The Royal Succession

by Maurice Druon

  The Count of Poitiers was King; a little Lombard was to be taken to Saint-Denis; and Jean I was alive.

  Bouville returned to his wife.

  ‘Philippe has been recognized,’ he told her. ‘What’s going to happen to us, with this King left on our hands?’

  ‘He must be made to disappear.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ cried Bouville in indignation.

  ‘No, I don’t mean that. You’re losing your wits, Hugues!’ replied Madame de Bouville. ‘I mean he must be hidden.’

  ‘But then he will not reign.’

  ‘He’ll live, at least. And perhaps one day … can one ever tell?’

  But how was he to be hidden? Who could be trusted with him without rousing suspicion? To begin with, he had to continue to be fed.

  ‘The wet-nurse. There is no one but the wet-nurse who can be any use to us,’ said Madame de Bouville. ‘Let’s go and see her.’

  They had been well advised to await the departure of the last barons before telling Marie de Cressay that her son was dead. For the cry she uttered pierced the manor walls. To those who heard it, and were aghast at the sound, it was later explained that it was the Queen who had screamed. Yet the Queen, semi-conscious as she was, sat up in bed and asked: ‘What’s the matter?’

  Even the old Seneschal de Joinville started out of the depths of his torpor.

  ‘Someone’s been killed,’ he said; ‘I heard the cry of someone having his throat cut.’

  And Marie was saying over and over again: ‘I want to see him! I want to see him! I want to see him!’

  Bouville and his wife had to restrain her by force from rushing dementedly through the Château.

  For two whole hours they did their best to calm and console her, and above all to justify themselves, repeating again and again explanations to which she paid no heed.

  Bouville might well assert that it was no fault of his, that it was the criminal act of the Countess Mahaut. The words took unconscious root in Marie’s memory, from which they were to be resurrected later; but at the moment they had no meaning.

  From time to time she ceased sobbing, gazed straight before her, and then began suddenly to howl again like a dog run over by a wagon.

  The Bouvilles thought she was losing her reason. She exhausted all their arguments: thanks to her involuntary sacrifice, Marie had saved the true King of France, the descendant of that illustrious line …

  ‘You are young,’ said Madame de Bouville, ‘you will have other children. What woman has not lost at least one child in the cradle in her life?’

  And she quoted the stillborn twins of Blanche of Castile, and all the children of the royal family who had died in the last three generations. How many mothers among the Angevins, the Courtenays, the Burgundians, the Châtillons and the Bouvilles themselves had not been regularly bereaved and yet ended up happily with a vast family! Among the twelve or fifteen children that one woman might bring into the world, it was unusual for more than half to survive.

  ‘But I understand very well,’ went on Madame de Bouville. ‘It’s always harder to lose the first.’

  ‘But you don’t understand!’ Marie cried through her tears, ‘I shall never be able to replace this one!’

  The child who had been killed was the child of love, born of a love and a faith greater than all the laws and restraints of this world; he had been the dream for which she had paid the price of two months’ outrage and four months’ cloister, the wonderful gift with which she had wished to present the man she had chosen, the miraculous plant in whom she had hoped to see flowering, every day of her life, her crossed yet marvellous love!

  ‘No, you cannot understand!’ she groaned. ‘You have not been turned away by your family because of a child. No, I shall never have another!’

  When one explains one’s unhappiness, translates it into rational terms, it is because one has already admitted it to oneself. The shock, the almost physical pressure, was slowly giving way to the second stage of sorrow: the cruelty of awareness.

  ‘I knew it, I knew it! When I didn’t want to come here, I knew that disaster lay in wait for me!’

  Madame de Bouville dared make no reply.

  ‘And what will Guccio say when he knows?’ said Marie. ‘How shall I ever be able to break it to him?’

  ‘He must never know, my child, never!’ cried Madame de Bouville. ‘No one must know that the King lives, for those who missed their aim the first time would unhesitatingly try again. You are in danger yourself for you acted in concert with us. You must keep the secret until you are authorized to reveal it.’

