1.
The Outlaw
FOR OVER THREE YEARS Robert of Artois prowled round the frontiers of the kingdom like some great wounded beast.
Related to all the kings and princes of Europe, nephew of the Duke of Brittany, uncle of the King of Navarre, a brother of the Countess of Namur, brother-in-law of the Count of Hainaut and the Prince of Taranto, cousin of the King of Naples, the King of Hungary and of many others, he was now, at the age of forty-five, a solitary traveller to whom the doors of every castle were closed. He had sufficient money, thanks to the letters of credit given him by the Sienese bankers; but no equerry ever came to the inn in which he happened to be staying to invite him to dine with the local lord. If there was a tournament in the neighbourhood, the host wondered how he could avoid asking Robert of Artois, the outlaw and the forger, who in the old days would have been put in the place of honour. And the Captain of the town would intimate a cold request from Monseigneur the Suzerain Count that he would move on. For Monseigneur the Suzerain Count, or Duke, or Margrave, had no desire to quarrel with the King of France and felt no obligations towards a man who was so disgraced that he no longer had either blazon or banner.
And Robert had to continue on his random way, accompanied by his single servant, Gillet de Nelle, who was a bad character and thoroughly deserved to be hanged, though, like Lormet in the past, he was utterly devoted to his master. As a reward Robert gave him that satisfaction which is more precious than high wages: the intimacy of a great lord in adversity. During their wanderings they spent many nights playing dice together at a table in the corner of some wretched tavern. And when they needed women, they would go off together to one of the numerous Flanders brothels, in which there was always a good selection of plump whores.
It was in these places that Robert heard the latest news from France, either from merchants returning from the fairs or from whores who had listened to travellers’ talk.
In the summer of 1332 Philippe VI had married his son, Jean, the Duke of Normandy, to the daughter of the King of Bohemia, Bonne of Luxemburg. ‘That’s why John of Luxemburg had me expelled from the lands of his cousin of Brabant,’ Robert thought, ‘and this is the price of his intervention.’ The celebrations held in honour of the wedding, which took place at Melun, had, so it was said, surpassed in splendour anything seen before.
Philippe VI had taken the opportunity of this great assembly of princes and lords to have the cross solemnly sewn on to his royal robe. For the crusade had now at last been decided on. Pierre de la Palud, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, had preached it in a sermon at Melun, drawing tears from the six thousand wedding guests, of whom eighteen hundred were German knights. Bishop Pierre Roger had preached it at Rouen, to which diocese he had recently been appointed, after holding those of Arras and Sens. The general expedition was planned to set out in the spring of 1334. A huge fleet was being built in the Provençal ports of Marseilles and Aigues-Mortes. And Bishop Jean de Marigny had already been sent with a challenge to the Sultan of Egypt! But if the Kings of Bohemia, Navarre, Majorca and Aragon, who were living at Philippe’s Court, if the dukes, counts and great barons, together with a certain number of knights impatient for adventure, supported the King of France’s projects with enthusiasim, the minor provincial nobility, on the other hand, appeared to be showing rather less eagerness to seize the red cloth crosses the preachers handed them and take ship for the sands of Egypt. The King of England was pressing forward with the military training of his people, but was unresponsive to the plan for invading the Holy Land. While old Pope John XXII, who was moreover engaged in a serious quarrel with the University of Paris and Buridan, its rector, about the problems of the Beatific Vision, was turning a deaf ear to the proposal. Indeed, he had only given his approval to the crusade with a bad grace and was even more reluctant to subsidize it. On the other hand, the spice, incense, silk and relic merchants, not to mention the armourers and shipbuilders, were wholly in favour of the expedition.
Philippe VI had already made arrangements for the Regency during his absence by making the peers, barons and bishops take an oath of obedience to his son, Jean, and swear that they would hand over the crown to him without argument if he himself should die beyond the seas.32
‘It’s because Philippe can’t be quite sure that his son’s legitimate that he’s having him recognized now,’ thought Robert of Artois.
