very low, which rises bare enough to-day over the African Sea. The
Mediterranean breaks (when in that sheltered gulf it breaks at all)
in waves upon a straight and narrow beach at the foot of this hill.
Beyond, not farther inland but farther up the coast, another hill,
somewhat higher but still insignificant, is joined by a saddle to
this first; to the south the land sinks altogether and admits (by a
narrow passage) the sea into the broad and stagnant lagoon of Tunis.
A few isolated houses, with no pretense to comfort or to charm, a
sort of villas, are to be found upon the quarter of mile of flat by
the seashore, and one or two stand on the rise of the little height.
Between them, for here a hundred yards and here two hundred, and all
around them for half a mile and a mile again, is dry, burnt, dirty
land, brown in summer, and empty save for here and there some tufts
of coarse grass. Far off, in two great horns or arms leading to the
horizon, run the mountain promontories that enclose this bay like
a pocket--a side pocket of the sea. A tramway, come from Tunis and
spanning the lagoon upon the embankment, runs past the base of the
hill at the edge of the sea flat. There is a halt rather than a
station, a deserted wooden platform without rooms or master. On that
platform is the name of the place, “CARTHAGE”; and thus does a man
to-day know where it was that the mighty Carthaginian aristocracy
stood, where the ships rode innumerable, where Elissa died, and where
the Roman armies, masters at last as armies always are of merchants
and the sea, stormed yard by yard the rise to the Citadel.
It was upon this hill and near the summit of it, upon the eastern
side which overlooks the water below, at a spot just in front of the
place where the Saracens had built out of the blocks of Carthaginian
ruin a castle of their own, that the King of France lay dying.
He was in his splendid tent, the baking air within hardly relieved by
the lifting of its side and the spraying of water on the canvas. With
him were his sons, and round that poor camp-bed were the many men of
his house. It was the day after St. Bartholomew’s feast, an awful day
of heat in August, when the distant blue of the promontory hills
trembled in the air, and when the iron of men’s accoutrements, the
rings of the saddle and of the bridle, were burning to the hand, and
the baked earth of that low hill camp scorching to the feet.
St. Louis, who thus lay feeble in the last moments of his life, was
but fifty-five years of age, nor did even these years fit him well,
for his face had always something boyish in it and too tender for the
approach of age. But the coming of death was clearly imprinted upon
his pinched features, his lips without blood, and the droop of his
mouth after so many days of pain. Before his voice fell low, while
he yet had the power, he already had ordered a layer of ashes to be
spread--as custom was then with pious rich men, that they might pass
the more humbly. He said that Philip, his son, who was to reign after
him, should be sent to him. This soldier was also weak from illness,
but he came; and when that lord had come St. Louis said from his bed
many things to this his heir, which things he ordered to be put down
in writing as he spoke them, and to be kept as a testament for the
governing of the realm of France, of which, years before, he had said
to this same son as a child,--
“Rather would I that a Scot should come out of Scotland to govern
this land of France than that it should be governed other than in
Christian wise.”
Of these things which he gave for commandment to his son he said
(among other things),--
“Fair son, the first thing I teach you is that you order your life to
the love of God, for lacking this no man can be saved. If God sends
you adversity, receive it in patience; if He sends you prosperity,
give thanks humbly lest you become worse through pride. Confess
thee often, and choose a wise confessor, who can guide you in what
should be done, and what should be left undone; follow devoutly with
heart and with lips the service of the Church, but especially the
Mass, where Consecration is. Keep your heart soft and piteous to the
poor, the misshapen, and all men ill at ease, and comfort and aid
them within your power. Do not take all to which you have a right.
If you have torment in your heart, share it with your confessor or
some other man who is discreet. Thus will you bear it more easily.
Cherish what is yours and your goods. Allow none to blaspheme God to
your face. Be very stiff to insist on justice and on the fulfilment
of rights, veering neither left nor right as between your subjects,
and follow up the quarrel of the weak until full truth is declared.
If you hold anything that you think another’s, give it back at once,
and if you are in doubt put the matter into the judgment of a third.
