Читать книгу The Three Edwards: The Pageant of England - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 36

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Surprise may be felt that Edward was absent from Scotland at such a critical moment, knowing the low caliber of at least some of his chief lieutenants. The truth was that he had another problem on his hands of at least equal importance. He and King Philip the Fair of France were engaged in what might reasonably be termed the first stages of the Hundred Years’ War.

The French king has come down through the centuries as an enigma, because some of the very few flashes of him that history supplies make him appear stolid and slow, both of body and mind. It has been assumed that he depended on the clever lawyer chancellors he employed and that he gave little attention to affairs of state. Yet at all stages of his reign remarkable things were happening in France which made it clear that a ruthless intelligence was at work. Could his first chancellor, Pierre Flotte, a one-eyed jurist from Montpellier with a silver tongue, have been the master mind of the state? Was it Enguerrard de Marigny, a Norman squire, who had been a protégé of the queen? Or was it Guillaume de Nogaret, the best and least favorably known of the trio, who was so bold that he tried to make a prisoner of Pope Boniface VIII? Modern opinion seems to have veered to the belief that the power behind all the extraordinary things that happened was Philip the Fair himself.

In appearance he was what might be termed a super-Plantagenet, taller even than Edward of England. In any company he stood a full head above everyone else; and a most unusual head it was, of a pink and white complexion, with blond ringlets and handsome blue eyes. He was immensely strong and could crumple up almost any man with his great white hands. In character he showed some signs of his descent from his grandfather, that great and holy man, Louis IX, who is called St. Louis. One of his first acts on becoming king was to expel women from the court. Only three dishes were served at his table, and his guests had to drink water colored with wine. The desserts were always fruit grown on the royal estates. This may have been either asceticism or parsimony, and no one was sure which.

Once on a chilly day in Paris, with a mizzling rain falling, he was stopped by three soldiers who had some trivial complaint to make. The tall, silent king stood with the moisture falling on his white headpiece, his great feet sinking deep in the mud of the street, and listened attentively. This was what his saintly grandfather would have done, always having an ear for any subject, no matter how humble.

It was strange that he began his reign with the expulsion of women from the court, because in his household circle he was surrounded by them. He had two sisters, the princesses Blanche and Marguerite. Blanche was as lovely as he was handsome; gay, sparkling, slender, with a small foot and a trim ankle. This was the picture of her supplied to Edward by his brother Edmund, who was sent to Paris to make a report. Edward still grieved for his lost Eleanor but he was considering a second marriage, if only for reasons of state. The feminine fashions of the day were the least revealing of almost any period, and Edmund must have secured some of his information from gossipy sources. Authentic or not, the report he sent back depicted the fair Blanche as a veritable fairy-tale princess, and Edward decided that he wanted her for his second wife. The other sister, Marguerite, was slender and somewhat delicate of appearance, with a sweetness of mien rather than beauty.

Philip’s own family consisted of three sons and one daughter, Isabella, who was a striking beauty and of whom much will be heard later. She resembled him and not her mother, Jeanne of Navarre, a plump woman with a high complexion, who made up in intelligence what she may have lacked in pulchritude.

In addition there were a great many nieces, most of them daughters of a brother, Charles of Valois, for all of whom husbands had to be found. Charles was a bothersome fellow, garrulous and lacking in judgment, who made a muddle of anything entrusted to him.

Such was Philip the Fair, and it may seem surprising that during the twenty-nine years of his reign many astonishing things came to pass. The feudal power of the French dukes, who had in their time ruled more of the country than the kings, was reduced, and new machinery for justice and legislation was evolved. The order of Templars was violently dissolved and all their immense wealth confiscated, the head of the order in France being summarily declared guilty of heinous offenses and burned at the stake. When Pope Boniface VIII, who was a strong advocate of the supreme power of the papacy, issued a bull, Clericis laicos (a papal bull was distinguishable by its lead seal), which forbade any king to levy taxes on the clergy without his consent, Philip’s opposition forced its withdrawal. As a result of the hostility which followed, Nogaret went to Italy to arrest the Pope and take him back to France for trial and deposition. Only the illness of the Holy Father, who died soon after his room was violently entered by Nogaret at Anagni, prevented the plan from being carried out. Pope Clement, a Gascon by birth, was crowned at Lyons, and one of his first official acts was to appoint nine French cardinals. It was Clement who moved the papal court to Avignon, and thus began the seventy years of exile during which the papacy existed, in what was called a Babylonian captivity, in France. Nogaret may have been one of the blackest villains in history, but he would not have dared plan such a course had he lacked the backing of his king. Behind everything that went on was this ambitious, ruthless, dangerous king.

Nevertheless, the Bishop of Pamiers, Bernard Saisset, who was antagonistic to Philip, had this to say of him: “Our king resembles the horn-owl, the finest of birds and yet the most useless. He is the finest man in the world; but he only knows how to look at people fixedly without speaking.” This opinion was widely accepted.

This was the French monarch with whom Edward found himself in almost continuous conflict.