is by the escheating of male fiefs to the crown by the extinction
of male heirs. Thus the estates of _Valois_ fell to the crown, and
were bestowed by Philip III. on his second son Charles brother of
Philip-the-fair. This Charles was the father of Philip VI. first king
of the house of Valois.
Strictly speaking these poor kings had no family names at all--that is
none in the sense that Smith and Brown are family names; and when Louis
XVI. was arraigned before those cut-throats of the Convention, and
called to answer to the name of Louis Capet, he refused, saying that
his name was Louis of France. And in the archives of the Convention, is
still to be found the inscription of a sum of francs expended to bury
the Widow Capet. Widow Capet was Marie Antoinette, Mary of Lorraine,
the descendant of Rudolph of Hapsburg, the daughter of a line of
emperors, the wife of Louis of Bourbon, the queen of France. Widow
Capet![5]
To return to the Captivity. On the death of Clement V. the cardinals
made an effort to rescue the pontificate from French domination, and
for two years there was no pope; but the French party prevailed, and
the bishop of Fréjus was chosen who took the name of John XXII. He
immediately confirmed the French ascendancy by appointing six new
French cardinals. It was during his reign that began the quarrel
between the Holy See and the Visconti a powerful Lombard family
from which were descended the later Valois kings, and from which
they derived their fatal claim to the Milanese. John XXII. not only
excommunicated Matteo Visconti the head of the family, but he added
an edict advertising him, his wife and children for sale as slaves.
There were no bids, because the Visconti were pugnacious and would not
have made good household servants. His son Marco beat the pope’s army
at Vavrio on the Adda, and drove him back to France. But he came not
bootless home like Bolingbroke. He had plundered Italy from end to end.
Though he did not succeed in turning the Visconti into cash, there were
found in his coffers after his death, twenty-five millions of florins
in gold, in jewels and in plate.
The next pope was Jacques Fournier, Benedict XII. and the next, Pierre
Roger, archbishop of Rouen, called Clement VI. The Holy See had now
been thirty years without a home of its own. It had resided as tenant
at Avignon, and paid rent to the Angevine Kings of Naples, called
Angevine from their founder Charles of Anjou brother of Saint Louis.
The Angevines were a disreputable set, and Queen Jane the heiress at
that period, was not the best of them. Clement VI. bought Avignon
of Jane for eighty thousand florins in gold which Voltaire says he
never paid. He made it up to her however, by a transaction in his own
line, to the understanding of which we must look a little into Jane’s
qualities and conduct. She was married four times, and neither time
did she make a good wife. Her first husband Andrew of Hungary, she
strangled; her second, Louis of Tarento, she poisoned; her third, James
of Aragon, perished nobody knows how; her fourth, Otho of Brunswick,
prudently kept away from her. At last, her cousin Charles of Durazzo
dethroned her, and served her as she had served her first husband--that
is choked her, and that was the end of Jane. Before this last
culmination, the pope had pardoned her sins. They were as scarlet, and
he made them white like snow; and when you reflect that the catalogue
embraced the assassination of at least two husbands, you will admit
that according to any reasonable tariff, the pontiff did not remain her
debtor.
It was during the reign of Clement VI. that the citizens of Rome, sick
of misrule, revolted and created Nicholas Rienzi tribune of the people,
and thus conjured up a ghost of the ancient republic. At Rome you are
still shown the house of Rienzi.
Like the rest, Clement played with his thunderbolts. He excommunicated
Waldemar king of Denmark for having made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land
without his permission, which shows how hazardous it was in those days,
to be pious on mere impulse and without due license from the Church.
Next came Innocent VI. and then Urban V. who was a Marseilles abbot.
Urban undertook to be a great pope, but the Captivity was no time
for great popes. Urban’s spiritual artillery seemed to have the same
disagreeable property of recoil as that of our old friend Boniface VIII.
Petrarch then lived, and though he was a citizen of Avignon, he
prayed night and morning for the rebuilding of the Roman pontificate.
