Introductory material (continued 3)

The foundations of the work were below him, as were its vast surrounding ditch and its first low containing wall. But the turrets and the battlements, with their wooden, jutting platforms, stood immensely above him, and higher still that enormous central keep which was the stake of the entire concern. It stood inhumanly large up against the keen March air, and the wind blew upon it from down the broad river valley and the distant sea. It had in it all the magnificence of Normandy. Down below, hundreds of feet, where the wide river ran, the Seine, he could see the burnt timber houses of Lesser Andelys, surrounded by its wall which he had stormed months before; the ruins also of the outworks upon the island by which he had approached across the stream. He heard, but did not see, the carts in perpetual rumble and the footmen tramping across his bridge of boats below. He heard the hammering of wood and the sawing of stone in his own lines, and in his mind he recalled, as he so sat, the long business of the siege.

Here was the test! This place, once fallen, he had forced the gate of Normandy, the last province which could defy his arms and his sovereignty. For now three hundred years and more it had been a kingdom almost apart from his own, though in feudal tenure responsible to him and to his house. John the Angevin, last Duke of Normandy, no longer the young man but still the great soldier, had abandoned the Normans—now five months ago. He was back in England. And here, before Philip, Roger of Lascy, with his superb little garrison, was still holding out, and until the castle fell there was no passing north into the Caux country or into the Calvados, no seizing of rich Caen or of Rouen, the mistress of all that land.

Philip, the king, remembered the long adventure. The advance up the wide valley of the Seine until, a march away, he first saw, whiter than the white scars of chalk on which it stood, the splendid new work of Richard gleaming far off like a challenge. He remembered the storming of the outworks on the island, the laborious fighting into Andelys, the rush of the refugees into the castle. He remembered the abominable winter, and his alignment of the strict blockade: the sentries calling to each other round the lines through the long, frozen nights. He remembered, not with pleasure, that awful day in which Roger of Lascy had turned out all the useless mouths, the refugees from the town below—the old men, and the children, and the women; their helpless panic, stumbling to and fro between the outer wall and his own lines; their hideous famine, and the blood, and at last his own clemency, and his permission that they should pass through and be fed.

Now the first breath of spring had come, and still the strict blockade was of no avail. Five months had gone, and nothing had been done save to contain that little band within, which still mounted guard surely in regular fashion, whose taunts could still be heard in the rough jibes shouted by night against his sentinels, and whose arrows, when they went down wind, sometimes just reached his lines, and had cost him men here and there. As he sat there he determined, for all great odds and risks, that an assault must be delivered even against so tremendous a body of resistance. Much lay in that decision; but Philip, the soldier, was a man who would arrive at a plan with increasing swiftness of judgment, and, having arrived at it, would as suddenly execute his desire.

There went through the lines the order for the attack, and the whole aspect of the camps surrounding the castle, one great oval linked by continuous works, was changed. The business was now no longer to starve but to destroy—and the murder of Arthur of Brittany should be avenged in violence.

First they made a great way, very broad and hardened everywhere with stone, along which the engines and the wooden towers could be hauled. Then, at night, they threw into the first outer main ditch earth and faggots from the woods on the hill above and all the refuse of the camp, and they began that week to struggle against the corner bastion of the outer wall. It was undermined in its foundations—the sappers’ work defended by vigorous fire from the causeway against the battlements of the tower, and by the repeated shocks from the catapults and the rams, until, in some few days, the hard chalk rock having been tunnelled thoroughly, down came a whole segment of the outer wall, and the first circuit was in the hands of the king. Next, in the same fashion, was the second circuit attempted; and this, far less extended, concentrating its men more thoroughly, resisted with greater power. The engines did nothing against it. It seemed that the assault must fail.

Now there was in King Philip’s army a soldier called Bogis, an obscure man loving ruse, and he found that in certain wooden outworks of the place there was an entry to be made by those who could cunningly avoid the sentinels, and he, with a small band, went in there. But just as they thought to hold this entry, the besieged caught them, and, as being the quickest way to drive them out, set fire to this little building. It was a ruinous plan. Both had they—the besieged themselves—to retire from the fierceness of the flame, and also they were, by the effect of the fire when it was over and done, left with a gap in their defences, so that though the first intruders had been beaten back, Philip’s men could pour through the charred breach.

They were at the third wall, the high wall round the donjon keep, and this was taken by mere strength and at vast loss and at storm. But of Lascy’s very loyal band not two hundred remained, and all of them defending the wall, so that when they were cut off by the many thousands of Philip Augustus, the king, they could not post even a rearguard to defend the rush into the keep itself, though that was but a few yards behind; and so, upon the Saturday, the 6th of March, 1204, those that had not fallen in the fight were taken each separately between the wall and the tower. And the Saucy Castle, Richard the Lion Heart’s eldest daughter, so young and so strong, had fallen.

It was the greatest feat of arms, almost, of the Middle Ages. It was to the French monarchy and the re-constitution of the land what Wattignies, six hundred years later, was to be for the defence and the survival of the Revolution. It was the opening of Normandy and the advent of all the host into the rich province of the north; the most stalwart, the most lengthily organized of all the feudal things that had proposed to withstand the re-integration of France. Through that breach in Château Gaillard’s wall, as through a break in a dike, the flood of France poured through, armed, into the deep pasturage, the loaded wealth, the granaries, and the orchards of Normandy. And with Normandy so held under, that summer France was made again. And Philip Augustus, the king, became something almost more than a king as kings were accounted in that time. For he became a strict ruler over not one fief or two of his own, but over fief after fief that had formerly been bound only by plea and service, not in subjection, to his fathers. And it almost seemed as though Rome were returning.

This conqueror so conquering had about him, as he entered the Norman towns after his victory, a physical character of conquest, and there was a monk away in Tours, a canon of St. Martin’s there, who saw him and knew him, and tells us well enough what he was:⁠—

“A man high coloured, of a nature driven to good cheer, and to women and to wine, large to his friends, sparing to those who displeased him, an engineer, in faith Catholic, cautious for the future, stubborn in a resolution formed; he judged at once and directly. Fortune loved him, though he was too careful of his life. He was easily both roused and appeased. He loved to be served by the many and to think himself a tamer of the proud. Of the Church he was a good protector, and he nourished the poor.”

THE CONVERSATION OF THE KING

(1245–1250)

St. louis, the king, loved quiet speech, meeting the speech of others. He loved rallying and conversed with all as though with peers. Pomp wearied him, even where it was necessary for the dignity of so great a state. Those jests which complete a question and leave no more to be said he was amused to hear. Also he himself observed men with very great wisdom, often silently; and his eyes, which were a little weary even in youth from too much questioning of himself and of the world, and from too much business of fighting of every kind within and without, were always luminous and often smiled. His body, which was spare, exercised by continual chivalry and by the weight of arms, but a little wasted by solicitude, by mortification, and by occasional disease, suited his gesture and the holy irony with which he salted life.

All those, or nearly all, who came about the king—men themselves, for the most part, much grosser in temper or much less subtle in observation—felt this play of his intelligence upon theirs, and when he was dead remembered it most vividly. Nor were the words of St. Louis and his manner things very conscious. They surrounded his personality like an air, impossible to define, easy to taste. They were a perfume. Some who thus received his influence wrote down a little clumsily what they remembered, and the things they wrote down, after so many catastrophes and such vast changes in Europe, stand to-day quite neat and clear. So that when you read of St. Louis it is like looking out of a little window, unglazed, in a tower, and seeing through it, framed in the stones of the wall, a well-ordered, sunlit landscape, particular, vivid, and defined; full of small brilliant things, exact in outline.

One day in that good thirteenth century, when all was new, amid the new white buildings, upon the new ordered roads, when even the grass was new (for it was Pentecost), the king, Louis the Saint, was in Corbeil with eighty of his knights and certain others of his train. And when he had eaten the morning meal (which was at nine o’clock, for that was their hour), he went down to the field below the chapel to speak at the door with Count John of Brittany, and with him was the Seneschal of Champagne and others, younger and older men. And as the groups stood there at the door in the spring sunlight, treading the spring grass, mown smooth, Robert of Cerbon (the same that founded the great college of Sorbonne, so that his name stands everywhere to-day for learning) took the young seneschal’s coat and pulled him by it towards the king. And the seneschal said,⁠—

“What would you with me, Master Robert?”

Robert said,⁠—

“I wish to ask you this: If the king were to sit himself down in this field, and you were to sit down without leave on the same bench, and higher than he, would you not be to blame?”

“Yes,” said the seneschal, “I should.”

“Then,” said Robert, “you are to blame now. For even now you are far more nobly clad than the king, for your coat is of many colours, and embroidered nobly with green, and the king does not go so clothed.”

