviere, were, undoubtedly, men full of ability and zeal for his service, for he had picked them out and maintained them unchangeably in their offices. There is reason to believe that they conducted themselves discreetly, for we do not observe that after their master's death there was any outburst against them, on the part either of court or people, of that violent and deadly hatred which has so often caused bloodshed in the history of France. Bureau de la Riviere was attacked and prosecuted, without, however, becoming one of the victims of judicial authority at the command of political passions. None of Charles V.'s councillors exercised over his master that preponderating and confirmed influence which makes a man a premier minister. Charles V. himself assumed the direction of his own government, exhibiting unwearied vigilance, "but without hastiness and without noise." There is a work, as yet unpublished, of M. Leopold Delisle, which is to contain a complete explanatory catalogue of all the Mandements et Actes divers de Charles V. This catalogue, which forms a pendant to a similar work performed by M. Delisle for the reign of Philip Augustus, is not yet concluded; and, nevertheless, for the first seven years only of Charles V.'s reign, from 1364 to 1371, there are to be found enumerated and described in it eight hundred and fifty-four mandements, ordonnances et actes divers de Charles V., relating to the different branches of administration, and to daily incidents of government; acts all bearing the impress of an intellect active, farsighted, and bent upon becoming acquainted with everything, and regulating everything, not according to a general system, but from actual and exact knowledge. Charles always proved himself reflective, unhurried, and anxious solely to comport himself in accordance with the public interests and with good sense. He was one day at table in his room with some of his intimates, when news was brought him that the English had laid siege, in Guienne, to a place where there was only a small garrison, not in a condition to hold out unless it were promptly succored. "The king," says Christine de Pisan, "showed no great outward emotion, and quite coolly, as if the topic of conversation were something else, turned and looked about him, and, seeing one of his secretaries, summoned him courteously, and bade him, in a whisper, write word to Louis de Sancerre, his marshal, to come to him directly. They who were there were amazed that, though the matter was so weighty, the king took no great account of it. Some young esquires who were waiting upon him at table were bold enough to say to him, 'Sir, give us the money to fit ourselves out, as many of us are of your household, for to go on this business; we will be new-made knights, and will go and raise the siege.' The king began to smile, and said, 'It is not new-made knights that are suitable; they must be all old.' Seeing that he said no more about it, some of them added, 'What are your orders, sir, touching this affair, which is of haste?' 'It is not well to give orders in haste; when we see those to whom it is meet to speak, we will give our orders.'"
On another occasion, the treasurer of Nimes had died, and the king appointed his successor. His brother, the Duke of Anjou, came and asked for the place on behalf of one of his own intimates, saying that he to whom the king had granted it was a man of straw, and without credit. Charles caused inquiries to be made, and then said to the duke, "Truly, fair brother, he for whom you have spoken to me is a rich man, but one of little sense and bad behavior." "Assuredly," said the Duke of Anjou, "he to whom you have given the office is a man of straw, and incompetent to fill it." "Why, prithee?" asked the king. "Because he is a poor man, the son of small laboring folks, who are still tillers of the ground in our country." "Ah!" said Charles; "is there nothing more? Assuredly, fair brother, we should prize more highly the poor man of wisdom than the profligate ass;" and he maintained in the office him whom he had put there.
The government of Charles V. was the personal government of an intelligent, prudent, and honorable king, anxious for the interests of the state, at home and abroad, as well as for his own; with little inclination for, and little confidence in, the free co-operation of the country in its own affairs, but with wit enough to cheerfully call upon it when there was any pressing necessity, and accepting it then without chicanery or cheating, but safe to go back as soon as possible to that sole dominion, a medley of patriotism and selfishness, which is the very insufficient and very precarious resource of peoples as yet incapable of applying their liberty to the art of their own government. Charles V. had recourse three times, in July, 1367, and in May and December, 1369, to a convocation of the states-general, in order to be put in a position to meet the political and financial difficulties of France. At the second of these assemblies, when the chancellor, William de Dormans, had explained the position of the kingdom, the king himself rose up "for to say to all that if they considered that he had done anything he ought not to have done, they should tell him so, and he would amend what he had done, for there was still time to repair it, if he had done too much or not enough." The question at that time was as to entertaining the appeal of the barons of Aquitaine to the King of France as suzerain of the Prince of Wales, whose government had become intolerable, and to thus make a first move to struggle out of the humiliating pace of Bretigny. Such a step, and such words, do great honor to the memory of the pacific prince who was at that time bearing the burden of the government of France. It was Charles V.'s good fortune to find amongst his servants a man who was destined to be the thunderbolt of war and the glory of knighthood of his reign. About 1314, fifty years before Charles's accession, there was born at the castle of Motte-Broon, near Rennes, in a family which could reckon two ancestors amongst Godfrey de Bouillon's comrades in the first crusade, Bertrand du Guesclin, "the ugliest child from Rennes to Dinan," says a contemporary chronicle, flat-nosed and swarthy, thick-set, broad-shouldered, big-headed, a bad fellow, a regular wretch, according to his own mother's words, given to violence, always striking or being struck, whom his tutor abandoned without having been able to teach him to read. At sixteen years of age, he escaped from the paternal mansion, went to Rennes, entered upon a course of adventures, quarrels, challenges, and tourneys, in which he distinguished himself by his strength, his valor, and likewise his sense of honor. He joined the cause of Charles of Blois against John of Montfort, when the two were claimants for the duchy of Brittany; but at the end of thirty years, "neither the good of him, nor his prowess, were as yet greatly renowned," says Froissart, "save amongst the knights who were about him in the country of Brittany." But Charles V., at that time regent, had taken notice of him in 1359, at the siege of Melun, where Du Guesclin had for the first time borne arms in the service of France. When, in 1364, Charles became king, he said to Boucicaut, marshal of France, "Boucicaut, get you hence, with such men as you have, and ride towards Normandy; you will there find Sir Bertrand du Guesclin, hold yourselves in readiness, I pray you, you and he, to recover from the King of Navarre the town of Mantes, which would make us masters of the River Seine." "Right willingly, sir," answered Boucicaut; and a few weeks afterwards, on the 7th of April, 1364, Boucicaut, by stratagem, entered Mantes with his troop, and Du Guesclin, coming up suddenly with his, dashed into the town at a gallop, shouting, "St. Yves! Guesclin! death, death to all Navarrese!" The two warriors did the same next day at the gates of Meulan, three leagues from Mantes. "Thus were the two cities taken, whereat King Charles V. was very joyous when he heard the news; and the King of Navarre was very wroth, for he set down as great hurt the loss of Mantes and of Meulan, which made a mighty fine entrance for him into France."
