race and language, France and England were called into existence.
England, up to this date, had been a collection of contending states;
France, a tributary portion of a great Germanic empire. Slowly
stretching northward, the Roman language, modified, of course, by
local pronunciation, had pushed its way among the original Franks.
Latin had been for many years the language of Divine Service, and of
history, and of law. All westward of the Rhine had yielded to those
influences, and the old Teutonic tongue which Clovis had brought
with him from Germany had long disappeared, from the Alps up to the
Channel. [A.D. 814.] When the death of Charlemagne, in 814, had
relaxed the hold which held all his subordinate states together, the
diversity of the language of Frenchman and German pointed out, almost
as clearly as geographical boundaries could have done, the limits of
the respective nations. From henceforward, identity of speech was to
be considered a more enduring bond of union than the mere inhabiting
of the same soil. But other circumstances occurred to favour the
idea of a separation into well-defined communities; and among these
the principal was a very long experience of the disadvantages of an
encumbered and too extensive empire. Even while the sword was held
by the strong hand of Charlemagne, each portion of his dominions saw
with dissatisfaction that it depended for its peace and prosperity on
the peace and prosperity of all the rest, and yet in this peace and
prosperity it had neither voice nor influence. The inhabitants of the
banks of the Loire were, therefore, naturally discontented when they
found their provisions enhanced in price, and their sons called to
arms, on account of disturbances on the Elbe, or hostilities in the
south of Italy. These evils of their position were further increased
when, towards the end of Charlemagne's reign, the outer circuit of
enemies became more combined and powerful. In proportion as he had
extended his dominion, he had come into contact with tribes and
states with whom it was impossible to be on friendly terms. To the
East, he touched upon the irreclaimable Sclaves and Avars--in the
South, he came on the settlements of the Italian Greeks--in Spain,
he rested upon the Saracens of Cordova. It was hard for the secure
centre of the empire to be destroyed and ruined by the struggles of
the frontier populations, with which it had no more sympathy in blood
and language than with the people with whom they fought. Already,
also, we have seen how local their government had become. They had
their own dukes and counts, their own bishops and priests to refer to.
The empire was, in fact, a name, and the land they inhabited the only
reality with which they were concerned. We shall not be surprised,
therefore, when we find that universal rebellion took place when Louis
the Debonnaire, the just and saint-like successor of Charlemagne,
endeavoured to carry on his father's system. Even his reforms served
only to show his own unselfishness, and to irritate the grasping and
avaricious offenders whom it was his object to amend. Bishops were
stripped of their lay lordships--prevented from wearing sword and
arms, and even deprived of the military ornament of glittering spurs
to their heels. The monks and nuns, who had almost universally fallen
into evil courses, were forcibly reformed by the laws of a second St.
Benedict, whose regulations were harsh towards the regular orders, but
useless to the community at large--a sad contrast to the agricultural
and manly exhortations of the first conventual legislator of that
name. Nothing turned out well with this simplest and most generous of
the Carlovingian kings. His virtues, inextricably interlaced as they
were with the weaknesses of his character, were more injurious to
himself and his kingdom than less amiable qualities would have been.
