on English soil unreal and dim. Hardly a building in his realm preserves
the memory of Henry II.; Richard is a mere visitor to English shores;
Beaulieu alone and the graven tomb at Worcester enable us to realize
John. But along the Loire these Angevin rulers meet us in river-bank and
castle and bridge and town. Their names are familiar words still through
the length and breadth of the land. At Angers men show you the vast
hospital of Henry II., while the suburb around it is the creation of his
son. And not only do the men come vividly before us, but they come
before us in another and a fresher light. To us they are strangers and
foreigners, stern administrators, exactors of treasure, tyrants to whose
tyranny, sometimes just and sometimes unjust, England was destined to
owe her freedom. But for Anjou the period of their rule was the period
of a peace and fame and splendour that never came back save in the
shadowy resurrection under King Rene. Her soil is covered with
monuments of their munificence, of their genuine care for the land of
their race. Nine-tenths of her great churches, in the stern grandeur of
their vaulting, their massive pillars, their capitals breaking into the
exquisite foliage of the close of the century, witness to the pious
liberality of sovereigns who in England were the oppressors of the
Church, and who when doomed to endow a religious house in their realm
did it by turning its inhabitants out of an already existing one and
giving it simply a new name. As one walks along the famous Levee, the
gigantic embankment along the Loire by which Henry saved the valley from
inundation, or as one looks at his hospitals at Angers or Le Mans, it is
hard not to feel a sympathy and admiration for the man from whom one
shrinks coldly under the Martyrdom at Canterbury. There is a French side
to the character of these Kings which, though English historians have
disregarded it, is worth regarding if only because it really gave the
tone to their whole life and rule. But it is a side which can only be
understood when we study these Angevins in Anjou.
To the English traveller Angers is in point of historic interest without
a rival among the towns of France. Rouen indeed is the cradle of our
Norman dynasty as Angers of our Plantagenet dynasty; but the Rouen of
the Dukes has almost vanished while Angers remains the Angers of the
Counts. The physiognomy of the place--if we may venture to use the
term--has been singularly preserved. Few towns have it is true suffered
more from the destructive frenzy of the Revolution; gay boulevards have
replaced "the flinty ribs of this contemptuous city," the walls which
play their part in Shakspere's 'King John'; the noblest of its abbeys
has been swept away to make room for a Prefecture; four churches were
demolished at a blow to be replaced by the dreariest of squares; the
tombs of its later dukes have disappeared from the Cathedral. In spite
however of new faubourgs, new bridges, and new squares, Angers still
retains the impress of the middle ages; its steep and narrow streets,
its dark tortuous alleys, the fantastic woodwork of its houses, the
sombre grimness of the slate-rock out of which the city is built, defy
even the gay audacity of Imperialist prefects to modernize them. One
climbs up from the busy quay along the Mayenne into a city which is
still the city of the Counts. From Geoffry Greygown to John Lackland
there is hardly one who has not left his name stamped on church or
cloister or bridge or hospital. The stern tower of St. Aubin recalls in
its founder Geoffry himself; the nave of St. Maurice, the choir of St.
Martin's, the walls of Roncevray, the bridge over Mayenne, proclaim the
restless activity of Fulc Nerra; Geoffry Martel rests beneath the ruins
of St. Nicholas on its height across the river; beyond the walls to the
south is the site of the burial place of Fulc Rechin; one can tread the
very palace halls to which Geoffry Plantagenet led home his English
bride; the suburb of Roncevray, studded with buildings of an exquisite
beauty, is almost the creation of Henry Fitz-Empress and his sons.
But, apart from its historical interest, Angers is a mine of treasure to
the archaeologist or the artist. In the beauty and character of its site
it strongly resembles Le Mans. The river Mayenne comes down from the
north, from its junction with the Sarthe, edged on either side by low
ranges of _coteaux_ which approaching it nearly on the west leave room
along its eastern bank for vast level flats of marshy meadow land, cut
through by white roads and long poplar-rows--meadows which in reality
represent the old river-bed in some remote geological age before it had
shrunk to its present channel. Below Angers the valley widens, and as
the Mayenne coils away to Ponts de Ce it throws out on either side broad
flats, rich in grass and golden flowers, and scored with rhines as
straight and choked with water-weeds as the rhines of Somersetshire. It
is across these lower meadows, from the base of the abbey walls of St.
