But, once again, it was not a question of buying absolution; it was a question of duty being raised for registering and furnishing the authentic proof.
The innumerable pamphlets put into circulation after the Reformation to discredit the Roman Church were all based on this wilful confusion.
It is, moreover, a remarkable fact that at the precise period when John XXII created the Holy Penitentiary, King Philippe V, on his side, was reorganizing the functioning of the royal chancellery and revising the tariffs.
10. The Predicant Friars, or Dominicans, were also called Jacobins because of the Church of Saint-Jacques which had been given to them in Paris, and about which they had established their community.
The monastery at Lyons, where the Conclave of 1316 was held, had been built in 1236 on a site behind the Hôtel of the Templars. The monastery extended from the present Place des Jacobins to the Place Bellecour.
11. Geoffroy Coquatrix (without doubt from the term coquatier, an egg and poultry merchant), who first married Marie La Marcelle, then Jeanne Gencien, kept until his death, in 1321, all the posts he had accumulated under three reigns, and for which he never rendered any accounts. It was only the son of Charles of Valois, Philippe VI, who, after 1328, asked for these accounts from Geoffroy Coquatrix’s heirs; but he had to give up and ultimately absolved the sons from having to justify their father’s administration, though they had to forfeit a sum of fifteen thousand livres.
12. These arguments were first used in the States General of February 1317, and again at the deaths of Philippe V and Charles IV, when the succession to the throne of France was involved in somewhat similar circumstances. There is little doubt that the Constable Gaucher de Châtillon, who lived and held his appointment until 1329, played a preponderant part in denying the throne to women.
13. It is generally forgotten that the Capet monarchy was originally elective and that this preceded, or at least coexisted with, its hereditary character.
At the accidental death of the last Carolingian, Louis V the Slothful, who died at the age of twenty after a reign of a few months, the Dukes and Counts elected one of their number. They chose Hugues, Duke of France, whose father Hugues the Great, Count of Paris, Duke of France and Burgundy, had in fact exercised the powers of government during the last reigns.
Hugues Capet (that is to say Hugues the Head, Hugues the Chief) immediately associated his son Robert II with the throne by having him elected as his successor and crowned in the same year as himself. Almost the same procedure was followed during the five following reigns, up to and including that of Philippe-Auguste. As soon as the eldest son of the King was nominated heir-presumptive, the peers had to ratify the choice and the newly elected heir was crowned during his father’s lifetime.
It was only at the time of Louis VIII, two hundred and twenty-seven years after Hugues Capet, that the formality of a preliminary election was abandoned.
Louis VIII inherited the Crown of France at the death of Philippe-Auguste, on 14 July 1223, exactly as he would have inherited a fief. It was on that 14th of July that the French monarchy became truly hereditary.
At the time of Philippe the Long’s regency the new custom was less than a century old.
14. In the genealogies the Christian name of Louis is generally given to the son of Philippe V, who was born in July 1316. But in the accounts of Geoffroy de Fleury, Bursar to Philippe the Long, who began to keep his books in that year, precisely on the 12th of July, when he assumed his functions, the child is mentioned by the name of Philippe.
Other genealogists mention two sons of whom one was born in 1315 and was therefore conceived while Jeanne of Burgundy was a prisoner at Dourdan; this seems incredible when one considers the efforts Mahaut made to reconcile her daughter and her son-in-law.
The child who was the fruit of this reconciliation probably received several Christian names, among them both Philippe and Louis; and, since he lived but a short while, the latter-day chroniclers probably became confused.
15. Blanche of Castile’s seizure of power was not, however, without its difficulties. Though nominated by an act of King Louis VIII, her husband, as guardian and regent, Blanche was opposed by the violent hostility of the great vassals who disliked the idea of the kingdom being in the hands of a woman.
But Blanche of Castile was a woman of different stamp from Clémence of Hungary. Moreover, she had been Queen for ten years and had twelve children. She triumphed over the barons, thanks to the support of Count Thibaud of Champagne, who was said to be her lover. It was even whispered that she used him to poison her husband; but there are no real grounds for this suspicion.
16. There is a remarkable similarity between the madness of Robert of Clermont and that which attacked King Charles VI, who was his nephew in the fifth generation on the male side, and in the fourth generation on the female side.
