Women of Mediaeval France Part 8

Like a faithful sovereign, Blanche hastened to the defence of her va.s.sal. Ordering Ferrand de Flandre to create a diversion by an attack upon the county of Boulogne, she summoned her va.s.sals and commanded them to desist from their attack upon Thibaud. They refused to obey; she forthwith put herself at the head of her army and marched to Troyes. The barons were compelled to accede to a truce.

During this truce Thibaud managed to secure several allies, and the civil war broke out again, even before the nominal expiration of the truce. Villages and towns were burned by the partisans on both sides; Philippe Hurepel, it is said, besought Blanche to be allowed to fight a duel with Thibaud to avenge the alleged murder of Louis VIII.--a sort of appeal to the judgment of G.o.d. Wider and wider spread the flames of civil war, till Blanche was almost at the end of her resources, and in real peril. At this juncture a danger from without caused a temporary cessation of hostilities against Thibaud de Champagne.

Pierre Mauclerc, now insolently styling himself Duke--not Count--of Brittany, and adding an English t.i.tle, Count of Richmond, had written to Louis IX. announcing the withdrawal of his homage. He was to be henceforth a va.s.sal of the crown of England. Henry III. was preparing in earnest for a descent upon France; and Blanche sought allies, or at least friends, among her va.s.sals, while the barons leagued against Thibaud agreed to a truce. Collecting what forces she could, the queen, accompanied by Louis, marched toward Angers against Pierre. Meanwhile, with much pomp and ceremony and rich clothing and luxurious baggage, Henry III. landed at Saint-Malo, on May 3, 1230, where he had an interview with Pierre. Henry was full of splendid plans; fortunately for Blanche, he was incapable of putting them into execution. The time was frittered away in petty encounters, and in debauchery on Henry's part, while Blanche continued to negotiate with any who seemed disposed to favor her cause. She won in this way the support of some Breton and Poitevin n.o.bles, and held together her uncertain feudal army. As soon as the legal forty days of their service were done, the more discontented of the va.s.sals in her army withdrew, and the king had to follow them in order to prevent their renewing their attacks upon Champagne. Instead of profiting by the embarra.s.sment of his enemies and overwhelming the French, Henry marched to and fro in Brittany, through Poitou and to Bordeaux, returning thence to Brittany. His army was exhausted without fighting; there was much sickness among men and animals; his provisions were giving out. Tired of the fruitless expedition, he sailed back to England, abandoning to the chances of war the Breton n.o.bles who had deserted France under promise of protection from England. Before the joyful news of his departure could reach her, however, Blanche was again in trouble in her attempts to protect Thibaud de Champagne.

A coalition stronger than before had been formed against Thibaud. He had put forth his entire resources in his preparations for defence; but in a pitched battle under the walls of Provins his forces were defeated and routed, and the count himself fled to Paris with the pursuing victors at his heels. All seemed lost, and his enemies were marching about as they pleased over Champagne, when Queen Blanche arrived with her army, which was large enough, fortunately, to intimidate the rebels. She would not talk of terms with armed rebels, but demanded the evacuation of Champagne. After some little parleying, in which the queen held firm, the rebellious barons submitted. Reparation was agreed to on both sides, and the chief of the malcontents, Philippe Hurepel, Count of Boulogne, was satisfied by large indemnities granted him for the damage inflicted by Ferrand de Flandre while he was making war, in defiance of his sovereign, upon the Count of Champagne. Truly, mediaeval dispensations are sometimes amazing.

By the end of 1230 the barons were at peace, and Blanche was at liberty to turn her attention to Brittany and Pierre Mauclerc. Louis and his mother marched upon Brittany in the early summer of 1231; but a truce was made with England, and soon after with Pierre Mauclerc, to last until June 24, 1234. The most critical period in Blanche's regency was now pa.s.sed. Her son, now nearing his majority, was firmly established on his throne; for the great ones of the land had not been able to subdue the spirit of his mother. Their wars had devastated a considerable portion of France, but the common people knew who was to blame for the havoc wrought; they had seen their queen a peacemaker, resorting to arms in defence of loyal and oppressed subjects, but always endeavoring to further the interests of the kingdom by preserving order within rather than by seeking conquests without. She had shown herself a ruler full of energy and resource; the great va.s.sals of the crown, little by little, recognized their inability to destroy her power, and abandoned the attempt.