Nicholas, that one gets the finest view of Angers, the colossal mass of
its castle, the two delicate towers of the Cathedral rising sharp
against the sky, the stern belfry of St. Aubin. Angers stands in fact on
a huge block of slate-rock, thrown forward from one of the higher
plateaux which edge the marshy meadows, and closing up to the river in
what was once a cliff as abrupt as that of Le Mans. Pleasant boulevards
curve away in a huge semicircle from the river, and between these
boulevards and the Mayenne lies the dark old town pierced by steep lanes
and break-neck alleys. On the highest point of the block and approached
by the steepest lane of all stands the Cathedral of St. Maurice, the
tall slender towers of its western front and the fantastic row of
statues which fill the arcade between them contrasting picturesquely
enough with the bare grandeur of its interior, where the broad, low
vaulting reminds us that we are on the architectural border of northern
and southern Europe. St. Maurice is in the strictest sense the mother
church of the town. M. Michelet has with singular lucklessness selected
Angers as the type of a feudal city; with the one exception of the
Castle of St. Louis it is absolutely without a trace of the feudal
impress. Up to the Revolution it remained the most ecclesiastical of
French towns. Christianity found the small Roman borough covering little
more than the space on the height above the river afterwards occupied by
the Cathedral precincts, planted its church in the midst of it,
buttressed it to north and south with the great Merovingian Abbeys of
St. Aubin and St. Serge, and linked them together by a chain of inferior
foundations that entirely covered its eastern side. From the river on
the south to the river on the north Angers lay ringed in by a belt of
priories and churches and abbeys. Of the greatest of these, that of St.
Aubin, only one huge tower remains, but fragments of it are still to be
seen embedded in the buildings of the Prefecture--above all a
Romanesque arcade, fretted with tangled imagery and apocalyptic figures
of the richest work of the eleventh century. The Abbey of St. Serge
still stands to the north of Angers; its vast gardens and fishponds
turned into the public gardens of the town, its church spacious and
beautiful with a noble choir that may perhaps recall the munificence of
Geoffry Martel. Of the rivals of these two great houses two only remain.
Portions of the Carolingian Church of St. Martin, built by the wife of
Emperor Louis le Debonnaire, are now in use as a tobacco warehouse; the
pretty ruin of Toussaint, not at all unlike our own Tintern, stands well
cared for in the gardens of the Museum.
But, interesting as these relics are, it is not ecclesiastical Angers
that the English traveller instinctively looks for; it is the Angers of
the Counts, the birthplace of the Plantagenets. It is only in their own
capital indeed that we fully understand our Angevin Kings, that we fully
realize that they were Angevins. To an English schoolboy Henry II. is
little more than the murderer of Beket and the friend of Fair Rosamund.
Even an English student finds it hard after all the labours of
Professor Stubbs to lay hold of either Henry or his sons. In spite of
their versatile ability and of the mark which they have left on our
judicature, our municipal liberty, our political constitution, the first
three Plantagenets are to most of us little more than dim shapes of
strange manner and speech, hurrying to their island realm to extort
money, to enforce good government, and then hurrying back to Anjou. But
there is hardly a boy in the streets of Angers to whom the name of Henry
Fitz-Empress is strange, who could not point to the ruins of his bridge
or the halls of his Hospice, or tell of the great "Levee" by which the
most beneficent of Angevin Counts saved the farmers' fields from the
floods of the Loire. Strangers in England, the three first Plantagenets
are at home in the sunny fields along the Mayenne. The history of Anjou,
the character of the Counts, their forefathers, are the keys to the
subtle policy, to the strangely-mingled temper of Henry and his sons.
The countless robber-holds of the Angevin noblesse must have done much
towards the steady resolve with which they bridled feudalism in their
island realm. The crowd of ecclesiastical foundations that ringed in
their Angevin capital hardly failed to embitter, if not to suggest,
their jealousy of the Church.