In both cases the madness began with a wound, with cranial traumatism in the case of Clermont, without traumatism in the case of Charles VI, though in each case the madness became dangerous; they both had periods of frenzy followed by long periods of calm in which their behaviour appeared normal; they were both obsessed with a love of tournaments which they could not be prevented from organizing and in which they themselves took part, though sometimes in a state of delirium. Clermont, mad and dangerous as he was, had permission to hunt all over the royal domain. He also appeared in Philip the Fair’s army during one of the campaigns in Flanders, as Charles VI, who had been mad for twenty years, took part, during his reign, in the siege of Bourges and in all the battles against the Duke of Berry.
Clermont died on 7 February 1317, a month after Philippe V’s coronation.
17. The accustomed cries at the beginning of a tournament.
18. These two children were later to marry each other and receive the Crown of Navarre.
19. Children’s toys and games have scarcely altered since the Middle Ages. They already had balls of various sizes made of leather or cloth, hoops, tops, dolls, hobby-horses and quoits. They played at blind-man’s-buff, prisoners’ base, counting each other out, tag, hot cockles, hide-and-seek and leapfrog, and also at puppets. Little boys in rich families also had imitation suits of armour made to measure: helmets of light steel, coats of mail, blunt swords, the ancestors of the modern soldier or cowboy suits.
20. The second daughter of Agnès of Burgundy, Jeanne, married to Philippe of Valois, future Philippe VI, was lame like her first cousin, Louis I of Bourbon, son of Robert of Clermont.
There was also lameness in the collateral branch of Anjou, since King Charles II, grandfather of Clémence of Hungary, had the byname of ‘the Lame’. There is a tradition, recapitulated by Mistral in the Iles d’Or, which has it that, when the ambassador of the King of France, the Count de Bouville, came to ask Clémence’s hand in marriage for his master, he demanded that the Princess should undress before him so that he might make sure her legs were straight.
Jeanne of Burgundy’s infirmity was accompanied by a pathological cruelty which, when she came to the throne, earned her the name of ‘the Bad Queen of France’ or ‘the Lame Queen’.
The list of her victims is a long one. It is possible that Marguerite of Burgundy (who seems to have been affected, amid all the defects of her family, only with excessive sensuality) had been credited with a great many of the cruelties inflicted by her younger sister.
Among other examples, Jeanne endeavoured to get rid of Archbishop Jean de Marigny by preparing him a poisoned bath. She also forged death sentences which she sealed with the King’s seal. Philippe VI, having on one occasion discovered her in the act, whipped her so violently with birch-rods that he nearly killed her.
When she died of plague in 1349, the populace with considerable satisfaction saw in it the punishment of Heaven.
21. The hauberk (broigne) was a garment of leather, cloth or velvet, on which were sewn steel rings, and which had replaced the coat of mail properly so called. On the hauberk, to reinforce it, had be
gun to appear pieces of steel called ‘plates’ – from which derives the name plate armour – which were forged to the shape of the body and articulated like the tails of crayfish.
22. Mahaut drew up a detailed list of the thefts and damage committed in her castle of Hesdin, a list which contained no fewer than a hundred and twenty-nine articles.
She began a lawsuit in the Court of Justice in Paris to obtain damages, which were partially accorded her by a judgment of 9 May 1321.
23. Philippe V was called the Long, the Tall, or the Myope.
24. There are three methods of election in the Conclave:
1. By secret scrutiny, completed if necessary by a second scrutiny called ‘of accession’; the majority must consist of two-thirds of the votes.
2. By delegation, if the Cardinals unanimously appoint some among them to elect the Pope in the name of them all.
3. By ‘inspiration’ or ‘acclamation’.
Some authors assert that Jacques Duèze was elected by delegation; this opinion may have been based on the numerous negotiations which his election involved. But in fact Duèze was elected by an ordinary vote, since there were the regulation number of four tellers whose names are known.
25. Miniver is the fur of a kind of squirrel, grey on the back and white underneath.
26. It was the custom at that time, in royal and princely families, to give children several godmothers and godfathers, sometimes as many as eight altogether. Thus Charles of Valois and Gaucher de Châtillon were both godfathers to Charles de La Marche, the third son of Philip the Fair. Mahaut was a godmother to this Prince, as she was to many other children in the family. Her selection to carry the posthumous child of Louis X to the font had, therefore, nothing surprising about it; not to have chosen her would, on the other hand, have been an insult.
27. Baptism at this period was always performed on the day after birth.
Total immersion in cold water was practised only until the beginning of the fourteenth century.
A synod, held at Ravenna in 1313, decided for the first time that baptism might also be given by aspersion, if there was a shortage of holy water, or if it was feared that total immersion would imperil the child’s health.
But it was really only in the fifteenth century that the practice of immersion disappeared.
