Читать книгу History of France from the Earliest Times (Vol. 1-6) - Guizot François - Страница 39

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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!”