Of the monuments of the Counts which illustrate our own history, the
noblest, in spite of its name, is the Bishop's Palace to the north of
the Cathedral. The residence of the Bishop was undoubtedly at first the
residence of the Counts, and the tradition which places its transfer as
far back as the days of Ingelger can hardly be traced to any earlier
source than the local annalist of the seventeenth century. It is at
least probable that the occupation of the Palace by the Bishop did not
take place till after the erection of the Castle on the site of the
original Eveche in the time of St. Louis; and this is confirmed by the
fact that the well-known description of Angers by Ralph de Diceto places
the Comitial Palace of the twelfth century in the north-east quarter of
the town--on the exact site, that is, of the present episcopal
residence. But if this identification be correct, there is no building
in the town which can compare with it in historical interest for
Englishmen. The chapel beneath, originally perhaps simply the
substructure of the building, dates from the close of the eleventh
century; the fine hall above, with its grand row of windows looking out
upon the court, from the earlier half of the twelfth. It was to the
building as it actually stands therefore that Geoffry Plantagenet must
have brought home his English bride, Maud the Empress, the daughter of
our Henry I., along the narrow streets hung with gorgeous tapestries and
filled with long trains of priests and burghers. To Angers that day
represented the triumphant close of a hundred years' struggle with
Normandy; to England it gave the line of its Plantagenet Kings.
The proudest monuments of the sovereigns who sprang from this match, our
Henry the Second and his sons, lie not in Angers itself but in the
suburb across the river. The suburb seems to have originated in the
chapel of Roncevray, the Roman-like masonry of whose exterior may date
back as far as Fulc Nerra in the tenth century. But its real importance
dates from Henry Fitz-Empress. It is characteristic of the temper and
policy of the first of our Plantagenet Kings that in Anjou, as in
England, no religious house claimed him as its founder. Here indeed the
Papal sentence on his part in the murder of Archbishop Thomas compelled
him to resort to the ridiculous trick of turning the canons out of
Waltham to enable him to refound it as a priory of his own without cost
to the royal exchequer. But in his Continental dominions he did not even
stoop to the pretence of such a foundation. No abbey figured among the
costly buildings with which he adorned his birthplace Le Mans. It was as
if in direct opposition to the purely monastic feeling that he devoted
his wealth to the erection of the Hospitals at Angers and Le Mans. It is
a relief, as we have said--a relief which one can only get here--to see
the softer side of Henry's nature represented in works of mercy and
industrial utility. The bridge of Angers, like the bridges of Tours and
Saumur, dates back to the first of the Count-Kings. Henry seems to have
been the Pontifex Maximus of his day, while his care for the means of
industrial communication points to that silent growth of the new
mercantile class which the rule of the Angevins did so much to foster.
But a memorial of him, hardly less universal, is the Lazar-house or
hospital. One of the few poetic legends that break the stern story of
the Angevins is the tale of Count Fulc the Good, how, journeying along
Loire-side towards Tours, he saw just as the towers of St. Martin's rose
before him in the distance a leper full of sores, who put by his offer
of alms and desired to be borne to the sacred city. Amid the jibes of
his courtiers the good count lifted him in his arms and carried him
along bank and bridge. As they entered the town the leper vanished from
their sight, and men told how Fulc had borne an angel unawares. Little
of his ancestor's tenderness or poetry lingered in the practical
utilitarian mind of Henry Fitz-Empress; but the simple Hospice in the
fields by Le Mans or the grand Hospital of St. John in the suburb of
Angers displayed an enlightened care for the physical condition of his
people which is all the more striking that in him and his sons it had
probably little connection with the usual motives of religious charity
which made such works popular in the middle ages, but, like the rest of
their administrative system, was a pure anticipation of modern feeling.
