Louis: The French Prince Who Invaded England (35 page)

What is noticeable about these occasions is that none of them resulted in an atrocity: perhaps Louis could see that any rash action due to his anger could have long-lasting consequences and he was able to rein himself in accordingly. Conversely, those occasions when barbarity was committed by him or in his name appear to have been the result of a more cool-headed decision to punish or to make an example, rather than of a wild bout of temper. The towns of Flanders were burned in 1213 to send a message to the count who had betrayed his king; Sandwich was razed in 1217 both as a punishment for changing sides in the war and as a tactical manoeuvre so it could not aid the enemy; and the horrific, unjustifiable massacre at Marmande in 1219 was intended to spread terror in the region so that others might surrender without the need for battle. In committing these acts (or in allowing them to be committed in his name) Louis does not appear to best advantage, but he was behaving in a manner which would have been understood at the time.

It is difficult to offer a proper assessment of Louis’s reign in France as a whole as it was so short. Given that he had more or less achieved one of his lifetime aims – the curtailment of Plantagenet influence – that he was making progress towards the other, the subduing of southern France, and that he left an enlarged and stable realm which survived inheritance by a minor, we can safely characterise his reign as good, if not yet great. Whether he might have gone on to achieve greatness had he lived longer, we will never know.

Louis was known in his own time as a fearless and just man; even those chroniclers who are hostile to him cannot find many grounds on which to criticise him on a personal level. And among those who are more sympathetic towards him the opinions are remarkably similar across the years. The only surviving manuscript of the work of Nicholas de Bray is, unfortunately, incomplete and so we do not know what he wrote about Louis after his death, but other epitaphs bear a resemblance to each other: the Minstrel of Reims says that ‘this Louis was brave and hardy and combative and had the heart of a lion’, while the
Life of Louis VIII
concludes that: ‘During his lifetime King Louis was as brave as a lion towards his enemies, and marvellously peaceable towards the good.’

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But, as the Minstrel of Reims continues in his narration of the aftermath of Louis’s demise, let us now leave the dead in peace and speak of the living.

Blanche, in Paris in the autumn of 1226, had heard that Louis was on his way back from Languedoc, the southern campaign terminated for now; she was no doubt preparing to welcome him home when the dreadful news arrived. Her grief was extreme, worsened by the fact that she now found herself in a very difficult position both personally and politically. On a personal level the situation was catastrophic: she had lost her beloved husband, the man to whom she had been happily married for more than two-thirds of her life since she was twelve years old; she had seven young children (one of whom, baby Stephen, would die within months, compounding her grief) and was pregnant with an eighth who would never know his father. But more than this, her eldest son, the new king, was a minor, and this was a dangerous political situation in the thirteenth century. Once more the Minstrel of Reims is sympathetic to her plight: ‘her children were small and she was a lone woman in a foreign country. She had to outwit a number of the great lords.’ For the nobles of France were not all in agreement with Louis’s deathbed decision that the queen mother was the best choice for regent, and trouble lay ahead. Blanche would need to have her wits and her courage about her in the weeks, months and years to come – she had no time to mourn her loss and could not allow her grief to overwhelm her.

At first glance it might seem a little odd that the regency was left to a woman when there were male relatives available. But there were good reasons for this and there was plenty of precedent: for example, we will recall that when Philip Augustus departed on his crusade in 1190 he left his mother, Queen Adela, in charge; Richard the Lionheart of England had also confided the rule of his kingdom to Eleanor of Aquitaine during his numerous absences from England. The rule of a mother during a minority was also a well-established custom among the nobility of France: Blanche of Champagne had been in control of that county until her son Theobald came of age, and the current duke of Burgundy was the child Hugh IV, again under the tutelage and rule of his mother. On a more personal level, it was for obvious reasons not entirely safe to entrust the care of a boy king to a paternal male relative who might himself have a claim to the throne; a mother, on the other hand, could be relied upon to do her utmost in the cause of a son. Nobody could doubt that Blanche would devote herself wholeheartedly to the care and guidance of young Louis, and all was not black politically: ‘foreign’ she might have been, but as a member of the Castilian royal family she was above internal French rivalries; she was not allied to any of the great French houses and would therefore not be suspected of trying to favour one at the expense of the others.