It was at Rheims, during the ceremony of his coronation, that Charles V. heard of his two officers' success. The war thus begun against the King of Navarre was hotly prosecuted on both sides. Charles the Bad hastily collected his forces, Gascons, Normans, and English, and put them under the command of John de Grailli, called the Captal of Buch, an officer of renown. Du Guesclin recruited in Normandy, Picardy, and Brittany, and amongst the bands of warriors which were now roaming all over France. The plan of the Captal of Buch was to go and disturb the festivities at Rheims, but at Cockerel, on the banks of the Eure, two leagues from Evreux, he met the troops of Du Guesclin; and the two armies, pretty nearly equal in number, halted in view of one another. Du Guesclin held counsel, and said to his comrades in arms, "Sirs, we know that in front of us we have in the Captal as gallant a knight as can be found to-day on all the earth; so long as he shall be on the spot he will do us great hurt; set we then a-horseback thirty of ours, the most skilful and the boldest; they shall give heed to nothing but to make straight towards the Captal, break through the press, and get right up to him; then they shall take him, pin him, carry him off amongst them, and lead him away some whither in safety, without waiting for the end of the battle. If he can be taken and kept in such way, the day will be ours, so astounded will his men be at his capture." Battle ensued at all points [May 16, 1364]; and, whilst it led to various encounters, with various results, "the picked thirty, well mounted on the flower of steeds," says Froissart, "and with no thought but for their enterprise, came all compact together to where was the Captal, who was fighting right valiantly with his axe, and was dealing blows so mighty that none durst come nigh him; but the thirty broke through the press by dint of their horses, made right up to him, halted hard by him, took him and shut him in amongst them by force; then they voided the place, and bare him away in that state, whilst his men, who were like to mad, shouted, 'A rescue for the Captal! a rescue!' but nought could avail them, or help them; and the Captal was carried off and placed in safety. In this bustle and turmoil, whilst the Navarrese and English were trying to follow the track of the Captal, whom they saw being taken off before their eyes, some French agreed with hearty good will to bear down on the Captal's banner, which was in a thicket, and whereof the Navarrese made their own standard. Thereupon there was a great tumult and hard fighting there, for the banner was well guarded, and by good men; but at last it was seized, won, torn, and cast to the ground. The French were masters of the battle-field; Sir Bertrand and his Bretons acquitted themselves loyally, and ever kept themselves well together, giving aid one to another; but it cost them dear in men."
Charles was highly delighted, and, after the victory, resolutely discharged his kingly part, rewarding, and also punishing. Du Guesclin was made marshal of Normandy, and received as a gift the countship of Longueville, confiscated from the King of Navarre. Certain Frenchmen who had become confidants of the King of Navarre were executed, and Charles V. ordered his generals to no longer show any mercy for the future to subjects of the kingdom who were found in the enemy's ranks. The war against Charles the Bad continued. Charles V., encouraged by his successes, determined to take part likewise in that which was still going on between the two claimants to the duchy of Brittany, Charles of Blois and John of Montfort. Du Guesclin was sent to support Charles of Blois; "whereat he was greatly rejoiced," says Froissart, "for he had always held the said lord Charles for his rightful lord." The Count and Countess of Blois "received him right joyously and pleasantly, and the best part of the barons of Brittany likewise had lord Charles of Blois in regard and affection." Du Guesclin entered at once on the campaign, and marched upon Auray, which was being besieged by the Count of Montfort. But there he was destined to encounter the most formidable of his adversaries. John of Montfort had claimed the support of his patron, the king of England, and John Chandos, the most famous of the English commanders, had applied to the Prince of Wales to know what he was to do. "You may go full well," the prince had answered, "since the French are going for the Count of Blois; I give you good leave." Chandos, delighted, set hastily to work recruiting. Only a few Aquitanians decided to join him, for they were beginning to be disgusted with English rule, and the French national spirit was developing itself throughout Gascony, even in the Prince of Wales's immediate circle. Chandos recruited scarcely any but English or Bretons, and when, to the great joy of the Count of Montfort, he arrived before Auray, "he brought," says Froissart, "full sixteen hundred fighting men, knights, and squires, English and Breton, and about eight or nine hundred archers." Du Guesclin's troops were pretty nearly equal in number, and not less brave, but less well disciplined, and probably also less ably commanded. The battle took place on the 29th of September, 1364, before Auray. The attendant circumstances and the result have already been recounted in the twentieth chapter of this history; Charles of Blois was killed, and Du Guesclin was made prisoner. The cause of John of Montfort was clearly won; and he, on taking possession of the duchy of Brittany, asked nothing better than to acknowledge himself vassal of the King of France, and swear fidelity to him. Charles V. had too much judgment not to foresee that, even after a defeat, a peace which gave a lawful and definite solution to the question of Brittany, rendered his relations and means of influence with this important province much more to be depended upon than any success which a prolonged war might promise him. Accordingly he made peace at Guerande, on the 11th of April, 1365, after having disputed the conditions inch by inch; and some weeks previously, on the 6th of March, at the indirect instance of the King of Navarre, who, since the battle of Gocherel, had felt himself in peril, Charles V. had likewise put an end to his open struggle against his perfidious neighbor, of whom he certainly did not cease to be mistrustful. Being thus delivered from every external war and declared enemy, the wise King of France was at liberty to devote himself to the re-establishment of internal peace and of order throughout his kingdom, which was in the most pressing need thereof.
We have, no doubt, even in our own day, cruel experience of the disorders and evils of war; but we can form, one would say, but a very incomplete idea of what they were in the fourteenth century, without any of those humane administrative measures, still so ineffectual,—provisionings, hospitals, ambulances, barracks, and encampments,—which are taken in the present day to prevent or repair them. The Recueil des Ordonnances des Lois de France is full of safeguards granted by Charles V. to monasteries and hospices and communes, which implored his protection, that they might have a little less to suffer than the country in general. We will borrow from the best informed and the most intelligent of the contemporary chroniclers, the Continuer of William of Nangis, a picture of those sufferings and the causes of them. "There was not," he says, "in Anjou, in Touraine, in Beauce, near Orleans and up to the approaches of Paris, any corner of the country which was free from plunderers and robbers. They were so numerous everywhere, either in little forts occupied by them or in the villages and country-places, that peasants and tradesfolks could not travel but at great expense and great peril. The very guards told off to defend cultivators and travellers took part most shamefully in harassing and despoiling them. It was the same in Burgundy and the neighboring countries. Some knights who called themselves friends of the king and of the king's majesty, and whose names I am not minded to set down here, kept in their service brigands who were quite as bad. What is far more strange is, that when those folks went into the cities, Paris or elsewhere, everybody knew them and pointed them out, but none durst lay a hand upon them. I saw one night at Paris, in the suburb of St. Germain des Pres, while the people were sleeping, some brigands who were abiding with their chieftains in the city, attempting to sack certain hospices: they were arrested and imprisoned in the Chatelet; but, before long, they were got off, declared innocent, and set at liberty without undergoing the least punishment—a great encouragement for them and their like to go still farther. . . . When the king gave Bertrand du Guesclin the countship of Longueville, in the diocese of Rouen, which had belonged to Philip, brother of the King of Navarre, Du Guesclin promised the king that he would drive out by force of arms all the plunderers and robbers, those enemies of the kingdom; but he did nothing of the sort; nay, the Bretons even of Du Guesclin, on returning from Rouen, pillaged and stole in the villages whatever they found there— garments, horses, sheep, oxen, and beasts of burden and of tillage."