Louis, hearing this dispute, smiled at them but did not speak. And the seneschal answered sharply,⁠—

“Master Robert, saving your grace, I am not to blame at all, though I do dress in ’broidery and in green. For this cloak was left to me by my father and my mother, who were noble. But you are to blame. For you are the son of a serf, and your mother was a serf as well, and you have given up the clothes that were left you by your father and your mother, and you are dressed in rich woollens much grander than the king’s.”

And the seneschal, growing livelier still, took Robert of Cerbon’s coat, and took the hem of the king’s coat, and held them up side by side, and said triumphantly,⁠—

“There! See if I do not speak the truth. Look how much grander is the stuff you wear than the stuff that clothes the king.”

Then King Louis spoke, and first he put his hand upon the sward and sat him down at the gate of the chapel, and said to his sons, who were there, young men,⁠—

“Come, sit down beside me on the grass that we may hear each other the plainer.”

And they answered,⁠—

“Sire, we would not dare.”

Then he said to the seneschal,⁠—

“Seneschal, do you sit so.”

And so did the seneschal. He sat so close that their two cloaks touched.

Then said St. Louis to his sons,⁠—

“You have done very wrong in that you did not obey at once, you, my sons.”

And then he said to the seneschal,⁠—

“You did wrong to speak thus to Master Robert, and when I saw how shamed you made him, I at once knew that it was my business to defend him; and as to dress, this is my counsel: you all of you should dress well and decently, in order that your women may love you more, and that your household may respect you; for the wise man says that we ought to dress ourselves and to arm ourselves in such a manner that neither shall the good men of this world blame us for extravagance nor the young blades for meanness.”

And upon another time, when they were sailing upon the sea, it being night, the ship was struck violently and lay over, and the storm rose so that it was thought she could not live. Then St. Louis, understanding that death was at hand, went as he was, half-clad, to where the Blessed Sacrament was kept, and there expected death.

But when the storm as suddenly abated, and the morning was come, and danger was passed, he asked by what name that wind was called which had nearly wrecked the King of France and all his people. To which the master mariner answered that this wind was no great wind, not one of the major winds of the world, not one of the cardinal winds, but a little side wind that hardly had a name, though some called it the little Gerbin wind.

When St. Louis heard this, he said to one of those about him,⁠—

“See how great is God, and how He shows us His power. Since one of His little unimportant winds, which hardly has a name, all but destroyed the King of France, his children, and his wife, and all his household, in peril of the sea.”

St. Louis, the king, loved also to tell this tale:⁠—

There was a master in divinity, one who had disputed for the Faith, and he came to Bishop William of Paris in great distress, and said that he was full of doubt, and that his heart would not bend to believe in the Sacrament of the Altar, and that this mood, sent by the Enemy, pressed him sore.

To whom Bishop William answered,⁠—

“And does this please you?”

To which the argufier answered vehemently,⁠—

“Not at all! I am tormented thereby!”

“Sir,” said the bishop again, “would you be pleased that these new doubts should conquer?”

“I would rather,” said the poor man, “that my limbs should be torn from my body.”

“Why, then,” said Bishop William, “I will give you a parable. You know that the King of France wars now with the King of England, and that on the front of this war stands the castle of Rochelle, which is in the country of Poitiers. Now, if the king had given you Rochelle to guard, upon the edges of the war where the fighting is, but to me the hill of Laon, peaceably in the heart of his kingdom, which would be honour most—to whom would he give the greater reward?”

“To the man,” said the doubter, “who held Rochelle.”

“Well, then,” said Bishop William, “let me tell you that my heart is not even like the hill of Laon, but rather like the little hill of Montlheri, near Paris, with its tower, for I have never doubted at all. So where God gives me in reward one measure, he will give you four.”

St. Louis said that one should never speak ill of any man, and those who listened closely to his talk never remembered his speaking ill of any man; on which account also he would never so much as mention the name of the Devil.

Also one day, when he was in Cyprus, on Crusade, he said to a companion that put water into his wine,⁠—

“Why do you put water into your wine?”

Then that companion, who was a young man, answered,⁠—

“For two reasons. First, because the physicians have warned me to do so; and secondly, because I do not wish to get drunk.”

To which St. Louis answered,⁠—

“You do well. For if you do not learn this custom in youth you will not practise it in age, and if in age you drink your wine unmixed, you will, without doubt, be drunk every evening of your life; which is a horrible thing to see in a valiant man.”

And thinking of this, he said again,⁠—

“Would you be honoured in this world, and then have Paradise?”

And the young man said “Yes.”

Then the king said,⁠—

“This is the rule: Neither say nor do what you would fear that all men should know.”

And another time the king said to this young man, when they were on Crusade in the East,⁠—

“Tell me which you would rather be—a leper, or in mortal sin.”

And the young man, who was afraid to lie to the king, answered,⁠—

“I would much rather have committed thirty or forty mortal sins than be a leper.”

And the king did not answer him; but the next day he said to the young man,⁠—

“Come here and sit at my feet.” Which the young man did, and then St. Louis said, “You spoke yesterday like a wild man in a hurry, for all ills of the body are cured in a little time, when a man dies; but if your soul is tarnished, and you cannot be certain that God has pardoned you, that evil will last for ever as long as God sits in Paradise.”

And then he asked the young man suddenly whether he ever washed the feet of poor men on Maundy Thursday, and the young man answered,⁠—

“Sire, far be it from me to wash the feet of poor men! No! Never will I do this thing!”

And the king said to him,⁠—

“You are wrong again—thinking yourself too grand to do what God did for our enlightenment. Now I pray you, for the love of God and for the love of me, get yourself into the habit of washing poor men’s feet.”

For this king loved all kinds of men, whatsoever kind God had made and Himself loved.

On which account also he would give castles to guard to men that had no claim on him, if they had renown in good deeds. And he would have at his table men of any birth for the same reason. And so seated once at table he said to a companion,⁠—

“Tell me the reasons that a ‘loyal gentleman’ is so good a thing to be called.”

Then they all began disputing and defining, and at the end the king said, giving no reasons and turning to Robert of Cerbon, the same whom he had defended for dressing well,⁠—

“Master Robert, this is what I think upon the matter: I desire to be called by men a ‘loyal gentleman,’ but much more to know that I am one. And if you would leave me that, you might take all the rest; for that title is so great a thing, and so good a thing, that merely to name it fills my mouth.”

THE DEATH OF ST. LOUIS

(August 25, 1270)

There is a little hill, not steep at first sight and seemingly very low, which rises bare enough to-day over the African Sea. The Mediterranean breaks (when in that sheltered gulf it breaks at all) in waves upon a straight and narrow beach at the foot of this hill. Beyond, not farther inland but farther up the coast, another hill, somewhat higher but still insignificant, is joined by a saddle to this first; to the south the land sinks altogether and admits (by a narrow passage) the sea into the broad and stagnant lagoon of Tunis.

A few isolated houses, with no pretense to comfort or to charm, a sort of villas, are to be found upon the quarter of mile of flat by the seashore, and one or two stand on the rise of the little height. Between them, for here a hundred yards and here two hundred, and all around them for half a mile and a mile again, is dry, burnt, dirty land, brown in summer, and empty save for here and there some tufts of coarse grass. Far off, in two great horns or arms leading to the horizon, run the mountain promontories that enclose this bay like a pocket—a side pocket of the sea. A tramway, come from Tunis and spanning the lagoon upon the embankment, runs past the base of the hill at the edge of the sea flat. There is a halt rather than a station, a deserted wooden platform without rooms or master. On that platform is the name of the place, “Carthage”; and thus does a man to-day know where it was that the mighty Carthaginian aristocracy stood, where the ships rode innumerable, where Elissa died, and where the Roman armies, masters at last as armies always are of merchants and the sea, stormed yard by yard the rise to the Citadel.

It was upon this hill and near the summit of it, upon the eastern side which overlooks the water below, at a spot just in front of the place where the Saracens had built out of the blocks of Carthaginian ruin a castle of their own, that the King of France lay dying.

He was in his splendid tent, the baking air within hardly relieved by the lifting of its side and the spraying of water on the canvas. With him were his sons, and round that poor camp-bed were the many men of his house. It was the day after St. Bartholomew’s feast, an awful day of heat in August, when the distant blue of the promontory hills trembled in the air, and when the iron of men’s accoutrements, the rings of the saddle and of the bridle, were burning to the hand, and the baked earth of that low hill camp scorching to the feet.

