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Three years later Louis gave not only to the King of England, but to the whole English nation, a striking proof of his judicious and true-hearted equity. An obstinate civil war was raging between Henry III. and his barons. Neither party, in defending its own rights, had any notion of respecting the rights of its adversaries, and England was alternating between a kingly and an aristocratic tyranny. Louis, chosen as arbiter by both sides, delivered solemnly, on the 23d of January, 1264, a decision which was favorable to the English kingship, but at the same, time expressly upheld the Great Charter and the traditional liberties of England. He concluded his decision with the following suggestions of amnesty: “We will also that the King of England and his barons do forgive one another mutually, that they do forget all the resentments that may exist between them; by consequence of the matters submitted to our arbitration, and that henceforth they do refrain reciprocally from an offence and injury on account of the same matters.” But when men have had their ideas, passions, and interests profoundly agitated and made to clash, the wisest decisions and the most honest counsels in the world are not sufficient to re-establish peace; the cup of experience has to be drunk to the dregs; and the parties are not resigned to peace until on or the other, or both, have exhausted themselves in the struggle and perceive the absolute necessity of accepting either defeat compromise. In spite of the arbitration of the King of France the civil war continued in England; but Louis did not seek any way to profit by it so as to extend, at the expense of his neighbors, his own possessions or power; he held himself also from their quarrels, and followed up by honest neutrality ineffectual arbitration. Five centuries afterwards the great English historian, Hume, rendered him due homage in these terms: “Every time this virtuous prince interfered in the affairs of England, it was invariably with the view of settling differences between the king and the nobility. Adopting an admirable course of conduct, as politic probably as it certainly was just, he never interposed his good offices save to put an end the disagreements of the English; he seconded all the measures which could give security to both parties, and he made persistent efforts, though without success, to moderate the fiery ambition of the Earl of Leicester.” (Hume, History of England, t. ii. p. 465.)

It requires more than political wisdom, more even than virtue, to enable a king, a man having in charge the government of men, to accomplish his mission and to really deserve the title of Most Christian; it requires that he should be animated by a sentiment of affection, and that he should, in heart as well as mind, be in sympathy with those multitudes of creatures over whose lot he exercises so much influence. St. Louis more perhaps than any other king was possessed of this generous and humane quality: spontaneously and by the free impulse of his nature he loved his people, loved mankind, and took a tender and comprehensive interest in their fortunes, their joys, or their miseries. Being seriously ill in 1259, and desiring to give his eldest son, Prince Louis, whom he lost in the following year, his last and most heartfelt charge, “Fair son,” said he, “I pray thee make thyself beloved of the people of thy kingdom, for verily I would rather a Scot should come from Scotland and govern our people well and loyally than have thee govern it ill.” To watch over the position and interests of all parties in his dominions, and to secure to all his subjects strict and prompt justice, this was what continually occupied the mind of Louis IX. There are to be found in his biography two very different but equally striking proofs of his solicitude in this respect. M. Felix Faure has drawn up a table of all the journeys made by Louis in France, from 1254 to 1270, for the better cognizance of matters requiring his attention, and another of the parliaments which he held, during the same period, for considering the general affairs of the kingdom and the administration of justice. Not one of these sixteen years passed without his visiting several of his provinces, and the year 1270 was the only one in which he did not hold a parliament. (Histoire de Saint Louis, by M. Felix Faure, t. ii. pp. 120, 339.) Side by side with this arithmetical proof of his active benevolence we will place a moral proof taken from Joinville’s often-quoted account of St. Louis’s familiar intervention in his subjects’ disputes about matters of private interest. “Many a time,” says he, “it happened in summer that the king went and sat down in the wood of Vincennes after mass, and leaned against an oak, and made us sit down round about him. And all those who had business came to speak to him without restraint of usher or other folk. And then he demanded of them with his own mouth, ‘Is there here any who hath a suit?’ and they who had their suit rose up; and then he said, ‘Keep silence, all of ye; and ye shall have despatch one after the other.’ And then he called my Lord Peter de Fontaines and my Lord Geoffrey de Villette (two learned lawyers of the day and counsellors of St. Louis), and said to one of them, ‘Despatch me this suit.’ And when he saw aught to amend in the words of those who were speaking for another, he himself amended it with his own mouth. I sometimes saw in summer that, to despatch his people’s business, he went into the Paris garden, clad in camlet coat and linsey surcoat without sleeves, a mantle of black taffety round his neck, hair right well combed and without coif, and on his head a hat with white peacock’s plumes. And he had carpets laid for us to sit round about him. And all the people who had business before him set themselves standing around him; and then he had their business despatched in the manner I told you of before as to the wood of Vincennes.” (Joinville, chap. xii.)

The active benevolence of St. Louis was not confined to this paternal care for the private interests of such subjects as approached his person; he was equally attentive and zealous in the case of measures called for by the social condition of the times and the general interests of the kingdom. Amongst the twenty-six government ordinances, edicts, or letters, contained under the date of his reign in the first volume of the Recueil des Ordonnances des Rois de France, seven, at the least, are great acts of legislation and administration of a public kind; and these acts are all of such a stamp as to show that their main object is not to extend the power of the crown or subserve the special interests of the kingship at strife with other social forces; they are real reforms, of public and moral interest, directed against the violence, disturbances, and abuses of the feudal system. Many other of St. Louis’s legislative and administrative acts have been published either in subsequent volumes of the Recueil des Ordonnances des Rois, or in similar collections, and the learned have drawn attention to a great number of them still remaining unpublished in various archives. As for the large collection of legislative enactments known by the name of Etailissements de Saint Louis, it is probably a lawyer’s work, posterior, in great part at least, to his reign, full of incoherent and even contradictory enactments, and without any claim to be considered as a general code of law of St. Louis’s date and collected by his order, although the paragraph which serves as preface to the work is given under his name and as if it had been dictated by him.