Listening to him, Urban went to Italy to recover if possible the
patrimony of Saint Peter, or, if you insist, that of the Countess
Matilda. He was confronted by that chronic enemy of the papacy, the
Visconti. At that time the head of that house was one Bernabo who was
if anything a little less bland in his way than his predecessors. After
many high words, Urban lost his temper and let fly at Bernabo a major
excommunication cursing him in eating and drinking and sleeping and
in all the functions of life, and redoubling the anathema upon him
wherever he might fetch up in the life to come. Bernabo seized the
legate who brought the bull, and made him eat it--parchment, ribbon,
leaden seal and all. What sauce was allowed him with this strange
victual, and how he felt after supper, have not been handed down to us.
Not content with that, the impious ruffian sent Urban word that it was
he, Bernabo, who was pope in Italy, and emperor to boot; and that the
Almighty himself dared do nothing there without his consent.
On Urban’s return to Avignon, a fresh humiliation awaited him.
Peter-the-cruel king of Castile had an illegitimate brother, Henry of
Trastamara who undertook to dethrone him. Henry obtained the aid of
the famous French knight, Bertrand du Guesclin, and also of a band
of mercenary soldiers called Free Companions who were not always
distinguishable from free-booters. In their march toward Spain, they
encamped one night on the bank of the Rhone opposite Avignon, and sent
to the Holy Father praying that he would pardon their sins, bless their
enterprise and give them some money. Urban granted them absolution and
benediction; but he told them he had no money for them, and bid them be
gone. They demanded forty thousand crowns in gold as the price of their
departure. Urban launched at them a thunder-bolt as pregnant with
disaster as the one he had discharged at Bernabo. Du Guesclin himself
then sought an interview with his Holiness, and told him that he had
no control over those marauders except on the field of battle, and
that they were threatening to sack the papal palace. Urban, thoroughly
frightened, recalled his curses and renewed his benedictions; but as
his conscience would not allow him to take money out of the sacred
treasury to give to such miscreants, he laid a tax on the citizens of
Avignon, and they had to pay the sum demanded.
Gregory XI., nephew of Clement VI. was the next pope, and the last of
the Captivity. He secured Avignon from being again put to ransom by the
Free Companions by taking into his service a troop of them commanded by
an Englishman named Sir John Hawkwood.
The Florentines had encroached upon the States of the Church; and
Gregory, taking a leaf out of the book of John XXII., excommunicated
them and advertised them for sale as slaves; but the Florentines proved
to be no more merchantable than the Visconti.
Gregory went to Italy on the same errand as Urban V. and was no better
received. He made however a solemn entry into Rome, and was on the
point of being driven out, when he suddenly died there. Anybody may die
suddenly in Rome; but trite as the event reads, Gregory’s not dying
elsewhere brought about a state of things worse than the Captivity.
It was usage to hold the elective conclave in the town where the last
pope had died, and the cardinals assembled in Rome. Out of the sixteen,
eleven were Frenchmen. All the Avignon popes had been French either
native or by adoption; and the conclave was on the point of choosing
one more French pontiff when a Roman mob gathered around it and
threatened, if the cardinals did not elect an Italian, to “make their
heads redder than their hats”--that is to cut them off. Under this
threat the cardinals chose the archbishop of Bari, a Neapolitan who was
not even a cardinal. He took the name of Urban VI. and fixed his seat
at Rome.
As soon as the cardinals could levy Free-Companions enough to defend
them from the rabble, they met at Agnani the place where Boniface had
been seized by the ruffians of Philip, and repudiating the previous
election as having been made under duress, chose one of their number,
Robert of Geneva who succeeded to the throne of Avignon under the name
of Clement VII. Thus began what is called the Great Schism or Schism of
the West.
The Church has never questioned the authority of the Avignon popes
of the Captivity, but she has stigmatised those of the Schism as
antipopes. At that time however, at least half of the Roman Catholic
world cleaved to them. To the see of Avignon adhered France, Spain,
Scotland, Poland and Sicily; to the see of Rome, England, Germany and
Flanders. The Italians now acknowledged and now rejected the rule of
the Roman incumbent, as faction and civil strife swayed them.
On the death of Clement VII., the Avignon cardinals elected Peter de
Luna one of their number, who assumed the name of Benedict XIII.