St. Louis, who thus lay feeble in the last moments of his life, was but fifty-five years of age, nor did even these years fit him well, for his face had always something boyish in it and too tender for the approach of age. But the coming of death was clearly imprinted upon his pinched features, his lips without blood, and the droop of his mouth after so many days of pain. Before his voice fell low, while he yet had the power, he already had ordered a layer of ashes to be spread—as custom was then with pious rich men, that they might pass the more humbly. He said that Philip, his son, who was to reign after him, should be sent to him. This soldier was also weak from illness, but he came; and when that lord had come St. Louis said from his bed many things to this his heir, which things he ordered to be put down in writing as he spoke them, and to be kept as a testament for the governing of the realm of France, of which, years before, he had said to this same son as a child,⁠—

“Rather would I that a Scot should come out of Scotland to govern this land of France than that it should be governed other than in Christian wise.”

Of these things which he gave for commandment to his son he said (among other things),⁠—

“Fair son, the first thing I teach you is that you order your life to the love of God, for lacking this no man can be saved. If God sends you adversity, receive it in patience; if He sends you prosperity, give thanks humbly lest you become worse through pride. Confess thee often, and choose a wise confessor, who can guide you in what should be done, and what should be left undone; follow devoutly with heart and with lips the service of the Church, but especially the Mass, where Consecration is. Keep your heart soft and piteous to the poor, the misshapen, and all men ill at ease, and comfort and aid them within your power. Do not take all to which you have a right. If you have torment in your heart, share it with your confessor or some other man who is discreet. Thus will you bear it more easily. Cherish what is yours and your goods. Allow none to blaspheme God to your face. Be very stiff to insist on justice and on the fulfilment of rights, veering neither left nor right as between your subjects, and follow up the quarrel of the weak until full truth is declared. If you hold anything that you think another’s, give it back at once, and if you are in doubt put the matter into the judgment of a third. Remember the chief townsfolk, for if you will rely on them, the foreigner and the great man within will fear to attack you. Revere your father and your mother in memory, and keep their commandments. Give the benefices of the Church not only to wise men but to clean. Do not fight against Christian men, at least without taking counsel, and in your wars spare the Church and all those who have done you no harm. Lastly, very dear son, have Masses sung for me for my soul, and prayers said throughout your realm, and I pray you put apart for this a fixed sum of all you receive. Dear and fair son, I give you all benedictions, whatever a good father can give his child, and may the Blessed Trinity and all the Saints guard and defend you from all evils, and God give you grace to do His will always, and to have Himself honoured by you so that you and I both, when we have done this mortal life, may be together with Him and praise Him for ever.”

Then added King Louis, “Amen!”

But these are only certain few words out of all that St. Louis said, for the whole that he said was longer by far, and when he had done, it was the full heat of the day, and already he was failing.

The suffering he was in grew greatly. He called for the Sacraments. He received them with a whole mind, as was clearly apparent from this, that they could hear him murmuring the verses of the Psalms as they anointed him; and his younger son, the Count of Alençon, heard him as he whispered in death. He was calling in whispers upon the Saints, and in particular on St. James, the guardian of pilgrims and of men who take long voyages; also he called on St. Denis of France, and on St. Geneviève, who is the Queen of Paris, as all must know. But by this time, noon being long past, all strength was deserting him. He could make some sign, so that they lifted him as he desired down upon the bed of ash where he would pass; and lying there he found the strength to cross one hand above the other on his breast, and so lying backwards, and still looking up to Heaven, he gave up his spirit to God who made us, in that same hour of None—that is three o’clock in the afternoon, which is the hour in which God the Son died upon the Cross for the salvation of the world.

Thus, upon the morrow of the Feast of St. Bartholomew the Apostle, passed wholly out of this world the good King Louis, in the year of the Incarnation of our Lord, the year of Grace 1270. And his bones were put into a chase and buried at St. Denis in France, there in the place where he had chosen his sepulchre. In which place he was laid away in earth, there where God has worked many a miracle for him through his deserts.

THE TEMPLARS

(October 13, 1307)

In that quarter of Paris which lay to the north, built on the old marsh that had been so laboriously drained, and close to the wall which Philip Augustus had thrown round the city a century before, stood wide, with its open spaces and innumerable roofs, the enclosure of the Templars. It was a polity within a polity. No thoroughfare ran through those many acres, and gates admitted outsiders through the walls just as gates similarly guarded admitted outsiders through the walls into that larger unit of the city.

This fortification of stone all about, this high curtain flanked with towers and containing within its defences a whole population, was the very symbol of what the Temple had become. Wherever Christian men (now that the Crusades had failed) still held their own against the pressure of Baltic heathendom or of Islam insolent upon the east and south, there the Temple, over wide estates or commanding great castles armed, boasted its power.

Within the fields of Christendom, far within, wherever long immunity from heathen or from Saracen pressure had half corrupted the life of Christian men, the Temple boasted its wealth or exalted its luxury. In London, in Ravenna, in Aragon—principally here in Paris—everywhere it was the richest and the greatest thing. Christendom counted perhaps one hundred thousand manors; nine thousand were in the hands of the Temple. Saving perhaps the Papacy itself, the enormous wealth of the Jewish financiers, and the Courts of the Angevins and of the Capetians, there was no such strength of gold anywhere in Europe. It was the rival of all of these, and I think their superior.

And this vast Order, as it was thus so enormously strong through gold, was strong also through two other things—ubiquity and noble lineage; and through a third thing it was strong—secrecy. For those younger sons of the great nobles, those many squires and those knights returned from wars in Spain or in the Levant, who formed its not very numerous but dominating body, were bound by so strict a discipline and acted with such solidarity behind their fortress gates in every capital and garrison, that it seemed as though Christendom had now within it some alien body separate from itself, and already half an enemy to the great traditions of the common people and of the universal Church, and of those open public servants, the kings. There was a grumbling and a hatred against Templars everywhere. It had endured for fifty years. What was all this wealth and all this secrecy? Of what sort was the evil that hid behind those walls? And how could there be tolerated in Christendom, whose nature it is to be both homogeneous and free, something so jealously separate and possessed of such unaccredited dominion?

And more: were not these men, by the very tenure of their office, the defenders of the Holy Sepulchre, and had not that charge of theirs been lost? St. Peter men knew, and his successor, and the kings they knew, and the great lords their barons; but what was this other thing established in their midst, irresponsible and giving no man account of their worship—whatever it was they worshipped? Some said it was an idol. All feared it was Satan. The great Orders, the preachers coming right out of the populace, mixing with them, and haranguing in the market-places, were no such peril. The Jews, in the mass small men and poor, some few composing that strong oligarchy of finance which had long dominated Europe, were exposed to constraint; but even those that hated them could jest with them. They were neighbours. The pitiless executors of royal orders were still neighbours too. Whatever had power for whatever reasons over the lives of common men was at least known and openly judged—save only the Temple. All the West in the great mass of its people was inflamed and alarmed, the little children playing in the street put forth their fingers to ward off bad influence whenever two Templars went by. Men loved to repeat whatever tales were told against them; and the pride of their demeanour, sprung from a general nobility of blood as much as from the consciousness of unchallenged strength, exasperated the public soul.

Of all such angers the Capetian monarchy was about to become the spokesman. It was a rôle perilous in the extreme; for to strike at such a thing a man must strike at once with a secrecy equal to its own and with a power almost as universal. Time and again, for a generation past, it had been said that the thing would be done. Philip the Fair, King of France, discovered in his jealousy, and perhaps in his indignation, the strength required for the blow.

That fortress, which stood, an isolated thing, challenging the greater fortress which Paris was, had in its centre, overlooking the many low gables of its outhouses and servants of those who lived under its protection, of its guests, and of its treasure rooms, one great square tower, capped with the high, pointed slate roof which could be seen from miles around. The tower was as tall and as menacing as the huge round tower of the Louvre itself; it lifted above Paris as high as the old belfry of St. Germanus, or as the twin praying towers of Notre-Dame.

Within that tower certain men, among the chiefs of the whole Order, sat upon an autumn evening, feasting. It was a Friday in October, and Friday is a day big with the superstitions or the disasters of Christendom. It was in October, the 13th of the month, and thirteen is a number which Christendom has consented to regard with some similar dread.

But these men suffered no great fear, although so much had been rumoured now year after year. The greater part of them had come to Paris upon the invitation of the king but recently. That Burgundian squire, who was the chief of them all, had only the day before walked, by the king’s own order, in a funeral of the king’s own Court, holding the pall and playing his great part. Certain of these men, the lesser ones, spoke as they sat at meat in this high tower, which in a fashion commanded the city, of the talk that was everywhere about, and the dangers which all might feel to be in the air they breathed. But their timorous suggestions were ridiculed both by the gayer of their colleagues and by the grave reproof of the superiors who sat there eating and drinking with them.

It was not yet quite dark, for this meal of the day was a meal begun at five o’clock as we now reckon time.

“There is such power in the Temple,” said that Burgundian knight, the old Grand Master, gravely, “that if there were but allied with them those others of the Knights Hospitallers which are not of our body, freely could they rule the whole world.”