Two formidable enemies still threatened her, however, in the persons of Henry III. and Pierre Mauclerc. While warlike preparations were going forward, in antic.i.p.ation of the expiration of the truce, domestic sorrows fell upon Blanche; she lost two of her sons, John and Philippe Dagobert, the first of whom died certainly in 1232, the second perhaps in the same year, perhaps not till 1234. In the midst of great events, those griefs which touch most nearly a woman's heart pa.s.s unnoticed by chroniclers.

In order to be prepared for the expiration of the truce, Pierre Mauclerc was seeking to gain such allies as he could. Even in the early part of 1232 he began negotiations with Thibaud de Champagne,--who had lost his second wife, Agnes de Beaujeu, in the year preceding,--in order to bring about his marriage to Yolande de Bretagne. We have seen how Blanche checkmated this move of her wily adversary. Thibaud married, in September, 1232, Marguerite, the daughter of the loyal Archambaud de Bourbon. In the next year died one who had been a dangerous power in France, Count Philippe Hurepel; his death removed one more of Blanche's difficulties, for he had been restless and pugnacious, when not actually in rebellion. In 1234 Blanche was enabled to do another good turn to Thibaud, who now, by the death of his uncle, had become King of Navarre.

The old question of the succession in Champagne and the claims of Alix had never been satisfactorily determined. Blanche now summoned Alix to a conference, where, realizing that her party was no longer in the ascendant, the latter renounced all claim to the counties of Champagne and Blois.

From the south of France, that land of the troubadours, now laid waste in the name of religion, Blanche had nothing to fear in the way of active resistance. Her cousin, Raymond VII. of Toulouse, was completely overcome and was intent only on making his peace with the Church. Prince Alphonse of France was to wed Raymond's daughter, Jeanne, and the restoration of some degree of prosperity in a land which might ere long become a part of France was a matter which Blanche was too wise to neglect. Never forgetting the political interests she had to serve, she did all in her power to protect Raymond from petty annoyance and spoliation, to soothe his feelings, and to get the Pope to return to him the marquisate of Provence, taken away by the treaty of 1229. Meanwhile, the royal power was being more firmly established over the domains ceded to France.

Louis IX. was nearing manhood; it was time to seek a suitable alliance for him. The initiative in this matter probably came from Blanche, who decided everything for her son, with his unquestioning approval. In 1233, when Louis was nineteen, she consulted with her friends and decided upon the daughter of Raymond Berenger, Count of Provence, as the most suitable wife for her son. Though the King of France could have commanded a more brilliant alliance, the marriage with Marguerite de Provence was a happy one, and not impolitic, for it a.s.sured the friends.h.i.+p of the Provencals, and through the mediation of the queen peace was re-established between the Counts of Provence and Toulouse.

An emba.s.sy was despatched to escort the young princess, who, as became a daughter of Provence, came with a numerous suite, in which there were minstrels and musicians. Louis went to meet his bride, accompanied by most of the members of the royal family, and the marriage ceremony was performed at Sens, by the Archbishop, on May 26 or 27, 1234. Adequate preparations consonant with the dignity of the occasion had been made by Blanche, but there was no extravagance, no vain display. We hear of a gold crown made for the young queen; of jewels purchased for her; and of a ring formed of lilies and _marguerites_, with the inscription _Hors cet and pourrions nous trouver amor?_--"Without this ring, can we find love?" presented to the bride by Louis. A handsome wardrobe was provided for the king, and to the lords and ladies of the court were given furs, handsome robes, many of silk, and other presents. Tents were erected to accommodate the crowd, which was too great to find housing in Sens, and there was a leafy bower, made of green boughs, where the king's throne was set up and where, doubtless, the minstrels played. Then there were distributions of money among the poor, whom Blanche and her son never forgot.

Marguerite was young, lovely, and, what was more important still in one who must be the wife of a saint, had been carefully educated and reared in piety. She was of gentler stuff than Queen Blanche, and so we shall not find her playing any great role in history; but she was courageous, and a devoted wife. She won her husband's love, and probably exercised some influence over him; but of her married life and of her treatment by Queen Blanche we shall not speak at present.

