The Strangled Queen

by Maurice Druon

  The smell of power was abroad in Paris and it seemed that everyone wished to sniff it.

  But behind this façade of prestige there was a canker hidden: money, its hideous lack, its pursuit, which for years now Charles of Valois had ceaselessly maintained. Remorselessly led on by his temperament to wish to take first place, he had lived above his resources, accumulating debts till he was scarcely able to pay the interest upon them.

  The luxury in which he lived was fabulously expensive. And then there was his numerous and terrible family. Mahaut de Châtillon, his third wife, loved the most extravagant clothes and could not have borne that another woman should be better dressed than herself. Philippe, his favourite son, since he had been knighted was continuously buying suits of armour, fine light English surcoats, Cordovan boots, lances of wood from the north, and German swords.

  A prolific progenitor, Monseigneur of Valois had thirteen daughters by his three marriages! Those who were already married had caused Charles to get into debt so that their weddings might match in splendour the crowns with which they were allying themselves. As for the others, marriage portions had to be thought of if they were to find suitable husbands.

  As for the chamberlains, equerries, stewards and servants, they were both numerous and excessively rapacious. It was impossible to prevent their wasting everything, and stealing more. To feed the whole crowd of them, meat arrived on the scale of whole carcasses at a time, and vegetables and groceries by the cartload.

  Not long before, playing the liberal by enfranchising the serfs of his estates – because his brother had obliged him to – against compensation, Valois had been able to meet part of his debts. But serfs can only be liberated once; and if, with the change of reign, the King’s uncle longed to take the affairs of the kingdom into his own hands, it was as much to restore his credit as to satisfy his lust for power.

  Some battles leave the conqueror as poor as the conquered. Monseigneur of Valois now had control of the royal treasury; but the treasury was empty.

  And while on the ground floor the crowd was warming and refreshing itself at his expense, Valois, in his study, receiving visitor after visitor, was searching for some means of filling not only his own coffers, but also those of the State.

  As he led the redoubtable Count of Dreux, with whom he had been discussing the situation in the bailiwicks west of Paris, to the top of the staircase, he heard a commotion below, mingled with cries of surprise.

  It was Robert of Artois who, in the centre of an admiring circle, was twisting a horseshoe in his hands. Someone had just said in his presence that King Philip had been able to do it in his youth, and the giant wanted to demonstrate that this particular talent was common in his family. The veins swelled in his temples with the effort but the iron bent and men nodded their heads with respect while the women uttered little cries of wonder.

  Monseigneur of Valois appeared upon a sort of interior balcony which overhung the Great Hall. At once all those present raised their heads towards him like a nestful of young birds waiting to be fed.

  ‘Artois!’ called Valois. ‘I would like to have a word with you.’

  ‘I am at your disposal, Cousin,’ replied big Robert.

  He threw the twisted horseshoe to an equerry who very nearly received it on his head, and hastened to join the King’s uncle in his study.

  The room had the proportions of a cathedral. A huge tapestry, embroidered in silver and gold, pictured upon the walls an embarkation for a crusade. Ivory statues, pictures, thin carved shutters standing open, goblets encrusted with gems, all gave the room an air of even greater luxury than the rest of the house. Upon a little table stood a chessboard of jasper and jade, mounted in silver and set with precious stones; one set of pieces was of jasper and the other of rock-crystal.

  ‘Well,’ cried Valois, ‘do you think your man will come? He seems very dilatory.’

  Heavy, massive in appearance, his colour high, superbly dressed to the point of bad taste, he walked to and fro, his expression anxious, among the treasures of which most had not yet been paid for.

  ‘Well, Cousin, I sincerely hope he does come!’ replied Artois. ‘I am no less anxious to see him than you are, I can assure you, because if he gives us a favourable answer, I propose making you a request.’

  ‘What may that be?’

  ‘Now that you have control of the royal treasury, could it not pay me some of what it owes me?’

  Valois raised his arms towards the ceiling.

