The Poisoned Crown

by Maurice Druon

  ‘If you give at this rate, Madam, we shall not have enough left to reach Paris.’ It was when she arrived at Vienne, the home of her sister Beatrice, who was married to the ruling Prince of Dauphiné, that she learnt that King Louis X had just left to make war upon the Flemings.

  ‘Dear Lord,’ she murmured, ‘am I to be widowed before even setting eyes upon my husband? Have I arrived in France merely to witness disaster?’

  5

  The King Receives the Oriflamme

  ENGUERRAND DE MARIGNY, during the course of his trial, had been accused by Charles of Valois of having sold himself to the Flemings in negotiating with them a peace treaty which was contrary to the interests of the Kingdom.

  And now, when Marigny had but barely been hanged in the chains of Montfaucon, the Count of Flanders had broken the treaty. To do so he had employed the simplest means: he had refused, though summoned, to come to Paris to render homage to the new King. At the same time he ceased to pay the indemnities and reaffirmed his claim to the territories of Lille and Douai.

  Upon receiving this news, King Louis X fell into an appalling rage. He was subject to fits of fury which had won for him the nickname of ‘Le Hutin’ and which terrified his entourage, not only for themselves but for him, since at these moments he bordered upon dementia.

  His rage, upon hearing of the Flemings’ rebellion, surpassed in violence anything that he had manifested before.

  For many hours, as he prowled about his study like a wild beast in a trap, his hair in disorder, his neck empurpled, breaking ornaments, kicking chairs over, he incessantly shouted meaningless words, while his cries were interrupted only by fits of coughing which bent him double, half suffocating him.

  ‘The indemnity!’ he cried. ‘And the weather! Oh, they’ll pay for the weather too! Gibbets, that’s what I need, gibbets! Who’s refused to pay the indemnity? On his knees! I’ll have the Count of Flanders on his knees! And I’ll put my foot on his head! Bruges? I’ll set fire to it! I’ll burn it down!’

  His tirade was a confused mixture of the names of the rebellious towns, the delay of Clémence of Hungary’s arrival and promises of punishment. But the word that came most often to his lips was that of ‘indemnity’. For Louis X had but a few days before decreed the raising of an extra tax to cover the expenses of the previous year’s military campaign.

  Without daring to say so openly people were beginning to regret Marigny and his methods of dealing with this form of rebellion; for instance, his reply to the Abbé Simon of Pisa, who informed him that the Flemings were becoming inflamed: ‘Their ardour in no way astonishes me, Brother Simon; it’s the effect of hot blood. Our lords are also hot-headed and in love with war. Yet the Kingdom of France is not to be dismembered by mere words; deeds are necessary.’ People wanted the same tone to be adopted; unfortunately the man who could have spoken thus was no longer of this world.

  Encouraged by his uncle Valois, whose bellicose ardour had in no way been diminished by the exercise of power, on the contrary rather, and who never ceased wishing to give proof of his capacity as a great commander, The Hutin began to dream of valour. He would mobilize the greatest army that had ever been seen in France, fall like a mountain eagle on the rebellious Flemings, carve a few thousand of them to pieces, ransom the rest, bring them to their knees in a week and, where Philip the Fair had never completely succeeded, show the whole world what he was capable of. Already he saw himself returning, preceded by triumphant standards, his coffers filled with plunder and with the indemnities imposed upon the towns, having at once surpassed his father’s reputation and effaced the misfortune of his first marriage, for a war at least was necessary to make people forget his marital disaster. Then, amid a popular ovation, he would gallop home, a conquering prince and a hero of war, to meet his new wife and lead her to the altar and to coronation.

  Clearly the young man was a fool and one might have pitied him, because there is always something pathetic about folly, if he were not the ruler of France and its population of fifteen millions.

  On June 23rd he summoned the Court of Peers, stuttered violently at them, declared the Count of Flanders to be a felon, and resolved to mobilize the army before Courtrai on August 1st.