No point of doctrine separated the two pontificates; they were kept
asunder by party spirit alone; and everybody began to be tired of the
scandal. An effort was made on both sides to put an end to it. The
disciples of Avignon extorted from Benedict a promise to abdicate
which he did not keep. Those of the Roman obedience also revolted and
appealed to the Council of Pisa which put forth an edict deposing
both popes and electing a new one. The other two refused to lay down
their respective tiaras; and then christians, and I fear sinners too,
beheld the spectacle of three popes at once, each fulminating bulls of
excommunication and anathema against his two rivals. The Council of
Constance then tried its hand. It seized John XXIII. the Roman pontiff
who had also promised to resign and had not kept his word, and put him
in prison. This so dishonored the name John that no pope has assumed
it since, though it was the favorite before. Faction however still
prevailed, and the two conclaves persisted in making separate elections.
Avignon still disputed preëminence with Rome; but after Benedict XIII.
the popes of the Schism do not seem to have resided there, and the
Schism itself became apparently more or less vagrant and interrupted.
Benedict’s successor a Spaniard named Munoz who called himself Clement
VIII. sold out his interest in the triple crown for a bishopric; and
the Schism slept. It was awakened again by the Council of Bàle which
undertook to depose the Roman pontiff Eugenius IV., on a charge of
heresy, and to set up in his place the strangest member of a strange
family--that of Savoy. The feudal chiefs of that house had been known
as Counts. Owing to their love of fighting and their success at it, the
Emperor had created them Dukes; and a scion of that pugnacious race now
reigns over Italy. Amadeus VIII. of Savoy, tired of fighting, turned
monk. With a few of his nobles he withdrew to a monastery where the
whole party made such progress in holiness, that the Council of Bale
raised Amadeus to the papacy with the title of Felix V., and scattered
bishoprics and other preferments among the rest. Eugenius mocked at the
Council and refused to quit, and for nine years more the Church was
convulsed by rival popes. Eugenius died clinging to the keys to the
last; and the Savoyard, weary of supra-mundane elevation, went back to
his monastery, leaving Nicholas V. who had succeeded Eugenius, sole
head of the Church. The Schism of the West was at an end: it had lasted
off and on within a year as long as the Captivity.
For more than a century, Avignon had been a seat of the papacy;
and when it ceased to be so it was still hallowed ground: secular
dominion would no longer take root there; and the Holy See remained
in possession and governed it. The Eternal City herself had been a
warning. During the paralysis of papal authority there, she had been a
prey to anarchy. The Orsini, the Colonnas and a score of minor brigands
had desolated her pleasant places, and decimated her people.
Avignon was not to be put to such a trial. The Church still governed
and order reigned. It is true that sometimes when the French kings
waxed recalcitrant, they would drive out the pope’s lieutenant and
seize the town; but they always repented them of the evil, and gave
back the sacred city unharmed.
At last one hundred years ago, those sans culottes of the revolution
dissolved that charm as they did many another.
The Second House of Burgundy
Froude in his history, calls the kings of Spain the house of Burgundy.
They were properly Hapsburgs and of the eldest branch. At the same time
they were descended from Mary of Burgundy; and it shows how deeply the
career of her ducal ancestors had impressed itself on the mind of the
historian, that he would fain continue the name beyond conventional
usage.
There were but four of those dukes, and they flourished a century only;
but they made changes which greatly moulded the polity of Europe.
England whose history is our history, allowed herself to be drawn into
the vortex. She allied herself with the House of Burgundy for the
insane purpose of enabling the Plantagenets to transfer the seat of
their empire from England to France, by which England would have been
reduced to the condition of a province. She escaped that humiliation,
but at the cost of her continental domain, the patrimony of Eleanor
of Guienne wife of the first Plantagenet king, which comprised nearly
one-third of France.
I propose to give some account of the foundation of that Second House
of Burgundy. My authority is chiefly but not wholly Barante who takes
for his motto: Scribitur ad narrandum non ad probandum, and is none the
less quoted by both English and French historians.
There were two Burgundies: the duchy still called Burgundy, and the
county better known as La Franche Comté. The people of both were
French; but while the duchy was a fief of France, the county was a fief
of the Empire. And there were two great lines of Burgundian dukes: the
first the Robertine descended from Robert king of France son of Hugh
Capet; and the second, the Valois line descended from Charles of Valois
brother of Philip-the-fair.