War with England was threatening again when, on June 8th, Louis returned to Paris with his bride; for the truce with England could not be renewed. Blanche de Castille had provided against the evil day, and the vindictive cruelty of Pierre Mauclerc had helped on her projects. He punished so severely those of his va.s.sals who had been loyal to France that it became easier for Blanche to detach one here and there as an ally. She did not wait for the expiration of the truce to begin her operations, but summoned her army and marched upon Brittany with overwhelming forces. Pierre, who had had but small aid from Henry III., was compelled to submit, and a truce was agreed to for three months, to terminate on November 15th. The delay had been sought by Pierre in the hope of extracting, by entreaties or threats, more active a.s.sistance from the miserable Henry III. Finding his appeals here in vain, Pierre returned to France to submit to Blanche and Louis. It is said that he came into the presence of the king with a halter about his neck, pleaded for mercy, and abandoned to Louis all Brittany. While this is doubtless an exaggeration, we know that he submitted absolutely, in November, 1234, to the will of his sovereign, and promised to serve faithfully the king and his mother. It was not long after this that he went to the Holy Land, leaving the government of Brittany in the hands of his son.

The most bitter, the most crafty, the most dangerous of her enemies having been reduced to subjection, there remained but one task for Blanche to accomplish in order to crown the work she had undertaken for her son. In the course of the year 1235-1236 negotiations were undertaken with England that resulted in a truce for a term of five years. Blanche was about to hand over the more active control of affairs to Louis; it was no bad beginning for him to find his realm at peace within and without, with a prospect of the continuance of these conditions.

CHAPTER VI

THE MOTHER AND THE WIFE OF A SAINT

As the regency of Queen Blanche had begun without formality, so it ceased insensibly. There was no set day upon which she formally relinquished the reins to Louis; and so one can but determine an approximate date. On April 25, 1234, Louis may be considered to have attained his majority. Though we find the name of Blanche figuring in royal acts after this date, it becomes less frequent: her share in the government is growing less, though throughout her life she never ceased to stand by her son and act with or advise him. At the very close of her regency we find her once more the central figure with that unaccountable person Thibaud de Champagne. It must be remembered that he was now King of Navarre, a dignity which brought with it less of real power in France than one might suppose; for the French and the Spanish dominions, Champagne and Navarre, were separated. His elevation to the throne may have momentarily turned the head of the poet-king; at any rate, he began to show dissatisfaction and to demur about fulfilling some of the conditions incident to the settlement of the claims of Alix de Champagne. In defiance of his duty as a va.s.sal he gave his daughter, without the king's consent, to Jean le Roux, son of Pierre Mauclerc. He formed alliances with Mauclerc and with others of the old league; the hostile intent could not be mistaken. The king mobilized his forces and went to meet those of Thibaud. As the latter had not had time to effect a junction with his Breton allies, the royal forces were overwhelming, and he was compelled to find some way out of his difficulty other than fighting. Remembering that he had a.s.sumed the Cross, and was, therefore, under the protection of the Church, he persuaded the Pope to enjoin Louis from attacking him, declaring that his person and his lands were, on account of his crusading vow, under the protection of the Church.

Even this intervention might not have saved him from severe punishment at the hands of his incensed sovereign; but when he sent to make submission and to ask mercy, Queen Blanche, to whom he especially appealed, summoned him to her presence and promised to obtain fair terms for him. The terms, indeed, were not hard, nor were the reproaches unduly severe which Blanche is said to have made in her last interview with Thibaud: "In G.o.d's name, Count Thibaud, you should not have taken sides against us; you should have called to mind the great goodness of my son, the king, when he came to your aid to protect your county and your lands from all the barons of France, who would have burned everything and reduced it to ashes." Then came the courteous reply of the gallant and contrite Thibaud: "By my faith, madame, my heart and my body and all my lands are yours; there is naught that could please you that I would not do willingly; and never again, please G.o.d, will I go against you or yours."

The romance of this scene, almost pathetic, is ruthlessly disturbed by the scene that is said to have followed, yet we must tell of this also.

The young Prince Robert, always of a violent temper, took it upon him to insult the vanquished King of Navarre. He had the tails of the latter's horses cut off a--shameful insult to a knight--and as Thibaud was leaving the palace Robert threw a soft cheese on his head. Thibaud returned to Blanche indignant at the insult offered him despite her safe conduct; and she was preparing to punish the offenders summarily when she discovered that the ringleader was her own son.