Another act, known by the name of the Pragmatic Sanction, has likewise got placed, with the date of March, 1268, in the Recueil des Ordonnances des Rois de France, as having originated with St. Louis. Its object is, first of all, to secure the rights, liberties, and canonical rules, internally, of the Church of France; and, next, to interdict “the exactions and very heavy money-charges which have been imposed or may hereafter be imposed on the said Church by the court of Rome, and by the which our kingdom hath been miserably impoverished; unless they take place for reasonable, pious, and very urgent cause, through inevitable necessity, and with our spontaneous and express consent and that of the Church of our kingdom.” The authenticity of this act, vigorously maintained in the seventeenth century by Bossuet (in his Defense de la Declaration du Clerge de France de 1682, chap. ix. t. xliii. p. 26), and in our time by M. Daunou (in the Histoire litteraire de la France, continuee par des Hembres de l’Institut, t. xvi. p. 75, and t. xix. p. 169), has been and still is rendered doubtful for strong reasons, which M. Felix Faure, in his Histoire de Saint Louis (t. ii. p. 271), has summed up with great clearness. There is no design of entering here upon an examination of this little historical problem; but it is a bounden duty to point out that, if the authenticity of the Pragmatic Sanction, as St. Louis’s, is questionable, the act has, at bottom, nothing but what bears a very strong resemblance to, and is quite in conformity with, the general conduct of that prince. He was profoundly respectful, affectionate, and faithful towards the papacy, but, at the same time, very careful in upholding both the independence of the crown in things temporal, and its right of superintendence in things spiritual. Attention has been drawn to his posture of reserve during the great quarrel between the priestdom and the empire, and his firmness in withstanding the violent measures adopted by Gregory IX. and Innocent IV. against the Emperor Frederick II. Louis carried his notions, as to the independence of his judgment and authority, very far beyond the cases in which that policy went hand in hand with interest, and even into purely religious questions. The Bishop of Auxerre said to him one day, in the name of several prelates, “ ‘Sir, these lords which be here, archbishops and bishops, have told me to tell you that Christianity is perishing in your hands.’ The king crossed himself and said, Well, tell me how that is made out!’ ‘Sir,’ said the bishop, ‘it is because nowadays so little note is taken of excommunications, that folk let death overtake them excommunicate without getting absolution, and have no mind to make atonement to the Church. These lords, therefore, do pray you, sir, for the love of God and because you ought to do so, to command your provosts and bailiffs that all those who shall remain a year and a day excommunicate be forced, by seizure of their goods, to get themselves absolved.’ Whereto the king made answer that he would willingly command this in respect of the excommunicate touching whom certain proofs should be given him that they were in the wrong. The bishop said that the prelates would not have this at any price, and that they disputed the king’s right of jurisdiction in their causes. And the king said that he would not do it else; for it would be contrary to God and reason if he should force folks to get absolution when the clergy had done them wrong. As to that,’ said the king, ‘I will give you the example of the Count of Brittany, who for seven years, being fully excommunicate, was at pleas with the prelates of Brittany; and he prevailed so far that the pope condemned them all. If, then, I had forced the Count of Brittany, the first year, to get absolution, I should have sinned against God and against him.’ Then the prelates gave up; and never since that time have I heard that a single demand was made touching the matters above spoken of.” (Joinville, chap. xiii. p. 43.)

One special fact in the civil and municipal administration of St. Louis deserves to find a place in history. After the time of Philip Augustus there was malfeasance in the police of Paris. The provostship of Paris, which comprehended functions analogous to those of prefect, mayor, and receiver-general, became a purchasable office, filled sometimes by two provosts at a time. The burghers no longer found justice or security in the city where the king resided. At his return from his first crusade, Louis recognized the necessity for applying a remedy to this evil; the provostship ceased to be a purchasable office; and he made it separate from the receivership of the royal domain. In 1258 he chose as provost Stephen Boileau, a burgher of note and esteem in Paris; and in order to give this magistrate the authority of which he had need, the king sometimes came and sat beside him when he was administering justice at the Chatelet. Stephen Boileau justified the king’s confidence, and maintained so strict a police that he had his own godson hanged for theft. His administrative foresight was equal to his judicial severity. He established registers wherein were to be inscribed the rules habitually followed in respect of the organization and work of the different corporations of artisans, the tariffs of the dues charged, in the name of the king, upon the admittance of provisions and merchandise, and the titles on which the abbots and other lords founded the privileges they enjoyed within the walls of Paris. The corporations of artisans, represented by their sworn masters or prud’hommes, appeared one after the other before the provost to make declaration of the usages in practice amongst their communities, and to have them registered in the book prepared for that purpose. This collection of regulations relating to the arts and trades of Paris in the thirteenth century, known under the name of Livre des Metiers d’Etienne Boileau, is the earliest monument of industrial statistics drawn up by the French administration, and it was inserted, for the first time in its entirety, in 1837, amongst the Collection des Documents relatifs d l’Histoire de France, published during M. Guizot’s ministry of public instruction.

St. Louis would be but very incompletely understood if we considered him only in his political and kingly aspect; we must penetrate into his private life, and observe his personal intercourse with his family, his household, and his people, if we would properly understand and appreciate all the originality and moral worth of his character and his life. Mention has already been made of his relations towards the two queens, his mother and his wife; and, difficult as they were, they were nevertheless always exemplary. Louis was a model of conjugal fidelity, as well as of filial piety. He had by Queen Marguerite eleven children, six sons and five daughters; he loved her tenderly, he never severed himself from her, and the modest courage she displayed in the first crusade rendered her still dearer to him. But he was not blind to her ambitious tendencies, and to the insufficiency of her qualifications for government. When he made ready for his second crusade, not only did he not confide to Queen Marguerite the regency of the kingdom, but he even took care to regulate her expenses, and to curb her passion for authority. He forbade her to accept any present for herself or her children, to lay any commands upon the officers of justice, and to choose any one for her service, or for that of her children, without the consent of the council of the regency. And he had reason so to act; for, about this same time, Queen Marguerite, emulous of holding in the state the same place that had been occupied by Queen Blanche, was giving all her thoughts to what her situation would be after her husband’s death, and was coaxing her eldest son, Philip, then sixteen years old, to make her a promise on oath to remain under her guardianship up to thirty years of age, to take to himself no counsellor without her approval, to reveal to her all designs which might be formed against her, to conclude no treaty with his uncle, Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily, and to keep as a secret the oath she was thus making him take. Louis was probably informed of this strange promise by his young son Philip himself, who got himself released from it by Pope Urban IV. At any rate, the king had a foreshadowing of Queen Marguerite’s inclinations, and took precautions for rendering them harmless to the crown and the state.