  And to her husband she whispered: ‘Go and get the Gospels.’

  When Bouville had returned with the great book, which he had taken from the chapel, they persuaded Marie to place her hand on it and swear to maintain absolute silence towards even the father of her dead child, in the confessional even, concerning the events that had taken place that day. Only Bouville or his wife could release her from her oath.

  In her present condition Marie agreed to swear all that they asked. Bouville promised her a pension; but little she cared for money.

  ‘And now you must keep the King of France, my child, and tell everyone that he is yours,’ added Madame de Bouville.

  Marie rebelled. She could no longer bring herself to touch the child in whose stead her own had been murdered. She wished to remain at Vincennes no longer; she wanted to escape, no matter where, and then to die.

  ‘You’ll die quickly enough, you may be sure of that, if you talk. Mahaut will see to it that you are poisoned or stabbed.’

  ‘No, I shall not talk, I promise you. But for God’s sake let me go!’

  ‘You shall go, you shall go. But you cannot let that child die too. Don’t you see he’s hungry? Feed him today at least,’ said Madame de Bouville, placing in her arms Queen Clémence’s child.

  When Marie held the baby to her, her tears fell faster than ever. She felt the empty place at the other breast too keenly.

  ‘Keep him. He will be as if he were yours,’ insisted Madame de Bouville. ‘And when the time comes to place him back on the throne, you will take an honoured place at Court with him; you will be his second mother.’

  One lie more or less cost her nothing. But, in any case, it was not honours promised by the Curator’s wife which could touch Marie, but the presence of the little life in her hands to which, unconsciously, she was to transfer her maternal feeling.

  She placed her lips against the baby’s downy head and, with a gesture that had become automatic, opened her bodice, murmuring: ‘No, I cannot let him die, my little Jean, my little Jean …’

  The Bouvilles heaved a sigh of relief. They had won, for the moment at least.

  ‘She must not still be in Vincennes tomorrow, when they come to take her child away,’ Madame de Bouville said in a whisper to her husband.

  The next day Marie, who was prostrate and had left all decisions to Madame de Bouville, was taken back to the Convent of the Clarisses with the child.

  To the Mother Abbess Madame de Bouville explained that Marie had been much shaken by the death of the little King, and that no attention should be paid to any absurdities she might utter.

  ‘She gave us a considerable fright; she screamed and even failed to recognize her own child.’

  Madame de Bouville insisted that Marie should receive no visitors and should be left in complete quiet and seclusion.

  ‘If anyone comes to see her, do not let them in and send to warn me.’

  That same day two lengths of gold cloth bespangled with lilies, two turkey sheets embroidered with the arms of France and eight ells of black cendal were brought to Vincennes for use in the burial of the first King of France who had borne the name of Jean. And, indeed, it was a child called Jean who was removed in a coffin so small that there was no need to place it on a vehicle; it was simply carried on the pack-saddle of a mule.

  Master Geoffroy de Fleury, Bursar of the Palace, noted in his account book tha
t the cost of the funeral amounted to one hundred and eleven livres, seventeen sols and eight deniers.

  There was no long ritual procession or ceremony at Notre-Dame. They went straight to Saint-Denis where the burial took place immediately after the Mass. A narrow grave had been opened at the foot of the effigy of Louis X, which was still white and fresh in its newly carved stone; it was here, among the bones of the sovereigns of France, that the child of Marie de Cressay, Demoiselle of the Ile-de-France, and of Guccio Baglioni, Siennese merchant, was laid.

  Adam Héron, First Chamberlain and Master of the Household, advanced to the edge of the little tomb and cried, looking at his master, Philippe of Poitiers: ‘The King is dead, long live the King!’

  The reign of Philippe V, the Long, had begun; Jeanne of Burgundy had become Queen of France, and Mahaut of Artois was triumphant.

  Only three people in the kingdom knew that the real King was alive. One of them had sworn on Holy Writ to keep the secret and the other two were fearful that the secret would not be kept.