  ‘Don’t you realize, Cousin,’ Artois went on, ‘that for the last seven years I have not been paid the five thousand pounds of revenues from my county of Beaumont, which was graciously given me supposedly in recompense for having Artois taken away, though it already belonged to me! Just think what that means! Thirty-five thousand pounds due to me. What am I expected to live on?’

  Valois put his hand on Robert’s arm with the protective gesture that was habitual to him.

  ‘Cousin,’ he said, ‘for the moment the great urgency is to find the money to send Bouville on his way. The King is hourly demanding it. After that, I promise you, your affairs are the first I shall attend to.’

  But his face grew dark with anxiety. To how many people had he made the same promise since the day before?

  ‘The trick Marigny has played on us, emptying the coffers by making payments, will be his last, I promise you,’ he cried. ‘I’ll have him hanged, do you understand, Robert! I’ll have him hanged! Where do you think the revenues from your country have gone? Into his pocket, my good Cousin, into his pocket, I tell you!’

  Since he had succeeded in giving the Rector-General of the kingdom a first blow, there were no limits to Valois’s rage, and he continually found new causes for complaint against him.

  In his eyes Marigny was responsible for everything. Had a burglary been committed in Paris? It was Marigny’s fault because his police were not properly organized, perhaps even went shares with the burglar. Had Parliament issued a decree to the disadvantage of a great lord? Marigny had dictated it. Had a husband discovered his wife’s misconduct? Again it was Marigny’s fault, because of the incredible relaxation of morals that had taken place since he had been in power. It was even doubtful whether Marigny had not been the instigator of the royal Princesses’ adultery, and if Philip the Fair were not dead through his fault.

  ‘Anyway, do you think that your Siennese will accept?’ asked Valois suddenly.

  ‘Yes, yes. He will ask for security, but he’ll accept, you’ll see.’

  Artois listened, never growing tired of watching his cousin, at once amused and fascinated. Valois was his own particular ‘great man’, the only being with whom he would have consented to exchange personalities. The giant, devoted to no one but himself, nevertheless felt almost capable of devotion to Valois.

  For someone whose nature was not utterly dissimilar, Monseigneur of Valois’s personality was indeed a fascinating one, and to watch the way he lived and behaved was something of a spectacle. This great lord was an extraordinary personage, impatient, tenacious, crafty, simple, physically courageous, but weak in the face of flattery, and above all animated by an ambition that nothing, neither honours nor privileges, could ever appease.

  Others would have been perfectly satisfied with being Lord of Valois, Peer of France, Count of Alençon, of Chartres, of Perche, of Anjou, of Maine, premier peer of the kingdom besides. But not he; he was tortured by the longing to be king. At the age of thirteen he had received the crown of Aragon, to which he had pretensions as a descendant of Jaime the Conquistador, but had not been able to retain it. At twenty, placed at the head of the French armies by his brother, he had ravaged Guyenne. At thirty-one, summoned by his father-in-law, the King of Naples, to pacify Tuscany, where the Guelfs and Ghibellines were at each others’ throats,13 he had succeeded in acquiring from the Pope the indulgences of a Crusade, with the title of Vicar-General of the Christian World and Count of Romagna, while at the same time he extracted from the Florent
ines, whom he had utterly ruined, two hundred thousand golden florins as a reward for doing them the honour of going away and ceasing to pillage.

  Widower of Marguerite of Anjou-Sicily, he had hastily remarried a Courtenay, with whom he had fallen madly in love as soon as he grasped the fact that she brought him by inheritance the fabulous title of Emperor of Constantinople. Alas, he had not reigned, since the two Paleologi, who shod in purple occupied the throne of Byzantium, if they had many difficulties within their empire, nevertheless took little heed of the busybody at the other end of the Christian world, who had begun to talk as if he were the ruler of the universe.

  Again in 1308, after a series of extraordinary manoeuvres, Valois had become a candidate for the crown of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire without obtaining a single vote at the election. There was no available sceptre towards which he did not extend his hand across the world.