Charles V. was not, as Louis XII. and Henry IV. were, of a disposition full of affection, and sympathetically inclined towards his people; but he was a practical man, who, in his closet and in the library growing up about him, took thought for the interests of his kingdom as well as for his own; he had at heart the public good, and lawlessness was an abomination to him. He had just purchased, at a ransom of a hundred thousand francs, the liberty of Bertrand du Guesclin, who had remained a prisoner in the hands of John Chandos, after the battle of Auray. An idea occurred to him that the valiant Breton might be of use to him in extricating France from the deplorable condition to which she had been reduced by the bands of plunderers roaming everywhere over her soil. We find in the Chronicle in verse of Bertrand Guesclin, by Cuvelier, a troubadour of the fourteenth century, a detailed account of the king's perplexities on this subject, and of the measures he took to apply a remedy. We cannot regard this account as strictly historical; but it is a picture, vivid and morally true, of events and men as they were understood and conceived to be by a contemporary, a mediocre poet, but a spirited narrator. We will reproduce the principal features, modifying the language to make it more easily intelligible, but without altering the fundamental character.
"There were so many folk who went about pillaging the country of France that the king was sad and doleful at heart. He summoned his council, and said to them, 'What shall we do with this multitude of thieves who go about destroying our people? If I send against them my valiant baronage I lose my noble barons, and then I shall never more have any joy of my life. If any could lead these folk into Spain against the miscreant and tyrant Pedro, who put our sister to death, I would like it well, whatever it might cost me.'
"Bertrand du Guesclin gave ear to the king, and 'Sir King,' said he, 'it is my heart's desire to cross over the seas and go fight the heathen with the edge of the sword; but if I could come nigh this folk which Both anger you, I would deliver the kingdom from them.' 'I should like it well,' said the king. 'Say no more,' said Bertrand to him; 'I will learn their pleasure; give it no further thought.'
"Bertrand du Guesclin summoned his herald, and said to him, 'Go thou to the Grand Company and have all the captains assembled; thou wilt go and demand for me a safe-conduct, for I have a great desire to parley with them.' The herald mounted his horse, and went a-seeking these folk toward Chalon-sur-la-Saone. They were seated together at dinner, and were drinking good wine from the cask they had pierced. 'Sirs,' said the herald, 'the blessing of Jesus be on you! Bertrand du Guesclin prayeth you to let him parley with all in company.' 'By my faith, gentle herald,' said Hugh de Calverley, who was master of the English, 'I will readily see Bertrand here, and will give him good wine; I can well give it him, in sooth, I do assure you, for it costs me nothing.' Then the herald departed, and returned to his lord, and told the news of this company.
"So away rode Bertrand, and halted not; and he rode so far that he came to the Grand Company, and then did greet them. 'God keep,' said he, 'the companions I see yonder!' Then they bowed down; each abased himself. 'I vow to God,' said Bertrand, 'whosoever will be pleased to believe me; I will make you all rich.' And they answered, 'Right welcome here sir, we will all do whatsoever is your pleasure.' 'Sirs,' said Bertrand, 'be pleased to listen to me; wherefore I am come I will tell unto you. I come by order of the king in whose keeping is France, and who would be right glad, to save his people, that ye should come with me whither I should be glad to go into good company I fain would bring ye. If we would all of us look into our hearts, we might full truly consider that we have done enough to damn our souls; think we but how we have dealt with life, outraged ladies and burned houses, slain men, children, and everybody set to ransom, how we have eaten up cows, oxen, and sheep, drunk good wines, and done worse than robbers do. Let us do honor to God and forsake the devil. Ask, if it may please you, all the companions, all the knights, and all the barons; if you be of accord, we will go to the king, and I will have the gold got ready which we do promise you I would fain get together all my friends to make the journey we so strongly desire.'"
Du Guesclin then explained, in broad terms which left the choice to the Grand Company, what this journey was which was so much desired. He spoke of the King of Cyprus, of the Saracens of Granada, of the Pope of Avignon, and especially of Spain and the King of Castile, Pedro the Cruel, "scoundrel-murderer of his wife (Blanche of Bourbon)," on whom, above all, Du Gueselin wished to draw down the wrath of his hearers. "In Spain," he said to them, "we might largely profit, for the country is a good one for leading a good life, and there are good wines which are neat and clear." Nearly all present, whereof were twenty-five famous captains, "confirmed what was said by Bertrand." "Sirs," said he to them at last, "listen to me: I will go my way and speak to the King of the Franks; I will get for you those two hundred thousand francs; you shall come and dine with me at Paris, according to my desire, when the time shall have come for it; and you shall see the king, who will be rejoiced thereat. We will have no evil suspicion in anything, for I never was inclined to treason, and never shall be as long as I live." Then said the valiant knights and esquires to him, "Never was more valiant man seen on earth; and in you we have more belief and faith than in all the prelates and great clerics who dwell at Avignon or in France."
When Du Gueselin returned to Paris, "Sir," said he to the king, "I have accomplished your wish; I will put out of your kingdom all the worst folk of this Grand Company, and I will so work it that everything shall be saved." "Bertrand," said the king to him, "may the Holy Trinity be pleased to have you in their keeping, and may I see you a long while in joy and health!" "Noble king," said Bertrand, "the captains have a very great desire to come to Paris, your good city." "I am heartily willing," said the king; "if they come, let them assemble at the Temple; elsewhere there is too much people and too much abundance; there might be too much alarm. Since they have reconciled themselves to us, I would have nought but friendship with them."
The poet concludes the negotiation thus: "At the bidding of Bertrand, when he understood the pleasure of the noble King of France, all the captains came to Paris in perfect safety; they were conducted straight to the Temple; there they were feasted and dined nobly, and received many a gift, and all was sealed."