  After that Saturday of 20 November 1316 all the sovereigns who reigned over France were no more than a long line of involuntary usurpers.

  6

  France in Firm Hands

  TO GAIN THE THRONE Philippe V had used, within the monarchical constitution, the eternal process known in modern times as a coup d’état.

  When, owing to his personal authority and the support of the clan surrounding him, he had found himself invested with the principal royal powers, he had persuaded the Assembly of July to ratify an act dealing with the succession; it might, eventually, favour his own ambitions, but only after considerable delay and after certain preliminary conditions had been fulfilled. But the death of the little King provided a new opportunity; Philippe, casting on one side the law he had himself established, immediately appropriated the Crown without submitting to the delay or awaiting the conditions.

  Power obtained in these circumstances was naturally subject to menace, at least at the outset.

  Busy consolidating his position, Philippe had little time to savour his victory or indulge in the self-satisfactions of achieved ambition. The summit he had reached was a perilous one.

  There was much talk in the kingdom and suspicion was spreading. But the weight of the King’s hand was known, and those likely to suffer from it gathered about the Duke of Burgundy.

  The latter hurried to Paris to contest the accession of his future father-in-law. He demanded that the Council of Peers be summoned and that Jeanne of Navarre be recognized Queen.

  Philippe made no attempt to use guile. For the regency he had offered his daughter and the county of Burgundy; to keep the throne he offered the separation of the two Crowns of France and Navarre, united so recently, and to give the inheritance of the little Pyrenean kingdom to his brother’s suspect daughter.

  But if Jeanne were considered worthy to reign over Navarre, she would also be worthy of reigning over France. At least this was the conclusion reached by Duke Eudes, who refused to yield. Force would therefore be the deciding factor.

  Eudes galloped away to Dijon, whence, in the name of his niece, he issued a proclamation to all the lords of Artois, Picardy, Brie and Champagne, inviting them to withhold their obedience from the usurper.

  He wrote in similar terms to King Edward II of England, who, in spite of the efforts of his wife Isabella, did his utmost to inflame the quarrel by taking the Burgundian part. In every division arising within the kingdom of France, the English King saw the prospect of emancipating Guyenne.

  ‘Is this to be the sole result of my having denounced the adultery of my sisters-in-law?’ thought Queen Isabella.

  Seeing himself threatened in the north, the east and the south-west, anyone but Philippe the Long might perhaps have yielded. But the new King saw that he had several months in hand: the winter was no time for making war; his enemies would await the spring, if indeed they ultimately determined to put armies into the field. For Philippe the most urgent necessity was to be crowned and to clothe himself with the inalienable majesty conferred by coronation.

  At first he wished to hold the ceremony at Epiphany; the Feast of the Kings seemed to him a good augury; and it was also the date his father had chosen to be crowned. But representations were made to him that the burgesses of Rheims would not have enough time to prepare for it; he accorded them a delay of three days. The Court would leave Paris on the 1st of January, and the coronation take place on Sunday the 9th.

  Since Louis VIII, the first King not to have been elected during his predecessor’s lifetime, the heir to the throne had never been so precipitate in repairing to Rheims.

  But religious consecration was not enough for Philippe; he wished to add to it something that would fire the people’s spirit in a new way.

  He had often meditated the instructions of Egidio Colonna, Philip the Fair’s tutor, the man who had formed the Iron King’s thought. ‘Considered in absolute terms,’ Egidio Colonna had written in his treatise on the principles of sovereignty, ‘it would be preferable that the King be elected; but the corrupt desires of men and their manner of acting must make heredity preferable to election.’

  ‘I wish to be King with the consent of my subjects,’ said Philippe the Long, ‘and only on that basis shall I feel really worthy to rule them. And since some among the greater do not support me, I shall take the opinion of the smaller.’