As for his children, Louis occupied himself in thought and deed with their education and their future, moral and social, showing as much affection and assiduity as could have been displayed by any father of a family, even the most devoted to this single task. “After supper they followed him into his chamber, where he made them sit down around him; he instructed them in their duties, and then sent them away to bed. He drew their particular attention to the good and evil deeds of princes. He, moreover, went to see then in their own apartment when he had any leisure, informed himself as to the progress they were making, and, like another Tobias, gave them excellent instructions. … On Holy Thursday his sons used to wash, just as he used, the feet of thirteen of the poor, give them a considerable sum as alms, and then wait upon them at table. The king having been minded to carry the first of the poor souls to the Hotel-Dieu, at Compiegne, with the assistance of his son-in-law, King Theobald of Navarre, whom he loved as a son, his two eldest sons, Louis and Philip, carried the second thither.” They were wont to behave towards him in the most respectful manner. He would have all of them, even Theobald, yield him strict obedience in that which he enjoined upon them. He desired anxiously that the three children born to him in the East, during his first crusade, John Tristan, Peter, and Blanche, and even Isabel, his eldest daughter, should enter upon the cloistered life, which he looked upon as the safest for their salvation. He exhorted them thereto, especially his daughter Isabel, many and many a time, in letters equally tender and pious; but, as they testified no taste for it, he made no attempt to force their inclinations, and concerned himself only about having them well married, not forgetting to give them good appanages, and, for their life in the world, the most judicious counsels. The instructions, written with his own hand in French, which he committed to his eldest son, Philip, as soon as he found himself so seriously ill before Tunis, are a model of virtue, wisdom, and tenderness on the part of a father, a king, and a Christian.

Pass we from the king’s family to the king’s household, and from the children to the servitors of St. Louis. We have here no longer the powerful tie of blood, and of that feeling, at the same time personal and yet disinterested, which is experienced by parents on seeing themselves living over again in their children. Far weaker motives, mere kindness and custom, unite masters to their servants, and stamp a moral character upon the relations between them; but with St. Louis, so great was his kindness, that it resembled affection, and caused affection to spring up in the hearts of those who were the objects of it. At the same time that he required in his servitors an almost austere morality, he readily passed over in silence their little faults, and treated them, in such cases, not only with mildness, but with that consideration which, in the humblest conditions, satisfies the self-respect of people, and elevates them in their own eyes. “Louis used to visit his domestics when they were ill; and when they died he never failed to pray for them, and to commend them to the prayers of the faithful. He had the mass for the dead, which it was his custom to hear every day, sung for them.” He had taken back an old servitor of his grandfather, Philip Augustus, whom that king had dismissed because his fire sputtered, and John, whose duty it was to attend to it, did not know how to prevent that slight noise. Louis was, from time to time, subject to a malady, during which his right leg, from the ankle to the calf, became inflamed, as red as blood, and painful. One day, when he had an attack of this complaint, the king, as he lay, wished to make a close inspection of the redness in his leg; as John was clumsily holding a lighted candle close to the king, a drop of hot grease fell on the bad leg; and the king, who had sat up on his bed, threw himself back, exclaiming, “Ah! John, John, my grandfather turned you out of his house for a less matter!” and the clumsiness of John drew down upon him no other chastisement save this exclamation. (Vie de Saint Louis, by Queen Marguerite’s confessor; Recueiz des Historiens de France, t. xx. p. 105; Vie de Saint Louis, by Lenain de Tillemont, t. v. p. 388.)

Far away from the king’s household and service, and without any personal connection with him, a whole people, the people of the poor, the infirm, the sick, the wretched, and the neglected of every sort occupied a prominent place in the thoughts and actions of Louis. All the chroniclers of the age, all the historians of his reign, have celebrated his charity as much as his piety; and the philosophers of the eighteenth century almost forgave him his taste for relics, in consideration of his beneficence. And it was not merely legislative and administrative beneficence; St. Louis did not confine himself to founding and endowing hospitals, hospices, asylums, the Hotel-Dieu at Pontoise, that at Vernon, that at Compiegne, and, at Paris, the house of Quinze-Vingts, for three hundred blind, but he did not spare his person in his beneficence, and regarded no deed of charity as beneath a king’s dignity. “Every day, wherever the king went, one hundred and twenty-two of the poor received each two loaves, a quart of wine, meat or fish for a good dinner, and a Paris denier. The mothers of families had a loaf more for each child. Besides these hundred and twenty-two poor having out-door relief, thirteen others were every day introduced into the hotel, and there lived as the king’s officers; and three of them sat at table at the same time with the king, in the same hall as he, and quite close.” … “Many a time,” says Joinville, “I saw him cut their bread, and give them to drink. He asked me one day if I washed the feet of the poor on Holy Thursday. ‘Sir,’ said I, ‘what a benefit! The feet of those knaves! Not I.’ ‘Verily,’ said he, ‘that is ill said, for you ought not to hold in disdain what God did for our instruction. I pray you, therefore, for love of me accustom yourself to wash them.’ ” Sometimes, when the king had leisure, he used to say, “Come and visit the poor in such and such a place, and let us feast them to their hearts’ content.” Once when he went to Chateauneuf-sur-Loire, a poor old woman, who was at the door of her cottage, and held in her hand a loaf, said to him, “Good king, it is of this bread, which comes of thine alms, that my husband, who lieth sick yonder indoors, doth get sustenance.” The king took the bread, saying, “It is rather hard bread.” And he went into the cottage to see with his own eyes the sick man.

