The Accursed Kings Series Books 1-3: The Iron King, the Strangled Queen, the Poisoned Crown

by Maurice Druon

  The others present nodded their heads with satisfaction; as a start, it was not too bad.

  But Louis X was displeased with himself, for he had forgotten to begin by rendering homage to the memory of his father and by speaking of the continuity of power.

  Moreover, he had had a couple of admirable sentences prepared for him during the morning; but they had escaped his mind in the emotion caused by his entrance, and now he had nothing more to say.

  The silence soon became unbearable again. There was obviously someone missing from this assembly: the dead man.

  Enguerrand de Marigny gazed at the young King, obviously expecting him to say, ‘Messire, I confirm you in your duties of Coadjutor and Rector-General of the kingdom, Chamberlain, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Minister of Works, Captain of the Louvre …’

  Since nothing happened, Marigny behaved as if it had been said, and asked, ‘Upon what matters does the King wish to be informed? Of the collecting of the subsidies and taxes, of the state of the Treasury, of the decisions of Parliament, of the growing famine in the provinces, of the dispositions of the garrisons, of the situation in Flanders, of the claims and demands of the leagues of the barons in Burgundy and Champagne?’

  This quite clearly signified, ‘Sire, these are the questions about which I am busy, and there are many others too, which I could reel off as I say my beads. Do you think you can get on without me?’

  The Hutin, anxious and apparently taken aback, turned towards his uncle Valois as if asking for support.

  ‘Messire de Marigny, the King has not called us together to deal with these matters,’ said the Count of Valois. ‘He will listen to them later.’

  ‘If I am not advised of the agenda of the Council, Monseigneur, I cannot be expected to guess it,’ replied Marigny.

  ‘The King, Messire,’ continued Valois as if he had not heard the interruption, ‘the King wishes to hear our views upon the most important anxiety which, as a good sovereign, he can have: that of his posterity and the succession to the throne.’

  ‘That is precisely it, Messire,’ said The Hutin, trying to assume a tone of grandeur in order to express a desire from which it was lacking by its very nature. ‘My first duty is to provide for the succession to the throne and for that I need a wife …’

  He stopped short.

  ‘The King, therefore, has come to the conclusion that he must marry again,’ went on Valois. ‘And his attention is fixed, after long consideration, upon Madame Clémence of Hungary, niece to the King of Naples. We wish to have the benefit of your advice before sending an embassy.’

  The phrase ‘we wish’ sounded disagreeably in the ears of many of those present. Was it Monseigneur of Valois who reigned?

  Philippe of Poitiers inclined his long head on one side. ‘That is why,’ he thought, ‘they have begun by buttering me up with a peerage of the realm! As long as Louis did not marry again, I was second in the line of succession after the little Jeanne, who is suspected of being a bastard. If he takes another wife, and she gives him further children, I shall count for nothing. And they have decided this without consulting either Charles or myself, who are in the same position as Louis, with imprisoned wives.’11

  ‘What is Monseigneur de Marigny’s opinion of this proposal?’ he asked in order to be disagreeable to Valois.

  At the same time, he was knowingly committing a gross breach of etiquette towards his elder brother, because in principle it was the sovereign, and the sovereign alone, who asked the councillors to give their opinions. There would have been hell to pay if such a breach had occurred at a Council of King Philip’s.

  But today everyone seemed to be taking individual command, and since the new King’s uncle was taking it upon himself to dominate the Council, the brother might well take the liberty of doing as much.

  Marigny leant forward with his bull-like forehead, and it was clear that he was about to charge.