  His father had shown him the road by summoning, at the difficult crises of his reign, assemblies in which all classes, all the ‘Estates’ of the realm, were represented. He decided that two assemblies of this nature, but larger than former ones, should be held, one in Paris for the langue d’oïl, the other at Bourges for the langue d’oc, during the weeks following his coronation. And he used the phrase ‘States General’.

  The lawyers were set to drafting the bills to be presented to the Estates to ratify Philippe’s accession to the throne by popular vote. The arguments of the Constable were naturally renewed to the effect that lilies could not spin wool and that the kingdom was too noble a thing to fall into the hands of women. There were other still stranger arguments: that there were, for instance, three intermediate generations between the venerated Saint Louis and Madame Jeanne of Navarre, while between Saint Louis and Philippe there were but two.

  And this caused the Count of Valois to exclaim, not unjustifiably: ‘In that case, why should I not be chosen, for I am separated from Saint Louis only by my father!’

  Finally the councillors to Parliament, spurred on by Messire de Noyers, exhumed, though without much belief in it, the ancient code of the customs of the Salian Franks, before the conversion of Clovis to Christianity. This code contained nothing concerning the transmission of the royal powers. It was a fairly rough system of civil and criminal jurisprudence, and almost incomprehensible moreover, since it was over eight centuries old. A brief paragraph laid it down that the inheritance of land must be by equal division among the male heirs. That was all.

  No more was necessary for certain doctors of secular law to construct a thesis and support the doctrine for which they were being paid. The Crown of France could go only to males, because the Crown implied the possession of land. And the best proof that the Salian Code had been applied since the beginning was clearly to be found in the fact that only men had indeed succeeded to it. Thus Jeanne of Navarre could be eliminated without the unprovable accusation of bastardy being even brought forward.

  The doctors were masters of their own obscurity. No one thought of objecting that the Merovingian dynasty was not derived from the Salians, but from the Sicambres and the Bructeres; and no one, for the moment, thought of examining the documents on which the famous Salic Law was supposed to be based – this law which was to triumph in history after it had ruined the kingdom by a hundred years of war.

  The adultery of Marguerite of Burgundy was to cost France dear.

  But for the moment the central power was far from idle. Philippe was already reorganizing the
administration, summoning important burgesses to his Council, and creating his ‘Knights Pursuivant’, thus rewarding those who had served him unremittingly since Lyons.

  From Charles of Valois he bought back the mint at Le Mans, before buying the ten others scattered over France. From now on, all the coinage circulating in the kingdom would be minted by the King.

  Remembering the ideas of John XXII, when he was still no more than Cardinal Duèze, Philippe prepared a reformed system of penal fines and chancellery dues. The lawyers would pay the dues into the Treasury every Saturday, and the registration of deeds would be subject to tariffs decreed by the Exchequer.30

  He dealt with customs, provostships, captaincies of towns and the inland revenue as he had dealt with the chancelleries. The abuses and malversations, which had been freely indulged in since the death of the Iron King, were now sternly repressed. In every rank of society, in every national activity, in the courts of justice, in the ports, in the market-places and in the fairgrounds, it was felt and appreciated that France was now in firm hands – hands of twenty-three! Loyalty is not assured without favours. Philippe’s accession was accompanied by considerable liberality.

  The old Seneschal de Joinville had been taken back to his Château of Wassy, where he declared he wished to die. He knew that he had reached the very end of his life. His son, Anseau, who since Lyons had never left Philippe’s side, one day said to the King: ‘My father has told me that strange things occurred at Vincennes at the time of the little King’s death; disturbing rumours have come to his ears.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Philippe replied. ‘I too have heard of certain curious events which took place during those days. Do you know what I think, Anseau? I don’t want to slander Bouville, for I have no proof; but I sometimes wonder whether my nephew was not already dead when we went to Vincennes and whether another child was not presented to us.’

  ‘Why should he have done that?’

  ‘I do not know. Fear that he would be blamed; fear that he would be accused by Valois and others. For, after all, he alone had charge of the child and obstinately refused to show him, do you remember? But it’s only a feeling and not based on anything factual. Anyway, it’s too late now.’