The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down

by Jesse Browner

  What choice does the host have, you might ask, if he wishes to invite two hundred people to his daughter's wedding? He can't very well cook for them, can he? To which I can only respond: Why does he need to invite two hundred people when everyone he loves in this world can fit in one medium-size room? For whom is the wedding supposed to be if not for them? I know this is an unfair question based on unrealistic assumptions, but it still bears asking. After all, weddings have been catered for thousands of years, consistently with the same end in mind. I understand perfectly well that your typical wedding has never been an intimate family affair on a par with, say, Thanksgiving or a bris, but that is precisely my point - a wedding is always about something else. If a father of the bride finds it necessary to invite his clients or business associates, he must be honest with himself and acknowledge that he is exploiting the happiest day of his child's life to project an exaggerated and sanitized message of his own social standing.

  That is why the hospitality of a powerful person - a politician, say, or a wealthy patron, as we have seen in earlier chapters - is always fraught with anxiety and confusion for the guest. Like yours and mine, his hospitality is a powerful form of self-expression; unlike yours and mine, his is deliberately couched in the idiom of remove. You know that he has chosen this language to conceal at least as much as he reveals about himself; what you cannot hope to know, because he does not want you to know, is precisely what it is he is concealing. This perversion of all that is potentially fine and ennobling in the conversation of souls is at the very heart of his power over you - the host as Grand Inquisitor. No one understands this duplicity of the potentate better than his caterer.

  Olivier de La Marche was born to serve. His family, of the minor nobility of Bresse, had been in the service of the dukes of Burgundy since the thirteenth century. His grandfather had served with distinction in the household of Philip the Bold, the first Valois duke of Burgundy. His aunt had served as lady-in-waiting to Duchess Marguerite, Philip's wife. His uncle had served as equerry and cupbearer to Philip's son, John the Fearless. His father had served as warden of the forest of Burgundy and as counselor and chamberlain to John's son, Philip the Good, the third Valois duke. In 1439, Olivier's patron presented him to the ducal court, where the fourteen-year-old boy was taken into service as a page.

  It is safe to say that the La Marche family owed everything to the house of Burgundy, and that they knew it. They reciprocated with a blind loyalty that bordered on cultish devotion. Such fidelity was supposed to be the norm in feudal society, but in the case of the La Marches it was all the more deferential by virtue of their acute awareness of the honor and glory of living in the golden age of Burgundy. Anyone who was ever involved in the households of the four Valois dukes could not help but recognize that it was the grandest court in Europe, not excluding the royal establishments in Paris, London, and Madrid or the imperial court in Vienna. To actually live among and serve the dukes of Burgundy was to experience the very acme of the knightly tradition and medieval pageantry. The wealth, the color, the pomp, and the glory would have dazzled a mind far more independent, creative, and skeptical than young Olivier's; as it was, the young man threw himself into unquestioning, slavish service with tireless zeal and gratitude.

  The Valois family had been dukes since 1363, when King John II of France had given the dukedom to his son, Philip the Bold. The power struggle that began then between the two Valois branches, Burgundy and Orleans, grew nastier and fiercer with every succeeding generation, fueled by the Hundred Years War. Burgundy slowly began to swallow up its neighbors: Artois, Flanders, Franche-Comte, the Netherlands, the Ardennes, Hainaut, Brabant, and Luxembourg all became Burgundian territories. In 1407, John the Fearless ordered the assassination of Louis, due d'Orleans, the king's brother. The Orleans retaliated in kind against John twelve years later; his son Philip the Good recognized Henry VI of England as his suzerain and pursued the war against France. A peace treaty was signed in 1435 that made further territorial concessions to Burgundy. By 1450, the house of Burgundy had courts in Dijon, Brussels, and Bruges and controlled territories encompassing most of the modern Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and northern and eastern France. The Burgundian state stretched nearly to Lyon and its western border came within fifty miles of Paris.

  It was around this time that Olivier de La Marche, recently promoted to pantler-squire, left the service of Philip the Good to become secretary to the duke's son, Charles, count of Charolais. It must have seemed like a good move at the time. It was true that Olivier had prospered under Philip, a fine man, proud, beloved, and lusty, whom Olivier would later describe as more like "a chivalrous gentleman, performing bold and valiant deeds," than a great prince. If he were perhaps given to unbridled fits of rage, he was also praised for his "quality of moderation" and ability to forgive and forget. If he was associated with certain unpleasant moments, such as the sale of Joan of Arc to the English for ten thousand gold crowns, he was also the founder of the Low Countries and a true Frenchman who regretted his entire life not having fought for his country at Agincourt. Philip was a credit to his family, Burgundy, and chivalry.