  ‘Since the King’s consideration has turned in the direction of Madame of Hungary, she must naturally have great queenly qualities,’ he said. ‘But, apart from the fact that she is Monseigneur of Valois’s niece, which naturally suffices to make us love her, I do not clearly see how this alliance will profit the kingdom. Her father, Charles Martel, has been dead a long time, having been King of Hungary only in name; her brother Charobert [unlike Monseigneur of Valois, who affected the Italian pronunciation of these names, Marigny said them in French] has at last achieved a year or two ago, after fifteen years of fighting and intriguing, the Magyar crown which still sits rather loosely upon his head. All the fiefs and principalities of the House of Anjou have already been distributed among the family, which is so numerous that it spreads across the world like oil upon a cloth, and it might soon be thought that the royal family of France was but a branch of the line of Anjou. One can certainly not expect from such a marriage an enlargement of the kingdom, as King Philip always desired, nor any help in war if it were to become necessary, since all these remote princes have enough to do to retain their own possessions. In other words, Sire, I am certain that your father would have opposed a union in which the dowry was nebulous rather than assured.’

  Monseigneur of Valois had gone crimson with anger; his knee began shaking under the table. Everything that had been said was directed against him, each phrase had a perfidious tendency.

  ‘It is all very fine, Messire de Marigny,’ he cried, ‘to make the dead speak from the tomb. I shall reply that a queen’s virtue is worth a province! The splendid alliances you wove so cleverly with Burgundy, and to which you so craftily persuaded my brother, have not turned out so well that you can set yourself up as a judge in these matters; or that you can expect to be consulted once again. Shame and sorrow resulted for everyone concerned.’

  ‘That is the truth!’ cried The Hutin sharply.

  ‘Sire,’ replied Marigny with almost imperceptible contempt, ‘you were still very young when your marriage was decided upon by your father, and Monseigneur of Valois did not seem so opposed to it then. He made all haste, and without too close an investigation, to marry off his own son to Madame Marguerite’s sister, in order to relate himself more nearly to her and to you.’

  Valois was forced to admit the impeachment and found no answer. His face became more blotched than ever. He had, in fact, believed himself extremely clever to marry his elder son, Philippe, to the younger sister of Marguerite, who was known as Jeanne the Little, or Jeanne the Halt, because she had one leg shorter than the other. And now Marguerite was in prison, and the cripple a member of his family.12

  ‘Women’s virtue, like their beauty, is a passing thing, Sire,’ went on Marigny. ‘But provinces are permanent. And Monseigneur of Poitiers cannot dispute the fact that we possess the Franche-Comté.’

  ‘Is this Council,’ asked Valois roughly, ‘to be devoted to listening to Messire de Marigny praising himself, or to the advancement of the King’s wishes?’

  Tempers were rising; the discussion had become a paying off of old scores.

  ‘In any case, Monseigneur,’ replied Marigny, ‘it would make more sense not to put the cart before the horse. We may consider all the princesses on earth for the King. I can well understand his impatience. But we have first to get him unmarried from his present wife. The Count of Artois appears not to have brought back the answers you expected from Château-Gaillard,’ he continued in order to show that he was well informed. ‘The first requirement for an annulment is a Pope …’

  ‘The Pope you have been promising us for the last six months, Marigny, has not yet materialized out of this phantom conclave. Your envoys have so successfully bullied and defenestrated the cardinals at Carpentras that, raising their soutanes, they have fled across country and can no longer be found. You have little reason to think it a stroke of genius! Had you shown greater moderation, and that respect due to the ministers of God, which is so alien to you, we would not be in our present difficulty.’

  ‘Up till now I have succeeded in preventing t
he election of a Pope who would be the creature of the King of Naples, because King Philip particularly wished that there should be one useful to France.’

  Men who love power are not only dominated, as is generally supposed, by an appetite for wealth and honours. Above all they are influenced by an objective taste for the creation of events, for controlling their occurrence, for acting upon the world with effectiveness and for being always in the right. Wealth and honours are no more than the signs and tools of their influence.

  Marigny and Valois were both men of this particular stamp and, in Council, the successful man from the middle classes had nearly always won the day over the Prince of the Blood. Only Philip the Fair had succeeded in keeping these two adversaries at arm’s length, using the political understanding of the one and the military ability of the other to the best advantage.

  Louis X was completely submerged by the storm; the argument was going much too rapidly for him, and he was unable to forget certain painful memories of the previous night.