His elbows on the table in front of a pot of beer, Robert dared not tell the casual acquaintances who gave him the news that he knew all the great people they talked about; he dared not say that he had jousted against the King of Bohemia, procured Pierre Roger his mitre, dandled the King of England on his knee and dined at the Pope’s table. But he noted all they said in the hope of being able to turn it one day to his own advantage.
It was hatred that sustained him. And he would go on hating as long as he lived. Wherever he happened to be, it was hatred that awakened him with the first ray of light filtering through the shutters of his unfamiliar room. Hatred was the salt in his food and the sky above his road.
It is said that a strong man is one who can see his own mistakes. But perhaps they are even stronger who never see them. Robert was one of these. It was not he who had done wrong; but everyone else, the living and the dead, Philip the Fair, Enguerrand, Mahaut, Philippe of Valois, the Duke of Burgundy, and the Chancellor Sainte-Maure. And, as he travelled on, he added more names to the list of his enemies: his sister of Namur, his brother-in-law of Hainaut, John of Luxemburg and the Duke of Brabant.
In Brussels he recruited a shady lawyer called Huy and his clerk, Berthelot; it was with these lawyers that he began collecting a household again.
At Louvain Huy discovered a monk of hideous appearance and dubious life, Brother Henry de Sagebran, who knew more about spells and witchcraft than he did about litanies and works of charity. With the help of Brother Henry de Sagebran, the former Peer of France, remembering the lessons he had learnt from Beatrice d’Hirson, baptized wax dolls in the names of Philippe, Saint-Maure or Mathieu de Trye, and pierced them with needles.
‘Pay particular attention to this one and pierce it from the head right down through the body, for its name is Jeanne and she’s the Queen of France. She’s not really a queen, she’s a devil!’
He also procured invisible ink with which to write certain death-dealing formulas on parchment. The parchment, however, had to be placed in the victim’s bed. Provided with a little money and many promises, Brother Henry de Sagebran set off for France, like any honest mendicant, with a quantity of these lethal parchments concealed beneath his habit.
In the meantime, Gillet de Nelle had recruited hired assassins, professional thieves and escaped prisoners, low fellows who preferred crime to an honest day’s work. And when Gillet had collected a little band of them, and they had received suitable training, Robert sent them into France with orders to operate for preference at the great assemblies and festivals.
‘Backs are an easy target for the knife when every eye is on the lists or every ear listening to the crusade being preached.’
Robert had grown thinner on his travels; the crease had sunk deeper into the muscles of his forehead, and his preoccupation with wickedness from morning till night, and even in his dreams, had permanently marked his features. On the other hand, the whole adventure seemed to have rejuvenated him in spirit. He enjoyed the unaccustomed food of these foreign countries, and their women too.
When Liège expelled him, it was not because of his past misdeeds, but because Gillet and he had turned a house leased from a certain Sieur d’Argentau into a haunt of whores and the noise they made kept the whole neighbourhood awake.
There were good days; and bad ones too, such as that on which he learnt that Brother Henry de Sagebran, with his lethal parchments, had been arrested in Cambrai, and another on which one of his hired assassins reported that his comrades had been unable to get farther than Reims and were now languishing in the ‘Makeshift’ King’s prisons.
Disgusted with the Flemish Marches, he went to Geneva. As he was wandering round the lake, he learned of the arrest of his wife, the Countess of Beaumont, and of their three children. As a reprisal against Robert, Philippe VI had not hesitated to imprison his own sister, first in the keep of Nemours and then at Château Gaillard, which had been Marguerite of Burgundy’s prison. Burgundy was undoubtedly having its revenge.