The last duke of the Robertine line was Philip de Rouvre, so called
from the castle of Rouvre where he was born near Dijon. He inherited
both Burgundies and Artois from his grandfather, his father having
been killed at the siege of Aiguillon. Now this Philip de Rouvre, like
some of my readers, is an interesting personage only by the woman he
married; and to his wife rather than to him I ask your attention.
She was Margaret daughter of Louis de Mâle, count of Flanders, lord
of Ghent, of Bruges, of Ypres and of other municipalities of the Low
Countries. Margaret was his only child and heir. It was she who was
destined to bring to the House of Burgundy, those first acquisitions
in the Netherlands which were to draw the rest after them, and make the
Spanish Hapsburgs counts of Flanders, of La Franche Comté, of Holland,
of Hainault; dukes of Brabant, lords of Ghent, etc., an accumulation of
titles by no means empty, such as the world had never seen before. In a
word, Margaret of Flanders was to lay the foundation of the Belgic wing
of the empire of Charles-the-fifth.
Margaret was very young when she married Philip de Rouvre, and not
long after their espousals Philip died of the plague, leaving Margaret
childless; and the great Robertine line which had worn the ducal
coronet three centuries, was ended. How then was this childless widow
to fulfil the destiny we have marked out for her?
We will leave her to ponder that problem, and take up our story at
another point.
John of Valois king of France was called John II., though you have to
look with a microscope into French history, to discover John I. No
chapter bears his name at the head of it. (v. Captivity, page 62.) John
II. was called John-the-good for no reason that history has explained.
If he ever did anything that was good, it has shared the fate of the
men who lived before Agamemnon. He was not even a good soldier for a
king, though very pugnacious. His idea of military strategy was to
shut down his visor, couch his lance and spur into the thickest of the
fight.
In following up these tactics at the battle of Poictiers, he was
knocked off his horse. He could not rise for the weight of his armor;
so his attendants set him up on end, and he instantly began to lay
about him again, on foot, with his accustomed fury. His eldest son
the dauphin, seeing that the battle was lost, turned on his heel and
ran away; and not only lived to fight another day but to rule France
so well that he gained the name of Charles-the-wise. Not so Charles’
youngest brother Philip a boy of sixteen. He stood by his sire to the
end; and as the enemy pressed in now on this side and now on that, he
would cry out: Look out father, on the right! look out father on the
left! and would throw himself in front, and play at cut and thrust like
a gladiator.
But they might better have followed the example of the dauphin and run
away; for they were soon borne to the ground and carried off prisoners
to England. There they were graciously received by Edward III. and
queen Philippa both of whom were related to their prisoners. Indeed
John and Philippa were first cousins, both grandchildren of Charles of
Valois.
After the battle of Poictiers, John gave to the brave boy who had
stood by him, the name of Philip-the-bold; and a touch of that quality
in England, confirmed the title. At dinner one day the cup-bearer
poured out wine to Edward before he did to John. This was a double
breach of etiquette: John was not only a guest, but he was the feudal
superior, Edward owing him homage as duke of Aquitaine. Philip was so
indignant at this slight to his father, that he jumped up and boxed the
cup-bearer’s ears. Thou art indeed Philip-the-bold! exclaimed Edward
more amused than vexed.
But the appellation was premature. Philip grew to be as prudent as he
was brave. On the whole he resembled his brother Charles-the-wise more
than he did his father the fighting John.
Philip was his father’s idol, and this idolatry was of grave portent to
France. Though John had three older sons, he would have left to Philip
the crown of France itself if the laws of the realm had permitted; but
this being impossible he did the next worst thing.
At the death of Philip de Rouvre there was strife for the Robertine
inheritance. Artois and La Franche Comté fell to Margaret of France
daughter of Philip V. We shall meet this lady again. The duchy of
Burgundy was claimed by king John and by Charles-the-bad, king of
Navarre, both descended from the Robertines through females. On this
footing the claim of Charles was the best; but John backed up his by
pleading that Burgundy was a male fief, and that the male line being
extinct, the duchy escheated to him as king of France. The only answer
to this logic was the ultima ratio regum; but Charles-the-bad’s badness
had so alienated his friends and allies, that he was in no condition
for that species of arbitrement; so the bad claim of John-the-good
prevailed over the good claim of Charles-the-bad, and the duchy of
Burgundy was united to the crown.