Young Louis had not been crowned in the lifetime of his father, although this is not surprising given that he was only twelve: Louis VIII had evidently expected to live much longer, and (despite or perhaps because of his own experience) may have been intending to return to the tradition of crowning the junior king once his son was a little older. But the lack of prior coronation meant that it was all the more imperative that the crown should now be set firmly upon Louis IX’s head, and that he should be anointed with the holy oil as the one true king of France. And so mother and son found themselves riding towards Reims very shortly after the funeral. On the way, young Louis was knighted at Soissons; if he was to be the first knight of the armies of France, as symbolised in part of the coronation ritual, he needed to have received the accolade himself, regardless of his youth.

The coronation took place as anticipated on 29 November 1226. There was no archbishop of Reims, as William de Joinville had died only a few weeks beforehand and the see was still vacant, so the ceremony was performed by the bishop of Soissons, assisted by Guérin, chancellor and bishop of Senlis. We may imagine Blanche’s mixed feelings as she sat in the same throne in the same cathedral as she had done at the great moment of triumph only three years previously, but this time at the side of her son rather than her husband. Once Louis had been crowned, the nobles swore oaths of allegiance not only to him but also to Blanche as regent, thus publicly recognising her position.

Notable by their absence from the coronation were three great lords who were to stir up much strife during the next few years. The names of two of them could have been predicted; the other came as something of a shock.

Theobald, count of Champagne, was the first. It is probable that he was banned from attending the ceremony on Blanche’s orders, either because of rumours still circulating about his suspected poisoning of Louis, or (more likely) due to his undoubted desertion of the army while the king was still in the field at Avignon, which the widowed queen could not forgive. The second was Hugh de Lusignan, count of La Marche and Angoulême, who, perhaps sensing a chance for gain, had lived up to his reputation as a man of loose loyalties and had thrown in his lot with Theobald. But it was the third absentee who was the surprise, the major blow to the grieving queen: Peter de Dreux, the duke of Brittany.

Peter had been one of Louis’s closest companions since their boyhood; he had ridden with him on numerous campaigns, including to England, and had risked his own and his brother’s life for the royal cause at Nantes in 1214. As the younger son of the count of Dreux his expectations may not have been high originally, but his loyalty had seen him rise via his marriage to become one of the most powerful noblemen in France. Alas for Blanche and young Louis, it would appear that his ambition did not stop there. The dukedom of Brittany, previously held by members of the Plantagenet family, had long been associated with the earldom of Richmond in England, and Peter had entered into discussions with Henry III about the possibility of paying homage to him (thus effectively returning Brittany to English overlordship and removing it from French territory, which could have serious ramifications) in order to gain that title and its lands. Indeed, he may well have started these negotiations while Louis VIII was still alive, going behind the back of his king and liege lord. In an age which valued brotherhood-in-arms and chivalric companionship, this duplicity is all the more shocking. Louis’s distress and anger, had he found out about this betrayal by his lifelong friend, would have been terrible.

Peter now joined Theobald and Hugh, and they were instrumental in fomenting resistance to Blanche’s regency and even to young Louis’s kingship in the name of Philip Hurepel, the new king’s twenty-six-year-old uncle who had been overlooked as regent. This was potentially dangerous: as the complex recent situations in England and the Holy Roman Empire had demonstrated, the claims of an adult male if he had enough resources to back him up could push aside those of a woman or child who had a better blood claim. In this case it appears that although banners were being raised in the name of Philip Hurepel, he was not actually the instigator of any revolt and did not press a claim to the throne himself. If he had done, it is difficult to see what he might have achieved: Philip Augustus’s bigamous marriage to Philip Hurepel’s mother meant that there were always going to be questions over his legitimacy, and this was France, not England – the Capetian dynasty was by now so well established that there was no real challenge to the idea that the eldest son of the previous king should inherit the throne.