There are few buildings more complete or more beautiful in their
completeness than the Hospital of St. John; the vast hall with its
double row of slender pillars, the exquisite chapel, trembling in the
pure grace of its details on the very verge of Romanesque, the engaged
shafts of the graceful cloister. The erection of these buildings
probably went on through the whole reigns of our three Angevin
sovereigns, but the sterner and simpler hall called the Lazar-house
beside with its three aisles and noble sweep of wide arches is clearly
of the date of Henry alone. It was occupied when I visited it some years
ago as a brewery, but never was brewer more courteous, more genuinely
archaeological, than its occupant. Throughout these central provinces
indeed, as throughout Normandy, the enlightened efforts of the
Government have awakened a respect for and pride in their national
monuments which extends even to the poorest of the population. Few
buildings of a really high class are now left to ruin and desecration as
they were twenty years ago; unfortunately their rescue from the
destruction of time is too often followed by the more destructive attack
of the restorer. And in almost every town of any provincial importance
one may obtain what in England it is simply ridiculous to ask for, a
really intelligent history of the place itself and a fair description of
the objects of interest which it contains.
The broken ruins of the Pont de Treilles, the one low tower above the
river Mayenne which remains of the walls around the suburb of
Roncevray, show the price which Henry and his sons set on these costly
buildings. They have a special interest in Angevin history, for they
were the last legacy of the Counts to their capital. Across the river,
at the south-west corner of the town itself, stands the huge fortress
that commemorates the close of their rule, the castle begun by the
French conqueror, Philip Augustus, and completed by his descendant St.
Louis. From the wide flats below Angers, where Mayenne rolls lazily on
to the Loire, one looks up awed at the colossal mass which seems to
dwarf even the minster beside it, at its dark curtains, its fosse
trenched deep in the rock, its huge bastions chequered with iron-like
bands of slate and unrelieved by art of sculptor or architect. It is as
if the conquerors of the Angevins had been driven to express in this
huge monument the very temper of the men from whom they reft Anjou,
their grand, repulsive isolation, their dark pitiless power.
It is a relief to turn from this castle to that southern fortress which
the Counts made their home. A glance at the flat tame expanse of Anjou
northward of the Loire explains at once why its sovereigns made their
favourite sojourn in the fairer districts south of the river. There are
few drives more enjoyable than a drive along the Vienne to the royal
retreat of Chinon. The country is rich and noble, deep in grass and
maize and corn, with meadows set in low broad hedgerows, and bare
scratchy vineyards along the slopes. The road is lined with acacias,
Tennyson's "milk-white bloom" hanging from their tender feathery boughs,
and here beneath the hot sun of the South the acacia is no mere garden
shrub but one of the finest and most graceful of trees. Everywhere along
the broad sunlit river of Vienne nature is rich and lavish, and nowhere
richer or more lavish than where, towering high on the scarped face of
its own grey cliff above the street of brown little houses edged
narrowly in between river and rock, stands the favourite home of our
Angevin Kings.
It is only in one or two points amidst the great mass of stately
buildings which is known as the castle of Chinon that their hand can be
traced now. The base of the Tour du Moulay, where tradition says the
Grand Master of the Templars was imprisoned by Philippe le Bel, is a
fine vault of twelfth-century date, which may have been the work of
Henry II., and can hardly be later than his sons. But something of its
original character as a luxurious retreat lingers still in the purpose
to which the ground within the walls has been devoted; it serves as a
garden for the townsfolk of Chinon, and is full of pleasant shadowy
walks and flowers, and gay with children's games and laughter. And
whatever else may have changed, the same rich landscape lies around that
Henry must have looked on when he rode here to die, as we look on it now
from the deep recessed windows of the later hall where Joan of Arc stood
before the disguised Dauphin. Beneath is the broad bright Vienne coming
down in great gleaming curves from Isle-Bouchard, and the pretty spire
of St. Maurice, Henry's own handiwork perhaps, soaring lightly out of
the tangled little town at our feet. Beyond, broken with copse and
hedgerow and cleft by the white road to Loudun, rise the slopes of
Pavilly leading the eye round, as it may have led the dying eye of the
king, to the dim blue reaches of the west where Fontevraud awaited him.