Priest and noble were equally ignorant of the real characteristics
of a Christian life. When he refunded the exactions of his father,
and restored the conquests which he considered illegally acquired,
the universal feeling of astonishment was only lost in the stronger
sentiment of disdain. An excellent monk in a cell, or judge in a court
of law, Louis the Debonnaire was the most unfit man of his time to
keep discordant nationalities in awe. His children were as unnatural
as those of Lear, whom he resembled in some other respects: for he
found what little reverence waits upon a discrowned king; and personal
indignities of the most degrading kind were heaped upon him by those
whose duty it was to maintain and honour him. Superstition was set
to work on his enfeebled mind, and twice he did public penance for
crimes of which he was not guilty; and on the last occasion, stripped
of his military baldric--the lowest indignity to which a Frankish
monarch could be subjected--clothed in a hair shirt by the bands of an
ungrateful bishop, he was led by his triumphant son, Lothaire, through
the streets of Aix-la-Chapelle. [A.D. 833.] But natural feeling was
not extinguished in the hearts of the staring populace. They saw in
the meek emperor's lowly behaviour, and patient endurance of pain and
insult, an image of that other and holier King who carried his cross up
the steeps of Jerusalem. They saw him denuded of the symbols of earthly
power and of military rank, oppressed and wronged--and recognised in
that down-trodden man a representation of themselves. This sentiment
spread with the magic force of sympathy and remorse. All the world, we
are told, left the unnatural son solitary and friendless in the very
hour of his success; and Louis, too pure-minded himself to perceive
that it was the virtue of his character which made him hated, persisted
in pushing on his amendments as if he had the power to carry them
into effect. He ordered all lands and other goods which the nobles
had seized from the Church to be restored--a tenderness of conscience
utterly inexplicable to the marauding baron, who had succeeded by open
force, and in a fair field, in despoiling the marauding bishop of land
and tower. It was arming his rival, he thought, with a two-edged sword,
this silence as to the inroads of the churchman on the property of the
nobles, and prevention of their just reprisals on the property of the
prelate, by placing it under the safeguard of religion. The rugged
warrior kept firm hold of the bishopric or abbey he had secured, and
the belted bishop reimbursed himself by appropriating the wealth of his
weaker neighbours.
But Louis was as unfortunate in his testamentary arrangement as in all
the other regulations of his life. Lothaire was to retain the eastern
portion of the empire; Charles, his favourite, had France as far as
the Rhine; while Louis was limited to the distant region of Bavaria.
[A.D. 840.] And having made this disposition of his power, the meek
and useless Louis descended into the tomb--a striking example, the
French historians tell us, of the great historic truth renewed at such
distant dates, that the villanies and cruelties of a race of kings
bring misery on the most virtuous of their descendants. All the crimes
of the three preceding reigns--the violence and disregard of life
exhibited by Charlemagne himself--found their victim and expiation
in his meek and gentle-minded son. The harshness of Henry VIII. of
England, they add, and the despotic claims of James, were visited on
the personally just and amiable Charles; and they point to the parallel
case of their own Louis XVI., and see in the sad fortune of that mild
and guileless sovereign the final doom of the murderous Charles IX.,
and the voluptuous and hypocritical Louis XIV. But these kings are
still far off in the darkness of the coming centuries. It is a strange
sight, in the middle of the ninth century, to see the successor of the
great Emperor stealing through the confused and chaotic events of that
wretched period, stripped as it were of sword and crown, but everywhere
displaying the beauty of pure and simple goodness. He refused to
condemn his enemies to death. He was only inexorable towards his own
offences, and sometimes humbled himself for imaginary sins. A protector
of the Church, a zealous supporter of Rome, it would give additional
dignity to the act of canonization if the name of Louis the Debonnaire
were added to the list of Saints.
But we have left the empire which it had taken so long to consolidate,
now legally divided into three. There is a Charles in possession of the
western division; a Louis in the farther Germany; and Lothaire, the
unfilial triumpher at Aix-la-Chapelle, invested with the remainder of
the Roman world. But Lothaire was not to be satisfied with remainders.
Once in power, he was determined to recover the empire in its undivided
state. He was King of Italy; master of Rome and of the Pope; he was
eldest grandson of Charlemagne, and defied the opposition of his
brothers. [A.D. 842.] A battle was fought at Fontenay in 842, in which
these pretensions were overthrown; and the final severance took place
in the following year between the French and German populations.
The treaty between the brothers still remains. It is written in
duplicate--one in a tongue still intelligible to German ears, and the
other in a Romanized speech, which is nearer the French of the present
day than the English of Alfred, or even of Edward the Confessor, is to
ours.
[A.D. 843.]
France, which had hitherto attained that title in right of its
predominant race, held it henceforth on the double ground of language
and territory. But there is a curious circumstance connected with the
partition of the empire, which it may be interesting to remember.