Then another said, after a little pause,⁠—

“Though the King of France himself should seek to do us some evil, others as powerful as he would stand our sponsors. The King of Aragon was with us when last the dogs growled and dared not bite.”

Then a third, who had a subtle face and spoke in a high voice, said, not pleasantly,⁠—

“Were my own father to seek admission to this Order of ours I would warn him that there are things known to us which should bid him pause, for there are secrets we hold” (and here he smiled at the brethren) “which are known only to God and to the Devil—and to you: three partners.”

As the last man said this, the youngest of the Templars there present showed in his face at once so great a terror and so great a pain that the speaker sneered. That young man was muttering to himself. The Grand Master, speaking still gravely but somewhat sharply from his old lips, asked him what words he was thus saying secretly.

“I was praying to the Mother of God,” said the young man, “and I was thinking of the dead.”

From the streets below, as evening gathered, there came a sound perhaps a little louder than the common sound of the tradesmen at their booths and of the passing crowds, but not much louder. Over the river, in the king’s garden under the new white walls and squat turrets of the palace on the island, a strange gathering had met. There assembled at the king’s express command members chosen from all the guilds and trades of Paris. They sat in rank, some hundreds in number, by parishes and by mysteries beneath certain wooden pulpits that had been hastily set up; and, from these, monks of the preaching Orders cried out in tones of violence and of condemnation, preparing them for what was to come.

“A thing deplorable and horrible to the mind is among us, and a thing terrible to the ears.... Natures that have exiled themselves beyond the bounds of nature, treasonable to the dignity of man. Christ is betrayed, and their initiation is the initiation of devils. They spit upon the Cross.”

Also to these men admissions made by Templars who had betrayed their Order were related, and truth and rumour, and blasphemy and justice, were commingled in these high denunciations.

The congregation of these picked men chosen to spread the thing immediately throughout Paris were ready to believe, and most of what they believed was true.

But still in that high tower, as the darkness came, the chiefs of the Templars were confident and immune. Nothing in Christendom was so strong as they. The noise from the streets beyond their walls grew less, then suddenly rose and was more ordered and, as it were, more menacing. They could catch the regular footfall of men in rank and the clank of metal. Some rose, and going to the deep western windows of their high place, whence the sunset beyond Valerian and the hills of St. Cloud still warmed all the sky, they saw torches lit in the gloaming, and they heard a challenge at the gate. The gate opened, and a troop poured in. It was the king’s men.

No resistance was held or opposed. That great door of the tower itself, which was to stand as the tower stood for so many centuries more (until it fell at the orders of Napoleon), was opened to the order of the king. The men who opened it at first looked at one another. None spoke save the Grand Master, who only said, “Woe to him that betrays his brethren,” and who, as he said it, looked fixedly at the youngest man. Then the worked hanging, which hung by rings before the archway of their room, was drawn clattering aside. The archers entered in a body, and these men were prisoners. Before it was night Philip himself, the king, had taken possession of that tower. He had filled it with his scribes. The treasury was forced. The rolls of parchment were brought forth, the accounts were rendered, and the vast fortunes of that place were beneath the grasp of the monarchy, which would proceed to the full revelation of so many crimes and of the humbling of so much pride, to the torture and to the death.

But later, months and months later, when the last of these men were themselves brought out for public recantation before the cathedral, the old Grand Master, that Burgundian knight, standing forward on the high platform before the thousands of the people to declare the guilt of the Templars to the astonishment of Europe, for all his avowals acted a most memorable part. Loudly he denied whatever wrongs he had himself admitted, whatever blasphemies, whatever obscenities, whatever denials of the Christ. They burnt him with his companions after that relapse (for so they called it); they burnt him on those little islands which lay westward of the palace, and which are now a green place beneath the Place Dauphine; and the awestruck crowd that watched his death whispered among themselves that the man in his agony had summoned to the tribunal of God within one year and a day the Pope and the King. Before the term of that citation had expired the Pope and the King were dead.

BLANCHETAQUE

(August 24, 1346)

[I have corrected Froissart by the map and local knowledge. Hence Boismont, not Oisemont, etc.]

Edward the plantagenet sat in Boismont at his evening meal upon Wednesday, August 23, 1346. He, and his nobles about him. He had marched from Acheux that day, an easy journey. He had found at Boismont, before sunset, the advance guard of his force; now, by evening, it had all concentrated, and the division (as we should call it to-day, for it was about that strength) lay, some in bivouac, some billeted, some under canvas, grouped round the village. The moon was at the full; through the late summer air, still warm, the flood of her light was over those miles of stubble, the open high fields of Picardy.

Edward the Plantagenet, in a chance room of the village, chosen in its best house, still sat at a table well furnished and spoke to those about him of the campaign.

There sat among these who were that night the guests of the king one or two useful upland squires, a little doubtful of their French, a little afraid, therefore, of speaking in such company; but Edward could understand, and could even make himself understood in the local idioms of north England which sounded so harsh in such a place; and, intermingled with the play of French at that table—with the advice and the jests and the courtesy of the greater men—he would demand the opinion and listen carefully to the reply of those few whom he had also bidden to meet him, and who, in their ignorance, hesitated to use the tongue of their rank.

But there was little to learn, either from these few who were easier in their half-Saxon dialects, or from the main group of guests with whom, as with the king, French was the only talk. The position was known, its character was simple, its issue was desperate.

Headquarters take tragedy in war with a strange ease, partly because it is their duty to check emotion, partly because they have to handle affairs as a problem in the void, and to forget the too human reactions of peril; partly because they have grown too familiar with an evil situation, if that situation has arisen gradually and enforced itself; partly because instruction, and the habit of a cultured class, has taught them how futile in such a pass is any waste of energy upon grieving.

In the billets and posts around, the polyglot gossip at the camp fires and hearths, where sergeants saw to the cooking of the common meals, was less restrained; and in Welsh, and in the Saxon or nearly English phrases, in the rare French, in the mingled speech of the men from the sea coast, there was a note always of gloom and sometimes of alarm. Though the solid organization of the sergeants saw to it that the muttering should not spread too far, there could be no mistaking the temper of the troops. They knew, by that curious unexplained process through which the common soldier absorbs a position which he could not understand from a map, that things were desperate.

But around the king’s table a much clearer appreciation of the peril led to no corresponding words, nor would any stranger present have imagined, from the tone of that room, how close and apparently inevitable was disaster.

The little force had now been in retreat, and rapid retreat, from the failure before Paris, through one feverish week, pounding up northward for Calais; not with forced marches, indeed, but with full days’ marches. Now, at the end of that effort, it found itself headed off. The long, straight, marshy trench of the Somme lay between them and their Channel transports home. They had attempted its crossing a first, a second, a third time, and every attempt had been thrust back. They had felt down river with increasing anxiety, as the host upon the farther bank grew; and, while they had failed to make the crossing good, and while, as they were thus impelled northward, the breadth of the valley which defied them increased. Here they were at last at Boismont, on the lower estuary, with a huge sea tide swirling back and forth, at its height—a mile and a half of deep tumbling water—twice the depth that would drown a man. At its lowest it became a mass of marsh and mud, through which the hurrying ebb ran tumbling to the sea in varied channels.

Boismont stood upon the eastern bank of that broad water flank, grouped upon the dry steep above the edge of the marsh and the mud. There were rumours of some available passage, but no one caught sight of it, and even were it known, what chance had the army of forcing a long and narrow and perilous traverse when they had been unable to force the short bridges of the upper stream?

Yet that very difficulty was to prove their salvation. There was a ford, as the king was to learn, but its farther end upon the eastern bank was ill guarded with an insufficient force detached from the French vanguard upon the farther shore. For it was imagined that the crossing could hardly be attempted, or, if attempted, easily repelled.

Edward Plantagenet turned to one of the lesser commanders, who had spoken of the rumour of a ford, and said,⁠—

“What was the name of your prisoner?”

The soldier replied,⁠—

“Gobain Agache. He is a farmer of Mons, through which we marched but yesterday. We took him with us because he had been talking too much.”

“One might have thought that you could have found intelligence.”

“No, sir; they were all dumb. But we had heard that this man had talked, so we took him with us.”

“What has he told you?”

“He has told us nothing.”

“What have you offered him?”

The commander mentioned a sum large in his eyes. Edward Plantagenet laughed.

“We will give him the worth of his whole farm,” he said, “and his freedom, and that of any twenty of his comrades. Are there so many from his part?”

“No doubt, sir,” said the officer.

They sent for Gobain Agache, and they made him their offer pleasantly enough. He stood before them stolid for a moment. They did not press him.

As to which of these two kings should prove himself by ordeal of battle to be the rightful king Gobain Agache cared nothing. The jabbering of Welsh and of half English in the billets had sounded to him very foreign indeed, but then many of the others there were also of his own kind. He was disturbed in the matter of loyalty to his lord, who, he was told, had followed the Valois king upon the farther side of the river. He was disturbed about his farm, and what would happen to it if the battle were decided one way or the other; and here he was, with the value of his farm to his hand for the taking! So he spoke.