No scene harmonizes more thoroughly than Fontevraud with the thoughts
which its name suggests. A shallow valley which strikes away southward
through a break in the long cliff-wall along the Loire narrows as it
advances into a sterner gorge, rough with forest greenery. The grey
escarpments of rock that jut from the sides of this gorge are pierced
here and there with the peculiar cellars and cave-dwellings of the
country, and a few rude huts which dot their base gather as the road
mounts steeply through this wilder scenery into a little lane of
cottages that forms the village of Fontevraud. But it is almost suddenly
that the great abbey church round which the village grew up stands out
in one colossal mass from the western hill-slope; and in its very
solitude and the rock-like grandeur of its vast nave, its noble apse,
its low central tower, there is something that marks it as a fit
resting-place for kings. Nor does its present use as a prison-chapel jar
much on those who have grown familiar with the temper of the early
Plantagenets. At the moment of my visit the choir of convicts were
practising the music of a mass in the eastern portion of the church,
which with the transepts has now been set apart for divine service, and
the wild grandeur of the music, unrelieved by any treble, seemed to
express in a way that nothing else could the spirit of the Angevins.
"From the devil we come, and to the devil we go," said Richard. In spite
of the luckless restoration to which their effigies have been
submitted--and no sight makes us long more ardently that the "Let it
alone" of Lord Melbourne had wandered from politics into archaeology--it
is still easy to read in the faces of the two King-Counts the secret of
their policy and their fall. That of Henry II. is clearly a portrait.
Nothing could be less ideal than the narrow brow, the large prosaic
eyes, the coarse full cheeks, the sensual dogged jaw, that combine
somehow into a face far higher than its separate details, and which is
marked by a certain sense of power and command. No countenance could be
in stronger contrast with his son's, and yet in both there is the same
look of repulsive isolation from men. Richard's is a face of cultivation
and refinement, but there is a strange severity in the small delicate
mouth and in the compact brow of the lion-hearted king which realizes
the verdict of his day. To an historical student one glance at these
faces as they lie here beneath the vault raised by their ancestor, the
fifth Count Fulc, tells more than pages of chronicles; but Fontevraud is
far from being of interest to historians alone. In its architectural
detail, in its Romanesque work, and in its strangely beautiful
cinque-cento revival of the Romanesque, in its cloister and Glastonbury
kitchen, it is a grand study for the artist or the archaeologist; but
these are merits which it shares with other French minsters. To an
English visitor it will ever find its chief attraction in the Tombs of
the Kings.
CAPRI.
I.
We can hardly wonder at the love of artists for Capri, for of all the
winter resorts of the South Capri is beyond question the most beautiful.
Physically indeed it is little more than a block of limestone which has
been broken off by some natural convulsion from the promontory of
Sorrento, and changed by the strait of blue water which now parts it
from the mainland into the first of a chain of islands which stretch
across the Bay of Naples. But the same forces which severed it from the
continent have given a grandeur and variety to its scenery which
contrast in a strangely picturesque way with the narrowness of its
bounds. There are few coast-lines which can rival in sublimity the
coast-line around Capri; the cliff wall of sheer rock broken only twice
by little dips which serve as landing-places for the island, and
pierced at its base by "blue grottoes" and "green grottoes" which have
become famous from the strange play of light within their depths. The
reader of Hans Andersen's 'Improvisatore' will remember one of these
caverns as the scene of its closing adventure; but strange as Andersen's
description is it is far less strange than the scene which he sketches,
the deep blue light which turns the rocks into turquoise and emerald or
the silvery look of the diver as he plunges into the waves. Twice in
their course the cliffs reach a height of thirteen hundred feet above
the sea, but their grandeur is never the barren grandeur of our Northern
headlands; their sternest faces are softened with the vegetation of the
South; the myrtle finds root in every cranny and the cactus clings to
the bare rock front from summit to base. A cliff wall hardly inferior in
grandeur to that of the coast runs across the midst of the island,
dividing it into an upper and a lower plateau, with no means of
communication save the famous rock stairs, the "Steps of Anacapri," now,
alas, replaced by a daring road which has been driven along the face of
the cliff.