  Monseigneur of Evreux intervened in an endeavour to quiet their tempers, and brought forward a formula which might conciliate the two positions.

  ‘If, in exchange for a marriage with the Princess Clémence, we obtained from the King of Naples an agreement that the Pope should be French,’ he proposed, ‘and elected with all speed …’

  ‘Certainly, Monseigneur,’ said Marigny more calmly, ‘such an agreement would have certain benefits; but I very much doubt whether we can get it.’

  ‘Nevertheless, let us send an embassy to Naples if that be the King’s wish.’

  ‘Most assuredly, Monseigneur.’

  ‘Bouville, what do you advise?’ said The Hutin suddenly, in order to give an appearance of continuing the discussion in hand.

  Fat Bouville started. He had made an excellent Chamberlain, overseeing the expenditure and managing the household with precision, but his mind was not capable of any great flights. Philip the Fair hardly ever spoke to him in Council except to order him to open the windows.

  ‘Sire,’ he said, ‘you are seeking a wife from a noble family; they maintain all the old traditions of chivalry. We should be honoured to serve such a Queen …’

  He stopped, interrupted by a glance from Marigny which seemed to say, ‘You are betraying me, Bouville!’

  Hugues de Bouville, a Norman like Marigny, was five years the elder. It was in his household, as an equerry, that Marigny had begun his career. The equerry had not been slow to surpass his lord, but had always faithfully dragged his old master after him in his extraordinary rise.

  Fat Bouville lowered his head. He was so devoted a servant of the crown and so dazzled by royal majesty that, when the King spoke to him, he could not but approve. That The Hutin was an idiot was not apparent to him; he was The King and Bouville was prepared to lavish upon him all the zeal that he had shown towards Philip the Fair.

  This servility received its immediate recompense, for The Hutin decided, to everyone’s surprise, that Bouville should be sent to Naples.

  Moreover, there was no opposition. The Count of Valois, believing that he could arrange everything by letter, thought that a mediocre but tractable man was exactly the ambassador he required. While Marigny thought, ‘All right, send him then. He has as much cunning as a child of three. You’ll see what the results will be.’

  So, blushing, the good servant found himself charged with an important mission he had never expected.

  ‘Don’t forget, Bouville, that I must have a Pope,’ said the young King.

  ‘Sire, I shall have no other idea in my mind.’

  Louis X was impatient for his departure. He wished his messenger already upon the road. He suddenly seemed to gain authority.

  ‘On your way back you will pass through Avignon,’ he went on. ‘You will do your best to hasten the conclave. And since the cardinals, so it appears, are to be bought, you will get Messire de Marigny to furnish you with sufficient gold.’

  ‘Where shall I find the gold, Sire?’ asked the latter.

  ‘Good God, in the Treasury of course!’

  ‘The Treasury is empty, Sire, that is to say there is enough in it only to cover the necessary expenses between now and the Feast of Saint Nicholas, no more.’

  ‘What do you mean, the Treasury is empty?’ cried Valois. ‘Why haven’t you told us this before?’

  ‘I wished to begin with it, Monseigneur, but you prevented me.’

  ‘And why, in your opinion, is it empty?’

  ‘Because, Monseigneur, the revenue from taxes does not easily accrue from a starving people. Because the barons, as you will be the first to realize,’ said Marigny, his voice rising insolently, ‘refuse to pay the dues which they had agreed. Because the loan from the Lombard companies has been exhausted by the war in Flanders, the war you so strongly recommended …’

  ‘And which you wished to terminate upon your own authority,’ cried Valois, ‘before our knights could find an opportunity of glory and our finances of profit. If the kingdom has drawn no advantage from the peculiar treaties you went there to conclude, I imagine that that does not hold good for you, Marigny, because it is not your habit to overlook your own advantage in any business you undertake. I know this to my own detriment.’