“The ford is close by. Your men ought to have seen it. Any stranger could see it. It is clearly marked at low tide from the hard to the hard, a broad made way of marl and chalk and great stones going right across the river.”

Edward looked at that one of his subordinates chiefly responsible, who murmured at once,⁠—

“Sir, we did not reach this bank until the tide was already flowing.”

“Did you see a hard going down into the water?” said the king sharply.

“I thought it was a village wharf.”

The king smiled, and turned again to Gobain Agache.

“How broad is it?”

“About twenty paces,” said the farmer.

“Who is the best fisherman here?” said the king abruptly.

Gobain hesitated.

“I do not know the place,” he said.

The king nodded his head slightly to a younger man who stood ready. That younger man went out. Edward bade the farmer be seated on a form near the wall, and spent the next few minutes talking of this and that at random, until the young man who had gone out came back with an old, wooden-faced fellow, who pulled his hair as he entered and stood stooping somewhat and stroking his beard with his left hand.

Of him the king asked at what o’clock the tide was full. He said, but in the speech of St. Valery,⁠—

“At midnight, for it is the full moon.”

“That means that the last of the ebb,” said Edward, half to himself and half to his companions, “will be a little after six in the morning.”

The fisherman shook his head and grinned at hearing such strange errors.

“After seven,” he said. “Seven hours ebb, five hours flow.”

An old man, half servant, half vassal, who looked after the king’s land round the waters of Chichester harbour, and who could always be straight with his master, looked him full in the face and said,⁠—

“Never argue about the tide.”

And Edward answered,⁠—

“All the better, so long as it is not too late.”

Then he turned to the old fisherman for a last question,⁠—

“What depth is there at the very lowest of the passage on this ebb?”

“No more than knee-deep water,” said the old man, “for the springs are making, and we shall have the lowest ebb in three more tides.”

All this the king fitted together in one. He saw his opportunity. The ford close at hand, its hardness, the chance of the tide just at the right moment; he saw how all depended upon the defence of the farther shore. He saw that his chance of crossing and escaping to Calais had come.

He told the young man to lead the fisherman out and to give him a piece of gold, and to see that no one took it from him.

The king gave orders for a march in the first hours of the morning, long before dawn, while still they had the full moonlight to guide them. The sergeants were warned. The Court and the army took but little sleep. The grooms had none.

The accustomed delays and rearrangements, without which no force is gathered, kept them to within two hours of dawn. There was but one road leading parallel to the shore along the higher dry land southward; the very long column followed it under the moonlight. They reached Saigneville, those few miles to the south, just as the beginnings of daylight, mixing in with the last gold of the moon, was restoring colour to the world. Yet an hour more was the division occupied in marshalling under three columns to face the river. It was broad daylight by the time everything was done, and the sun was very near the edge of the uplands on the farther shore.

In front of the army ran rapidly the broad stream of the estuary, racing at more than half ebb to the sea. Already the mud flats below the village were widely exposed, and were similarly showing upon the farther bank, and there, running out boldly to the water, which still submerged it, was the causeway of the ford. Its prolongation, now that they knew its character, could be caught by the eye nearly a mile beyond, upon the farther flats. It was Blanchetaque, the ford, broad and raised as Gobain had described it. Far away upon the low bluff there could just be made out doubtfully the small—the too small—force which the advance guard of the Valois had sent to protect that scarcely threatened issue. It numbered not a sixth of the Plantagenet’s columns.

Those three columns waited for the fall of the tide. Before them, in a small, close group, some four hundred knights, fully armed, stood for the order to mount. It came somewhat before seven in the morning. The thing had to be calculated closely. Too early a start would find unfordable water. Too late would mean the catching of the ends of the column by the tide; for the rearguard of that army, as it crossed on so narrow a front, was two miles from the head.

The signal sounded, and that trumpet was heard by Godemard de Fay, the commander of the Valois on the farther bank. He saw Edward’s knights mount, and the three columns, each four abreast, coming across the covered causeway, formed. Against Edward’s mounted squires he sent knights, equally mounted and armed, down into the water to take the shock. These two small bodies of cavalry met, struggling and thrusting and hacking at each other, with the salt ebb swirling round the horses’ knees as the beasts slipped and struggled on the slime of the causeway floor. But not the wrestling between those handfuls of heavily accoutred nobles was to decide the passage. That was determined by the long-bow.

Behind the French knights, on the hard above the falling water level, a detachment of the Genoese with their cross-bows supported the horse and sent their shafts into the mass of Edward’s knights, perhaps just reaching the infantry behind. But that infantry was here in the van, wholly made up of the archers, the superb arm of all that command, and it was they who forced the advance. For the Welsh long-bow, with its greater precision, its sharper impact, its longer range, and the discipline of the force that used it, firing with exactitude and command, not only threw Godemard’s horse into a confusion, stampeding from the causeway into the mud and breaking back towards the shore, but threw into an equal confusion the Genoese archers and the French infantry behind. Edward’s knights, acting as a sort of spearhead, could go forward, but only through the perpetual support of the long-bow men as they advanced steadily through the narrowing water and up towards the shore.

There was a moment of hesitation and of last resistance, then that break in the line which is the end. Edward could see from far off the horse of his small group of knights vigorously mounting the bluff, and the scattering of the small force that opposed them. The bridgehead was held; the main army began to file across.

So close was the issue that it could hardly save its baggage. A detachment of the King of France’s forces had already appeared upon the sky-line above Saigneville before the wagons could follow the last of the English infantry on to the ford. Much of Edward’s train had to be abandoned. But that same accident which caused so severe a loss in provision saved the army. The Plantagenet’s command, nearly all its fighting men at least, had crossed the Somme, and the rising tide had made pursuit impossible by the time the Valois’ men had made secure of their booty and had reached the eastern bank. They watched the growing flood of water between, as, far away upon the farther bank, the triple column of the English king disappeared over the western folds of the land.

This was the crossing of Blanchetaque, and this it was which founded, two days later, the decision of Crécy.

Edward had said “God and our Lady and St. George will find me a passage.”

VILLE GAGNÉE

(Friday, April 13, 1436)

In Paris never was such confusion of mind, such exhaustion of argument! It had gone on for twenty years, for twenty-one years—and you would have said that no man knew where he stood. For who was king? And where stood Burgundy? And what had come to what had been the Armagnacs? Never was such a generation of conflict since the city had been founded!

There are two currents in such turmoils: the young men, and the fathers. Now the young men, from those of thirty who could just remember the news of Agincourt, and who, in their teens, had seen the great massacres when the Burgundians had retaken the city from the Armagnacs, had lived all their lives under a king—the grandson of a king of France, the son of a daughter of France—but a king also of England, and himself a child whom they hardly saw. Still, that was their king. Their priests, their notables, their magistrates—all the world about them, took such a king for granted, and Burgundy, that great house which the populace of Paris had always loved to follow, still swore by such a king. The old men would some of them remember this child-king as a usurper, but some of them as a restoration of good things; for was not this new Plantagenet kingship the work of Burgundy and the end of the hateful Armagnac? Was it not a true Parisian thing?

All the great story of Joan, those intense two years, had not passed unheeded. The loud echoes of it had sounded through Paris on that memorable day when the armoured girl had fallen wounded in the fruitless assault upon the St. Honoré Gate. But not even that great sweep of reconquest could wholly shake the city. All the country round fell away from the Plantagenet to the Valois, but Paris was still Plantagenet. For nearly half a lifetime one state of things had endured, and after so many miseries it seemed well enough.

But latterly there had come a change. For the people, and especially the young men, were telling each other that Burgundy was no longer friends with their boyish, weak, and distant king; and at the same time had come a petty but significant alteration in the air of the city, something that the men of the time hardly noticed—something of profound significance for posterity was at work. The forces within the city were no longer of one kind. Even of the nobles, some were wholly foreign. The English tongue had arisen, and Willoughby, in command of the garrison, was of that tongue. The conqueror of Agincourt had spoken, thought, and lived in French. It was as a man indistinguishable from their own nobles that he had ridden all the way down the narrow St. Martin’s street, kissing the relics at the church doors when he made his entry into Paris, all those years before. But even by his time the tide had turned in England. The Black Death had done its work before he was born. Henry V. himself could use the English tongue, and to all the lesser men about him it was native. Many nobles even could then speak no other. Now, after the working of a full seventeen years, the estrangement was more pronounced still; and the populace of Paris knew not, when a patrol passed by at night, whether its few men would chance to be men of like speech with themselves or of alien tongue.