  But he had been duke for some thirty years, while young Charles, still in his teens, represented the future. Olivier was ambitious not just for himself but also for the house in which he served, and Charles already seemed destined to carry the momentum of Burgundy's century to its natural culmination: the establishment of an independent kingdom. As a boy, he had stayed up late into the night reading the old stories of Lancelot and Gawain, Hannibal and Caesar, delighting most especially in the exploits of Alexander the Great, who, like him, was a son of a Philip. Charles was the first of his line to speak fluent Flemish and English. He was the very embodiment of knighthood, a fine jouster, fighter, hunter, and sportsman. "He was hot, active, and impetuous: as a child he was very eager to have his own way," says La Marche. Most unusually for the time, he had been breast-fed by his mother, Isabella of Portugal, whose suspicious nature he seems to have inherited. Was he perhaps aloof, austere, friendless, of hasty temper, impetuous, vindictive? Did he lack serenity and collegiality? Did his swarthy complexion, icy blue eyes, prim mouth, and protruding jaw reveal a certain latent barbarism? Never mind - he was a great lord and Olivier was his man to the end. "It may be said hereafter," he would later write, "that I praise him highly in my writings because he was my master. To that, I respond that I am telling the truth and that I knew him to be thus. Any vices that he may have had were never apparent to me." Philip may have been the Good, but Charles was the Bold.

  Philip lived on, while Charles and Olivier chaffed. There was a job to do, and the moment of truth seemed tantalizingly close at hand, but the aging Philip fell just short of the energy and ruthlessness needed to see it through. Several Burgundian kingdoms had thrived since the fall of Rome; the destruction of the first is the subject of the Nibelungenlied; the kingdom of Lothar­ingia had extended from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. It could do so again, and soon. The family was strong enough; the court already richer and more splendid than any royal court; the glories of Burgundian arms, architecture, arts, and letters were the envy of Europe; and almost all of the necessary territories were in place. All that was needed was the acquisition of Alsace, Lorraine, and Provence, and Charles could be king, even if Philip would not. Lotharingia could rise again, but it would have to be on the ruins of France. As Charles himself put it, he loved France so much that he would have liked her to have six kings instead of one. Philippe de Commynes, who knew Charles intimately, limned his ambition more grimly: "Even the half of Europe would not have satisfied him."

  In 1465, the great princes of France - Burgundy, Brittany, Normandy, Bourbon, and Berry - waged the War of the Public Good against King Louis XI, and the moment seemed at hand. One decisive military campaign would topple the king and dismember France for good. Charles led the princes at the battle of Montlhery, with Olivier de La Marche at his side. When Charles broke one wing of the royal ar
my and sent it into panicked flight, all seemed lost for the king. But instead of consolidating his strength, Charles ignored all the advice of his commanders in order to pursue the fleeing Frenchmen. By the time he returned to the battlefield, only to find the rest of Louis's army intact, his men were exhausted from the chase. The battle was fought to an inconclusive standstill, but Paris and the king survived. Lotharingia would have to wait. Olivier must have experienced certain nagging doubts about his suzerain's fitness to command, but the knighthood he received on the battlefield would have made them easy to suppress.

  The year 1467 finally brought the long-awaited death of Philip the Good and the accession of Charles the Bold as fourth Valois duke of Burgundy. His personal inheritance, according to La Marche, was "four hundred thousand crowns of gold cash, seventy-two thousand marks of silver plate, without counting rich tapestries, rings, gold dishes garnished with precious stones, a large and well-equipped library, and rich furniture." He wasted not one moment, dispatching Olivier de La Marche on a secret mission to England forthwith. La Marche soon returned with Edward IV's promise of his sister, Margaret of York, in marriage to the new duke. The news of the betrothal rang out like a thunderclap across western Europe.

  Charles was a direct descendant of John of Gaunt, the first Plantagenet duke of Lancaster. Thus, for him to marry Margaret - a Yorkist, an enemy of France, and sister of the king who had deposed the Lancastrian Henry VI - could only mean one thing: a reversal of Burgundian foreign policy. This marriage was, in essence, Charles's notification to Louis XI of his intention to resume the Hundred Years War. To France, facing the triple threat of an Anglo-Burgundian-Germanic alliance, the wedding bells would have sounded an awful lot like a death knell. And Olivier de La Marche was in charge of organizing the festivities.

