The King Without a Kingdom

by Maurice Druon

  But you will also understand, Archambaud, why King Edward so steadfastly supports this Charles the Bad, who has often deceived him. It is because the tiny Navarre, and the big County of Évreux, are pieces, not only in his dealings with France, but in this long game of gathering together kingdoms that has taken root in his mind. Kings have to have something to dream about too!

  Soon after the mission of our fellows Morbecque and Brévand, it was Monseigneur Philip of Navarre, Count of Longueville, who himself travelled to England.

  Blond and tall and of a proud nature, Philip of Navarre is as loyal as his brother is deceitful; which means that, by loyalty to his brother, he espouses with conviction all of his brother’s treachery. He doesn’t have the gift of the gab of his elder brother, but he charms by the warmth of his soul. He greatly appealed to Queen Philippa, who says he looked exactly like her husband at the same age. It is no great wonder; they are cousins several times over.

  Good Queen Philippa! When she wed she was a round and rosy demoiselle who promised to grow fat, as the women of Hainaut often do. She fulfilled her promise.

  The king loved her dearly. But he had, with age, other impulses and desires, rare, but violent. There was the Countess of Salisbury; and at present there is Dame Alice Perrère, or Perrières, one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting. In order to soothe her pique, Philippa eats, and gets fatter and fatter.

  Queen Isabella? Yes, yes, she is still alive; at least she was still alive last month. In Castle Rising, a huge and sad castle where, twenty-eight years ago, her son locked her up after he had had her lover, Lord Mortimer, executed. Free, she would have caused him far too much trouble. The She-wolf of France … He visits her once a year, at Christmas time. It is from the Queen Dowager that he acquires his rights over France. But she it was, again, who provoked the dynastic crisis, by denouncing Marguerite of Burgundy’s adultery, and providing good reason to exclude Louis Hutin’s descendants from the line of succession. There is something rather ridiculous you will admit, to be found in the alliance, forty years on, between the grandson of Marguerite of Burgundy and the son of Isabella. Ah! It is enough to live in order to have seen it all!

  And there you have Edward and Philip of Navarre together at Windsor, and the interrupted treaty is back under discussion, whose first foundations were set down during the talks in Avignon. Still a secret treaty. In the first drafts, the names of the contracting princes were not to appear explicitly. The King of England is referred to as the elder brother and the King of Navarre the younger brother. As if that could suffice to mask their identities, and as if the terms written didn’t obviously refer to them! They are precautions of chancelleries, which fail to mislead those one distrusts: when you want a secret to be well kept, well, you shouldn’t write it down, that is all.

  The younger brother recognizes the elder brother as rightful King of France. Always the same thing; it is the first and the most essential part; it is the cornerstone of the agreement. The elder brother recognizes the younger brother his right to the duchy of Normandy, the counties of Champagne and Brie, the viscountcy of Chartres and all of the Languedoc with Toulouse, Béziers, Montpellier. It appears that Edward did not give way on Angoumois37 – too close to Guyenne, that must be the reason; he wouldn’t allow Navarre, should this treaty come into effect, may God forbid, to get a foothold between Aquitaine and the Poitou. On the other hand, he seems to have granted him Bigorre, which, if it comes to Phoebus’s ears, will not be at all to his liking. As you see, when you add it all up, that makes a big piece of France, a very big piece. And one may well be surprised that a man who means to reign there would relinquish so much of it to just one vassal. But, on the one hand, this kind sort of viceroyalty that he is bestowing upon Navarre corresponds to the idea he has been entertaining of a new empire; and on the other, the more he increases the possessions of the prince who recognizes him as rightful king, the more he broadens the territorial base of his legitimacy. Instead of having to rally people to his cause, piece by piece, he can maintain that he is recognized by all of those provinces in one fell swoop.

  As for the rest, sharing the cost of war, commitment to not conclude truces separately, these are habitual clauses and taken from the previous draft. But the alliance is set forth as a ‘perpetual alliance’.