When he was visiting the churches one Holy Friday, at Compiegne, as he was going that day barefoot according to his custom, and distributing alms to the poor whom he met, he perceived, on the yonder side of a miry pond which filled a portion of the street, a leper, who, not daring to come near, tried, nevertheless, to attract the king’s attention. Louis walked through the pond, went up to the leper, gave him some money, took his hand and kissed it. “All present,” says the chronicler, “crossed themselves for admiration at seeing this holy temerity of the king, who had no fear of putting his lips to a hand that none would have dared to touch.” In such deeds there was infinitely more than the goodness and greatness of a kingly sold; there was in them that profound Christian sympathy which is moved at the sight of any human creature suffering severely in body or soul, and which, at such times, gives heed to no fear, shrinks from no pains, recoils with no disgust, and has no other thought but that of offering some fraternal comfort to the body or the soul that is suffering.

He who thus felt and acted was no monk, no prince enwrapt in mere devoutness and altogether given up to works and practices of piety; he was a knight, a warrior, a politician, a true king, who attended to the duties of authority as well as to those of charity, and who won respect from his nearest friends as well as from strangers, whilst astonishing them at one time by his bursts of mystic piety and monastic austerity, at another by his flashes of the ruler’s spirit and his judicious independence, even towards the representatives of the faith and Church with whom he was in sympathy. “He passed for the wisest man in all his council.” In difficult matters and on grave occasions none formed a judgment with more sagacity, and what his intellect so well apprehended he expressed with a great deal of propriety and grace. He was, in conversation, the nicest and most agreeable of men; “he was gay,” says Joinville, “and when we were private at court, he used to sit at the foot of his bed; and when the preachers and cordeliers who were there spoke to him of a book he would like to hear, he said to them, ‘Nay, you shall not read to me, for there is no book so good, after dinner, as talk ad libitum, that is, every one saying what he pleases.’ ” Not that he was at all averse from books and literates: “He was sometimes present at the discourses and disputations of the University; but he took care to search out for himself the truth in the word of God and in the traditions of the Church. … Having found out, during his travels in the East, that a Saracenic sultan had collected a quantity of books for the service of the philosophers of his sect, he was shamed to see that Christians had less zeal for getting instructed in the truth than infidels had for getting themselves made dexterous in falsehood; so much so that, after his return to France, he had search made in the abbeys for all the genuine works of St. Augustin, St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. Gregory, and other orthodox teachers, and, having caused copies of them to be made, he had them placed in the treasury of Sainte-Chapelle. He used to read them when he had any leisure, and he readily lent them to those who might get profit from them for themselves or for others. Sometimes, at the end of the afternoon meal, he sent for pious persons with whom he conversed about God, about the stories in the Bible and the histories of the saints, or about the lives of the Fathers.” He had a particular friendship for the learned Robert of Sorbon, founder of the Sorbonne, whose idea was a society of secular ecclesiastics, who, living in common and having the necessaries of life, should give themselves up entirely to study and gratuitous teaching. Not only did St. Louis give him every facility and every aid necessary for the establishment of his learned college, but he made him one of his chaplains, and often invited him to his presence and his table in order to enjoy his conversation. “One day it happened,” says Joinville, “that Master Robert was taking his meal beside me, and we were talking low. The king reproved us, and said, ‘Speak up, for your company think that you may be talking evil of them. If you speak, at meals, of things which should please us, speak up; if not, be silent.’ ” Another day, at one of their reunions, with the king in their midst, Robert of Sorbon reproached Joinville with being “more bravely clad than the king; for,” said he, “you do dress in furs and green cloth, which the king doth not.” Joinville defended himself vigorously, in his turn attacking Robert for the elegance of his dress. The king took the learned doctor’s part, and when he had gone, “My lord the king,” says Joinville, “called his son, my lord Philip, and King Theobald, sat him down at the entrance of his oratory, placed his hand on the ground and said, ‘Sit ye down here close by me, that we be not overheard;’ and then he told me that he had called us in order to confess to us that he had wrongfully taken the part of Master Robert; for, just as the seneschal [Joinville] saith, ye ought to be well and decently clad, because your womankind will love you the better for it, and your people will prize you the more; for, saith the wise man, it is right so to bedeck one’s self with garments and armor that the proper men of this world say not that there is too much made thereof, nor the young folk too little.” (Joinville, ch. cxxxv. p. 301; ch. v. and vi. pp. 12 16; t. v. pp. 326, 364, and 368.)

Assuredly there was enough in such and so free an exercise of mind, in such a rich abundance of thoughts and sentiments, in such a religious, political, and domestic life, to occupy and satisfy a soul full of energy and power. But, as has already been said, an idea cherished with a lasting and supreme passion, the idea of the crusade took entire possession of St. Louis. For seven years, after his return from the East, from 1254 to 1261, he appeared to think no more of it; and there is nothing to show that he spoke of it even to his most intimate confidants. But, in spite of apparent tranquillity, he lived, so far, in a ferment of imagination and a continual fever, resembling in that respect, though the end aimed at was different, those great men, ambitious warriors or politicians, of natures forever at boiling point, for whom nothing is sufficient, and who are constantly fostering, beyond the ordinary course of events, some vast and strange desire, the accomplishment of which becomes for them a fixed idea and an insatiable passion. As Alexander and Napoleon were incessantly forming some new design, or, to speak more correctly, some new dream of conquest and dominion, in the same way St. Louis, in his pious ardor, never ceased to aspire to a re-entry of Jerusalem, to the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre, and to the victory of Christianity over Mohammedanism in the East, always flattering himself that some favorable circumstance would recall him to his interrupted work. It has already been told, at the termination, in the preceding chapter, of the crusaders’ history, how he had reason to suppose, in 1261, that circumstances were responding to his desire; how he first of all prepared, noiselessly and patiently, for his second crusade; how, after seven years’ labor, less and less concealed as days went on, he proclaimed his purpose, and swore to accomplish it in the following year; and how at last, in the month of March, 1270, against the will of France, of the pope, and even of the majority of his comrades, he actually set out—to go and die, on the 25th of the following August, before Tunis, without having dealt the Mussulmans of the East even the shadow of an effectual blow, having no strength to do more than utter, from time to time, as he raised himself on his bed, the cry of Jerusalem! Jerusalem! and, at the last moment, as he lay in sackcloth and ashes, pronouncing merely these parting words: “Father, after the example of our Divine Master, into Thy hands I commend my spirit!” Even the crusader was extinct in St. Louis; and only the Christian remained.