  This concentration-point was not a particularly good choice. It seems that there are places where disaster has a habit of striking, and Courtrai, to people of that period, sounded very much as the name Sedan does to modern ears. Unless it was that Louis X and his Uncle Charles decided presumptuously upon Courtrai precisely so as to exorcize the memory of the disaster of 1302, one of the few battles lost in the reign of Philip the Fair, at which several thousand knights, charging like madmen in the absence of the king, had foundered in the ditches only to get themselves cut to pieces by the knives of the Fleming weavers; a carnage in which no prisoners were taken.

  To maintain the formidable army which was to bring him glory, Louis X needed money; Valois, therefore, had recourse to the expediencies which Marigny had previously employed, while people openly wondered whether it had really been necessary to condemn the old Rector of the Kingdom to death merely so as to reapply his methods less efficiently.

  Every serf who could pay for his franchise was freed; the Jews were recalled, on payment of a crushing tax for the right to reside and trade; a new levy was raised on the Lombards who, from then on, looked upon the new reign with less favourable eyes. Two urgently demanded contributions within less than a year was rather more than they expected to be subjected to.6

  The Government wished to tax the clergy; but the latter, arguing that the Holy See was vacant and that no decision could be made without a pope, refused; then, in negotiation, the bishops consented to help provided no precedent were created, and profited by the opportunity to get certain concessions, exonerations, and immunities which ultimately were to cost the Treasury more than the funds obtained.

  The mobilization of the army took place without difficulty, and was even conducted with a certain enthusiasm by the barons who, pretty bored at home, were delighted with the idea of donning their breastplates and setting off on an adventure.

  There was less enthusiasm among the people.

  ‘Isn’t it enough,’ they said, ‘that we should be half-starved without having to give our men and our money to the King’s war?’

  But the people were assured that every ill derived from the Flemings; the hope of loot and free days of rape and pillage were dangled before the soldiers; for many it was a way of easing the monotony of daily labour and the anxiety of finding enough to eat; no one wished to show himself a coward, and if there were recalcitrants, the sergeants of the King or of the great lords were numerous enough to maintain discipline by decorating the trees bordering the roads with a hanging or two. According to Philip the Fair’s Order in Council, which was still in force, no healthy man could, in theory, be exempted if he were more than eighteen and less than sixty, unless he bought himself out with a money contribution or exercised an indispensable trade.

  At that time mobilization was a matter of purely local organization. The knights were sworn men, and it was incumbent upon them to raise a force among their vassals, subjects or serfs. The knight, and even the squire, never went alone to war. They were accompanied by pages, sutlers, and footmen. They owned their own horses and arms and those of their men. The ordinary knight without a banneret held approximately the rank of a lieutenant; once his men were assembled and equipped, he reported to the knight of a superior grade, that is to say his immediate suzerain. The knights with pennons were approximately equivalent to captains, the knights banneret to colonels, and the knights with double banners approximated to generals who commanded the whole tactical force raised from the jurisdiction of their barony or their county.

  During the battle itself all the knights would upon occasion, leaving their footmen to one side, rally for the charge, often with the splendid results we know so well.

  The ‘banner’ of Count Philippe of Poitiers, the King’s brother, mus
t have rallied something in the nature of an army corps, since it assembled all the troops from Poitou, together with those of the county of Burgundy of which Philippe was Count Palatine by marriage; moreover, ten knights banneret were administratively attached to it, among whom were the Count of Evreux, the King’s uncle, Count Jean de Beaumont, Miles des Noyers, Anseau de Joinville, son of the great Joinville, and even Gaucher de Châtillon who, even though Constable of France, that is to say Commander-in-Chief of the armies, had the troops from his fief incorporated into the enormous unit.

  Philip the Fair had had good reason for confiding to his second son, before he even reached the age of twenty-two, so important a military command, and for concentrating under his authority, as if to reinforce it, the men in whom he placed the greatest confidence.

  Under the ‘banner’ of Count Charles of Valois marched the troops from Maine, Anjou, and Valois, among whom was the old Chevalier d’Aunay, the father of Marguerite and Blanche of Burgundy’s two dead lovers.