Matters went, at the outset at least, as Du Guesclin had promised to the king on the one side, and on the other to the captains of the Grand Company. There was, in point of fact, a civil war raging in Spain between Don Pedro the Cruel, King of Castile, and his natural brother, Henry of Transtamare, and that was the theatre on which Du Guesclin had first proposed to launch the vagabond army which he desired to get out of France. It does not appear, however, that at their departure from Burgundy at the end of November, 1365, this army and its chiefs had in this respect any well-considered resolution, or any well-defined aim in their movements. They made first for Avignon, and Pope Urban V., on hearing of their approach, was somewhat disquieted, and sent to them one of his cardinals to ask them what was their will. If we may believe the poet-chronicler, Cuvelier, the mission was anything but pleasing to the cardinal, who said to one of his confidants, "I am grieved to be set to this business, for I am sent to a pack of madmen who have not an hour's, nay, not even half-an-hour's conscience." The captains replied that they were going to fight the heathen either in Cyprus or in the kingdom of Granada, and that they demanded of the pope absolution of their sins and two hundred thousand livres, which Du Guesclin had promised them in his name. The pope cried out against this. "Here," said he, "at Avignon, we have money given us for absolution, and we must give it gratis to yonder folks, and give them money also: it is quite against reason." Du Guesclin insisted. "Know you," said he to the cardinal, "that there are in this army many folks who care not a whit for absolution, and who would much rather have money; we are making them proper men in spite of themselves, and are leading them abroad that they may do no mischief to Christians. Tell that to the pope; for else we could not take them away." The pope yielded, and gave them the two hundred thousand livres. He obtained the money by levies upon the population of Avignon. They, no doubt, complained loudly, for the chiefs of the Grand Company were informed thereof, and Du Guesclin said, "By the faith that I owe to the Holy Trinity, I will not take a denier of that which these poor folks have given; let the pope and the clerics give us of their own; we desire that all they who have paid the tax do recover their money without losing a doit;" and, according to contemporary chronicles, the vagabond army did not withdraw until they had obtained this satisfaction. The piety of the middle ages, though sincere, was often less disinterested and more rough than it is commonly represented.
On arriving at Toulouse from Avignon, Du Guesclin and his bands, with a strength, it is said, of thirty thousand men, took the decided resolution of going into Spain to support the cause of Prince Henry of Transtamare against the King of Castile his brother, Don Pedro the Cruel. The Duke of Anjou, governor of Languedoc, gave them encouragement, by agreement, no doubt with King Charles V., and from anxiety on his own part to rid his province of such inconvenient visitors. On the 1st of January, 1366, Du Guesclin entered Barcelona, whither Henry of Transtamare came to join him. There is no occasion to give a detailed account here of that expedition, which appertains much more to the history of Spain than to that of France. There was a brief or almost no struggle. Henry of Transtamare was crowned king, first at Calahorra, and afterwards at Burgos. Don Pedro, as much despised before long as he was already detested, fled from Castile to Andalusia, and from Andalusia to Portugal, whose king would not grant him an asylum in his dominions, and he ended by embarking at Coronna for Bordeaux, to implore the assistance of the Prince of Wales, who gave him a warm and a magnificent reception. Edward III., King of England, had been disquieted by the march of the Grand Company into Spain, and had given John Chandos and the rest of his chief commanders in Guienne orders to be vigilant in preventing the English from taking part in the expedition against his cousin the King of Castile; but several of the English chieftains, serving in the bands and with Du Guesclin, set at nought this prohibition, and contributed materially to the fall of Don Pedro. Edward III. did not consider that the matter was any infraction, on the part of France, of the treaty of Bretigne, and continued to live at peace with Charles V., testifying his displeasure, however, all the same. But when Don Pedro had reached Bordeaux, and had told the Prince of Wales that, if he obtained the support of England, he would make the prince's eldest son, Edward, king of Galicia, and share amongst the prince's warriors the treasure he had left in Castile, so well concealed that he alone knew where, "the knights of the Prince of Wales," says Froissart, "gave ready heed to his words, for English and Gascons are by nature covetous." The Prince of Wales immediately summoned the barons of Aquitaine, and on the advice they gave him sent four knights to London to ask for instructions from the king his father. Edward III. assembled his chief councillors at Westminster, and finally "it seemed to all course due and reasonable on the part of the Prince of Wales to restore and conduct the King of Spain to his kingdom; to which end they wrote official letters from the King and the council of England to the prince and the barons of Aquitaine. When the said barons heard the letters read they said to the prince, 'My lord, we will obey the command of the king our master and your father; it is but reason, and we will serve you on this journey and King Pedro also; but we would know who shall pay us and deliver us our wages, for one does not take men-at-arms away from their homes to go a warfare in a foreign land, without they be paid and delivered. If it were a matter touching our dear lord your father's affairs, or your own, or your honor or our country's, we would not speak thereof so much beforehand as we do.' Then the Prince of Wales looked towards the Prince Don Pedro, and said to him, 'Sir King, you hear what these gentlemen say; to answer is for you, who have to employ them.' Then the King Don Pedro answered the prince, 'My dear cousin, so far as my gold, my silver, and all my treasure which I have brought with me hither, and which is not a thirtieth part so great as that which there is yonder, will go, I am ready to give it and share it amongst your gentry.' 'You say well,' said the prince, 'and for the residue I will be debtor to them, and I will lend you all you shall have need of until we be in Castile.' 'By my head,' answered the King Don Pedro, you will do me great grace and great courtesy.'"
When the English and Gascon chieftains who had followed Du Guesclin into Spain heard of the resolutions of their king, Edward III., and the preparations made by the Prince of Wales for going and restoring Don Pedro to the throne of Castile, they withdrew from the cause which they had just brought to an issue to the advantage of Henry of Transtamare, separated from the French captain who had been their leader, and marched back into Aquitaine, quite ready to adopt the contrary cause, and follow the Prince of Wales in the service of Don Pedro. The greater part of the adventurers, Burgundian, Picard, Champagnese, Norman, and others who had enlisted in the bands which Du Guesclin had marched out of France, likewise quitted him, after reaping the fruits of their raid, and recrossed the Pyrenees to go and resume in France their life of roving and pillage. There remained in Spain about fifteen hundred men-at-arms faithful to Du Guesclin, himself faithful to Henry of Transtamare, who had made him Constable of Castile.
Amidst all these vicissitudes, and at the bottom of all events as well as of all hearts, there still remained the great fact of the period, the struggle between the two kings of France and England for dominion in that beautiful country which, in spite of its dismemberment, kept the name of France. Edward III. in London, and the Prince of Wales at Bordeaux, could not see, without serious disquietude, the most famous warrior amongst the French crossing the Pyrenees with a following for the most part French, and setting upon the throne of Castile a prince necessarily allied to the King of France. The question of rivalry between the two kings and the two peoples had thus been transferred into Spain, and for the moment the victory remained with France. After several months' preparation the prince of Wales, purchasing the complicity of the King of Navarre, marched into Spain in February, 1367, with an army of twenty-seven thousand men, and John Chandos, the most able of the English warriors. Henry of Transtamare had troops more numerous, but less disciplined and experienced. The two armies joined battle on the 3d of April, 1367, at Najara or Navarette, not far from the Ebro. Disorder and even sheer rout soon took place amongst that of Henry, who flung himself before the fugitives, shouting, "Why would ye thus desert and betray me, ye who have made me King of Castile? Turn back and stand by me; and by the grace of God the day shall be ours." Du Guesclin and his men-at-arms maintained the fight with stubborn courage, but at last they were beaten, and either slain or taken. To the last moment Du Guesclin, with his back against a wall, defended himself heroically against a host of assailants. The Prince of Wales, coming up, cried out, "Gentle marshals of France, and you too, Bertrand, yield yourselves to me." "Why, yonder men are my foes," cried the king, Don Pedro; "it is they who took from me my kingdom, and on them I mean to take vengeance." Du Guesclin, darting forward, struck so rough a blow with his sword at Don Pedro, that he brought him fainting to the ground, and then turning to the Prince of Wales said, "Nathless I give up my sword to the most valiant prince on earth." The Prince of Wales took the sword, and charged the Captal of Buch with the prisoner's keeping. "Aha! sir Bertrand," said the Captal to Du Guesclin, "you took me at the battle of Cocherel, and to-day I've got you." "Yes," replied Du Guesclin; "but at Cocherel I took you myself, and here you are only my keeper."