It was a priceless acquisition: every dictate of prudence, of policy,
of patriotism demanded that it should be sacredly kept: it was
immediately thrown away by an act of fatuity which was the climax of
the bad reign of John-the-good. John issued a patent creating his
beloved Philip Duke of Burgundy, and ceding the duchy to him and to his
heirs forever. Thus was founded in the person of Philip-the-bold, the
famous second House of Burgundy.
We left a page or two ago, Margaret of Flanders duchess dowager of
Burgundy, widowed and childless. She was still young, and if not
quite handsome, any short-coming in that respect was made up by the
provinces that were to fall to her from her father the Count Louis;
and there came suitors a-plenty to offer consolation to her bereaved
heart. Distinguished among these consolers were first, Edmund Langley
fifth son of Edward III.; second, Philip of Valois the new duke of
Burgundy. Edmund seemed to have the lead. He found a good ally in his
mother Philippa who was herself half Valois as we have seen; but her
heart was English: she hated her French cousins, and now put forth
all her energy to win away from them this rich prize. She pleaded
so well with count Louis that he consented to give his daughter to
Edmund. But there was another woman who had something to say, namely
Margaret of France the lady I had the honor of introducing to you a
few moments ago. She was the mother of count Louis and grandmother of
the young widow who was named after her. She was thoroughly French and
hated her English cousins as cordially as Philippa hated her French
ones; and she declared that not if she could prevent it, should her
granddaughter marry that Plantagenet, that Cockney. She and her son
held a stormy interview. Louis was long recalcitrant; but she finally
used an argument to which he listened. She was in her own right
countess of Artois and of La Franche Comté, and she threatened to cede
those provinces to the crown, so that neither he nor his should ever
possess one rood of them. Now Louis was in the prime of life and hoped
to survive his mother, and to enjoy Artois and La Franche Comté with
the rest of his princely inheritance, and there was nothing to do but
to yield. He took back his word to Edmund, and gave it to Philip.
But there was still another personage to consult. Edmund, Philip
and Margaret were all related and not very remotely: they were all
three great-great-grand children of Philip III. Canon law forbade the
marriage of relations up to the seventh degree; and as nobody knew very
well where the seventh degree was, the Church had simplified matters
by declaring it to mean any relationship that could be traced. A papal
dispensation was therefore necessary; and the case was referred to
Urban V. who sat upon the throne of Avignon: it was for him to say in
favor of which aspirant he would suspend the canon.
Some of you may think they ought have asked Margaret herself which of
her admirers she loved best. The chronicles intimate that like a devout
widow she was ready to take thankfully whatever husband the Holy Father
should choose for her. Urban V. was a Frenchman, and it did not take
him long to decide in favor of the French suitor; and in June 1369,
Philip-the-bold and Margaret of Flanders were married at Ghent.
That no kind heart may be troubled about Edmund Langley, I will add
that that unsuccessful swain went and manfully offered himself to
a pretty Spanish girl, natural daughter of Peter-the-cruel; and a
descendant of that loving pair sits at this moment on the throne of
England.
Philip and Margaret had got as far as Bruges on their wedding tour when
they were out of money, and it seems their credit was so poor that
they could borrow none without security; so they had to pawn all their
jewels to defray their way back to Paris.[6]
The bride and groom after a short stay at Paris, refitted the castle of
Rouvre the birthplace and residence of Margaret’s first husband, the
last of the Robertines. Behold then dame Margaret once more mistress
of Rouvre, wedded to a second Philip, and a second time duchess of
Burgundy. She could now solve the problem; and in pursuance of that
worthy end, two years after her marriage, she brought forth a son. It
was a wondrous infant: nothing short of the pope himself would do for
its godfather; so that Gregory XI. successor of Urban, stood by proxy
at the font, and called the boy’s name John; and as he grew up in the
fear of neither God nor man, he become known as John-the-fearless.