Travelling under a false name and dressed like any ordinary bourgeois, Robert left Geneva for Avignon. He stayed there a fortnight, trying to set intrigues on foot for his cause. He found the capital of Christendom more luxurious and dissolute than ever. Ambition, vanity and vice were not here concealed behind tournament armour, but behind the robes of prelates; the insignia of power were not silver harness and plumed helms, but mitres encrusted with precious stones and gold chalices heavier than a king’s goblet. The hatreds of the sacristy took the place of challenges in the lists. There was little secrecy in the confessional; and the women were more immoral, unfaithful and venal than elsewhere, since sin could be their only title to fame.
And yet no one was prepared to risk compromising himself for the former Peer of France. People pretended they had hardly known him. Even in this sink of vice Robert was a pariah. The list of his enemies grew longer.
Nevertheless, he found some consolation in learning from the general gossip that his cousin of Valois’ affairs were going much less well than might have been supposed. The Church was much perturbed by the crusade. What would happen to the West, left at the mercy of the Emperor and the King of England, when Philippe and his allies had set sail? Suppose the two sovereigns formed an alliance? The expedition had already been postponed for two years. The spring of 1334 had gone by with nothing ready. People were now talking of 1336. Philippe VI had presided in person over a plenary assembly of the doctors of Paris on Mount Sainte-Geneviève and had brandished the threat of a decree of heresy against the aged Pontiff, now ninety, if he refused to retract his theological pronouncements. Everyone was waiting for his death, which month after month was reported to be imminent – but these reports had been current for eighteen years!
‘The great thing,’ thought Robert, ‘is to go on living; if you can last long enough the day will come when you’ll win.’
The death of some of his enemies had already given him hope. The Treasurer Forget had died at the end of the previous year; the Chancellor Guillaume de Sainte-Maure was also dead. Jean, Duke of Normandy, the heir to the throne of France, was gravely ill; and even Philippe VI, so it was said, was far from well; perhaps Robert’s spells had not been wholly ineffective.
For his return to Flanders he donned the habit of a lay brother; and a very strange brother the giant made, for his cowl stood out above the crowd like a steeple above the houses at its feet. He marched up to abbeys with the stride of a warrior, rang the bell at the gate as if he intended to tear it down, and demanded the hospitality due to a man of God in the tone of voice he would have used to ask a squire to hand him his lance.
As he sat in a refectory in Bruges at the bottom of a long greasy table, bending his head over his bowl and pretending to murmur prayers of which he did not know a single word or listening to the reader in the recess halfway up the wall reading the lives of the saints, his monotonous voice echoing in the vaults of the roof above the heads of the monks, Robert thought: ‘Why not finish my days here in the profound peace of the monastic life with its freedom from care, its renunciation, its assurance of refuge, its regular hours, and its end to wandering?’
However turbulent, cruel and ambitious a man may be, he has inevitably been tempted at some time or other to resign it all and seek rest. What was the use of struggles and vain enterprises, when they must all end in the dust of the tomb? Robert thought of it, as five years earlier he had thought of retiring with his wife and sons to the quiet life of a little provincial lord. But these were seldom more than passing thoughts. In any case, they always occurred to Robert too late, indeed at the very moment events were to hurl him back into the vortex of action and battle, his true vocation.
In Ghent, two days later, Robert of Artois made the acquaintance of Jakob Van Artevelde.
Van Artevelde was much the same age as Robert, approaching fifty. He was stout, stocky and square of face; a great eater and drinker, though he held his liquor well. As a young man, he had been to Rhodes with Charles of Valois, had made several other voyages and knew his Europe well. A dealer in honey and a cloth manufacturer on a large scale, he had married as his second wife a woman of noble birth.
Hard, haughty and imaginative, he had first acquired power over his own town of Ghent, which he completely controlled, and then over the principal Flemish communes. When the fullers, cloth merchants, or brewers, whose trades constituted the real wealth of the country, desired to make representations to the Count or the King of France, it was to Jakob Van Artevelde they turned to put forward their petitions and complaints in a strong voice and clear words. He had no title; he was merely Messire Van Artevelde, but everyone bowed before him. He had enemies of course, and went about with an escort of sixty armed servants who waited for him at the doors of the houses in which he dined.