Remember the chief townsfolk, for if you will rely on them, the
foreigner and the great man within will fear to attack you. Revere
your father and your mother in memory, and keep their commandments.
Give the benefices of the Church not only to wise men but to clean.
Do not fight against Christian men, at least without taking counsel,
and in your wars spare the Church and all those who have done you no
harm. Lastly, very dear son, have Masses sung for me for my soul,
and prayers said throughout your realm, and I pray you put apart for
this a fixed sum of all you receive. Dear and fair son, I give you
all benedictions, whatever a good father can give his child, and may
the Blessed Trinity and all the Saints guard and defend you from all
evils, and God give you grace to do His will always, and to have
Himself honoured by you so that you and I both, when we have done
this mortal life, may be together with Him and praise Him for ever.”
Then added King Louis, “Amen!”
But these are only certain few words out of all that St. Louis said,
for the whole that he said was longer by far, and when he had done,
it was the full heat of the day, and already he was failing.
The suffering he was in grew greatly. He called for the Sacraments.
He received them with a whole mind, as was clearly apparent from
this, that they could hear him murmuring the verses of the Psalms as
they anointed him; and his younger son, the Count of Alençon, heard
him as he whispered in death. He was calling in whispers upon the
Saints, and in particular on St. James, the guardian of pilgrims and
of men who take long voyages; also he called on St. Denis of France,
and on St. Geneviève, who is the Queen of Paris, as all must know.
But by this time, noon being long past, all strength was deserting
him. He could make some sign, so that they lifted him as he desired
down upon the bed of ash where he would pass; and lying there he
found the strength to cross one hand above the other on his breast,
and so lying backwards, and still looking up to Heaven, he gave up
his spirit to God who made us, in that same hour of None--that is
three o’clock in the afternoon, which is the hour in which God the
Son died upon the Cross for the salvation of the world.
Thus, upon the morrow of the Feast of St. Bartholomew the Apostle,
passed wholly out of this world the good King Louis, in the year of
the Incarnation of our Lord, the year of Grace 1270. And his bones
were put into a chase and buried at St. Denis in France, there in
the place where he had chosen his sepulchre. In which place he was
laid away in earth, there where God has worked many a miracle for him
through his deserts.
THE TEMPLARS
(_October 13, 1307_)
In that quarter of Paris which lay to the north, built on the old
marsh that had been so laboriously drained, and close to the wall
which Philip Augustus had thrown round the city a century before,
stood wide, with its open spaces and innumerable roofs, the enclosure
of the Templars. It was a polity within a polity. No thoroughfare ran
through those many acres, and gates admitted outsiders through the
walls just as gates similarly guarded admitted outsiders through the
walls into that larger unit of the city.
This fortification of stone all about, this high curtain flanked with
towers and containing within its defences a whole population, was
the very symbol of what the Temple had become. Wherever Christian
men (now that the Crusades had failed) still held their own against
the pressure of Baltic heathendom or of Islam insolent upon the east
and south, there the Temple, over wide estates or commanding great
castles armed, boasted its power.
Within the fields of Christendom, far within, wherever long immunity
from heathen or from Saracen pressure had half corrupted the
life of Christian men, the Temple boasted its wealth or exalted
its luxury. In London, in Ravenna, in Aragon--principally here
in Paris--everywhere it was the richest and the greatest thing.
Christendom counted perhaps one hundred thousand manors; nine
thousand were in the hands of the Temple. Saving perhaps the Papacy
itself, the enormous wealth of the Jewish financiers, and the Courts
of the Angevins and of the Capetians, there was no such strength of
gold anywhere in Europe. It was the rival of all of these, and I
think their superior.
And this vast Order, as it was thus so enormously strong through
gold, was strong also through two other things--ubiquity and noble
lineage; and through a third thing it was strong--secrecy. For those
younger sons of the great nobles, those many squires and those
knights returned from wars in Spain or in the Levant, who formed its
not very numerous but dominating body, were bound by so strict a
discipline and acted with such solidarity behind their fortress gates
in every capital and garrison, that it seemed as though Christendom
had now within it some alien body separate from itself, and already
half an enemy to the great traditions of the common people and of
the universal Church, and of those open public servants, the kings.