  Now, at forty-four, he was not yet cured of his Byzantine dreams, nor of his German ones either. In his thoughts he counted up all the crowns he had nearly worn, without hesitating to include that of France. To acquire the last so little had been needed: merely that Philip the Fair should have had no children or that they should have died in infancy.

  And when at times Valois exclaimed, ‘My life is over! The fates have always betrayed me!’ it was because he believed that he could have reconstituted under his own domination, from Spain to the Bosphorus, the Roman world as it had been a thousand years before under the Emperor Constantine.

  The great megalomaniac lord had the temperament of an adventurer, the manners of a parvenu and the prescience of a founder of a dynasty. The thirteen Valois kings who were to be his descendants and reign over France for two hundred and fifty years would all have in their blood, Charles V excepted, certain characteristics of his crazed nature. But he was foredoomed to miss everything: he would die four years before the throne of France became vacant and his son succeeded to it.

  ‘And that’s what I’m reduced to, Cousin!’ he cried at this juncture with theatrical despair. ‘Imagine having to depend on the goodwill of a Siennese banker in order to be able to restore some kind of order to the affairs of the kingdom!’

  4

  Who Rules France?

  AT LENGTH THE VISITOR Charles of Valois was awaiting was announced, and Artois assumed his most polite manner to receive Messire Spinello Tolomei.

  ‘Friend banker,’ he cried going towards him, his hands extended, ‘I owe you a great deal of money and I have always promised you that I would pay you as soon as fortune favoured me.’

  ‘Very good news indeed, Monseigneur,’ replied the banker.

  ‘Well, then! I can begin by showing the gratitude I owe you by procuring you a royal client.’

  Tolomei saluted Valois with a profound inclination of his head, saying, ‘Who does not know Monseigneur at least by sight and renown. He is well remembered at Sienna.’

  He had left there the same kind of memories as he had left in Florence, at least to the extent that, the town being smaller, he had taken only seventeen thousand florins for ‘pacifying’ it.

  Olive-skinned, pendulous of jowl, his left eye closed – it was supposed that he opened it only when he was speaking the truth, and it was therefore rarely seen – his grey, well-groomed hair falling low upon the collar of his dark green robe, Messire Tolomei waited to be asked to sit down. Having looked him up and down for a moment, Monseigneur of Valois complied.

  Since the death of old Boccanegra, Tolomei had been elected by his colleagues, as had been expected, Captain-General of the Lombard Companies of Paris, a high-sounding title which had no military significance but gave its holder a more certain power than that of the Constable. His function was the secret control of a third of the banking operations in the kingdom, and it is well known that in these matters who can control a third controls the whole.

  ‘There will be great changes in France now, friend banker,’ said Robert of Artois. ‘Messire de Marigny, who is no more a friend of yours, I believe, than he is of ours, finds himself very awkwardly placed.’

  ‘I know,’ murmured Tolomei.

  ‘Moreover, I have told Monseigneur,’ went on Artois, ‘that, since he needs the assistance of a financier, he can do no better than come to you whose ability and loyalty I know so well.’

  Tolomei smiled politely; but he thought mistrustfully, ‘If they were going to offer me the management of the Treasury, they would not be paying me so many compliments.’

  ‘What can I do to serve you, Monseigneur?’ he asked, turning to Valois.

  ‘What a banker usually does, Messire Tolomei,’ replied Valois with that fine arrogance he always assumed when he was going to ask for money.

  ‘That can mean a number of things,’ replied the Siennese. ‘Have you funds you wish to lay out in good merchandise which will double its price in the next six months? Or do you wish to acquire an interest in merchant shipping? It is developing very rapidly at the present time when so much that we need must be brought in by sea?’

  ‘No, it is nothing of that kind; I shall consider such matters later on,’ Valois replied quickly. ‘For the moment, what I require of you is to procure me some fresh money for the Treasury.’

  Tolomei looked disconsolate.

