Louis: The French Prince Who Invaded England (34 page)

The testament was complete. Louis would never see his beloved family again and he could do nothing more for them except to pray that they would survive his loss.

The doctors apparently had one last ploy. In a possibly apocryphal tale told by William of Puylaurens, they decided that such an excess of chastity as the king had demonstrated while he was on campaign was hindering his recovery. The solution was for him to deflower a virgin, so they found a suitable young woman and placed her in his bed while he was asleep. When Louis awoke he demanded to know what she was doing there; upon hearing the explanation he thanked her but declined, as he would rather die than commit a mortal sin and live as an adulterer who dishonoured his wife in such a way. Faithful to Blanche until the end, his mind remained clear enough for him to make a confession and receive absolution before he breathed his last on 8 November 1226.

At the age of thirty-nine, Louis was dead.

CHAPTER TEN

LEGACY

T
HERE WAS SILENCE
.

Louis had reigned over France for just three years and three months, dying in his prime too young, too soon, too suddenly, and the consequences for the realm could be serious.

The first considerations for those of the king’s advisers who were present were practical: the body must be dealt with before putrefaction set in. Louis’s entrails and heart were removed and buried in the abbey church at Montpensier (since destroyed); this may sound somewhat macabre but it was not unusual for the bodies of medieval kings to be divided in this way and the honour of their burial distributed among different places. His body was then embalmed to preserve it temporarily, wrapped in cloth, sewn into a leather covering, and placed in a coffin ready for the slow and sorrowful journey back to Paris.

Decisions needed to be made, decisions which would normally be left to those of higher rank. However, as neither the chancellor nor any of the great peers of the realm was present, those who had attended the dying king were forced to take action themselves. They had sworn to crown young Louis, and under the circumstances speed was of the essence: there was no time to send word to Paris to consult on the best date for the coronation as this would cause unwanted delay. Instead the bishops and nobles set the date for 29 November 1226 – just three weeks after Louis’s death, almost the minimum which could be managed given the travel times involved in contacting the lords and then their journeys to Reims – and sent out invitations there and then.

News of the king’s death travelled to Paris faster than his body, and the funeral was planned and ready to take place almost as soon as the cortège arrived. Louis was laid to rest on 15 November 1226, his body interred next to that of Philip Augustus at St Denis, the traditional burial place for French monarchs. Nobody could have predicted that the funeral of the son would follow so quickly after that of the father, and the grief of the mourners was intense.

And there, as Louis went to his eternal rest amid the tears of his family and friends, his story should have ended. But there was to be a sad addendum; he was not to be left in peace. In 1793 the French Revolutionary government, having executed their present king, turned their attention to the monarchs of the past and all the royal tombs at St Denis were broken into. The bodies were exhumed, thrown with deliberate carelessness into a ditch dug on the north side of the church, and covered in lime. Louis’s grave did not escape the desecration, but before it was disposed of his body became the subject of a study by Alexandre Lenoir, an archaeologist and historian who made notes on what he discovered. Once the coffin was opened he found the corpse wrapped in cloth of gold; underneath it was still in the leather covering which had been sewn around the body shortly after death. Inside this the skeleton was well preserved, and Lenoir was able to confirm that Louis had indeed been small and slender as per contemporary descriptions. On the king’s head was a simple diadem, and in his hand the remnants of a wooden sceptre, no doubt all that could be found of royal dignity in the rush to deal with his body far away from home. Lenoir was allowed to make a drawing of the corpse – a drawing which still exists and is now in the Louvre museum – but once this was complete Louis was taken away and tossed into the ditch along with his father, forty other kings, thirty-two queens and various other royal family members from throughout the ages. The only royal remains at St Denis to escape the desecration were those of Louis’s son St Louis IX, whose bones had been carefully exhumed and transferred to a reliquary elsewhere upon his canonisation in 1297.

When the monarchy was eventually restored in France after the Revolution the ‘Capetian ditch’ was dug up once more, but the bodies and the bones it contained were so deteriorated and mixed together that it was impossible to tell who was who. They were all tumbled into four great coffins, black and embossed with fleurs-de-lys, which were placed in the crypt at St Denis. Plaques were erected around the crypt listing those reinterred; one of the names carved there is Louis VIII, the only indicator of his physical resting place.

* * *

Louis was a man of both extraordinary energy and extraordinary patience. He loved his wife and his family and respected his father, but he was not content to stay at home, sit still and let events take their course around him; he needed to be at the centre of the action, and if that action was martial then so much the better. He was never happier than when he was on campaign, but he was able to temper his knightly fervour with good sense and leadership. None of this is contested, but over the years these basic facts have become embroidered, particularly by two persistent misconceptions about Louis: first, that he was at loggerheads with his father for much of the time; and, second, that he was sickly and suffered from ill-health throughout his life. Neither is true, or at least not to the extent previously thought.