Jakob Van Artevelde and Robert of Artois immediately recognized each other as men of the same kidney: clever, lucid, obsessed with the desire for power and physically brave.
That Robert was an outlaw mattered not in the least to Van Artevelde; indeed, for the man of Ghent, a former great lord who knew all the intrigues of the Court of France, all the men who held any position there, and yet was hostile to France, might prove a godsend. To Robert, this ambitious bourgeois seemed worth twenty nobles who forbade him their manors. Artevelde was a power among his fellow citizens and he was hostile to the Count of Flanders and therefore to Philippe VI; this was what mattered.
‘We do not like Louis of Nevers, and he has succeeded in remaining our count only because the King of France massacred our train-bands at Mont Cassel.’
‘I was there,’ Robert said.
‘He never comes near us except when he wants money to spend in Paris; he refuses to listen to the representations we make; and his idea of governing the country is merely to pass on the oppressive decrees of the King of France. We have just been obliged to expel the English merchants, though we have absolutely nothing against them. The King’s quarrels with his cousin of England about the crusade and the throne of Scotland mean nothing to us.33 And now England, in reprisal, is threatening to cut off the supply of wool. If that happens, our spinners and weavers, not only here but throughout Flanders, will have no alternative but to break up their looms and close their workshops. But on that day, Monseigneur, they will take up arms again; and Hainaut, Brabant, Holland and Zeeland will be with us, for those countries are allies of France merely through the marriages of their princes, but neither by the hearts nor stomachs of the people; and you cannot reign for long over a people you’ve starved.’
Robert listened attentively to Artevelde’s talk. At last he had met a man who knew his subject, spoke out and seemed to have real strength behind him.
‘If you really intend to rebel again,’ said Robert, ‘why don’t you make a definite alliance with the King of England? And why not enter into negotiations with the Emperor of Germany who, since he’s the Pope’s enemy, is therefore also the enemy of France, who holds the Pope in her hand? Your train-bands are brave, but can only mount minor actions because they lack cavalry. Give them the support of a corps of English knights and a corps of German knights and advance into Franc
e through Artois. I guarantee to raise reinforcements for you there.’
He could already see the coalition in being and himself riding at the head of an army.
‘Believe me, Monseigneur, I have thought of it often enough,’ replied Artevelde. ‘There would be no difficulty in entering into negotiations with the King of England and even with the Emperor Louis of Bavaria, if our bourgeois were ready to do so. The people in the communes hate Count Louis, but they still turn to the King of France when they want justice. They have sworn loyalty to the King of France. Even when they take up arms against him, he still remains their master. Besides, through France’s clever diplomacy, our towns have agreed to pay a fine of two million florins to the Pope if they rebel against their suzerain, and the Pope has threatened to excommunicate us if we don’t pay up. Our families are afraid of being deprived of priests and masses.’
‘What you mean is that the Pope has been obliged to threaten you with excommunication or ruin to keep your communes quiet during the crusade. But who can force you to pay up, when the French army is in Egypt?’
‘You know what the common people are like,’ said Artevelde; ‘they never know their own strength till the moment for using it has passed.’
Robert emptied his great flagon of beer; he was getting to like beer. He was silent for a moment, staring at the panelling. Jakob Van Artevelde had a handsome and comfortable house; the brass and pewter were well polished, and the oak furniture gleamed in the shadows.
‘So it’s allegiance to the King of France that prevents your making new alliances and taking up arms?’
‘Precisely that,’ said Artevelde.
Robert had a lively imagination. For the last three and a half years he had been slaking his thirst for revenge with minor draughts such as spells, sorcery, and hired assassins who never reached their intended victims. His hopes had now suddenly taken on a new dimension; a great idea was germinating in his mind, one that was worthy of him at last.
The Lily and the Lion Page 24