During the ten or twelve years that now intervened before Blanche was again to take the regency during Saint Louis's crusade, her role in public life is of less importance; there will be a fact in history to note here and there, but most of that which we shall say concerns the woman, the mother, rather than the queen. Though eminently fitted in intellect and temperament for exercising the powers of an active ruler, Blanche never forgot that she was only the king's mother, and that she held the royal power in trust for him. In all her acts--they were really done on her own responsibility--she sought to a.s.sociate the name of her son, as if she would keep for him the honor. In that speech to Count Thibaud she does not reproach him for ingrat.i.tude to her; it is, "you should have called to mind the great goodness of my son, the king." Her whole life was devoted to the service of this son, whom she loved with a love painfully intense, cruelly jealous.

When she was left a widow, there was entrusted to her not merely the ruling of a kingdom but the rearing of a large family of children. To this latter task Blanche devoted herself with as much energy and as much good sense as she displayed in larger affairs. She reared with particular care the son who, though not the eldest, had become the heir to the crown. She tried to make of him a good man. It was certainly not her training or her example that taught him excessive devoutness; for, though a good Christian, she was not a devotee. When he was a boy she gave him over to the care of masters who were to instruct him in all things. There was physical exercise and recreation as well as study; the young prince was not even exempt from discipline: according to his own testimony, one of his masters "sometimes beat him to teach him discipline." His days were regularly portioned off into periods of work, of play, and of religious devotion; in the midst of his teachers, most of whom were Dominicans, the little prince led a very sober life. He was of a quiet and docile disposition, and received instruction willingly and readily, and became a man of considerable learning. From his youth he manifested a tendency to extreme piety, going daily to church, where he entered into the services with strange fervor; he sang no songs but hymns, and led a pure and temperate life. It is said that a religious fanatic, who had listened to some of the calumnies circulated against the queen, one day came to her and rebuked her bitterly for encouraging her son to live a life of licentiousness, in the society of concubines.

She corrected his mistaken impression, and said that if her son, whom she loved better than any creature living, were sick unto death she would not have him made whole by the commission of a mortal sin. Saint Louis never forgot this saying of his mother's, which he was fond of repeating to Joinville, and by which he sought to regulate his conduct.

Another of Blanche's children was of the same disposition as Saint Louis in regard to religion. This was the Princess Isabelle, whom her mother had trained as carefully as Louis. On one occasion, when the family was going on a journey and there was much noise of preparation in the midst of the packing, Isabelle covered herself up in the bedclothes in order to pray undisturbed. One of the servants, occupied in packing, picked up child and bedclothes together, and was about to put her with the rest of the baggage, when she was discovered. Even as a child she would take no part in games, and as a young girl shunned all the gayeties of the court, devoting herself to study, to reading the Scriptures, and to devotional and charitable works, leading a life of the utmost austerity.

It is pleasant to know that this timid, pious little lady was not forced into a distasteful union and pa.s.sed her days in the pursuits she liked best.

Blanche's devotion to her son Louis was repaid by the greatest deference and affection. Her ascendency over him lasted as long as she lived, and was responsible, no doubt, for much unhappiness to his wife. Blanche's love was full of jealousy; she would brook no rival; she must always be first in the affections of her son. And one cannot deny that the great queen was selfish even to the point of positive cruelty in her treatment of Marguerite de Provence. A mere child when she came to the court of France, Marguerite was made to feel that she was not to be first there, though her position as the wife of Louis gave her a claim to first place. She was not of masculine temperament, like Blanche, and she did not seek even the show of power; but Blanche grudged her even the love of her husband, though we have no evidence that Marguerite ever reproached Saint Louis with excessive filial devotion or sought to detach him from his mother. Many stories have come down to us of how "the young queen" was treated by the one whom all France continued to call "the Queen." From the testimony of those intimate with the habits of the royal family come to us details of espionage, petty malice, and cold-heartedness on the part of Blanche: we could not believe these things if they came from less competent witnesses. They are not to the credit of Blanche, for they show the worst side of her nature. The confessor of Saint Louis says: "The queen mother displayed great harshness and rudeness towards Queen Marguerite. She would not permit the king to remain alone with his wife. When the king, with the two queens, went in royal progress through France, Queen Blanche commonly separated the king and the queen, and they were never lodged together.

It happened once that, at the manor of Pontoise, the king was lodged in a room above the lodging of his wife. He had instructed the ushers in the anteroom that, whenever he was with the queen and Queen Blanche wished to enter his room or the queen's, they should whip the dogs to make them bark; and when the king heard this he hid from his mother."