The world has seen upon the throne greater captains, more profound politicians, vaster and more brilliant intellects, princes who have exercised, beyond their own lifetime, a more powerful and a more lasting influence than St. Louis; but it has never seen a rarer king, never seen a man who could possess, as he did, sovereign power without contracting the passions and vices natural to it, and who, in this respect, displayed in his government human virtues exalted to the height of Christian. For all his moral sympathy, and superior as he was to his age, St. Louis, nevertheless, shared, and even helped to prolong, two of its greatest mistakes; as a Christian he misconceived the rights of conscience in respect of religion, and, as a king, he brought upon his people deplorable evils and perils for the sake of a fruitless enterprise. War against religious liberty was, for a long course of ages, the crime of Christian communities and the source of the most cruel evils as well as of the most formidable irreligious reactions the world has had to undergo. The thirteenth century was the culminating period of this fatal notion and the sanction of it conferred by civil legislation as well as ecclesiastical teaching. St. Louis joined, so far, with sincere conviction, in the general and ruling idea of his age; and the jumbled code which bears the name of Etablissements de Saint Louis, and in which there are collected many ordinances anterior or posterior to his reign, formally condemns heretics to death, and bids the civil judges to see to the execution, in this respect, of the bishops’ sentences. In 1255 St. Louis himself demanded of Pope Alexander IV. leave for the Dominicans and Franciscans to exercise, throughout the whole kingdom, the inquisition already established, on account of the Albigensians, in the old domains of the Counts of Toulouse. The bishops, it is true, were to be consulted before condemnation could be pronounced by the inquisitors against a heretic; but that was a mark of respect for the episcopate and for the rights of the Gallican Church rather than a guarantee for liberty of conscience; and such was St. Louis’s feeling upon this subject, that liberty, or rather the most limited justice, was less to be expected from the kingship than from the episcopate. St. Louis’s extreme severity towards what he called the knavish oath (vilain serment), that is, blasphemy, an offence for which there is no definition save what is contained in the bare name of it, is, perhaps, the most striking indication of the state of men’s minds, and especially of the king’s, in this respect. Every blasphemer was to receive on his mouth the imprint of a red-hot iron. “One day the king had a burgher of Paris branded in this way; and violent murmurs were raised in the capital and came to the king’s ears. He responded by declaring that he wished a like brand might mark his lips, and that he might bear the shame of it all his life, if only the vice of blasphemy might disappear from his kingdom. Some time afterwards, having had a work of great public utility executed, he received, on that occasion, from the landlords of Paris numerous expressions of gratitude. ‘I expect,’ said he, ‘a greater recompense from the Lord for the curses brought upon me by that brand inflicted upon blasphemers than for the blessings I get because of this act of general utility.’ ” (Joinville, chap. cxxxviii.; Histoire de Saint Louis, by M. Felix Faure, t. ii. p. 300.)

Of all human errors those most in vogue are the most dangerous, for they are just those from which the most superior minds have the greatest difficulty in preserving themselves. It is impossible to see, without horror, into what aberrations of reason and of moral sense men otherwise most enlightened and virtuous may be led away by the predominant ideas of their age. And the horror becomes still greater when a discovery is made of the iniquities, sufferings, and calamities, public and private, consequent upon the admission of such aberrations amongst the choice spirits of the period. In the matter of religious liberty, St. Louis is a striking example of the vagaries which may be fallen into, under the sway of public feeling, by the most equitable of minds and the most scrupulous of consciences. A solemn warning, in times of great intellectual and popular ferment, for those men whose hearts are set on independence in their thoughts as well as in their conduct, and whose only object is justice and truth.

As for the crusades, the situation of Louis was with respect to them quite different and his responsibility far more personal. The crusades had certainly, in their origin, been the spontaneous and universal impulse of Christian Europe towards an object lofty, disinterested, and worthy of the devotion of men; and St. Louis was, without any doubt, the most lofty, disinterested, and heroic representative of this grand Christian movement. But towards the middle of the thirteenth century the moral complexion of the crusades had already undergone great alteration; the salutary effect they were to have exercised for the advancement of European civilization still loomed obscurely in the distance; whilst their evil results were already clearly manifesting themselves, and they had no longer that beauty lent by spontaneous and general feeling which had been their strength and their apology. Weariness, doubt, and common sense had, so far as this matter was concerned, done their work amongst all classes of the feudal community. As Sire de Joinville, so also had many knights, honest burghers, and simple country-folks recognized the flaws in the enterprise, and felt no more belief in its success. It is the glory of St. Louis that he was, in the thirteenth century, the faithful and virtuous representative of the crusade such as it was when it sprang from the womb of united Christendom, and when Godfrey de Bouillon was its leader at the end of the eleventh. It was the misdemeanor of St. Louis, and a great error in his judgment, that he prolonged, by his blindly prejudiced obstinacy, a movement which was more and more inopportune and illegitimate, for it was becoming day by day more factitious and more inane.

In the long line of kings of France, called Most Christian Kings, only two, Charlemagne and Louis IX., have received the still more august title of Saint. As for Charlemagne, we must not be too exacting in the way of proofs of his legal right to that title in the Catholic Church; he was canonized, in 1165 or 1166, only by the anti-pope Pascal III., through the influence of Frederick Barbarossa; and since that time, the canonization of Charlemagne has never been officially allowed and declared by any popes recognized as legitimate. They tolerated and tacitly admitted it, on account, no doubt, of the services rendered by Charlemagne to the papacy. But Charlemagne had ardent and influential admirers outside the pale of popes and emperors; he was the great man and the popular hero of the Germanic race in Western Europe. His saintship was welcomed with acclamation in a great part of Germany, where it had always been religiously kept up. Prom the earliest date of the University of Paris, he had been the patron there of all students of the German race. In France, nevertheless, his position as a saint was still obscure and doubtful, when Louis XI., towards the end of the fifteenth century, by some motive now difficult to unravel, but probably in order to take from his enemy, Charles the Rash, Duke of Burgundy, who was in possession of the fairest provinces of Charlemagne’s empire, the exclusive privilege of so great a memory, ordained that there should be rendered to the illustrious emperor the honors due to the saints; and he appointed the 28th of January for his feast-day, with a threat of the penalty of death against all who should refuse conformity with the order. Neither the command nor the threat of Louis XI. had any great effect. It does not appear that, in the Church of France, the saintship of Charlemagne was any the more generally admitted and kept up; but the University of Paris faithfully maintained its traditions, and some two centuries after Louis XI., in 1661, without expressly giving to Charlemagne the title of saint, it loudly proclaimed him its patron, and made his feast-day an annual and solemn institution, which, in spite of some hesitation on the part of the parliament of Paris, and in spite of the revolutions of our time, still exists as the grand feast-day throughout the area of our classical studies. The University of France repaid Charlemagne for the service she had received from him; she protected his saintship as he had protected her schools and her scholars.