And there was yet another matter, perhaps decisive of the issue that came—in part because a reliance upon Burgundy had made the populace seem secure for the young Plantagenet king, in part because the heavy drain of men in the losing campaign all around left few to spare for Paris: the garrison in arms under Willoughby was too small—hardly more than a battalion (as we say to-day) and a couple of squadrons.

Already by the spring of the year the regency of England and of France was troubled, and a month before Easter the citizens had been summoned to take oath, individually, in support of that treaty of Troyes by which the young king reigned. For his mother, a princess of the blood royal of France, was dead. Very few refused to swear. All the great notables swore. The Bishop and the Abbots and the Prior of St. Martin, and the chiefs of all the Courts of Justice and of the Exchequer, and all the Bar, and all the City Companies, and every priest and monk. It seemed a unanimity; though some few had taken advantage of the liberty to leave the town, if their allegiance was to him, the Valois, who called himself King of France outside the walls.

Beneath that official surface the quarrel between the government at Westminster and Burgundy had changed the Parisian mind. Already, secretly, letters were passing between a little group of the livery-men of the city and Charles of Valois, the king who was reconquering his kingdom. They treated for amnesty; they assured Charles (with too much assurance) that he had the support of the populace in the streets.

So passed Easter. Arthur of Brittany, Count of Richemont and Constable of France, received those letters and made his plan. No very great force accompanied him as he marched up northwards towards Paris through the night, but from within the city there was nothing strong enough to meet him. There is a curious air of ease, simplicity, and silence about that last revolution which suddenly slipped the great capital away from the hands of the Lancastrian Plantagenets, kings of England.

They had marched, I say, through the night. Richemont the Constable, and Dunois with him: Dunois, who had been through all those battles with Joan, and was now to see their last fruit fall ripe into his hands.

It was the morning of Friday, the Friday after Easter, the 13th of April, 1436, just at dawn. The two flanking towers of St. Michael’s Gate, the southern gate of the city, stood clear in the new light, just before the rising of the sun. The grey of their old stones, and of their old slate, pointed, conical roofs (for the new wall covered only the north of the city, and in the south the old wall remained), was marked in every detail, and against the sky stood one man mounting guard upon the parapet.

Henry of Villeblanche, a gentleman of Brittany, bore the white lilies, the banner of the Valois, by the Constable’s side. Him did Richemont send forward to challenge the guard, and to him that lonely man upon the parapet gave the simple answer: “Not this gate, the next.” Such was the mood of the garrison. The commanders rode round, certain that none would challenge. They came to St. James’s Gate, little more than a bowshot away to the east; the postern was opened to him. He sent through a handful of his men; the men of the guard looked on, neither aiding nor resisting. The newcomers broke the links of the drawbridge chain and the heavy gangway came down with a clang, bridging the ditch. Across it rode at once the Constable and Dunois, then Philip of Ternaut, the fourth a plain knight, Simon of Lallain, and behind them the little force of men-at-arms and grooms, hardly two thousand all told, filed under the dark ogive archway and on into the city street, which pointed with its old Roman straightness right down the hill to the island. As they so rode L’Isle-Adam, the Marshal, climbed up the winding stair behind the guardroom to the top of the gate, carrying with him the flag of the lilies, the flag of the Valois. He ran it up in the growing morning light, and cried out, “Ville gagnée!” Never was there an odder capture of any walled strong city, famous throughout the world.

That troop of horse went on down the hill and through the streets in turn to the island, to the cathedral, to the town hall, to the market. The townsmen were just astir; few took heed. The Constable, he and his men, rode back to the cathedral again—Notre-Dame—and, leaving the horses outside, four to a groom, they dismounted in their full armour and heard the early morning Mass all together; and the canons who had so recently sworn for the rival king received them. But as the priests offered food, after the Mass, the Constable answered, “I hold the custom of fasting on a Friday, and I shall eat nothing.” As they came out from the great church the alarm was already raised. The little garrison was afoot, and Willoughby, at the head of it, raised the official part of the city. No one knew at that hour what would follow. All was still in doubt.

It was the populace, not the two opposing troops, which took the shock. It rose in a sudden tide, turned by we know not what preparatory workings of the last few weeks, or perhaps by a gusty mood. A group of unarmed men, running up to the northern gate, seized the cannon there, four or five small pieces, turned them down the street, and just as they did so saw Willoughby coming up with his little column of horse and foot. A volley of round shot pulled up Willoughby with some loss and turned him back.

The official world failed to raise a force. The leaders of the merchants, the greater lawyers coming into the street and shouting for King Henry, the bishops themselves, two of whom had begun to harangue, all failed; and the mob, growing greater street by street, shut off the issues with chains and ran back to attack Willoughby’s men-at-arms with anything that came to hand. That soldier kept his small troop well together, and through the increasing flood made eastward down St. Anthony’s Street to the Bastille. He had hardly twelve hundred men with him, counting both the French and the English-speaking sort, all told. He shut himself up in the Bastille, having saved his command. There he awaited terms.

The Constable at once organized the city: put garrisons to all the gates, had convoys of wheat brought in, and a market opened at once; put men of his own at the town hall and over the city companies, strongly holding all that merchant class which was the foundation of the Plantagenet power; he proclaimed the decree of his master, the French king, Charles—a decree of general amnesty—and all the Saturday organized the city and brought it to order. On Sunday, the 15th, he prepared to establish his lines round the Bastille with troops whom he had sent for from the neighbouring garrisons outside the town. Willoughby asked for terms, and generous terms were granted. The council round the Constable demanded that the Bastille be handed over to Ternaut; as for Willoughby himself and his men and his civilian notables, they should be convoyed safely, not through the now hostile streets, but round by the north, outside the new city wall.

As they passed, the men from the wall insulted them, and particularly that Bishop of Therouenne, who had been chancellor for the late government, to whom they called out, “Ah, the fox! The fox!” But he grumbled, not at the insult but at the loss of his jewels, and no man heeded him. Just behind the Louvre, where the city wall ended at the water, and where the footbridge runs to-day across the river, they embarked that little force to go down the Seine to Rouen, honourably enough. And so ended the rule of the Plantagenets in Paris.

LOUIS XI AND CHARLES THE BOLD

(January 5, 1477)

In a small room, the large grey stones of whose walls were partly hidden under tapestries, there sat at evening a man too wizened to show his full age. He was in the fifties. He might have been fifteen years younger or fifteen years older—he would have looked the same. He was simply dressed—it was winter—in warm grey clothes, and though a great fire of logs burnt in the huge open hearth of the small room, he had a thick cloak over his shoulders. He was cold, and thrust forward to the flames long, thin and somewhat grasping hands. His keen, narrow eyes, closely set together and very bright, shone in the firelight. On a large oak table to his left stood carefully ranged a mass of papers, and one great parchment which he had been consulting. But for the moment he read nothing. He muttered to himself.

One soldier was in the room, standing silent by the curtain which hid the door. Without could be heard from time to time the metallic clinking of arms and the steps of men coming and returning. At long intervals there came from distant roofs of the castle the cry of the sentry. For the rest there was no sound in that room save the crackling of the fire and the continued muttering of this man.

It was the king—Louis XI.

To his hand there upon the table, and docketed and filed minutely, stood his immediate affairs; accurately, in shelves which lined the larger rooms of the castle, and served by a great staff of clerks, was further stored the whole business of the realm.

In his childhood that realm was ruined. As a little frail child of five he had seen Joan passing through his father’s palace at Bourges. In his boyhood had come the difficult reconquest; his manhood had been filled with exiles, with quarrels against his father, the reigning king, and with a long apprenticeship in intrigue.

It was his business to rebuild the realm. And for now nearly sixteen years he had plunged into that business as private men of the same sort will plunge into the accumulation of a fortune. It had absorbed him altogether, and his soul, never sane, had suffered from that absorption, much as suffer the souls of men who devote themselves in the same fashion to gold.

But his zeal was for the re-establishment of the realm. This, the unceasing pressure of a spirit which for centuries had urged and spurred the Capetian line, which had made them—some quite unconsciously, none quite consciously—the agents of a great purpose, had urged Louis continually. His task was nearly done. Only one great rival still loomed to the east of him. It was Burgundy.

All that Rhineland, all that great street from south to north, from the Alps to the Low Countries, all that belt of true French soil, and of its extension into the Germanies, was under a man—Charles the Bold—ten years younger than himself, who, building on his father’s power, had dared to conceive independence. He would make a new State, breaking the vassalage with the King of France. He would leave France halved.

This man, Charles, stood against that older man, Louis, in a contrast more complete than any two rivals you can name: Louis frail, cunning, tenacious, garrulous, delighting in a millioned web of detail, patient, cruel, diseased: Charles, short but strong in the saddle, square-shouldered, violent in action, somewhat silent, his mass of thick black hair ponderous upon his enormous head, living in the midst of charges, and thinking that the world could be carried at a charge.