Over the next seven years Blanche – who, as one modern historian has opined, could really be classed among the kings of France rather than the queens – and her son Louis IX rode at the head of their loyal forces to subdue various uprisings from the rebels and their backers across the Channel. They were supported by the other nobles of France, including Robert III, count of Dreux, the last of Louis’s boyhood companions, who had no hesitation in declaring for his king against his brother Peter. Simultaneously Blanche dealt with the remainder of the Cathar question: in 1229 she set her seal to the Treaty of Paris which officially ended the Albigensian crusade after Raymond VII of Toulouse submitted unconditionally to her and to the Church.

Any lingering resistance in the name of Philip Hurepel came to an end in 1234 when he was killed, accidentally, in a tournament. In the same year Theobald of Champagne became king of Navarre and so lost interest in internal conflicts in France; Peter de Dreux, the main instigator of the rebellion, realised his cause was hopeless, and he submitted to Blanche, offered up a number of his castles in recompense, and took a vow to go on crusade to the Holy Land. Blanche had triumphed over the enemies of her son, those supposed friends who had betrayed her husband’s memory.

The regency was a success. Louis VIII’s legacy in France had been to leave his realm in a strong position politically, administratively, militarily and financially, and to leave his dynasty in uncontested possession of the crown, despite the precarious circumstances. The sudden death of a king from dysentery, leaving a minor as his heir, had far less catastrophic consequences for France in 1226 than it had done for England a decade earlier.

Louis IX was declared of full age in April 1235, when he turned twenty-one; at this stage he took over personal rule, though he still relied on his mother for advice, and indeed left her as regent again when he went on crusade to the east. Blanche never remarried; she died in 1252 at the age of sixty-four and was buried at Maubuisson Abbey, so her remains escaped the desecration of St Denis in 1793. Louis IX ruled peacefully and justly until 1270 and passed the throne safely to Philip III, the eldest surviving son of his eleven children by his queen, Margaret of Provence. Philip in turn would be succeeded by his own eldest son, and the Capetian dynasty continued its direct father–son line into the fourteenth century.

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In England, meanwhile, the now-adult Henry III and his advisers had been keeping a close eye on developments across the Channel, hoping to regain both the lands conquered by Louis in 1224 and those lost to Philip Augustus before that. France under its warrior king Louis VIII was just too powerful for any meaningful attempt to be made, but Henry took advantage of Louis IX’s minority and the support of Peter de Dreux to mount an invasion in 1230; it was easily repelled by Blanche’s forces. A further attempt in 1242 was similarly unsuccessful, Louis IX by now at the head of his own army. Henry, who had grown into a devout man, came to recognise the piety and saintliness which Louis demonstrated during his life and reign, and the two of them – of a similar age and aided by their marriages to two sisters, Margaret and Eleanor of Provence – ended up enjoying a relatively cordial relationship.

Louis VIII’s legacy to the English in France was thus the difficulty they found in trying to regain any lands there: thanks to his conquest of La Rochelle and the Poitou region, the English held no port further north than Bordeaux, which meant that any attempted landing on French soil involved a long sea journey along the French Atlantic coast and then, potentially, a hard march through well-defended French lands.

And what of Louis’s legacy in England? He had, after all, come very close to emulating the feat of William the Conqueror. However, despite initial success he did not replicate William’s final victory and his campaign was ultimately in vain. The Barnwell annalist, a sober monastic chronicler, puts it down simply to the fact that God was not on Louis’s side, for how else could he have failed after gaining so much support and controlling such a large proportion of the country? Before sceptical readers dismiss this out of hand we should note that the effect of Louis’s excommunication – the proof, to many contemporaries, that God did not support his cause – may have had a more substantial effect on morale than might seem thinkable now; added to this was the possibility that the papacy might step in to a greater extent to defend England (its own fief) if necessary. It would be difficult indeed for Louis to win a throne with the spiritual might and the practical resources of the papacy arrayed against him. Louis’s status outside the Church contrasted with his opponents’ positioning as crusaders against him, enjoying the support of the papal legate Guala (who had a violent antipathy to Louis); they could feel buoyant and confident that God was supporting them.