Imagine the King of France, the man whose peculiar piety won for him the name of a saint, dodging about like a guilty urchin to keep his mother from finding him in the company of his wife!

The honest old Sieur de Joinville, who feared not to tell his master when he thought him in the wrong, tells us that on one occasion, when Marguerite was very ill after the birth of a child, Louis came in to see her, fearing she was in danger of death. Blanche came in, and Louis hid himself behind the bed as well as he could, but she detected him. Taking him by the hand, she said: "Come away, for you are doing no good here."

She led him out of the room. "When the queen saw that Queen Blanche was separating her from her husband, she cried out with a loud voice: 'Alas!

will you let me see my husband neither in life nor in death?' And so saying she fainted away so that they thought she was dead; and the king, who thought so too, ran back to her and brought her out of her swoon."

There is nothing in these stories to the credit of Blanche or of her saintly son.

Let us turn from this unpleasant picture to glance at some of the facts in the domestic economy of the royal household. The expenditures of the court were not great; the household was kept on a scale befitting its rank, but there was no vain display. Besides the queen's children there were always a number of dependents, ladies and gentlemen in waiting, etc., and the expenses for the whole establishment were kept in a common account.

Blanche de Castille loved her native land, which she never saw again after she left it to become the wife of Louis VIII., and she kept up as active relations as possible with her relatives, particularly with Queen Berengere; but she had too much good sense to flood her court with Spanish dependents and Spanish customs, and, therefore, we do not find a great number of Spaniards occupying important posts in the court. A certain number of her special attendants appear to have been Spaniards; we may note a lady in waiting called Mincia, who is often mentioned in the accounts, and who is granted money and horses for a journey into Spain. Then there are two Spaniards to whom gifts of clothing and the like are made at the time of the coronation of Queen Marguerite. But these and other Spaniards whose names one can pick out belonged to the personal suite of the queen, and had nothing to do with politics. There was nothing like the incursion of foreigners which, the people complained, Italianized France in the time of the Medicis.

Among the legitimate expenditures of the court, but rather surprising in the household of a saint, are certain sums set down for the payment of minstrels. Prince Robert of France loved to give presents to minstrels, and when he was knighted, in 1237, more than two hundred and twenty pounds went to the payment of these singers. The horses and their furnis.h.i.+ngs form no small item in the expenses, since most of the travelling had to be done on horseback, and a numerous retinue of mounted attendants must be provided. Common pack horses were not costly, but the easy-riding palfrey and the war horse ranged in price from thirty to seventy-five pounds. There were carriages and other vehicles also, though the carriages were few. The state of the roads, indeed, often precluded their use; we find Blanche de Castille excusing herself from going to Saint-Denis because the state of her health forbids her going on horseback: the roads were probably impa.s.sable; or, perhaps, it was in attempting this little journey that her carriage suffered the damages recorded in a bill of repairs of 1234, when it seems the unlucky vehicle needed new wheels. There was a carriage for _la jeune reine_ Marguerite, too, and a new one was purchased in 1239.

Aside from the money expended in the actual maintenance of her family, Blanche herself spent, and taught Louis to spend, considerable sums in charity. With the miserable economic conditions prevailing in the Middle Ages, poverty must have been far more general and far more distressing than it has ever been since those days. During Blanche's regency the kingdom had been repeatedly ravaged in the course of the wars of the n.o.bles, and there is record of famine, notably in the southwest of the kingdom, where one chronicler a.s.serts that in 1235 he saw a hundred bodies buried in one day in a cemetery at Limoges. On their frequent journeys throughout the country, Blanche and Louis did what could be done to alleviate the condition of the unfortunate, who gathered on the wayside in crowds. There were regular officers to allot the alms properly, and considerable sums were distributed, usually at every stage on the journey. At home, in Paris, there was a regular distribution of money and of bread, with occasional special bounties on the feasts of the Church. One special charity of Queen Blanche's deserves notice. When a girl was to be married, one of the first questions was, and still is, in France, what dower her parents could give with her; if the dower were insufficient, the poor girl ran a serious risk of not being married at all. Blanche often came to the aid of deserving girls so situated, and her gifts were not confined to her immediate attendants and their families; for example, a poor woman from Anet, a stranger to the court, received one hundred sous parisis for the marriage of her daughter; and while on her way back from Angers, Blanche met a young girl of Nogent, to whom she gave fifteen pounds for her marriage.