The saintship of Louis IX. was not the object of such doubt, and had no such need of learned and determined protectors. Claimed as it was on the very morrow of his death, not only by his son Philip III., called The Bold, and by the barons and prelates of the kingdom, but also by the public voice of France and of Europe, it at once became the subject of investigations and deliberations on the part of the Holy See. For twenty-four years, new popes, filling in rapid succession the chair of St. Peter (Gregory X., Innocent V., John XXI., Nicholas III., Martin IV., Honorius IV., Nicholas IV., St. Celestine V., and Boniface VIII.), prosecuted the customary inquiries touching the faith and life, the virtues and miracles, of the late king; and it was Boniface VIII., the pope destined to carry on against Philip the Handsome, grandson of St. Louis, the most violent of struggles, who decreed, on the 11th of August, 1297, the canonization of the most Christian amongst the kings of France, and one of the truest Christians, king or simple, in France and in Europe.

St. Louis was succeeded by his son, Philip III., a prince, no doubt, of some personal valor, since he has retained in history the nickname of The Bold, but not otherwise beyond mediocrity. His reign had an unfortunate beginning. After having passed several months before Tunis, in slack and unsuccessful continuation of his father’s crusade, he gave it up, and re-embarked in November, 1270, with the remnants of an army anxious to quit “that accursed land,” wrote one of the crusaders, “where we languish rather than live, exposed to torments of dust, fury of winds, corruption of atmosphere, and putrefaction of corpses.” A tempest caught the fleet on the coast of Sicily; and Philip lost, by it several vessels, four or five thousand men, and all the money he had received from the Mussulmans of Tunis as the price of his departure. Whilst passing through Italy, at Cosenza, his wife, Isabel of Aragon, six months gone with child, fell from her horse, was delivered of a child which lived barely a few hours, and died herself a day or two afterwards, leaving her husband almost as sick as sad. He at last arrived at Paris, on the 21st of May, 1271, bringing back with him five royal biers, that of his father, that of his brother, John Tristan, Count of Nevers, that of his brother-in-law, Theobald King of Navarre, that of his wife, and that of his son. The day after his arrival he conducted them all in state to the Abbey of St. Denis, and was crowned at Rheims, not until the 30th of August following. His reign, which lasted fifteen years, was a period of neither repose nor glory. He engaged in war several times over in Southern France and in the north of Spain, in 1272, against Roger Bernard, Count of Foix, and in 1285 against Don Pedro III., King of Aragon, attempting conquests and gaining victories, but becoming easily disgusted with his enterprises and gaining no result of importance or durability. Without his taking himself any official or active part in the matter, the name and credit of France were more than once compromised in the affairs of Italy through the continual wars and intrigues of his uncle Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily, who was just as ambitious, just as turbulent, and just as tyrannical as his brother St. Louis was scrupulous, temperate, and just. It was in the reign of Philip the Bold that there took place in Sicily, on the 30th of March, 1282, that notorious massacre of the French which is known by the name of Sicilian Vespers, which was provoked by the unbridled excesses of Charles of Anjou’s comrades, and through which many noble French families had to suffer cruelly.

At the same time, the celebrated Italian Admiral Roger de Loria inflicted, by sea, on the French party in Italy, the Provincal navy, and the army of Philip the Bold, who was engaged upon incursions into Spain, considerable reverses and losses. At the same period the foundations were being laid in Germany and in the north of Italy, in the person of Rudolph of Hapsburg, elected emperor, of the greatness reached by the House of Austria, which was destined to be so formidable a rival to France. The government of Philip III. showed hardly more ability at home than in Europe; not that the king was himself violent, tyrannical, greedy of power or money, and unpopular; he was, on the contrary, honorable, moderate in respect of his personal claims, simple in his manners, sincerely pious and gentle towards the humble; but he was at the same time weak, credulous, very illiterate, say the chroniclers, and without penetration, foresight, or intelligent and determined will. He fell under the influence of an inferior servant of his house, Peter de la Brosse, who had been surgeon and barber first of all to St. Louis and then to Philip III., who made him, before long, his chancellor and familiar counsellor. Being, though a skilful and active intriguer, entirely concerned with his own personal fortunes and those of his family, this barber-mushroom was soon a mark for the jealousy and the attacks of the great lords of the court. And he joined issue with them, and even with the young queen, Maria of Brabant, the second wife of Philip III. Accusations of treason, of poisoning and peculation, were raised against him, and, in 1276, he was hanged at Paris, on the thieves’ gibbet, in presence of the Dukes of Burgundy and Brabant, the Count of Artois, and many other personages of note, who took pleasure in witnessing his execution. His condemnation, “the cause of which remained unknown to the people,” says the chronicler William of Nangis, “was a great source of astonishment and grumbling.” Peter de la Brosse was one of the first examples, in French history, of those favorites who did not understand that, if the scandal caused by their elevation were not to entail their ruin, it was incumbent upon them to be great men.

In spite of the want of ability and the weakness conspicuous in the government of Philip the Bold, the kingship in France had, in his reign, better fortunes than could have been expected.