The last issue between these two men had come. The one was sitting here in his narrow room, in the heart of France, holding the threads which stretched to the ends of Europe. The other, in camp, pursued the siege of Nancy, and was in the act of taking that capital, destroying Lorraine: confirming his power.

As King Louis sat there, his hands and feet toward the flame, muttering to himself, and his bright, narrow eyes seeing scheme after scheme conjointly in the dancing of the fire, his mood suddenly changed and, as though he were alone, careless of the attendant, he suddenly threw himself upon his knees at the chair where he had been sitting, and raised his mutterings somewhat into prayers. He groped in his breast for an amulet and kissed it fervently, and continued in a litany name after name of those who should protect him and his race, and all his land. But the name which occurred most often in that confused torrent of intense mumbling was the name of St. Martin of Tours, his neighbour, his protector, he to whom Louis the King had shown such generosity; he upon whom Louis the King had showered so much wealth, and before whom he continued to bow.

In the first light of a very cold morning the king rode out with half a dozen familiars. He was helped with difficulty not on to a horse but on to a mule. His long, thin, somewhat deformed legs with difficulty held the saddle, and he stooped forward gracelessly as he rode. No one could have told him from a chance traveller of the poorer sort. He was in grey, as always—a thick, coarse cloth—and on his head a rough, pointed hat, with a leaden medal stuck in the band of it, and on the medal, stamped, an image of Our Lady.

He rode out over the drawbridge toward Tours, in the bitterly cold mist as the day broadened. One hundred yards and more behind came the archers and the drivers of the wagons; for he had begun a journey.

The king and his little group of attendants halted for twenty minutes in the town for Mass. As he came out of Mass, he turned to the first poor inn of the market square, and ate the first short meal of the day, while the innkeeper and the serving-maid watched him in terror, and the passers-by in the streets huddled in corners, catching glimpses of him through the thick, small panes of the window.

And all during that meal he talked, and talked incessantly, to his companions, upon every point of his policy: upon the place they should visit, upon the chances of meeting the messenger whom he expected—upon all things.

They took the road again like a little company of poor pilgrims; they followed up the Loire.

They came at last to a place where the road, damp with melting snow but now lit by a pale morning sun, passed through a deep wood along the river bank, and there stood a hut which the foresters used. It was the appointed spot. The king halted, dismounted, and entered with but one companion. The rest stood without.

They had not long to wait. Another small group approached from the west, but these were splashed with mud, broken with fatigue, their fine horses hardly carrying them, and stumbling as they went. One of them was half in armour, and seemed to be their chief. He scrambled down stiffly from his beast, almost falling as he did so, entered the hut, and knelt before the king.

The king raised him, but before he could tell his great news Louis deluged him with yet another river of talk. How were the ways? What had he met? Had he passed through Bar, or had he come round north through Argonne? Had he heard what the common people were saying in either place?

Twice the newcomer attempted to tell his news, and twice he was swamped again by that ceaseless flood of clipped, tumbling words. At last he had his moment, and he took it to tell in three phrases the enormous thing which he had carried in silence through that night and through four desperate marches before.

Charles the Bold was dead. Nancy was relieved. Lorraine was master of his own again. The imagined new State was in ruins. Louis took up the ceaseless chatter again, patting the hand of his messenger as he did so, and smiling a thin but contented smile.

His work was accomplished. His great scheme was fulfilled, and yet such a moment led him to nothing more solemn than an endless cataract of words—save for one moment, when he fell again upon his knees on the earth floor of that hut and prayed as fervently as though he had been alone. He rose again to question and requestion, and to make his comments. He was exhausted before he was silent.

Meanwhile, far off in Lorraine, the battle had been brought to its conclusion, and the great Duke was dead.

It was upon Sunday, the 5th of January 1477, that René of Lorraine, coming out from his Mass in the Abbey Church of St. Nicholas, had ordered his armies—some few of the lords of the Barrois, some few more from the Charolais, some from the Jura were there; but the great mass of his rank and file were a hubbub of German talk from the Alsatian towns and from the Swiss mountains—ten thousand of them.

They had not far to go. Nancy was but a short two hours’ march away, and there, before his capital, starving and on the edge of surrender, Lorraine knew that the way was barred by the army of Charles.

It had been bitter cold, but there was half a thaw. The ice on the Meurthe (to the right of the road as the long column went northward up the bank) was still continuous, but thin and slushy. The great masses of snow round about were melting. It was somewhat before noon that they saw, drawn up in rank upon slightly rising ground before them, the host of Charles, and in the distance behind it, two miles away, the spires of Nancy.

From a wood upon his right to the west, down to the river Meurthe upon the east, Charles had drawn his line, with his guns commanding the road whereby the columns of Lorraine should advance. Fine snow began to fall, and under the veil of that cloud Lorraine detached a mass of the Swiss to follow round secretly by the hollow lane along the woodside. So they came up, unperceived, upon the flank of the Burgundians.

But those Burgundians, Charles’s men, stood in rank awaiting the shock upon their front, ignorant of the turning column. They were but five thousand all told, and against them were two men to their one. They knew not that half their enemies had thus been detached secretly to the west. Still they waited, confident in the strength of their position: waiting for the heavy armed knights of Lorraine to charge.

Even as they so stood, the Burgundians heard something which no troops will stand—the sound of attack behind their line.

It was the custom of the Swiss to sound their horns three times just before they struck, and that loud, unexpected challenge came where none thought soldiers to be—far off and behind them to their right, from the woodside.

It was in vain that Charles attempted to convert his line to the right, to face that sudden danger; it was in vain that he called for the guns to be dragged round and faced westward to the wood and the Swiss. All came too late; for all was in confusion, and already his line was dissolving. Upon such a beginning of chaos Lorraine, from the front, charged; and with that the Burgundian troops became a mob, and the action, hardly begun, turned at once into a slaughter.

Charles’s cavalry, upon the left, near the river, cut itself out across the water, losing heavily, the horses stamping through the thin ice, and a remnant escaping by that ford.

Round the great Duke himself a devoted centre rallied, half of them of his nobility, but it could not stand—it was forced back in the general flood, and all the two miles of ground that afternoon (the snow had ceased, and the sun shone upon the carnage) was filled with a confused mass of massacre and of flight. The Swiss and the Germans and the French lords of the Barrois pressed on into the midst of the broken herd, right up to the walls of the town.

A mile from the city gate there ran a brook, the brook of St. John. There, in the hurly-burly, Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, parried right and left desperately, his lords about him, and in their midst were the enemy, ahorse and afoot, the long halberds of the Swiss, thrusting pikes, and the swing of swords.

None knew the great Duke Charles in such a confusion. They saw his rich armour, but they had no other sign; for the golden lion of Burgundy upon his helm had fallen even before the battle, and he himself, as he saw the crest tumble on his saddle bow, all those hours before, had muttered: “An omen—signum dei!”

So that man, unknown to the enemy, fought hard with his visor down. A thrust took him in the left thigh, another in the back. As he reeled he cried “Bourgoyne!” but one Claude, the Lord of Bauzemont, who was fighting there for Lorraine, hearing that cry, thrust a lance at him, not knowing whom he struck. The helm and its visor shattered. The face of the great Duke was gashed from ear to chin, and he went down. None knew who had so fallen, for all the nobles about him also were destroyed. And that was the end of Charles the Bold.

The press of the conquerors rushed up to the city gate, the Gate of St. Nicholas. The starving people ran to cheer, the garrison let down the bridge beyond the town, the last remnants of Charles’s force were massacred at the bridge of Bouxières.

The wintry sun was setting. The force had its hold again upon all the fields. The Duke of Lorraine held festival that night—back in his own city, and all his people eating again and drinking, and rejoicing in victory.

But one thing checked his triumph: whither had Charles gone? Was he in Metz, or fled perhaps into the Germanies, or got home among his own people in the Low Countries?

All the next day, Twelfth Day, the Feast of the Kings, they searched the battlefield, heaps of naked bodies stripped by the spoilers, but none could say that they had found the great Duke. But that evening, as Lorraine rode back into Nancy, despondent and fearful, a captain brought to him a young page, one of the Colonnas of Rome, and said to him: “This lad knew the great Duke.”

So next morning, the Tuesday, the 7th of January, very early, they went out among the bodies in the snow, and the Italian boy would say first of one, then of another: “It is not he ... it is not he.” And with him also went one who had been a maid in the service of Charles. Then, at last, they came to the strong body, lying all wounds, with its dreadful gashed face, and the mass of thick, black hair against the snow, and the Italian page cried, “That is the Duke,” and the servant knelt down crying and sobbing, and they heard her say, “Ha! Burgundy, my Lord! my Lord!”

René of Lorraine had that famous body lifted with reverence, and wrapped in a linen shroud, and carried with pomp into Nancy.