In terms of any conflict with Philip Augustus, there was certainly no hint of this in public at the time, which naturally leads us to question whether Louis was genuinely content with his lot or whether he was putting on a very convincing mask. If the latter then he was an excellent actor indeed; it would be very difficult to keep a seething resentment hidden for so long – almost two decades from Louis reaching adulthood until the death of his father – and given how closely their lives were chronicled, we might expect to see some hint of discontent in at least one of the contemporary sources. But what we find, as we have seen, is the two men operating in tandem, Louis as Philip’s ‘very dear and faithful eldest son’, Philip confirming the agreements Louis makes, Louis working on behalf of his father, and Louis retaining his father’s advisers once he became king. They were dissimilar in character but they shared many of the same goals, even if they preferred to work towards them in different ways. Later writers have inferred that the often difficult positions in which Louis was placed by his father cannot possibly have been palatable to him, and that he therefore must have harboured a deep resentment, but it seems probable that Louis – devout and dutiful as well as skilled in combat – did not have the wild personal ambition of Henry the Young King or Richard the Lionheart which led them to rebel against their father, Henry II. Rather, he was content in his role as heir to the throne as it meant that he was able to undertake his favoured military activities with greater freedom, leaving the politics and the talking – at which he was less adept – to Philip.

With regard to stories of lifelong illness, we should note that if a myth is repeated often enough it appears to become a fact, and this is what has happened here: later commentators only mention it because earlier ones did, without explaining why. When we look at the actual evidence put forward for Louis’s supposed ill-health, we find it distils itself into four elements: he was ill with a stomach complaint, possibly dysentery, when he was four years old; he was kept well guarded in the royal household when he was a child; he was small and thin; and he died of dysentery. All of these need to be examined more closely before any general pronouncement on his health is made.

In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, childhood ailments were overwhelmingly common, and Louis’s falling sick at one point does not necessarily imply a propensity for illness. Indeed, the opposite could be argued: at a time when large numbers of children died from such ailments, Louis survived, which implies he was robust enough to fight it off. There are no other mentions of sickness in his youth; his education and chivalric training do not appear to have been disrupted. And after the travails which had attended the wait for a male heir for the dynasty (both for Philip and for Louis VII before him) was it not natural that Louis should be well guarded as he was the only son, indeed the only child for most of his childhood? Louis was eleven by the time his half-sister Marie was born, and Philip Hurepel did not appear until Louis was thirteen, at which point his household of other youths was formed and his training became more serious.

The evidence that Louis was small and thin is irrefutable; however, this does not in and of itself point to ill-health – it is perfectly possible to be of slight stature while remaining healthy. His military exploits show that his size did not prevent him from participating fully in knightly life. It was of course those same military exploits that led to his death, but anyone could be struck down by illness in the unsanitary conditions of a medieval siege camp, and dysentery was a frequent cause of mortality. The death some years later from the same disease of Edward the Black Prince – also among the greatest warriors of his own age and the military son and long-time heir of a strategist father – is not generally used to demonstrate that he was weak or illness-prone. Nearer Louis’s own time, Richard the Lionheart was ill to the point of death at Acre in 1191, and he eventually died of blood poisoning in a siege camp: historians do not tend to put this forward as evidence that he was sickly throughout his life.

And once again, there is no
contemporary
evidence of Louis being in continual ill-health. If he was then we might expect to find mention of it in the chronicles and other official records; perhaps the odd reference to a journey being delayed a day or two because Louis was not well enough to travel, or his absence from a meeting as he was not able to leave his bed, or a description of him struggling with the weight of his armour. But we do not. Instead we can use contemporary evidence to reconstruct an active life, that of a man full of energy who loved the knightly life of riding and fighting. We might even characterise Louis as restlessly driven: ever ready – too ready in some cases – to leap into his saddle and lead his men from the front. He had two great quests in his life, which were, firstly, the reduction of Plantagenet power and the corresponding increase in Capetian fortunes; and, secondly, the conquering of the heretical region of southern France. To these ends he exhibited a single-minded determination and a willingness not to be put off by setbacks, political, personal, military or otherwise.

Although perhaps not quite as intellectually gifted as his father, Louis demonstrated an interest in academic learning, particularly that of a religious nature, and he took the tenets of the contemporary Church to heart. He was, as we have seen, faithful to his wife; he was not given to drunkenness or gluttony; and although he dressed as a man of his rank, he was not ostentatious or flamboyant. He did not waste his time on display, hosting no grand feasts (other than the one following his coronation, which was to be expected) or tournaments. Equally, he was not an ascetic and did not allow his faith to remove him from day-to-day life – he was all business, all of the time. Many of his motives for action stemmed from his religious faith but he was, unlike his son, never going to be considered a saint: he was too human in his tempers and too concerned with military matters. When in the summer of 1216 he was faced with the choice of submitting to and reconciling with the Church or continuing his quest for the English crown, the latter took priority.

In an age when the rages of other kings were well documented, Louis remained in control of himself – most of the time. It took some provocation for him to lose his temper: if we look at the occasions we have highlighted in these pages, we see that the common factor seems to be frustration, and particularly frustration that his opportunities for military advancement were being curtailed. He certainly lost his temper with the papal legate Guala at the Assembly of Melun in April 1216, when Guala did his best to prevent Louis from invading England; he became enraged outside Dover later that year when the siege was going nowhere and the situation was holding him up from making gains elsewhere. The viscount of Melun was the target of his ire in 1217 for not posting adequate guard when the fortified ship was destroyed, thus weakening Louis’s position ahead of the ensuing combat; and Theobald of Champagne was on the receiving end of a tirade when he wanted to leave the siege of Avignon in 1226.