If to this form of baptism are added the deplorable hygienic conditions in which childbirth took place, it is easy to understand why the mortality among newborn children was so high during the Middle Ages.
28. Queen Clémence was suffering, so it would appear, from puerperal fever.
29. When a newborn child showed signs of illness, medicines were not given to the child but to the wet-nurse.
30. These dispositions included not only the registering of private deeds but the granting of patents, authorizations for foreigners to reside or trade, and the warrants for royal offices. According to the ordinance of 1321, it is to be noted for instance that deeds concerning Lombards and Jews were subject to the same tariffs: eleven sous for a letter with a plain label, seven livres and ten sous for a letter with a double label, and nine livres if the seal affixed to these labels was in green wax, the colour reserved for the royal seal. The letters of appointment to office were charged fifty-one sous for bailiffs and seneschals, six sous for sergeantries or minor offices. Even the gifts or revenues granted by the sovereign had to be certified by a document which was taxed.
31. The signs of mental derangement grew rapidly worse. Jean XXII, who had always protected Clémence since she was a Princess of Anjou (did he not go so far as to grant, when he heard of her lying-in, twenty days’ indulgence to those who prayed for her and for her son?), was compelled, in the following month of May, to take the young widow to task by letter, telling her that she must live in seclusion, chastity, humility, be simple in the table she kept, modest in her speech and clothing, and not show herself only in the company of young men. At the same time he approached Philippe V to fix Clémence’s dower, which was a matter of some difficulty.
On several occasions the Pope wrote again to Clémence exhorting her to reduce her private expenditure and asking her firmly to pay her debts, particularly that to the Bardi of Florence. Finally, in 1318, she had to make a retreat lasting several years in the Convent of Saint Mary of Nazareth, near Aix-en-Provence. But, before doing so, she was compelled, in order to satisfy the demands of her creditors, to make a deposit of all her jewels.
When she died, ten years later, in the Hôtel of the Templars in Paris, which Philippe V had given her in exchange for the Château of Vincennes, all her personal possessions were sold by auction.
32. The brothers Jean and Pierre de Cressay were to be armed knights by Philippe VI of Valois, twenty years later, in 1346, on the battlefield of Cressay (Crécy), on the eve of the famous English victory.
33. These figures are taken from the accounts of the coronation of Philippe VI, twelve years later. Neither prices nor quantities had much varied. On the other hand, all the details of the dresses and decorations given in the course of the chapter concerning the coronation of Philippe V are taken from the account books of his Bursar.
34. The electors of Hugues Capet – from which derives their title of peer, that is to say, equal to the King – had been: the Duke of Burgundy, the Duke of Normandy, the Duke of Guyenne, the Count of Champagne, the Count of Flanders and the Count of Toulouse.
No one either descended from or holding the titles of the six original lay peers was present at Philippe V’s coronation.
35. A few months later, in September 1317, the Pope wrote to Queen Jeanne’s confessor giving him the power to absolve her ‘of all the sins she had confessed three years earlier’. It seems unlikely that Philippe V could have asked his friend Duèze for this official absolution if he had not firmly believed in the innocence of his wife, at least as far as adultery was concerned.
36. Five centuries later, in his speech of 21 March 1817, in the Chamber of Peers, concerning a finance act, Chateaubriand brought forward in argument this ordinance of Philippe the Long’s, promulgated in 1318, by which the domains of the Crown had been declared inalienable.
Footnotes
1. The White Queen
fn1 The numbers in the text refer to historical notes at the end of the book.
2. The Cardinal who Did not Believe in Hell
fn1 ‘So you are Messire Guccio Baglioni?’
8. Departures
fn1 The history of this confession, and the dramatic life of Clémence of Hungary’s son, will be the subject of one of the volumes in the second series of The Accursed Kings.
10. The Bells of Rheims
fn1 ‘Receive this sword with God’s blessing, to resist all your enemies by virtue of the Holy Spirit …’
Author’s Acknowledgments
I AM most grateful to Georges Kessel, Edmonde Charles-Roux, Christiane Grémillon and Pierre de Lacretelle for the assistance they have given me with the material for this book; and to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence, and the Municipal Library of Florence for indispensable aid in research.
BY MAURICE DRUON
The Accursed Kings
The Iron King
The Strangled Queen
The Poisoned Crown
The Royal Succession
The She-Wolf
The Lily and the Lion
The King Without a Kingdom
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis 1958
Pan edition 1972
Arrow edition 1988
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Copyright © Maurice Druon 1957
Maurice Druon asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book
is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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