Blanche had always been respectful in her att.i.tude toward the Church, and pious in her habit of life; but she was never servile in her att.i.tude toward churchmen, whom she would no more allow to interfere with her rule than the greatest of the barons. The higher clergy, as a body, were faithful to her; but, here and there, bishops and archbishops arrogated to themselves powers not theirs, or refused to recognize the rights of the crown, whereupon Blanche did not hesitate to join issue with them. One celebrated case is that of the riots at Beauvais, in 1233, when, under Blanche's direction, Louis restored order and a.s.serted the royal power in spite of the objections of the bishop, and continued to sustain the position taken, even after an interdict had been proclaimed in Beauvais.

During the period between her two regencies, Blanche continued to reside at the court; her jealousy of Marguerite would in part account for her preferring this to retirement to some one of the chateaux belonging to her private estate. At the time, it must be remembered, the queen of Philippe Auguste, Ingeburge, was living in this way at Orleans. Queen Blanche, indeed, enjoyed a considerable revenue from her estates, which she generally intrusted to the care of the Knights Templars, the financial agents of many a crowned head in Europe. Part of her estates she administered in person. As a further occupation, she devoted herself to various charities. In 1242 the famous abbey of Notre Dame, generally known as Maubuisson, at Pontoise, was completed, thanks to the queen's munificence and to her careful supervision. Maubuisson, with its many dependencies, its beautiful gardens and buildings, became one of the most splendid monastic inst.i.tutions in France. It was frequently visited and enriched with new gifts by its foundress and her son, and n.o.ble ladies chose it as the place to take the veil. One of these ladies, Countess Alix de Macon, became abbess of another convent, Notre Dame du Lys, near Melun, founded by Blanche de Castille.

The management of her estates and the foundation of convents did not, however, monopolize the queen's time and energies; she was always the careful mother, looking out for the interests of her children, and always the queen, ready to act or to decide promptly and firmly in the affairs of the kingdom. She arranged the marriages of her sons, Robert and Alphonse. The former married, in 1237, Mahaut, daughter of the Duke of Brabant, and there were magnificent festivities at Compiegne in honor of the event, the young prince being knighted and made Count of Artois.

Alphonse, betrothed to the daughter of Raymond of Toulouse, was married in 1238. The next year Blanche provided a rich and most desirable bride for her nephew, Alphonse de Portugal, who had been reared at the French court. He married the widow of Philippe Hurepel, Mahaut de Boulogne, and was a faithful va.s.sal of France until he became King of Portugal in 1248. For each of these weddings Blanche saw that there was suitable provision in the way of new and elegant clothes and entertainments in keeping with the occasion.

[Ill.u.s.tration 5: BLANCHE OF CASTILLE, MOTHER OF SAINT LOUIS.

After the painting by Moreau de Tours.

Aside from the money expended in the actual maintenance of her family, Blanche herself spent, and taught Louis to spend, considerable sums in charity. With the miserable economic conditions prevailing in the Middle Ages, poverty must have been far more general and far more distressing than it has ever been since those days. On their frequent journeys throughout the country, Blanche and Louis did what could be done to alleviate the condition of the unfortunate, who gathered on the wayside.

At home, in Paris, there was a regular distribution of-money and of bread, with occasional special bounties on the feasts of the Church.]

In the larger world, Louis IX. still sought the counsel of his mother: "He sought her presence in his council, whenever he could have it with profit or advantage." In judicial proceedings particularly, we still find her acting in her sovereign capacity; and she continued to keep an eye upon those who had formerly been the rebel barons, her name being a.s.sociated with that of Louis in various acts concerning the s.h.i.+fty Pierre Mauclerc. For her unfortunate cousin, Raymond of Toulouse, she still exerted her influence with the Pope to obtain some relief from the obligation which he had been forced to a.s.sume of spending five years in the Holy Land. It was at his mother's instance, too, that Louis IX.

bought from the young Emperor Baldwin of Constantinople those most holy relics, the Crown of Thorns and the large portion of the true Cross, to receive which Louis built the beautiful Sainte-Chapelle. The purchase was really arranged as an excuse for contributing largely to the depleted treasury of the Christian Empire of the East, whose emperor was doubly related to Saint Louis through his father and through Blanche de Castille. The Crown of Thorns, indeed, had been in p.a.w.n to Venice. Louis and Blanche went to meet the sacred relic, which was escorted to its resting place in Paris by great crowds singing hymns and displaying every mark of the utmost reverence. For the piece of the Cross, bought three years later, in 1241, the same elaborate ceremonial was observed; and in the great procession which accompanied Saint Louis as he bore the Cross on his shoulders through the streets of Paris walked Blanche and Marguerite, barefooted.