The battle of Najara being over, and Don Pedro the Cruel restored to a throne which he was not to occupy for long, the Prince of Wales returned to Bordeaux with his army and his prisoner Du Guesclin, whom he treated courteously, at the same time that he kept him pretty strictly. One of the English chieftains who had been connected with Du Guesclin at the time of his expedition into Spain, Sir Hugh Calverley, tried one day to induce the Prince of Wales to set the French warrior at liberty. "Sir," said he, "Bertrand is a right loyal knight, but he is not a rich man, or in estate to pay much money; he would have good need to end his captivity on easy terms." "Let be," said the prince; "I have no care to take aught of his; I will cause his life to be prolonged in spite of himself: if he were released, he would be in battle again, and always a-making war." After supper, Hugh, without any beating about the bush, told Bertrand the prince's answer. "Sir," he said, "I cannot bring about your release." "Sir," said Bertrand, "think no more of it; I will leave the matter to the decision of God, who is a good and just master." Some time after, Du Guesclin having sent a request to the Prince of Wales to admit him to ransom, the prince, one day when he was in a gay humor, had him brought up, and told him that his advisers had urged him not to give him his liberty so long as the war between France and England lasted. "Sir," said Du Guesclin to him, "then am I the most honored knight in the world, for they say, in the kingdom of France and elsewhere, that you are more afraid of me than of any other." "Think you, then, it is for your knighthood that we do keep you?" said the prince: "nay, by St. George; fix you your own ransom, and you shall be released." Du Guesclin proudly fixed his ransom at a hundred thousand francs, which seemed a large sum even to the Prince of Wales. "Sir," said Du Guesclin to him, "the king in whose keeping is France will lend me what I lack, and there is not a spinning wench in France who would not spin to gain for me what is necessary to put me out of your clutches." The advisers of the Prince of Wales would have had him think better of it, and break his promise; but "that which we have agreed to with him we will hold to," said the prince; "it would be shame and confusion of face to us if we could be reproached with not setting him to ransom when he is ready to set himself down at so much as to pay a hundred thousand francs." Prince and knight were both as good as their word. Du Guesclin found amongst his Breton friends a portion of the sum he wanted; King Charles V. lent him thirty thousand Spanish doubloons, which, by a deed of December 27, 1367, Du Guesclin undertook to repay; and at the beginning of 1368 the Prince of Wales set the French warrior at liberty.
The first use Du Guesclin made of it was to go and put his name and his sword at the service first of the Duke of Anjou, governor of Languedoc, who was making war in Provence against Queen Joan of Naples, and then of his Spanish patron, Henry of Transtamare, who had recommenced the war in Spain against his brother, Pedro the Cruel, whom he was before long to dethrone for the second time and slay with his own hand. But whilst Du Guesclin was taking part in this settlement of the Spanish question, important events called him back to the north of the Pyrenees for the service of his own king, the defence of his own country, and the aggrandizement of his own fortunes. The English and Gascon bands which, in 1367, had recrossed the Pyrenees with the Prince of Wales, after having restored Don Pedro the Cruel to the throne of Castile had not disappeared. Having no more to do in their own prince's service, they had spread abroad over France, which they called "their apartment," and recommenced, in the countries between the Seine and the Loire, their life of vagabondage and pillage. A general outcry was raised; it was the Prince of Wales, men said, who had let them loose, and the people called them the host (army) of England. A proceeding of the Prince of Wales himself had the effect of adding to the rage of the people that of the aristocratic classes. He was lavish of expenditure, and held at Bordeaux a magnificent court, for which the revenues from his domains and ordinary resources were insufficient; so he imposed a tax for five years of ten sous per hearth or family, "in order to satisfy," he said, "the large claims against him." In order to levy this tax legally, he convoked the estates of Aquitaine, first at Niort, and then, successively, at Angouleme, Poitiers, Bordeaux, and Bergerac; but nowhere could he obtain the vote he demanded. "When we obeyed the King of France," said the Gascons, "we were never so aggrieved with subsidies, hearth-taxes, or gabels, and we will not be, as long as we can defend ourselves." The Prince of Wales persisted in his demands. He was ill and irritable, and was becoming truly the Black Prince. The Aquitanians too became irritated. The prince's more temperate advisers, even those of English birth, tried in vain to move him from his stubborn course. Even John Chandos, the most notable as well as the wisest of them, failed, and withdrew to his domain of St. Sauveur, in Normandy, that he might have nothing to do with measures of which he disapproved. Being driven to extremity, the principal lords of Aquitaine, the Counts of Comminges, of Armagnac, of Perigord, and many barons besides, set out for France, and made complaint, on the 30th of June, 1368, before Charles V. and his peers, "on account of the grievances which the Prince of Wales was purposed to put upon them." They had recourse, they said, to the King of France as their sovereign lord, who had no power to renounce his suzerainty or the jurisdiction of his court of peers and of his parliament.
Nothing could have corresponded better with the wishes of Charles V. For eight years past he had taken to heart the treaty of Bretigny, and he was as determined not to miss as he was patient in waiting for an opportunity for a breach of it. But he was too prudent to act with a precipitation which would have given his conduct an appearance of a premeditated and deep-laid purpose for which there was no legitimate ground. He did not care to entertain at once and unreservedly the appeal of the Aquitanian lords. He gave them a gracious reception, and made them "great cheer and rich gifts;" but he announced his intention of thoroughly examining the stipulations of the treaty of Bretigny, and the rights of his kingship. "He sent for into his council chamber all the charters of the peace, and then he had them read on several days and at full leisure." He called into consultation the schools of Boulogne, of Montpellier, of Toulouse, and of Orleans, and the most learned clerks of the papal court. It was not until he had thus ascertained the legal means of maintaining that the stipulations of the treaty of Bretigny had not all of them been performed by the King of England, and that, consequently, the King of France had not lost all his rights of suzerainty over the ceded provinces, that on the 25th of January, 1369, just six months after the appeal of the Aquitanian lords had been submitted to him, he adopted it, in the following terms, which he addressed to the Prince of Wales, at Bordeaux, and which are here curtailed in their legal expressions:—
"Charles, by the grace of God King of France, to our nephew the Prince of Wales and of Aquitaine, greeting. Whereas many prelates, barons, knights, universities, communes, and colleges of the country of Gascony and the duchy of Aquitaine, have come thence into our presence, that they might have justice touching certain undue grievances and vexations which you, through weak counsel and silly advice, have designed to impose upon them, whereat we are quite astounded, . . . we, of our kingly majesty and lordship, do command you to come to our city of Paris, in your own person, and to present yourself before us in our chamber of peers, for to hear justice touching the said complaints and grievances proposed by you to be done to your people which claims to have resort to our court. . . And be it as quickly as you may."