  The cities were laid under contribution no less than the country. For this Flanders army, Paris had to furnish four hundred horsemen and two thousand footmen, whose maintenance was guaranteed by the merchants of the Cité, fortnight by fortnight, which showed that in the King’s opinion the war would not last long. The horses and wagons for the supply train were requisitioned from the monasteries.

  On July 24th, 1315, after some delay, as was always the case, Louis X received, at Saint-Denis, from the hands of the Abbot Egidus de Chambly, who was its ex-officio guardian, the Oriflamme of France, a long band of red silk embroidered with golden flames (from which its name derived), ending in a swallow-tail and attached to a staff of gilded brass. Beside the Oriflamme, which was venerated as might have been a relic, the two King’s banners were carried, one blue with fleurs-de-lys and the other with the white cross.

  The huge army set itself in motion with all the contingents that had arrived from the west, the south, and the southeast, the knights from Languedoc, troops from Normandy and Brittany. At Saint-Quentin it was joined by the ‘banners’ of the duchy of Burgundy and those of Champagne, Artois, and Picardy.

  That particular day was a rare one of sunshine in an appalling summer. The sun shone upon a thousand lances, on breastplates, and chain-mail, on brightly painted shields. The knights showed off to each other the latest fashions in armour, a new form of helm or bassinet giving greater protection to the face while affording a wider field of vision, or some larger form of ailette which, placed upon the shoulder, gave greater protection against the blows of maces or made sword-thrusts glance off.

  Several miles behind the soldiers followed the train of four-wheeled wagons which carried food, forges, supplies of bolts for crossbows, and a variety of traders who were authorized to follow in the army’s wake, as well as whores by the cartful under the control of the brothel-masters. The whole procession advanced in an extraordinary atmosphere which smacked at once of the heroic and the fairground.

  The next day rain began to fall once more, soaking, unceasing, flooding the roads, opening ruts, trickling down steel helmets, dripping from breastplates, plastering the horses’ coats. Every man weighed five pounds the heavier.

  And it was rain, continuous rain, throughout the following day.

  The army of Flanders never reached Courtrai. It stopped at Bonduis, near Lille, before the swollen river Lys, which barred its advance, flooded the fields, swamped the roads, and soaked the clay soil. As it was no longer possible to advance, the army encamped there in pouring rain.

  6

  The Muddy Army

  INSIDE THE VAST ROYAL TENT, embroidered with fleurs-de-lys, but where the mud was as elsewhere ankle-deep, Louis X, in company with his brother the Count de la Marche, his uncle Count Charles of Valois, and his chancellor, Etienne de Mornay, listened to the Constable Gaucher de Châtillon reporting on the situation. The report was not a happy one.

  Châtillon, Count of Porcien and Lord of Crèvecoeur, had been Constable since 1286, that is to say from the very beginning of Philip the Fair’s reign. He had seen the disaster of Courtrai, the victory of Mons-en-Pevèle, and many other battles on this threatened northern frontier. He was in Flanders for the sixth time in his life. He was now sixty-five years of age. He was a tall good-looking man, with a determined jaw; neither years nor fatigue seemed to have affected him; he seemed slow because he was reflective. His physical strength and his courage in battle earned him respect as much as his strategical abilities. He had seen too much of war to be enamoured of it any longer, and now merely regarded it as a political necessity. He neither minced his words nor hid his meaning behind vainglorious phrases.

  ‘Sire,’ he said, ‘food supplies are no longer reaching the army, the wagons are stuck in the mud fifteen miles away, and they’re breaking the traces trying to get them out. The men are hungry and beginning to grumble angrily; the companies who still have food are having to defend their reserves against those who have nothing left; the archers of Champagne came to blows with those of Perche a little while ago, and there is a danger that your troops will fight among themselves before ever they come face to face with the enemy. I shall have to hang some of them, which is not a thing I like doing. But erecting gibbets does not fill stomachs. We’ve already got more sick than the surgeon-barbers can attend to; it will soon be the chaplains who’ll have most work to do. There has been no sign of a break in the weather in the last four days. Two days more and we shall have a famine on our hands, and no one will be able to stop the men deserting in search of food. All the supplies have gone mouldy, rotten, or rusty.’