When the Tartar hordes of Ghenghis Khan overran Poland and Hungary, the whole of Christian Europe trembled with fear and horror. If these barbarians could not be checked, and they continued to pour in resistless floods over the land, what was to become of Christendom?

"What shall we do, my son?" cried Blanche; "what will become of us?"

"Fear not, mother," replied the brave king; "let us trust in Heaven."

And then he added that famous pun which all his biographers repeat: "If these Tartars come upon us, either we shall send them back to Tartarus, whence they came, or they will send us all to Heaven."

Out of this threatening of the Tartars grew a religious persecution, in which Blanche took a part not discreditable to her. When things went wrong in the Middle Ages, it was the fault of the weak and oppressed; if it was not the witches, it was the Jews who had brought misfortune upon the land, and who must be punished before G.o.d would be pleased again. In this case it was the Jews, who were accused of lending aid to the Tartars. The popular odium incurred by this accusation encouraged the prosecution of an investigation, ordered by Pope Gregory IX., into the doctrines of the Talmud. France appears to have been the only country where the investigation was actually made. Several Jewish rabbis were haled before the court, presided over by Blanche, to explain and answer for their books. The fairness with which Blanche presided is indeed remarkable when one remembers the severity of the common judicial procedure of the time. The chief rabbi, Yehiel, appealed to her several times against the injustice of being forced to answer certain questions, and she sustained his plea. When Yehiel complained that, whatever the court decided, he and his people could not be protected from the blind rage of the populace, Blanche replied: "Say no more of that. We are resolved to protect you, you and all your goods, and he who dares to persecute you will be held a criminal." When he protested against taking an oath demanded by his persecutors, because it was against his conscience to swear, Blanche decided: "Since it is painful to him, and since he has never taken an oath, do not insist upon it." She reproved the Christian advocates, the learned doctors of the Church, for the unseemly violence of their language, and sought in every way to maintain some sort of impartiality, or at least of decency, in the trial. If she had conducted the trial to the close, there might have been a different sentence from that which condemned the Talmud and ordered it to be committed to the flames.

It was through an agent of Blanche, apparently a burgess of Roch.e.l.le, that Saint Louis obtained most valuable and timely information in regard to the rebellious preparations of Hugues de Lusignan, Comte de la Marche. This Hugues de Lusignan was the va.s.sal of Alphonse, brother of the king. He had always been inclined to revolt, and this inclination was not lessened by the incitement of his wife, the haughty, high-tempered Isabelle d'Angouleme, widow of King John of England. To have started as Queen of England, on an equal footing with her contemporary, Blanche de Castille, to have seen her miserable husband gradually lose his rich possessions in France, and to find herself now merely a countess and compelled to do homage to a son of her rival,--this must have been the very wormwood of bitterness for Isabelle. The secret agent of Queen Blanche writes a very elaborate account of the conduct of Isabelle and Hugues in 1242.

Hearing that Hugues had received King Louis and his brother, Alphonse, in her absence, Isabelle carried off part of her property and established herself in Angouleme. For three days she refused to admit her husband to her presence, and when he did appear she lashed him with her tongue in furious fas.h.i.+on: "You miserable man, did you not see how things went at Poitiers, when I had to dance attendance for three days upon your King and your Queen? When at last I was admitted to their presence, there sat the King on one side of the royal bed and the Queen on the other.... They did not summon me; they did not offer me a seat, and that on purpose to humiliate me before the court. There was I, like a miserable, despised servant, standing up in front of them in the crowd. Neither at my entry nor at my exit did they make any show of rising, in mere contempt of me and of you, too, as you ought to have had sense enough to see." After scenes of this kind in the bosom of his family it is not surprising that the unfortunate Comte de la Marche sought the more peaceful atmosphere of the camp, and engaged in a revolt against his sovereign. Louis, however, had little difficulty in bringing him to reason and obtaining another victory over England, whom the rebels had enlisted on their side. "And it was no marvel," says Joinville, writing of this campaign of Saint Louis's, "for he acted according to the advice of the good mother who was with him."