The death, without children, of his uncle Alphonso, St. Louis’s brother, Count of Poitiers and also Count of Toulouse, through his wife, Joan, daughter of Raymond VII., put Philip in possession of those fair provinces. He at first possessed the count-ship of Toulouse merely with the title of count, and as a private domain which was not definitively incorporated with the crown of France until a century later. Certain disputes arose between England and France in respect of this great inheritance; and Philip ended them by ceding Agenois to Edward I., King of England, and keeping Quercy. He also ceded to Pope Urban IV. the county of Venaissin, with its capital Avignon, which the court of Rome claimed by virtue of a gift from Raymond VII., Count of Toulouse, and which, through a course of many disputations and vicissitudes, remained in possession of the Holy See until it was reunited to France on the 19th of February, 1797, by the treaty of Tolentino. But, notwithstanding these concessions, when Philip the Bold died, at Perpignan, the 5th of October, 1285, on his return from his expedition in Aragon, the sovereignty in Southern France, as far as the frontiers of Spain, had been won for the kingship of France.

A Flemish chronicler, a monk at Egmont, describes the character of Philip the Bold’s successor in the following words: “A certain King of France, also named Philip, eaten up by the fever of avarice and cupidity.” And that was not the only fever inherent in Philip IV., called The Handsome; he was a prey also to that of ambition, and, above all, to that of power. When he mounted the throne, at seventeen years of age, he was handsome, as his nickname tells us, cold, taciturn, harsh, brave at need, but without fire or dash, able in the formation of his designs, and obstinate in prosecuting them by craft or violence, by means of bribery or cruelty, with wit to choose and support his servants, passionately vindictive against his enemies, and faithless and unsympathetic towards his subjects, but from time to time taking care to conciliate them, either by calling them to his aid in his difficulties or his dangers, or by giving them protection against other oppressors. Never, perhaps, was king better served by circumstances or more successful in his enterprises; but he is the first of the Capetians who had a scandalous contempt for rights, abused success, and thrust the king-ship, in France, upon the high road of that arrogant and reckless egotism which is sometimes compatible with ability and glory, but which carries with it in the germ, and sooner or later brings out in full bloom, the native vices and fatal consequences of arbitrary and absolute power.

Away from his own kingdom, in his dealings with foreign countries, Philip the Handsome had a good fortune, which his predecessors had lacked, and which his successors lacked still more. Through William the Conqueror’s settlement in England and Henry II.‘s marriage with Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Kings of England had, by reason of their possessions and their claims in France, become the natural enemies of the Kings of France, and war was almost incessant between the two kingdoms. But Edward I., King of England, ever since his accession to the throne, in 1272, had his ideas fixed upon, and his constant efforts directed towards, the conquests of the countries of Wales and Scotland, so as to unite under his sway the whole island of Great Britain. The Welsh and the Scotch, from prince to peasant, offered an energetic resistance in defence of their independence; and it was only after seven years’ warfare, from 1277 to 1284, that the conquest of Wales by the English was accomplished, and the style of Prince of Wales became the title of the heir to the throne of England. Scotland, in spite of dissensions at home, made a longer and a more effectual resistance; and though it was reduced to submission, it was not conquered by Edward I. Two national heroes, William Wallace and Robert Bruce, excited against him insurrections which were often triumphant and always being renewed; and after having, during eighteen years of strife, maintained a precarious dominion in Scotland, Edward I. died, in 1307, without having acquired the sovereignty of it. But his persevering ardor in this two-fold enterprise kept him out of war with France; he did all he could to avoid it, and when the pressure of circumstances involved him in it for a time, he was anxious to escape from it. Being summoned to Paris by Philip the Handsome, in 1286, to swear fealty and homage on account of his domains in France, he repaired thither with a good grace, and, on his knees before his souzerain, repeated to him the solemn form of words, “I become your liegeman for the lands I hold of you this side the sea, according to the fashion of the peace which was made between our ancestors.” The conditions of this peace were confirmed, and, by a new treaty between the two princes, the annual payment of fifty thousand dollars to the King of England, in exchange for his claims over Normandy, was guaranteed to him, and Edward renounced his pretensions to Querey in consideration of a yearly sum of three thousand livres of Tours. In 1292, a quarrel and some hostilities at sea between the English and Norman commercial navies grew into a war between the two kings; and it dragged its slow length along for four years in the south-west of France. Edward made an alliance, in the north, with the Flemish, who were engaged in a deadly struggle with Philip the Handsome, and thereby lost Aquitaine for a season; but, in 1296, a truce was concluded between the belligerents, and though the importance of England’s commercial relations with Flanders decided Edward upon resuming his alliance with the Flemish, when, in 1300, war broke out again between them and France, he withdrew from it three years afterwards, and made a separate peace with Philip the Handsome, who gave him back Aquitaine. In 1306, fresh differences arose between the two kings; but before they had rekindled the torch of war, Edward I. died at the opening of a new campaign in Scotland, and his successor, Edward II., repaired to Boulogne, where he, in his turn, did homage to Philip the Handsome for the duchy of Aquitaine, and espoused Philip’s daughter Isabel, reputed to be the most beautiful woman in Europe. In spite, then, of frequent interruptions, the reign of Edward I. was on the whole a period of peace between England and France, being exempt, at any rate, from premeditated and obstinate hostilities.

In Southern France, at the foot of the Pyrenees, Philip the Handsome, just as his father, Philip the Bold, was, during the first years of his reign, at war with the Kings of Aragon, Alphonso III. and Jayme II.; but these campaigns, originating in purely local quarrels, or in the ties between the descendants of St. Louis and of his brother, Charles of Anjou, King of the Two Sicilies, rather than in furtherance of the general interests of France, were terminated in 1291 by a treaty concluded at Tarascon between the belligerents, and have remained without historical importance.