There was a grumbling and a hatred against Templars everywhere. It
had endured for fifty years. What was all this wealth and all this
secrecy? Of what sort was the evil that hid behind those walls? And
how could there be tolerated in Christendom, whose nature it is to
be both homogeneous and free, something so jealously separate and
possessed of such unaccredited dominion?
And more: were not these men, by the very tenure of their office, the
defenders of the Holy Sepulchre, and had not that charge of theirs
been lost? St. Peter men knew, and his successor, and the kings they
knew, and the great lords their barons; but what was this other thing
established in their midst, irresponsible and giving no man account
of their worship--whatever it was they worshipped? Some said it was
an idol. All feared it was Satan. The great Orders, the preachers
coming right out of the populace, mixing with them, and haranguing in
the market-places, were no such peril. The Jews, in the mass small
men and poor, some few composing that strong oligarchy of finance
which had long dominated Europe, were exposed to constraint; but even
those that hated them could jest with them. They were neighbours.
The pitiless executors of royal orders were still neighbours too.
Whatever had power for whatever reasons over the lives of common men
was at least known and openly judged--save only the Temple. All the
West in the great mass of its people was inflamed and alarmed, the
little children playing in the street put forth their fingers to
ward off bad influence whenever two Templars went by. Men loved to
repeat whatever tales were told against them; and the pride of their
demeanour, sprung from a general nobility of blood as much as from
the consciousness of unchallenged strength, exasperated the public
soul.
Of all such angers the Capetian monarchy was about to become the
spokesman. It was a rôle perilous in the extreme; for to strike
at such a thing a man must strike at once with a secrecy equal to
its own and with a power almost as universal. Time and again, for
a generation past, it had been said that the thing would be done.
Philip the Fair, King of France, discovered in his jealousy, and
perhaps in his indignation, the strength required for the blow.
* * * * *
That fortress, which stood, an isolated thing, challenging the
greater fortress which Paris was, had in its centre, overlooking the
many low gables of its outhouses and servants of those who lived
under its protection, of its guests, and of its treasure rooms,
one great square tower, capped with the high, pointed slate roof
which could be seen from miles around. The tower was as tall and as
menacing as the huge round tower of the Louvre itself; it lifted
above Paris as high as the old belfry of St. Germanus, or as the twin
praying towers of Notre-Dame.
Within that tower certain men, among the chiefs of the whole Order,
sat upon an autumn evening, feasting. It was a Friday in October,
and Friday is a day big with the superstitions or the disasters of
Christendom. It was in October, the 13th of the month, and thirteen
is a number which Christendom has consented to regard with some
similar dread.
But these men suffered no great fear, although so much had been
rumoured now year after year. The greater part of them had come to
Paris upon the invitation of the king but recently. That Burgundian
squire, who was the chief of them all, had only the day before
walked, by the king’s own order, in a funeral of the king’s own
Court, holding the pall and playing his great part. Certain of
these men, the lesser ones, spoke as they sat at meat in this high
tower, which in a fashion commanded the city, of the talk that was
everywhere about, and the dangers which all might feel to be in the
air they breathed. But their timorous suggestions were ridiculed both
by the gayer of their colleagues and by the grave reproof of the
superiors who sat there eating and drinking with them.
It was not yet quite dark, for this meal of the day was a meal begun
at five o’clock as we now reckon time.
“There is such power in the Temple,” said that Burgundian knight, the
old Grand Master, gravely, “that if there were but allied with them
those others of the Knights Hospitallers which are not of our body,
freely could they rule the whole world.”
Then another said, after a little pause,--
“Though the King of France himself should seek to do us some evil,
others as powerful as he would stand our sponsors. The King of Aragon
was with us when last the dogs growled and dared not bite.”
Then a third, who had a subtle face and spoke in a high voice, said,
not pleasantly,--
“Were my own father to seek admission to this Order of ours I would
warn him that there are things known to us which should bid him
pause, for there are secrets we hold” (and here he smiled at the
brethren) “which are known only to God and to the Devil--and to you:
three partners.”