  He was alluding in this last phrase to an exchange of lands which had taken place between them in 1310, when Valois had asked Marigny to yield him his lordship of Champrond against that of Gaillefontaine, and had ever afterwards considered himself cheated.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Louis X, ‘Bouville must set out as soon as possible.’

  Marigny, without appearing to pay the slightest attention to the King’s last words, cried, ‘Sire, I would wish Monseigneur of Valois to elaborate what he has just said upon the subject of the treaties of Lille or, alternatively, to retract his words.’

  A terrifying silence fell over the Council. Would the Count of Valois dare repeat straight out the appalling accusations he had just brought against his brother’s Coadjutor.

  Monseigneur of Valois did so dare.

  ‘I tell you to your face, Messire, as everyone says behind your back, that the Flemish bought you to effect the retreat of our army, and that you embezzled money which should have been paid over to the Treasury.’

  Marigny rose to his feet. Indignation had paled his blotchy skin, and he now adopted the pose of his statue in the Mercer’s Hall.

  ‘Sire,’ he said, ‘I have listened today to more than a man of honour should hear in the whole course of his life. I possess what I do only from the benefits that the King, your father, lavished upon me for the services I rendered as his lieutenant for sixteen years. I have now been accused in your presence of embezzlement, of commerce with the enemies of the kingdom; nor has any voice been raised in my defence, not even yours, Sire. I demand that a commission be appointed to look into the accounts for which I am responsible to you and to you alone.’

  Anger is contagious. Louis X suddenly grew irritated with the attitude Marigny had displayed since the opening of the Council, the manner with which he had thwarted his proposals, treated him like a small boy, and made him feel all too clearly how inferior he was to his father.

  ‘Very well, Messire, the commission will be appointed,’ he replied, ‘since you demand it yourself.’

  By these words he separated himself from the only minister capable of commanding in his stead and of directing the policy of his reign. Mediocrities can tolerate being surrounded only by flatterers who conceal their mediocrity. France was to pay through long years for this momentary resentment.

  Marigny picked up his file, filled it with his documents, and went to the door. This action increased The Hutin’s irritation.

  ‘From now on,’ he added, ‘you will have no further concern with our Treasury.’

  ‘I shall take the greatest care not to, Sire,’ said Marigny, leaving the room.

  And his feet could be heard fading down the length of the corridor.

  Valois was tr
iumphant, surprised almost at the speed with which his enemy’s fall had been brought about.

  ‘You are wrong, Brother,’ said the Count of Evreux; ‘you cannot browbeat a man of that sort.’

  ‘I had good reason,’ replied Valois; ‘and you will soon be grateful to me for it. Marigny is a blot upon the face of the kingdom. He had to be squashed as soon as possible.’

  ‘Well, Uncle,’ asked The Hutin, reverting to his one anxiety, ‘when will you send the embassy to Madame Clémence?’

  As soon as Valois had promised that Bouville would set out within the week, he closed the meeting. He wanted to stretch his legs.

  2

  Marigny Remains Rector-General

  AS HE WENT HOME, preceded as usual by three sergeant-mace-bearers, and followed by two secretaries and an equerry, Monseigneur de Marigny did not as yet comprehend what had occurred, how destiny had turned so abruptly against him. He was blinded by anger. ‘That impudent rascal accuses me of having taken bribes over the treaties,’ he said to himself. ‘He’s a fine one to talk! And as for this little King, who has got the brains of a flea and the surliness of a wasp, who says not one single word in my defence, but instead takes the Treasury out of my control!’

  He rode on, unaware of the streets and the people he passed, unobservant of the hostile faces of those forced to make way for him. He was not loved. He had governed men from so high a position and for so long that he had lost the knack of looking at them.

  Having reached his house in the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain, he leapt from his horse without awaiting the help of his equerry, walked quickly across the courtyard, threw his cloak over the arm of the first servant he met and, still holding his file of documents, mounted the stairs leading to the first floor.

  His house was less like a private residence than a government office: heavy furniture, huge chandeliers, thick carpets, lavish hangings, nothing but solid furnishings designed to last. An army of servants were at his beck and call.