  ‘Alas, Monseigneur, in spite of my great desire to serve you, that is the one thing I cannot do. My friends and I have been bled white in recent times. None of the money the Treasury borrowed from us for the war in Flanders has yet been returned to us. Private accounts’ – Tolomei glanced at Artois – ‘bring us in nothing, nor do the advances we have made upon them; and to tell you the truth, Monseigneur, my coffers are a bit rusted at the locks. How much do you need?’

  ‘Not much. Ten thousand pounds.’

  The banker raised his hands in a gesture of horror.

  ‘Santo Dio! Where shall I find them?’ he cried.

  These were only preliminaries, and Artois had foreseen that Tolomei, as usual, would plead poverty, say that he was stripped to the bone and groan more loudly than Job on his dunghill. But Valois, who was in a hurry, wanted to demonstrate his authority and assumed a tone which generally succeeded in imposing his will.

  ‘Come, come, Messire Tolomei!’ he cried. ‘Don’t talk like that. I have sent for you on business, and in order that you should practise your profession as you have always practised it, with profit I suspect.’

  ‘My profession, Monseigneur,’ replied Tolomei, his eye shut, his hands comfortably crossed upon his stomach, ‘my profession is to lend; not to give. And for a long time now I have done nothing but give without return. I can’t make money out of thin air and have not found the philosopher’s stone.’

  ‘Don’t you want to help me get rid of Marigny for you? It would be to your own interest, I should have thought!’

  ‘Monseigneur, to pay tribute to one’s enemy when he is powerful and then to pay it again so that he should no longer be so, is a double operation which, you will agree, brings in very little return. Moreover, I should want to know what the consequences would be, and if I have a chance of getting my money back.’

  Charles of Valois then launched into the great homily he had given all comers since the day before. He intended, if only he were given the means to do it, to suppress all the ‘novelties’ introduced by Marigny and his middle-class justiciars, restore the authority of the great lords, and re-establish order and prosperity in the kingdom by returning to the old feudal rights which had made the grandeur of the kingdom of France. Order! As happens with all political blunderers, the word was ceaselessly upon his lips, and nothing could have persuaded him to admit that the world had changed even a little in the last century.

  ‘Before long,’ he cried, ‘I assure you we shall have returned to the good old customs of my ancestor Saint Louis!’

  As he spoke, he pointed to a sort of altar, upon which stood a reliquary in the form of a human foot containing a bone from the heel of his grandfather; the foot was of silver and the nail
s inset in gold.

  The remains of the King-Saint had been cut up into pieces, since each member of the family and each royal chapel desired to possess a portion. The top of the skull was preserved in a fine bust of goldsmith’s work in the Sainte-Chapelle; the Countess Mahaut of Artois, in her castle at Hesdin, possessed several hairs as well as a fragment of the jaw; and so many slivers and splinters of bone, so much debris, had been dissipated in this way that one might well wonder what could be left in the tomb at Saint-Denis. If all the pieces had been reassembled, the surprising discovery would undoubtedly have been made that the King-Saint had doubled in size since his death.14

  Having asked permission, the Captain-General of the Lombards rose and devoutly kissed the big toe of the silver foot. Then, returning, he asked, ‘Why do you require exactly ten thousand pounds, Monseigneur?’

  Valois was compelled to explain that Marigny’s orders had succeeded in emptying the Treasury and that the money was required for Bouville’s mission.

  ‘At Naples. Yes,’ said Tolomei. ‘Yes, we do much business with Naples through our cousins the Bardi. To marry the King. Yes, yes, I perfectly understand, Monseigneur. At length to reassemble the conclave. Alas, Monseigneur, a conclave is more expensive than a palace, and how much less solid! Yes, Monseigneur, yes, I understand.’

  Then, when Valois had at last revealed all that was in his mind to the fat little man who always pretended ignorance in order to have things more clearly explained, Tolomei said, ‘All that is very well thought out Monseigneur, and I wish you every success from the bottom of my heart; but I see no assurance that you will succeed in marrying the King, nor that you will have a Pope, nor even, if these things do happen, that I should see my gold again, supposing that I were in a position to provide it.’