"When the Prince of Wales had read this letter," says Froissart, "he shook his head, and looked askant at the aforesaid Frenchmen; and when he had thought a while, he answered, 'We will go willingly, at our own time, since the King of France doth bid us, but it shall be with our Basque on our head, and with sixty thousand men at our back.'"
This was a declaration of war; and deeds followed at once upon words. Edward III., after a short and fruitless attempt at an accommodation, assumed, on the 3d of June, 1369, the title of King of France, and ordered a levy of all his subjects between sixteen and sixty, laic or ecclesiastical, for the defence of England, threatened by a French fleet which was cruising in the Channel. He sent re-enforcements to the Prince of Wales, whose brother, the Duke of Lancaster, landed with an army at Calais; and he offered to all the adventurers with whom Europe was teeming possession of all the fiefs they could conquer in France. Charles V. on his side vigorously pushed forward his preparations; he had begun them before he showed his teeth, for as early as the 19th of July, 1368, he had sent into Spain ambassadors with orders to conclude an alliance with Henry of Transtamare against the King of England and his son, whom he called "the Duke of Aquitaine." On the 12th of April, 1369, he signed the treaty which, by a contract of marriage between his brother, Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, and the Princess Marguerite of Flanders, transferred the latter rich province to the House of France. Lastly he summoned to Paris Du Guesclin, who since the recovery of his freedom had been fighting at one time in Spain, and at another in the south of France, and announced to him his intention of making him constable. "Dear sir and noble king," said the honest and modest Breton, "I do pray you to have me excused; I am a poor knight and petty bachelor. The office of constable is so grand and noble that he who would well discharge it should have had long previous practice and command, and rather over the great than the small. Here are my lords your brothers, your nephews, and your cousins, who will have charge of men-at-arms in the armies, and the rides afield, and how durst I lay commands on them? In sooth, sir, jealousies be so strong that I cannot well but be afeard of them. I do affectionately pray you to dispense with me, and to confer it upon another who will more willingly take it than I, and will know better how to fill it." "Sir Bertrand, Sir Bertrand," answered the king, "do not excuse yourself after this fashion; I have nor brother, nor cousin, nor nephew, nor count, nor baron in my kingdom, who would not obey you; and if any should do otherwise, he would anger me so that he would hear of it. Take, therefore, the office with a good heart, I do beseech you." Sir Bertrand saw well, says Froissart, "that his excuses were of no avail, and finally he assented to the king's opinion; but it was not without a struggle, and to his great disgust. . . . In order to give him further encouragement and advancement the king did set him close to him at table, showed him all the signs he could of affection, and gave him, together with the office, many handsome gifts and great estates for himself and his heirs." Charles V. might fearlessly lavish his gifts on the loyal warrior, for Du Guesclin felt nothing more binding upon him than to lavish them, in his turn, for the king's service. He gave numerous and sumptuous dinners to the barons, knights, and soldiers of every degree whom he was to command.
| "At Bertrand's plate gazed every eye, So massive, chased so gloriously," |
says the poet-chronicler Cuvelier; but Du Guesclin pledged it more than once, and sold a great portion of it, in order to pay "without fail the knights and honorable fighting-men of whom he was the leader."
The war thus renewed was hotly prosecuted on both sides. A sentiment of nationality became, from day to day, more keen and more general in France. At the commencement of hostilities, it burst forth particularly in the North; the burghers of Abbeville opened their gates to the Count of St. Poi, and in a single week St. Valery, Crotoy, and all the places in the countship of Ponthieu followed this example. The movement made progress before long in the South. Montauban and Milhau hoisted on their walls the royal standard; the Archbishop of Toulouse "went riding through the whole of Quercy, preaching and demonstrating the good cause of the King of France; and he converted, without striking a blow, Cahors and more than sixty towns, castles, or fortresses." Charles V. neglected no means of encouraging and keeping up the public impulse. It has been remarked that, as early as the 9th of May, 1369, he had convoked the states-general, declaring to them in person that "if they considered that he had done anything he ought not, they should say so, and he would amend it, for there was still time for reparation if he had done too much or not enough." He called a new meeting on the 7th of December, 1369, after the explosion of hostilities, and obtained from them the most extensive subsidies they had ever granted. They were as stanch to the king in principle as in purse, and their interpretations of the treaty of Bretigny went far beyond the grounds which Charles had put forward to justify war. It was not only on the upper classes and on political minds that the king endeavored to act; he paid attention also to popular impressions; he set on foot in Paris a series of processions, in which he took part in person, and the queen also, "barefoot and unsandaled, to pray God to graciously give heed to the doings and affairs of the kingdom."
But at the same time that he was thus making his appeal, throughout France and by every means, to the feeling of nationality, Charles remained faithful to the rule of conduct which had been inculcated in him by the experience of his youth; he recommended, nay, he commanded, all his military captains to avoid any general engagement with the English. It was not without great difficulty that he wrung obedience from the feudal nobility, who, more numerous very often than the English, looked upon such a prohibition as an insult, and sometimes withdrew to their castles rather than submit to it; and even the king's brother, Philip the Bold, openly in Burgundy testified his displeasure at it. Du Guesclin, having more intelligence and firmness, even before becoming constable, and at the moment of quitting the Duke of Anjou at Toulouse, had advised him not to accept battle, to well fortify all the places that had been recovered, and to let the English scatter and waste themselves in a host of small expeditions and distant skirmishes constantly renewed. When once he was constable, Du Guesclin put determinedly in practice the king's maxim, calmly confident in his own fame for valor whenever he had to refuse to yield to the impatience of his comrades.