One of the severest trials in the life of this _bonne mere_ was approaching. Louis, always of a delicate const.i.tution, had contracted a fever during the campaign against the Comte de la Marche, and the effects lingered with him until, at the close of 1244, he had a violent recurrence of the attack, accompanied by dysentery. In spite of the tender care of Blanche, his life was despaired of. He lost consciousness and, says Joinville, to whom we shall leave the telling of the story, "was in such extremity that one of the ladies watching by him wished to draw the sheet over his face, and said that he was dead. And another lady, who was on the other side of the bed, would not suffer it, but said that there was still life in him. And as He heard the discussion between these two ladies, Our Lord had compa.s.sion on him, and gave him back his health. And as soon as he could speak he demanded that they give him the Cross; and so it was done. Then the queen, his mother, heard that the power of speech had returned to him, and she showed therefore as great joy as she could. And when she knew that he had taken the Cross, as he himself told her, she showed as great grief as if she had seen him dead."

Blanche's grief was not without cause, for nothing short of the death of this well-beloved son could have caused her the pain that she must endure if he went on the crusade. Not only her age, but the knowledge that he would wish her to stay behind and guard the kingdom for him, precluded all thought of her accompanying him. It meant separation from him on whom she had all her life lavished an affection little short of idolatry. How bitterly must she have regretted encouraging that fervent piety that now led to a sacrifice, in the name of his religion, of all that the king, the son, the husband ought to hold most dear. At a time when, under the persistent efforts of his grandfather, his father, and his mother, the power of the crown had just begun to be firmly established, Louis must reverse all this policy, or rather must make use of it not to the profit of his kingdom but to that of fanatical religious ideals. Blanche was too good a politician not to understand this, and too sensible not to deplore it. Louis's duty lay in France; he had everything to lose, nothing to gain, in a crusade; though Blanche knew too well the relentless doggedness with which he would cling to what he conceived to be his duty to G.o.d, nevertheless she pleaded with him to give up the idea of going on the crusade.

The pleading of his mother and of his wife could not turn Saint Louis from his design, nor was the advice of his councillors more effective.

For three years, however, other matters occupied his attention, though the preparations for his holy war were not forgotten. When these preparations began to be undertaken with more vigor a fresh attempt was made to dissuade him. The Bishop of Paris one day said to him: "Do you remember, sire, that when you received the cross, when you made suddenly and without reflection so momentous a vow, you were weak and troubled in spirit, which took from your words the weight of truth and responsibility? Now is come the time to seek release from this obligation. Our lord, the Pope, who knows the needs of your kingdom, would gladly give you a dispensation from your vow." And then he pointed out the peculiar danger of undertaking such an enterprise in the existing disturbed state of Europe. Blanche was present, watching with anxious countenance the effect of this subtle appeal. "My son, my son!"

she said, "remember how sweet it is to G.o.d to see a son obedient to his mother; and never did mother give her child better counsel than I give you. You have no need to trouble yourself about the Holy Land; if you will but stay in your own land, which will prosper in your presence, we shall be able to send thither more men and more money than if your country were suffering and weakened by your absence." Louis listened silently, thought earnestly a moment, and then replied: "You say that I was not myself when I took the cross. Very well, since you so wish, I lay it aside; I give it back to you." With his own hand he took the sacred symbol from his shoulder and surrendered it to the bishop. Then, while those present had hardly recovered from their delight and astonishment, he spoke again: "Friends, now surely I am not lacking in sense, I am not weak or troubled in spirit; I demand my cross again; He Who knows all things knows that no food shall pa.s.s my lips until the cross is placed once more on my shoulder."

There was no turning aside a man of such character; the preparations for the crusade went on, and Saint Louis raised the Oriflamme at Saint-Denis on June 12, 1248. We shall not tell of the crusade or of Louis's characteristic conscientiousness in seeing, before he left, that reparation was made for every act of injustice done in his kingdom, for which purpose he sent out a commission charged with holding an inquest in all parts of France. The inevitable day of separation came, the day to which Blanche looked forward as the last upon which she would see her son. She accompanied him for the first three or four days of his journey, which lay through southern France to Aigues-Mortes, and at Corbeil she received the regency, with power to act in the government through what agents she pleased and in what way she pleased. The guardians.h.i.+p of his children, too, Louis left to Blanche. At Cluni came the scene of final separation; the grief of Blanche can be imagined, and words would fail to help us to a realization of its intense sincerity.