Thenceforward, with whatever vicissitude of come and go, the Rhine was recovered for the Gauls.

TWO SATURDAYS

(Montmartre and Amboise) (August 15, 1534; March 16, 1560)

Two scenes, half a lifetime apart, small, detailed, vivid, mark the enormous storm of the Reformation in the Gauls—that vast battle which was never wholly won or lost, no, not to this day; for France is the arena of Europe. Each of these little scenes was an origin: the one of the force that half-reconquered Europe for the Church, the Jesuits; the other of the force that, taking arms for Calvinism, all but conquered the crown—the force of the great nobles in rebellion, of the gentry, of the merchants in their towns, and of the peasants in the central hills, the Huguenots.

In the morning of Saturday, August the 15th, in the year 1534, the Feast of the Assumption, six men of various age came to the little room on the hill of the university, where lived, determined, eager, somewhat silent, a dark, square-headed Basque, whose military temper was to half change the world. An intense devotion, a burning life within, an absorption in divine things and in the fate of the soul, made this man single from all of his fellows. None met him but went away with an impression as of flame. It was Ignatius of Loyola in his forty-fourth year.

The six who thus came together up the stone stairs to that little room, with its crucifix, its narrow bed, its bare table, its empty walls, were all men who had come under that profound influence; men of the university, like himself—men already filled with the conception of a mission. There, leading them, was yet another Basque, called from his mother’s name Xavier, six years younger than the chief. There was young Salman of Toledo, a boy of nineteen; there was Laynez the Castilian, just of age; Alphonso of Valladolid; Rodriguez of Portugal; and (the only Gaul among them) a peasant from the hills of Savoy, long plunged into the study of the academies, not yet thirty: Faber, from the hamlet, and the Alpine huts of Villaret. He alone was a priest.

When they were thus assembled they set out about their purpose.

They went them down the university hill by that straight and narrow Roman street which crosses Paris from south to north, and is here the street of St. James, there of St. Martin. They traversed the twin bridges of the island, they went the full mile to the city wall, passed through St. Martin’s Gate, and, outside, were in the fields. The hill of Montmartre stood before them, its gypsum quarries, its crazy windmills, and on the summit a little old church—poor, for it had few parishioners. It was called Our Lady of the Martyrs, and thither were they bound upon this, Her feast day.

They climbed the hill. They went down by the little stair near the porch, which leads into the crypt of that strange place, and where the stones go back to the temple of the pagan days. Faber vested and began the Mass.

When he came to the Communion, the six laymen rose and knelt at the altar rails. Then, one by one in order each, before receiving the Host, took in a loud voice the vow of their companionship, and Faber himself, the last, pronounced those words. The Ablutions were received. The post-Communions read, the last Gospel recited. The Society of Jesus was founded.

The winter was not over in Blois—the winter of 1560. The old king, who had so sternly maintained the national religion, was dead; a boy of fifteen reigned—frail, incompetent, diseased—the son of that Medicean woman whom an enemy has called “the worm from the tomb of Italy.”

The child was married to a child-wife, the daughter of the King of Scotland, Mary Stuart. It was she, in part, already masterful, that had called to that Court her mother’s brothers, the sons of Lorraine, the Guises; grandsons of that same man who had entered his capital of Nancy on the death of Charles the Bold.

And they were hated. They were not of the national nobility; they had enriched themselves scandalously. If they were to be the protectors of the Church, it was but another weakness for the Church. One of their group, a child of fourteen, had been made Archbishop of Rheims, and loaded with the wealth of such great names as Cluny—St. Bernard’s glorious house; as Marmoutier—St. Martin’s immemorial foundation. Scandal! Scandal!

Against these men, against the new, feeble, immature king, rose muttering throughout the commonwealth all forms of opposition, linked under the bond (here loose, there strict) of the Reform, of the Gospellers, of them that would be rid of their fathers, and who were clamped to the iron of Calvin. He, far off in Geneva, commanded. Already, some few months since, the Reformers had organized everywhere. They had held their first synod, making them one thing throughout the territory of France, and, by hundreds, the armed gentry were rallying, though secretly, to that standard. Men from all countries leaked in to take service in the coming war as mercenaries. Many from the Germanies, many from Switzerland. They were sworn in secrecy by the German freebooters’ oath: “To follow the dumb captain.” And of the native people crowds were ready, when the signal should be given, to join the nobles who were moving. By little groups, and as single men, they came filtering through towards the Loire.

What could the Guises bring against that? There were no armies in those days, save such guards as the king could pay, or such gentry as would still obey his summons.

The plot was laid to seize the crowned boy while the Court thus still sat in Blois, for the town was open and without walls. A mob could carry it. The leaders still professed that to this boy they wished no harm. It was his counsellors they would be rid of, and all their hatred was for the Guises—especially for the duke, their head, the real ruler.

But before the appointed day the young king, restless, must be moving down river. He would hunt, and he was tired of the woods to the west and to the south. The Court set out. It was through this chance whim that the rising was postponed and lost its vigour. It was through this chance whim that the threatened Court found itself safe in the little stronghold of Amboise.

As it there sat it felt in the air a menace all around. They had summoned and held hostage in the castle one or two of the greatest among those whom they knew to be their secret enemies. But the populace also was astir. Not all looks were kind, and there were strange men on market days.

Some order misunderstood, some rashness, provoked a misfire. A crowd of men made for the castle, not all of them unarmed, professing that they must see the king. They were rejected; contemptuously enough young Francis II. even scattered coins among them, as being of the poor and common people. That was only the grumbling of something distant.

It was on Saturday, the 16th of March, that the storm broke; but even then, ill-led. Men came swarming out from the woods on the south of the town. It was an armed attack. It has been called “The Tumult of Amboise.” The leaders were few, ill-chosen and worse followed. Not enough of the gentry were there. Horsemen and armour were lacking. It could but fail. The gates were shut in time, the ramparts armed, the wave of attack broke against impregnable walls; it was shot down under the trained aim of the archers; it was pursued, dispersed, driven to its woods again, and, on the way, whole dozens were rounded up and bound, and beaten, and thrust back into the castle as prisoners. For days the hanging of them went on, from the gibbet of the town itself, from the beams of the main gateway of the castle, from the iron crooks on its walls.

The thing was over, and it had seemed small. The young queen had laughed at it. But it was the beginning of that tremendous business which was to fill all France with death and the destruction of lovely stone; to sow a permanent division, to leave, much later, the Bourbons supreme, and not even to end when the thirteenth Louis should have ridden out to strike the last blow at La Rochelle—how many years to come!

THE FRONTIER

(September 9, 1642)

Richelieu, the Cardinal, was growing old, his work was nearly accomplished. It was the recovery of the frontiers, and on the south those limits were the Pyrenees.

The long process of the hotch-potch of popular movement and feeling over fifteen hundred years had blurred the outline of Gaul. It was his business to restore an exact shape and a true wall to the inheritance of the kings—“The Square Field.”

To the east the thing had never been possible, and perhaps never will be. The Rhine stood clearly before all eyes. The Rhine could be reached, but never made a final decision. Reached, it must be crossed; but reached at one point it could not be reached in all. There would ever be a struggle in those march lands. It is a struggle woefully present to us to-day. Elsewhere the sea, the Alps, made definite boundaries. There remained the Pyrenees.

But until this time the Pyrenees had not been attained. The tide of Gallic power had overflowed them, and again had ebbed; and those confused and noble valleys held races which overspread the crest, and none of which had felt themselves at heart to be either of the northern or of the southern land; neither of the pastures and the rivers and the woods of Gascony, nor of the hard and burnt Iberian rock and dust. Richelieu desired that crest and those limits, and that long mountain boundary against the sky.

Where that singular straight line of division, the most unbroken wall in Europe, reaches the Mediterranean, the Catalonian people and their language held all the passes and spread to the north and to the south, one nation—or at least one race. These, so early as Charlemagne, had been the march of the Ebro, and Barcelona, the great port, had remained the capital of one countryside. But in the darkness after the death of Charlemagne no man could tell you whether its fate would fall to the north or to the south. It acquired an independence which at first was feudal, and might later well have been national, as that of Portugal became, as that which little Andorra still holds in its fantastic isolated cup. Through the Middle Ages the thing had swung now to the French, now to the Spaniards, but still was Catalan: one thing. The genius of Richelieu, to the disadvantage of that entity, to the advantage of his sovereign, was to divide it by the crest of the Pyrenees, and to push the writ of Paris up to that sombre line where the peaks go down in lessening but rugged summits, and lose themselves in the salt—diminishing to mere rocks at last. For Richelieu had determined, not that all the Catalonian land, but only this province—this northern province of it, the Roussillon, hither of the Pyrenees—should be French; the rest he would leave to Spain.