The Flemish were the people with whom Philip the Handsome engaged in and kept up, during the whole of his reign, with frequent alternations of defeat and success, a really serious war. In the thirteenth century, Flanders was the most populous and the richest country in Europe. She owed the fact to the briskness of her manufacturing and commercial undertakings, not only amongst her neighbors, but throughout Southern and Eastern Europe, in Italy, in Spain, in Sweden, in Norway, in Hungary, in Russia, and even as far as Constantinople, where, as we have seen, Baldwin I., Count of Flanders, became, in 1204, Latin Emperor of the East. Cloth, and all manner of woollen stuffs, were the principal articles of Flemish production, and it was chiefly from England that Flanders drew her supply of Wool, the raw material of her industry. Thence arose between the two countries commercial relations which could not fail to acquire political importance. As early as the middle of the twelfth century, several Flemish towns formed a society for founding in England a commercial exchange, which obtained great privileges, and, under the name of the Flemish hanse of London, reached rapid development. The merchants of Bruges had taken the initiative in it; but soon all the towns of Flanders—and Flanders was covered with towns—Ghent, Lille, Ypres, Courtrai, Furnes, Alost, St. Omer, and Douai, entered the confederation, and made unity as well as extension of liberties in respect of Flemish commerce the object of their joint efforts. Their prosperity became celebrated; and its celebrity gave it increase. It was a burgher of Bruges who was governor of the hanse of London, and he was called the Count of the Hanse. The fair of Bruges, held in the month of May, brought together traders from the whole world. “Thither came for exchange,” says the most modern and most enlightened historian of Flanders (Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove, Histoire de Flandre, t. ii. p. 300), “the produce of the North and the South, the riches collected in the pilgrimages to Novogorod, and those brought over by the caravans from Samarcand and Bagdad, the pitch of Norway and the oils of Andalusia, the furs of Russia and the dates from the Atlas, the metals of Hungary and Bohemia, the figs of Granada, the honey of Portugal, the wax of Morocco, and the spice of Egypt; whereby, says an ancient manuscript, no land is to be compared in merchandise to the land of Flanders.” At Ypres, the chief centre of cloth fabrics, the population increased so rapidly that, in 1247, the sheriffs prayed Pope Innocent IV. to augment the number of parishes in their city, which contained, according to their account, about two hundred thousand persons. So much prosperity made the Counts of Flanders very puissant lords. “Marguerite II., called the Black, Countess of Flanders and Hainault, from 1244 to 1280, was extremely rich,” says a chronicler, “not only in lands, but in furniture, jewels, and money; and, as is not customary with women, she was right liberal and right sumptuous, not only in her largesses, but in her entertainments, and whole manner of living; insomuch that she kept up the state of queen rather than countess.” Nearly all the Flemish towns were strongly organized communes, in which prosperity had won liberty, and which became before long small republics sufficiently powerful not only for the defence of their municipal rights against the Counts of Flanders, their lords, but for offering an armed resistance to such of the sovereigns their neighbors as attempted to conquer them or to trammel them in their commercial relations, or to draw upon their wealth by forced contributions or by plunder. Philip Augustus had begun to have a taste of their strength during his quarrels with Count Ferdinand of Portugal, whom he had made Count of Flanders by marrying him to the Countess Joan, heiress of the countship, and whom, after the battle of Bouvines, he had confined for thirteen years in the tower of the Louvre. Philip the Handsome laid himself open to and was subjected by the Flemings to still rougher experiences.

At the time of the latter king’s accession to the throne, Guy de Dampierre, of noble Champagnese origin, had been for five years Count of Flanders, as heir to his mother, Marguerite II. He was a prince who did not lack courage, or, on a great emergency, high-mindedness and honor; but he was ambitious, covetous, as parsimonious as his mother had been munificent, and above all concerned to get his children married in a manner conducive to his own political importance. He had by his two wives, Matilda of Bethune and Isabel of Luxembourg, nine sons and eight daughters, offering free scope for combinations and connections, in respect of which Guy de Dampierre was not at all scrupulous about the means of success. He had a quarrel with his son-in-law, Florent V., Count of Holland, to whom he had given his daughter Beatrice in marriage; and another of his sons-in-law, John I., Duke of Brabant, married to another of his daughters, the Princess Marguerite, offered himself as mediator in the difference. The two brothers-in-law went together to see their father-in-law; but, on their arrival, Guy de Dampierre seized the person of the Count of Holland, and would not release him until the Duke of Brabant offered to become prisoner in his place, and found himself obliged, in order to obtain his liberty, to pay his father-in-law a tough ransom. It was not long before Guy himself suffered from the same sort of iniquitous surprise that he had practised upon his sons-in-law. In 1293 he was secretly negotiating the marriage of Philippa, one of his daughters, with Prince Edward, eldest son of the King of England. Philip the Handsome, having received due warning, invited the Count of Flanders to Paris, “to take counsel with him and the other barons touching the state of the kingdom.” At first Guy hesitated; but he dared not refuse, and he repaired to Paris, with his sons John and Guy. As soon as he arrived he bashfully announced to the king the approaching union of his daughter with the English prince, protesting, “that he would never cease, for all that, to serve him loyally, as every good and true man should serve his lord.” “In God’s name, Sir Count,” said the enraged king, “this thing will never do; you have made alliance with my foe, without my wit; wherefore you shall abide with me;” and he had him, together with his sons, marched off at once to the tower of the Louvre, where Guy remained for six months, and did not then get out save by leaving as hostage to the King of France his daughter Philippa herself, who was destined to pass in this prison her young and mournful life. On once more entering Flanders, Count Guy oscillated for two years between the King of France and the King of England, submitting to the exactions of the former, at the same time that he was privily renewing his attempts to form an intimate alliance with the latter. Driven to extremity by the haughty severity of Philip, he at last came to a decision, concluded a formal treaty with Edward I., affianced to the English crown-prince the most youthful of his daughters, Isabel of Flanders, youngest sister of Philippa, the prisoner in the tower of the Louvre, and charged two ambassadors to go to Paris, as the bearers of the following declaration: “Every one doth know in how many ways the King of France hath misbehaved towards God and justice. Such is his might and his pride, that he doth acknowledge nought above himself, and he hath brought us to the necessity of seeking allies who may be able to defend and protect us. … By reason whereof we do charge our ambassadors to declare and say, for us and from us, to the above said king, that because of his misdeeds and defaults of justice, we hold ourselves unbound, absolved, and delivered from all bonds, all alliances, obligations, conventions, subjections, services, and dues whereby we may have been bounden towards him.”