As the last man said this, the youngest of the Templars there present
showed in his face at once so great a terror and so great a pain that
the speaker sneered. That young man was muttering to himself. The
Grand Master, speaking still gravely but somewhat sharply from his
old lips, asked him what words he was thus saying secretly.
“I was praying to the Mother of God,” said the young man, “and I was
thinking of the dead.”
From the streets below, as evening gathered, there came a sound
perhaps a little louder than the common sound of the tradesmen at
their booths and of the passing crowds, but not much louder. Over
the river, in the king’s garden under the new white walls and squat
turrets of the palace on the island, a strange gathering had met.
There assembled at the king’s express command members chosen from all
the guilds and trades of Paris. They sat in rank, some hundreds in
number, by parishes and by mysteries beneath certain wooden pulpits
that had been hastily set up; and, from these, monks of the preaching
Orders cried out in tones of violence and of condemnation, preparing
them for what was to come.
“A thing deplorable and horrible to the mind is among us, and a thing
terrible to the ears.... Natures that have exiled themselves beyond
the bounds of nature, treasonable to the dignity of man. Christ is
betrayed, and their initiation is the initiation of devils. They spit
upon the Cross.”
Also to these men admissions made by Templars who had betrayed their
Order were related, and truth and rumour, and blasphemy and justice,
were commingled in these high denunciations.
The congregation of these picked men chosen to spread the thing
immediately throughout Paris were ready to believe, and most of what
they believed was true.
But still in that high tower, as the darkness came, the chiefs of the
Templars were confident and immune. Nothing in Christendom was so
strong as they. The noise from the streets beyond their walls grew
less, then suddenly rose and was more ordered and, as it were, more
menacing. They could catch the regular footfall of men in rank and
the clank of metal. Some rose, and going to the deep western windows
of their high place, whence the sunset beyond Valerian and the hills
of St. Cloud still warmed all the sky, they saw torches lit in the
gloaming, and they heard a challenge at the gate. The gate opened,
and a troop poured in. It was the king’s men.
No resistance was held or opposed. That great door of the tower
itself, which was to stand as the tower stood for so many centuries
more (until it fell at the orders of Napoleon), was opened to the
order of the king. The men who opened it at first looked at one
another. None spoke save the Grand Master, who only said, “Woe to him
that betrays his brethren,” and who, as he said it, looked fixedly at
the youngest man. Then the worked hanging, which hung by rings before
the archway of their room, was drawn clattering aside. The archers
entered in a body, and these men were prisoners. Before it was night
Philip himself, the king, had taken possession of that tower. He had
filled it with his scribes. The treasury was forced. The rolls of
parchment were brought forth, the accounts were rendered, and the
vast fortunes of that place were beneath the grasp of the monarchy,
which would proceed to the full revelation of so many crimes and of
the humbling of so much pride, to the torture and to the death.
But later, months and months later, when the last of these men were
themselves brought out for public recantation before the cathedral,
the old Grand Master, that Burgundian knight, standing forward on
the high platform before the thousands of the people to declare the
guilt of the Templars to the astonishment of Europe, for all his
avowals acted a most memorable part. Loudly he denied whatever wrongs
he had himself admitted, whatever blasphemies, whatever obscenities,
whatever denials of the Christ. They burnt him with his companions
after that relapse (for so they called it); they burnt him on those
little islands which lay westward of the palace, and which are now
a green place beneath the Place Dauphine; and the awestruck crowd
that watched his death whispered among themselves that the man in his
agony had summoned to the tribunal of God within one year and a day
the Pope and the King. Before the term of that citation had expired
the Pope and the King were dead.
BLANCHETAQUE
(_August 24, 1346_)
[_I have corrected Froissart by the map and local knowledge.
Hence Boismont, not Oisemont, etc._]
Edward the Plantagenet sat in Boismont at his evening meal upon
Wednesday, August 23, 1346. He, and his nobles about him. He had
marched from Acheux that day, an easy journey. He had found at
Boismont, before sunset, the advance guard of his force; now, by
evening, it had all concentrated, and the division (as we should call
it to-day, for it was about that strength) lay, some in bivouac, some
billeted, some under canvas, grouped round the village. The moon was
at the full; through the late summer air, still warm, the flood of
her light was over those miles of stubble, the open high fields of
Picardy.