  I was told there was an amusing exchange between Edward and Philip of Navarre because the latter requested that the settlement of the hundred thousand écus, never paid, but which featured in the marriage contract between Charles of Navarre and Joan of Valois, be included in the treaty.

  King Edward was surprised. ‘Why should I have to pay King John’s debts?’

  ‘But of course. You take his place on the throne; you take on his obligations also.’ Young Philip certainly had quite a nerve. One has to be his age to risk saying such things. That made Edward III laugh, he who never usually laughs. ‘So be it. But only after I have been crowned in Rheims. Not before the coronation.’

  And Philip of Navarre left again for Normandy. He was in Normandy as long as it took to commit to vellum what had been agreed, to go over the terms article by article, to send notes back and forth across the Channel: ‘the elder brother … the younger brother …’ and also the troubles of war, all of which meant that the treaty, still secret, still widely known, at least to those who had an interest in knowing about it, wouldn’t be signed until the beginning of September, at Clarendon Castle, barely three months ago, just days before the Battle of Poitiers. Signed by whom? By King Edward and by Philip of Navarre, who undertook a second trip to England to this end.

  By now you will understand, Archambaud, why the dauphin, who was strongly opposed to the King of Navarre’s arrest, as you have heard, keeps him so resolutely in prison, though as acting commander of the kingdom, he might with perfect ease and consistency release him, as he is being pressed from many sides to do. As long as the treaty is signed only by Philip of Navarre, it will be considered null and void. From the moment Charles of Navarre ratifies it, it will be another matter altogether.

  At this hour, the King of Navarre, because he is held prisoner in Picardie by the King of France’s son, doesn’t yet know – he is probably the only one not to know – he has recognized the King of England as rightful King of France, but his recognition being by proxy, since he cannot sign it himself, it is worthless.

  That adds a fine knot of confusion, even a cat wouldn’t recognize its kittens in the tangle, and it’s what we will try to untangle in Metz! I wager that years from now nobody will understand anything of this, except you perhaps, or your son, because you will have told him.

  3

  The Pope and the World

  HADN’T I TOLD you that in Sens we would get some news from Paris? And good news at that. The dauphin has walked out on everyone at his turbulent Estates-General where Marcel called for the disbanding of the king’s council and where Bishop Le Coq, while pleading for the release of Charles the Bad, forgot himself to the point of speaking of deposing King John. Yes, yes, my nephew, this is what we have come to: one of his neighbours had to stamp on the bishop’s foot to get him to correct himself, and put on record that it was not in the power of the estates to depose a king, only the pope might, at the request of the three estates. Well, the dauphin left yesterday, Monday, taking his people with him – for Metz, he too. With two thousand horses. As an excuse he cited messages received from the emperor, obliging him to attend his Diet for the good of the kingdom. Yes, and above all, my message. He has heard me. With his exit, the estates are in a void and will break up without being able to conclude a thing. If the town proves to be too turbulent, he could always come back with his troops. He holds it under by threat …

  Other good news: Capocci is not coming to Metz. He refuses to meet me. Blessed refusal. He is putting himself in the wrong vis-à-vis the Holy Father, and I will be rid of him. I am sending the Bishop of Sens to escort the dauphin; that makes two wise men to advise him, already he is accompanied by the Archbishop-Chanc
ellor, Pierre de La Forêt. For my part, I will have twelve prelates in my retinue. That will suffice. It is as many as any legate ever had. And no Capocci. Really, I cannot understand why the Holy Father persists in appointing him to me and still stubbornly refuses to recall him. First and foremost, without him I would have set out earlier. Really, it was a lost spring.

  In Avignon I sensed that everything was about to take a grave turn as soon as we learned of the affair of Rouen, and received letters from King John and King Edward, and found out that the Duke of Lancaster was equipping a new expedition, while the French army was convened for the first of June. I said to the Holy Father that we had to send a papal legate, which he agreed to. He was bemoaning the state of Christendom. I was ready to leave that very week. He needed three weeks to write down the instructions. I said to him: ‘But what instructions, sanctissimus pater? You only have to copy out those that your predecessor, the venerated Clement VI, drew up for a similar mission, ten years ago. They were entirely to the point. They would instruct me how to act so as to accordingly prevent a general resumption of war.’

