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.)

[Illustration: De la Marche’s parting Insult----126]

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 llontreuil, 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.”

[Illustration: ST. LOUIS MEDIATING BETWEEN HENRY III. AND HIS BARONS----

136]

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.

[Illustration: “It is rather hard Bread.”----146]

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, Theo-

bald 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.

[Illustration: THE SICILIAN VESPERS----156]

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.