Edward the Plantagenet, in a chance room of the village, chosen in
its best house, still sat at a table well furnished and spoke to
those about him of the campaign.
There sat among these who were that night the guests of the king one
or two useful upland squires, a little doubtful of their French, a
little afraid, therefore, of speaking in such company; but Edward
could understand, and could even make himself understood in the local
idioms of north England which sounded so harsh in such a place; and,
intermingled with the play of French at that table--with the advice
and the jests and the courtesy of the greater men--he would demand
the opinion and listen carefully to the reply of those few whom he
had also bidden to meet him, and who, in their ignorance, hesitated
to use the tongue of their rank.
But there was little to learn, either from these few who were easier
in their half-Saxon dialects, or from the main group of guests with
whom, as with the king, French was the only talk. The position was
known, its character was simple, its issue was desperate.
Headquarters take tragedy in war with a strange ease, partly because
it is their duty to check emotion, partly because they have to
handle affairs as a problem in the void, and to forget the too human
reactions of peril; partly because they have grown too familiar
with an evil situation, if that situation has arisen gradually and
enforced itself; partly because instruction, and the habit of a
cultured class, has taught them how futile in such a pass is any
waste of energy upon grieving.
In the billets and posts around, the polyglot gossip at the camp
fires and hearths, where sergeants saw to the cooking of the common
meals, was less restrained; and in Welsh, and in the Saxon or nearly
English phrases, in the rare French, in the mingled speech of the men
from the sea coast, there was a note always of gloom and sometimes of
alarm. Though the solid organization of the sergeants saw to it that
the muttering should not spread too far, there could be no mistaking
the temper of the troops. They knew, by that curious unexplained
process through which the common soldier absorbs a position which he
could not understand from a map, that things were desperate.
But around the king’s table a much clearer appreciation of the
peril led to no corresponding words, nor would any stranger present
have imagined, from the tone of that room, how close and apparently
inevitable was disaster.
The little force had now been in retreat, and rapid retreat, from
the failure before Paris, through one feverish week, pounding up
northward for Calais; not with forced marches, indeed, but with full
days’ marches. Now, at the end of that effort, it found itself
headed off. The long, straight, marshy trench of the Somme lay
between them and their Channel transports home. They had attempted
its crossing a first, a second, a third time, and every attempt had
been thrust back. They had felt down river with increasing anxiety,
as the host upon the farther bank grew; and, while they had failed
to make the crossing good, and while, as they were thus impelled
northward, the breadth of the valley which defied them increased.
Here they were at last at Boismont, on the lower estuary, with a huge
sea tide swirling back and forth, at its height--a mile and a half of
deep tumbling water--twice the depth that would drown a man. At its
lowest it became a mass of marsh and mud, through which the hurrying
ebb ran tumbling to the sea in varied channels.
Boismont stood upon the eastern bank of that broad water flank,
grouped upon the dry steep above the edge of the marsh and the mud.
There were rumours of some available passage, but no one caught sight
of it, and even were it known, what chance had the army of forcing a
long and narrow and perilous traverse when they had been unable to
force the short bridges of the upper stream?
Yet that very difficulty was to prove their salvation. There was a
ford, as the king was to learn, but its farther end upon the eastern
bank was ill guarded with an insufficient force detached from the
French vanguard upon the farther shore. For it was imagined that the
crossing could hardly be attempted, or, if attempted, easily repelled.
Edward Plantagenet turned to one of the lesser commanders, who had
spoken of the rumour of a ford, and said,--
“What was the name of your prisoner?”
The soldier replied,--
“Gobain Agache. He is a farmer of Mons, through which we marched but
yesterday. We took him with us because he had been talking too much.”
“One might have thought that you could have found intelligence.”
“No, sir; they were all dumb. But we had heard that this man had
talked, so we took him with us.”
“What has he told you?”
“He has told us nothing.”
“What have you offered him?”
The commander mentioned a sum large in his eyes. Edward Plantagenet
laughed.