This detached and indecisive war lasted eight years, with a medley of more or less serious incidents, which, however, did not change its character. In 1370, the Prince of Wales laid siege to Limoges, which had opened its gates to the Duke of Berry. He was already so ill that he could not mount his horse, and had himself carried in a litter from post to post, to follow up and direct the operations of the siege. In spite of a month's resistance the prince took the place, and gave it up as a prey to a mob of reckless plunderers, whose excesses were such that Froissart himself, a spectator generally so indifferent, and leaning rather to the English, was deeply shocked. "There," said he, "was a great pity, for men, women, and children threw themselves on their knees before the prince, and cried, 'Mercy, gentle sir!' but he was so inflamed with passion that he gave no heed, and none, male or female, was listened to, but all were put to the sword. There is no heart so hard but, if present then at Limoges and not forgetful of God, would have wept bitterly, for more than three thousand persons, men, women, and children, were there beheaded on that day. May God receive their souls, for verily they were martyrs!" The massacre of Limoges caused, throughout France, a feeling of horror and indignant anger towards the English name. In 1373 an English army landed at Calais, under the command of the Duke of Lancaster, and overran nearly the whole of France, being incessantly harassed, however, without ever being attacked in force, and without mastering a single fortress. "Let them be," was the saying in the king's circle; "when a storm bursts out in a country, it leaves off afterwards and disperses of itself; and so it will be with these English." The sufferings and reverses of the English armies on this expedition were such, that, of thirty thousand horses which the English had landed at Calais, "they could not muster more than six thousand at Bordeaux, and had lost full a third of their men and more. There were seen noble knights, who had great possessions in their own country, toiling along a-foot, without armor, and begging their bread from door to door without getting any." In vain did Edward III. treat with the Duke of Brittany and the King of Navarre in order to have their support in this war. The Duke of Brittany, John IV., after having openly defied the King of France, his suzerain, was obliged to fly to England, and the King of Navarre entered upon negotiations alternately with Edward III. and Charles V., being always ready to betray either, according to what suited his interests at the moment. Tired of so many ineffectual efforts, Edward III. was twice obliged, between 1375 and 1377, to conclude with Charles V. a truce, just to give the two peoples, as well as the two kings, breathing-time; but the truces were as vain as the petty combats for the purpose of putting an end to this great struggle.
The great actors in this historical drama did not know how near were the days when they would be called away from this arena, still so crowded with their exploits or their reverses. A few weeks after the massacre of Limoges the Prince of Wales lost, at Bordeaux, his eldest son, six years old, whom he loved with all the tenderness of a veteran warrior, so much the more affected by gentle impressions as they were a rarity to him; and he was himself so ill that "his doctors advised him to return to England, his own land, saying that he would probably get better health there." Accordingly he left France, which he would never see again, and, on returning to England, he, after a few months' rest in the country, took an active part in Parliament in the home-policy of his country, and supported the opposition against the government of his father, who since the death of the queen, Philippa of Hainault, had been treating England to the spectacle of a scandalous old age closing a life of glory. Parliamentary contests soon exhausted the remaining strength of the Black Prince, and he died on the 8th of June, 1376, in possession of a popularity that never shifted, and was deserved by such qualities as showed a nature great indeed and generous, though often sullied by the fits of passion of a character harsh even to ferocity. "The good fortune of England," says his contemporary Walsingham, "seemed bound up with his person, for it flourished when he was well, fell off when he was ill, and vanished at his death. As long as he was on the spot the English feared neither the foe's invasion nor the meeting on the battle-field; but with him died all their hopes." A year after him, on the 21st of June, 1377, died his father, Edward III., a king who had been able, glorious, and fortunate for nearly half a century, but had fallen, towards the end of his life, into contempt with his people and into forgetfulness on the continent of Europe, where nothing was heard about him beyond whispers of an indolent old man's indulgent weaknesses to please a covetous mistress.
Whilst England thus lost her two great chiefs, France still kept hers. For three years longer Charles V. and Du Guesclin remained at the head of her government and her armies. The truce between the two kingdoms was still in force when the Prince of Wales died, and Charles, ever careful to practise knightly courtesy, had a solemn funeral service performed for him in the Sainte-Chapelle; but the following year, at the death of Edward III., the truce had expired. The Prince of Wales's young son, Richard II., succeeded his grandfather, and Charles, on the accession of a king who was a minor, was anxious to reap all the advantage be could hope from that fact. The war was pushed forward vigorously, and a French fleet cruised on the coast of England, ravaged the Isle of Wight, and burned Yarmouth, Dartmouth, Plymouth, Winchelsea, and Lewes. What Charles passionately desired was the recovery of Calais; he would have made considerable sacrifices to obtain it, and in the seclusion of his closet he displayed an intelligent activity in his efforts, by war or diplomacy, to attain this end. "He had," says Froissart, "couriers going a-horseback night and day, who, from one day to the next, brought him news from eighty or a hundred leagues' distance, by help of relays posted from town to town." This labor of the king had no success; on the whole the war prosecuted by Charles V. between Edward III.'s death and his own had no result of importance; the attempt, by law and arms, which he made in 1378, to make Brittany his own and reunite it to the crown, completely failed, thanks to the passion with which the Bretons, nobles, burgesses, and peasants, were attached to their country's independence. Charles V. actually ran a risk of embroiling himself with the hero of his reign; he had ordered Du Guesclin to reduce to submission the countship of Rennes, his native land, and he showed some temper because the constable not only did not succeed, but advised him to make peace with the Duke of Brittany and his party. Du Guesclin, grievously hurt, sent to the king his sword of constable, adding that he was about to withdraw to the court of Castile, to Henry of Transtamare, who would show more appreciation of his services. All Charles V.'s wisdom did not preserve him from one of those deeds of haughty levity which the handling of sovereign power sometimes causes even the wisest kings to commit, but reflection made him promptly acknowledge and retrieve his fault. He charged the Dukes of Anjou and Bourbon to go and, for his sake, conjure Du Guesclin to remain his constable; and, though some chroniclers declare that Du Guesclin refused, his will, dated the 9th of July, 1380, leads to a contrary belief, for in it he assumes the title of constable of France, and this will preceded the hero's death only by four days. Having fallen sick before Chateauneuf-Randon, a place he was besieging in the Gevaudan, Du Guesclin expired on the 13th of July, 1380, at sixty-six years of age, and his last words were an exhortation to the veteran captains around him "never to forget that, in whatsoever country they might be making war, churchmen, women, children, and the poor people were not their enemies." According to certain contemporary chronicles, or, one might almost say, legends, Chateauneuf-Randon was to be given up the day after Du Guesclin died. The marshal De Sancerre, who commanded the king's army, summoned the governor to surrender the place to him; but the governor replied that he had given his word to Du Guesclin, and would surrender to no other. He was told of the constable's death: "Very well," he rejoined, "I will carry the keys of the town to his tomb." To this the marshal agreed; the governor marched out of the place at the head of his garrison, passed through the besieging army, went and knelt down before Du Guesclin's corpse, and actually laid the keys of Chateauneuf-Randon on his bier.
This dramatic story is not sufficiently supported by authentic documents to be admitted as an historical fact; but there is to be found in an old chronicle concerning Du Guesclin [published for the first time at the end of the fifteenth century, and in a new edition by M. Francisque Michel in 1830] a story which, in spite of many discrepancies, confirms the principal fact of the keys of Chateauneuf-Randon being brought by the garrison to the bier. "At the decease of Sir Bertrand," says the chronicler, "a great cry arose throughout the host of the French. The English refused to give up the castle. The marshal, Louis de Sancerre, had the hostages brought to the ditches, for to have their heads struck off. But forthwith the people in the castle lowered their bridge, and the captain came and offered the keys to the marshal, who refused them, and said to him, 'Friends, you have your agreements with Sir Bertrand, and ye shall fulfil them to him.' 'God the Lord!' said the captain, 'you know well that Sir Bertrand, who was so much worth, is dead: how, then, should we surrender to him this castle? Verily, lord marshal, you do demand our dishonor when you would have us and our castle surrendered to a dead knight.' 'Needs no parley hereupon,' said the marshal, 'but do it at once, for, if you put forth more words, short will be the life of your hostages.' Well did the English see that it could not be otherwise; so they went forth all of them from the castle, their captain in front of them, and came to the marshal, who led them to the hostel where lay Sir Bertrand, and made them give up the keys and place them on his bier, sobbing the while: 'Let all know that there was there nor knight, nor squire, French or English, who showed not great mourning.'"