  Perhaps, deep down, without being fully aware, as he is certainly incapable of a deliberately evil thought, wasn’t he desperate that I succeed where he had failed, before Crécy. What’s more, he admitted his failure with Edward III. ‘I was cruelly rebuffed by him, and I fear that the same will befall you. He is a very determined man, Edward III; he is not easy to get around. Moreover, he believes that all the French cardinals are in league against him. I will send along with you our venerabilis frater Capocci.’ That was his idea.

  Venerabilis frater! Each pope must make at least one mistake during his pontificate, otherwise he would be the Good Lord Himself. Well, Clement VI’s mistake is to have given Capocci the galero.

  ‘And thus,’ Innocent said to me, ‘should either one of you fall ill … may God protect you … the other would be able to pursue the mission.’ As he always feels ill, our poor Holy Father, he wants everyone else to be ill too, and he will administer you the Extreme Unction as soon as you sneeze.

  Have you seen me sick since the beginning of our journey, Archambaud? But Capocci, the jolts and bumps break his back; he has to stop every two leagues to piss. One day, he is sweating with fever, another he has diarrhoea. He wanted to take my doctor Master Vigier from me, whom you will notice is not overwhelmed with work, at least not on my part. For me, the good physician is the one who every morning palpates me, auscultates me, takes a look at my eyes and my tongue, examines my urine, doesn’t impose upon me too many privations nor does he bleed me more than once a month and who keeps me in good health. And to get himself ready, Capocci! He is one of those people who scheme and insist on being entrusted with a mission and no sooner they have it, can’t stop making demands. One papal secretary wasn’t enough, he needed two. One might wonder to what end, since of all of the letters bound for the Curia, before we were separated, it was I who dictated and corrected them. All of that meant that we only left at the time of the summer solstice, on the twenty-first of June. Too late. One does not stop wars when the armies are already marching. One stops them in the minds of kings, while the decision is still uncertain. I tell you, Archambaud, a lost spring.

  The day before our departure, the Holy Father granted me an audience, alone. Perhaps he regretted a little having inflicted upon me such a useless companion. I went to see him in Villeneuve, where he resides. As he refuses to live in the grand palace that his predecessors built. Too much luxury, too much pomp for his liking, too big a household. Innocent wanted to respond to public feeling that holds the papacy lives in too much splendour. Public feeling! A handful of scribblers, for whom gall is the natural ink; a few preachers that the Devil sent into the Church to sow discord. With some of them, a good excommunication, firmly dealt out, would have sufficed; with some, a prebend, or a benefice, accompanied by some order of precedence, since it is often envy that stimulates their spittle; their intention is to set the world straight on the matter of the too small place, in their eyes, that they take up in it. Look at Petrarch, whom you heard me speak of the other day to Monseigneur of Auxerre. He is a man of evil disposition, but great knowledge and experience, we must give him that, whose opinion is valued highly on both sides of the Alps. He was a friend of Dante Alighieri, who brought him to Avignon; and he was entrusted with many missions between princes. There is someone who wrote that Avignon was the cesspit of all cesspits, teeming with adventurers, where every possible vice flourished, where one came to bribe cardinals, where the pope ran a trade in dioceses and abbeys, and prelates had mistresses and their mistresses had go-betweens … in short, the new Babylon.

  About myself the rumours he spread were vile. As he was someone to be considered, I met him, listened to him, which seemed to satisfy him, several of his affairs were thus sorted out – it was said that he dabbled in the dark arts, black magic and other such things – I got him back several of the benefices that he had been stripped of; I corresponded with him, asking him to copy in each of his letters a few verses of the great ancient poets, that he masters to perfection, for the embellishment of my sermons, as I don’t overdo things on the literary front, I have the style of a jurist; I actually put him forward for the office of papal secretary, and left it entirely up to him whether or not this would meet with a successful conclusion. Well, now he has fewer bad things to say about the court of Avignon, and about me, he writes wonders. I am a star in the firmament of the Church, a power behind the papal throne; I equal or exceed in knowledge any other jurist of this age; I am blessed by nature and refined by study; and one can recognize in me that capacity to embrace all things in the universe that Julius Caesar attributed to Pliny the Elder. Yes, my nephew; no less! And I in no way reduced my household nor my domestic staff, which used to provoke his diatribes. He has gone back to Italy, my friend Petrarch. Something in his nature prevents him from settling anywhere, like his friend Dante, on whom he has largely modelled himself. He invented an immoderate love for a lady who was never his mistress, and who died. With that, he has his grounds for the sublime. I liked him a lot, that wicked man. I miss him. If he had stayed in Avignon, he would probably be sitting in your seat, at this moment, as I would have taken him in my luggage.