France, in gaining its name and language, lost its natural boundary of
the Rhine. Up to this time, the limit of ancient Gaul had continued
to define the territory of the Western Franks. In rude times, indeed,
there can be no other divisions than those supplied by nature; but
now that a tongue was considered a bond of nationality, the French
were contented to surrender to Lothaire the Emperor a long strip of
territory, running the whole way up from Italy to the North Sea,
including both banks of the Rhine, and acting as a wall of partition
between them and the German-speaking people on the other side,--a great
price to pay, even for the easiest and most widely-spread language in
Europe. Yet the most ambitious of Frenchmen would pause before he undid
the bargain and reacquired the "exulting and abounding river" at the
sacrifice of his inimitable tongue.
Very confused and uncertain are all the events for a long time after
this date. We see perpetual attempts made to restore the reality as
well as the name of the Empire. These battles and competitions of the
line of Charlemagne are the subject of chronicles and treaties, and
might impose upon us by the grandeur of their appearance, if we did
not see, from the incidental facts which come to the surface, how
unavailing all efforts must be to arrest the dissociation of state
from state. The principle of dissolution was at work everywhere.
Kingship itself had fallen into contempt, for the great proprietors
had been encouraged to exert a kind of personal power in the reign of
Charlemagne, which contributed to the strength of his well-consolidated
crown; but when the same individual influence was exercised under the
nominal supremacy of Louis the Debonnaire or Charles the Bald, it
proved a humiliating and dangerous contrast to the weakness of the
throne. A combination of provincial dignitaries could at any time
outweigh the authority of the king, and sometimes, even singly, the
owners of extensive estates threw off the very name of subject. They
claimed their lands as not only hereditary possessions, but endowed
with all the rights and privileges which their personal offices had
bestowed. If their commission from the emperor had given them authority
to judge causes, to raise taxes, or to collect troops, they maintained
from henceforth that those high powers were inherent in their lands.
The dukes, therefore, invested their estates with ducal rights,
independent of the Crown, and left to the holder of the kingly name
no real authority except in his own domains. Brittany, and Aquitaine,
and Septimania, withdrew their allegiance from the poor King of
France. He could not compel the ambitious owners of those duchies to
recognise his power, and condescended even to treat them as rival and
acknowledged kings. Then there were other magnates who were not to be
left mere subjects when dukes had risen to such rank. So the Marquises
of Toulouse and Gothia, a district of Languedoc, and Auvergne, were
treated more as equals than as appointed deputies recallable at
pleasure. But worse enemies of kingly dignity than duke or marquis
were the ambitious bishops, who looked with uneasy eyes on the rapid
rise of their rivals the lay nobility. Already the hereditary title of
those territorial potentates was an accomplished fact; the son of the
count inherited his father's county. But the general celibacy of the
clergy fortunately prevented the hereditary transmission of bishopric
and abbey. To make up for the want of this advantage, they boldly
determined to assert far higher claims as inherent in their rank than
marquis or count could aim at. Starting from the universally-conceded
ground of their right to reprimand and punish any Christian who
committed sin, they logically carried their pretension to the right
of deposing kings if they offended the Church. More than fifty years
had passed since Charlemagne had received the imperial crown from the
hands of the Pope of Rome. Dates are liable to fall into confusion in
ignorant times and places, and it was easy to spread a belief that
the popes had always exercised the power of bestowing the diadem upon
kings. To support these astounding claims with some certain guarantee,
and give them the advantage of prescriptive right by a long and
legitimate possession, certain documents were spread abroad at this
time, purporting to be a collection by Isidore, a saint of the sixth
century, of the decretals or judicial sentences of the popes from a
very early period, asserting the unquestioned spiritual supremacy of
the Roman See at a date when it was in reality but one of many feeble
seats of Christian authority; and to equalize its earthly grandeur
with its religious pretension, the new edition of Isidore contained
a donation by Constantine himself, in the beginning of the fourth
century, of the city of Rome and enormous territories in Italy, to
be held in sovereignty by the successors of St. Peter. These are now
universally acknowledged to be forgeries and impostures of the grossest
kind, but at the time they appeared they served the purpose for which
they were intended, and gave a sanction to the Papal assumptions far
superior to the rights of any existing crown.
[A.D. 859.]