  He pulled off the steel camail which covered his head and shoulders and smoothed his hair. The King walked to and fro, nervous, anxious, and alarmed. From outside the tent came the sound of cries and the cracking of whips.

  ‘Stop that row,’ cried The Hutin, ‘one can’t hear oneself think!’

  An equerry raised the flap of the tent. The rain was still falling in torrents. Thirty horses, sinking in the mud to their knees, were harnessed to a huge wine-cart which they were unable to draw.

  ‘Where are you taking that wine?’ the King asked the wagoners who were floundering in the clay.

  ‘To Monseigneur the Count of Artois, Sire,’ one of them replied.

  The Hutin looked at them for a moment with his huge pale eyes, shook his head and turned away without another word.

  ‘As I was saying, Sire,’ Gaucher continued, ‘we may still have some wine to drink today, but don’t count on it for tomorrow. Oh, I should have given you more insistent counsel. I was of the opinion that we should have stopped earlier, establishing ourselves on high ground rather than advancing into this morass. Both my cousin of Valois7 and yourself insisted that we should advance and I feared to be taken for a coward and that my age would be blamed if I stopped the army moving forward. I was wrong.’

  Charles of Valois was about to reply when the King asked, ‘And the Flemings?’

  ‘They’re opposite us, on the other side of the river, in as great numbers as we and no more happy, I should think, though they are nearer their supplies, and are maintained by the people of their towns and villages. If the flood waters should diminish tomorrow, they’ll be better prepared to attack us than we shall be to fall on them.’

  Charles of Valois shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Come now, Gaucher, the rain’s depressed your spirits,’ he said. ‘You’re not going to make me believe that a good cavalry charge won’t account for that rabble of weavers. They’ve only got to see our lines of breastplates and our forest of lances to be off like a flock of sparrows.’

  The Count was superb in his surcoat of gold-embroidered silk which he wore over his coat of mail and in spite of the mud that covered him; indeed, he looked more kingly than the King himself.

  ‘You make it quite clear, Charles,’ the Constable replied, ‘that you were not at Courtrai thirteen years ago. You were then fighting in Italy, not for France but for the Pope. But I’
ve seen that rabble, as you call it, destroy our knights when they acted too precipitately.’

  ‘That was doubtless because I was not there,’ said Valois with his own peculiar conceit. ‘This time I am.’

  The Chancellor de Mornay whispered into the ear of the young Count de la Marche, ‘It won’t be long before the sparks are flying between your uncle and the Constable; whenever they’re together one can set fire to the tinder without having to strike a light.’

  ‘Rain, rain!’ cried Louis X angrily. ‘Is everything always to be against me?’

  Uncertain health, a clever but overbearing father whose authority had crushed him, an unfaithful wife who had scoffed at him, an empty treasury, impatient vassals always ready to rebel, a famine in the first winter of his reign, a storm which threatened the life of his second wife – beneath what disastrous conjunction of the planets, which the astrologers had not dared reveal to him, must he have been born, that he should meet with adversity in every decision, every enterprise, and end by being conquered, not even nobly in battle, but by the water and mud in which he had engulfed his army.

  At this moment there was announced a delegation of the barons of Champagne, with the Chevalier Etienne de Saint-Phalle at their head, desiring an immediate revision of the Charter of Privileges which had been accorded them in the month of May; they threatened to leave the army if they did not receive satisfaction.

  ‘They’ve chosen a good day!’ cried the King.

  Three hundred yards away, Sire Jean de Longwy, in his own tent, was conversing with a singular personage who was dressed half as a monk and half as a soldier.

  ‘The news you bring me from Spain is good, Brother Everard,’ said Jean de Longwy, ‘and I am glad to hear that our brothers of Castille and Aragon have resumed their Commanderies. They are better off than we, who must continue to act in silence.’