  But to follow the so-called public feeling, like our good Innocent? That is to show weakness, to give power to one’s critics, and to estrange oneself from those who by tradition offer support, without winning over even the lesser malcontents, not one.

  So, in order to give himself an image of humility, our Holy Father went to live in his little cardinal’s palace in Villeneuve, on the other bank of the Rhône. But though expenses are indeed reduced, the establishment has proved to be really too small. Thus, it has had to be extended to house those who are indispensable. The secretariat of state functions poorly for lack of space; the clerks change rooms constantly as the plans evolve for the building work. Bulls38 are written in the dust. Not only that, since many offices have remained in the Avignon palace, one constantly has to cross the river, along which a strong wind most often blows, in winter freezing you to the bone. Our affairs are falling behind, we are late in all of our business … Furthermore, our Holy Father was elected over Jean Birel, the General of the Carthusians, who enjoyed a reputation of perfect saintliness. I wonder, after all, if I wasn’t wrong to brush him aside; he wouldn’t have been any more awkward, and our Holy Father promised to found a Carthusian monastery. The charterhouse is now under construction between the pontifical residence and a new defensive structure, Saint André’s fort, also under construction. But here, it is the king’s officers who are organizing the work. With the result that for the time being, Christendom is being commanded from the middle of a building site.

  The Holy Father granted me audience in his chapel, which he hardly ever leaves, a small, five-sided apse, adjoining the great audience chamber, because he does in fact need an audience chamber, he realized, and which he had decorated by an image-maker from Viterbo, Matte
o Giova something or other, Giovanotto, Giovanelli, Giovannetti … it is blue, it is pale; it would belong very well in a nunnery; I personally don’t like it at all; not enough red, not enough gold. Bright colours don’t cost any more than the others. And the noise, my nephew! Evidently, the apse is the calmest room in all of the palace, and that is why the Holy Father withdraws there! Saws grate in the stone, hammers bang against chisels, hoists squeal, cartage roll, beams bounce, workers call out to each other or quarrel, shouting. Dealing with serious matters in such a racket is purgatory. I understand that he suffers headaches, the Holy Father! ‘You see, my venerable brother,’ he tells me, ‘I spend a great deal of money and cause myself a great deal of bother to build up around me the appearance of poverty. And then I still have to keep up the huge palace opposite. I can’t just let it crumble.’

  He touches my heart, Pope Aubert, when he laughs at himself so sadly, and seems to recognize his mistakes, to mollify me.

  He was sitting on a wretched curule chair39 that I wouldn’t have had for a seat even in my first bishop’s palace; as usual, he remained stooped throughout the meeting. A large hooked nose, in the continuation of his forehead, big nostrils, big eyebrows raised very high, big ears, the lobes sticking out from under his white cap, the corners of his mouth turned down into his curly beard. His body is powerfully built, and one is surprised that his health is so fragile. A stone sculptor is working on fixing his likeness, for his tomb’s recumbent statue. Because he doesn’t want a standing effigy: ostentation. But he does, all the same, allow the need for a tomb.

  One day he was lamenting his fate. He went on: ‘Each pope, my brother, must live, in his own way, the passion of Our Lord, Jesus Christ. My own way has been in the failure of all of my undertakings. Since God’s will hoisted me up to the summit of the Church, I feel my hands are nailed down. What have I accomplished, what have I done right during these three and a half years?’