The body of Du Guesclin was carried to Paris to be interred at St. Denis, hard by the tomb which Charles V. had ordered to be made for himself; and nine years afterwards, in 1389, Charles V.'s successor, his son Charles VI., caused to be celebrated in the Breton warrior's honor a fresh funeral, at which the princes and grandees of the kingdom, and the young king himself, were present in state. The Bishop of Auxerre delivered the funeral oration over the constable; and a poet of the time, giving an account of the ceremony, says,
| "The tears of princes fell, What time the bishop said, 'Sir Bertrand loved ye well; Weep, warriors, for the dead! The knell of sorrow tolls For deeds that were so bright: God save all Christian souls, And his—the gallant knight:" |
The life, character, and name of Bertrand du Guesclin were and remained one of the most popular, patriotic, and legitimate boasts of the middle ages, then at their decline.
Two months after the constable's death, on the 16th of September, 1380, Charles V. died at the castle of Beaute-sur-Marne, near Vincennes, at forty-three years of age, quite young still after so stormy and hard-working a life. His contemporaries were convinced, and he was himself convinced, that he had been poisoned by his perfidious enemy, King Charles of Navarre. His uncle, Charles IV., Emperor of Germany, had sent him an able doctor, who "set him in good case and in manly strength," says Froissart, by effecting a permanent issue in his arm. "When this little sore," said he to him, "shall cease to discharge and shall dry up, you will die without help for it, and you will have at the most fifteen days' leisure to take counsel and thought for the soul." When the issue began to dry up, Charles knew that death was at hand; and "like a wise and valiant man as he was," says Froissart, "he set in order all his affairs, and sent for his three brothers, in whom he had most confidence, the Duke of Berry, the Duke of Burgundy, and the Duke of Bourbon, and he left in the lurch his second brother, the Duke of Anjou, because he considered him too covetous. 'My dear brothers,' said the king to them, 'I feel and know full well that I have not long to live. I do commend and give in charge to you my son Charles. Behave to him as good uncles should behave to their nephew. Crown him as soon as possible after my death, and counsel him loyally in all his affairs. The lad is young, and of a volatile spirit; he will need to be guided and governed by good doctrine; teach him or have him taught all the kingly points and states he will have to maintain, and marry him in such lofty station that the kingdom may be the better for it. Thank God, the affairs of our kingdom are in good case. The Duke of Brittany [John IV., called the Valiant] is a crafty and a slippery man, and he hath ever been more English than French; for which reason keep the nobles of Brittany and the good towns affectionate, and you will thus thwart his intentions. I am fond of the Bretons, for they have ever served me loyally, and helped to keep and defend my kingdom against my enemies. Make the lord Clisson constable, for, all considered, I see none more competent for it than he. As to those aids and taxes of the kingdom of France, wherewith the poorer folks are so burdened and aggrieved, deal with them according to your conscience, and take them off as soon as ever you can, for they are things which, although I have upheld them, do grieve me and weigh upon my heart; but the great wars and great matters which we have had on all sides caused me to countenance them."
Of all the dying speeches and confessions of kings to their family and their councillors, that which has just been put forward is the most practical, precise, and simple. Charles V., taking upon his shoulders at nineteen years of age, first as king's lieutenant and as dauphin, and afterwards as regent, the government of France, employed all his soul and his life in repairing the disasters arising from the wars of his predecessors and preventing any repetition. No sovereign was ever more resolutely pacific; he carried prudence even into the very practice of war, as was proved by his forbidding his generals to venture any general engagement with the English, so great a lesson and so deep an impression had he derived from the defeats of Crecy and Poitiers, and the causes which led to them. But without being a warrior, and without running any hazardous risks, he made himself respected and feared by his enemies. "Never was there king," said Edward III., "who handled arms less, and never was there king who gave me so much to do." When the condition of the kingdom was at the best, and more favorable circumstances led Charles to believe that the day had come for setting France free from the cruel conditions which had been imposed upon her by the treaty of Bretigny, he entered without hesitation upon that war of patriotic reparation; and, after the death of his two powerful enemies, Edward III. and the Black Prince, he was still prosecuting it, not without chance of success, when he himself died of the malady with which he had for a long while been afflicted. At his death he left in the royal treasury a surplus of seventeen million francs, a large sum for those days. Nor the labors of government, nor the expenses of war, nor far-sighted economy had prevented him from showing a serious interest in learned works and studies, and from giving effectual protection to the men who devoted themselves thereto. The University of Paris, notwithstanding the embarrassments it sometimes caused him, was always the object of his good-will. "He was a great lover of wisdom," says Christine de Pisan, "and when certain folks murmured for that he honored clerks so highly, he answered, 'So long as wisdom is honored in this realm, it will continue in prosperity; but when wisdom is thrust aside, it will go down.'" He collected nine hundred and fifty volumes (the first foundation of the loyal Library), which were deposited in a tower of the Louvre, called the library tower, and of which he, in 1373, had an inventory drawn up by his personal attendant, Gilles de Presle. His taste for literature and science was not confined to collecting manuscripts. He had a French translation made, for the sake of spreading a knowledge thereof, of the Bible in the first place, and then of several works of Aristotle, of Livy, of Valerius Maximus, of Vegetius, and of St. Augustine. He was fond of industry and the arts as well as of literature. Henry de Vic, a German clock-maker, constructed for him the first public clock ever seen in France, and it was placed in what was called the Clock Tower in the Palace of Justice; and the king even had a clock-maker by appointment, named Peter de St. Beathe. Several of the Paris monuments, churches, or buildings for public use were undertaken or completed under his care. He began the building of the Bastille, that fortress which was then so necessary for the safety of Paris, where it was to be, four centuries later, the object of the wrath and earliest excesses on the part of the populace. Charles the Wise, from whatever point of view he may be regarded, is, after Louis the Fat, Philip Augustus, St. Louis, and Philip the Handsome, the fifth of those kings who powerfully contributed to the settlement of France in Europe, and of the kingship in France. He was not the greatest nor the best, but, perhaps, the most honestly able. And at the same time he was a signal example of the shallowness and insufficiency of human abilities. Charles V., on his death-bed, considered that "the affairs of his kingdom were in good case;" he had not even a suspicion of that chaos of war, anarchy, reverses and ruin into which they were about to fall, in the reign of his son, Charles VI.
A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times, Volume : 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
