Читать книгу History of France from the Earliest Times (Vol. 1-6) - Guizot François - Страница 41

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.”