  To call the wedding of Charles the Bold to Margaret of York "the marriage of the century," as many historians have done, is almost an understatement. This marriage had the potential to alter the entire makeup of Western Europe. And since Western Europe was only decades away from launching the greatest era of exploration, colonization, and international trade the world has ever known, it is not too much of a stretch to say that this wedding held all world history in the balance. Try to imagine the history of North America without France or the history of Africa and Southeast Asia without the Netherlands. Now try to imagine that you are Olivier de La Marche, responsible for conveying the message of Charles's ambitions via the medium of one single event, one momentous, obliterating, omniphagous act of hospitality. Every wedding sends a message. How would you advise the caterer if yours was that you were intent on conquering the world? What would Colin Cowie do?

  Of course, La Marche had been waiting his whole life for this opportunity. He had had a dress rehearsal in 1454, when he had helped organize the Feast of the Pheasant to mobilize a new crusade against the Turks, who had finally taken Constantinople the year before. The crusade came to naught, but the feast had been a spectacular success. Still, it was nothing compared to this wedding, which was going to be nothing less than the apotheosis of Charles, Burgundy, and the ideals of medieval knighthood.

  Edward IV gave his sister a dowry of two hundred thousand pounds and sent her across the Channel with a large flotilla and a trousseau that included £1,000 worth of silks; £160 in gold, silver, and gilt dishes; and £100 of bedding, cushions, and carpets. She landed in Sluis on June 25,1468, wearing a wedding coronet of gold trimmed with pearls, precious stones, enameled white roses, and a diamond cross over her long blond hair - every inch the medieval princess. The streets of Sluis were carpeted in her honor. She was introduced to her fiancé by the Bishop of Salisbury, whom protocol required to ascertain that she was willing to go through with the wedding. It was for that reason and no other, she responded, that she had been sent by her brother, the king of England, and what the king had commanded, she was ready to undertake and accomplish. The next week, she sailed upriver with her retinue for the private wedding ceremony in Damme. Then, borne in a gilded litter and wearing a gown of white cloth of gold, she was accompanied by the greatest peers of the realm in thirteen white hackneys draped with crimson cloth of gold to the Gate of Saint Croix in Bruges, where the wedding festivities were ready to begin.

  Bruges in the fifteenth century was one of the wealthiest cities of northern Europe, a bustling mercantile center home to bankers, jewelers, goldsmiths, and cloth merchants. Now it had the eyes of a continent upon it. A vast press of Flemish nobility met Margaret at the gate, and she was led by four official processions through streets garlanded with flowers and hung with carpets and tapestries. The horses were draped in gold cloth. The members of the processions wore robes of black damask and doublets of crimson satin; embroidered gowns of black satin; black and violet brocade and pourpoints - all paid for by the duke at a cost of some forty thousand francs. Ten tableaux vivants - representing, among other things, God ushering Adam and Eve into the Garden of Eden, and Cleopatra's marriage to Alexander [sic] were set up at strategic points along the route. At last, the bride arrived at the ducal palace, where a forty-foot tower, teeming with monkeys, wolves, and bears, and a golden pelican perched on an artificial tree, spurting sweet hippocras from its breast, had been erected in the courtyard.

  An enormous wooden banquet hall, some 140 by 70 feet, had also been raised there, boasting two upper galleries, glass windows with gilded shutters, and mirrored chandeliers in the form of castles. The ceilings were draped in blue and white wool, the walls in tapestries of silk, wool, and gold and silver thread, depicting the arms of Burgundy and the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece. As the historian Christine Weightman points out, even one set of such tapestries might cost the equivalent of the total annual income of a noble landowner. Three enormous buffet tables groaned under the weight of crystal, gold, silver, and copper plate, encrusted with precious gems. Three hundred men labored in the kitchen, eighty in the saucerie, sixty in the wine room, sixty in the bakery, and fifteen in the pantry to prepare the banquet.

  La Marche, typical of medieval chroniclers, does not include a menu in his description of the banquet, but it is not hard to imagine. At the Feast of the Pheasant, each course consisted of forty-eight dishes; the wedding banquet certainly had no fewer. In his Le Viandier, Guillaume Tirel, chief cook to Charles VI of France, had set down a wealth of recipes that were most representative of the diversity of the medieval aristocratic table, and we can assume that many of these dishes were served at Charles the Bold's wedding. The boiled meats would have included beef, pork, mutton, venison, boar, and capon, served with sauces of green garlic; white garlic; parsley, sage, and hyssop; mustard; sharp pepper; or cameline, a favorite sauce composed of ginger, cinnamon, cloves, grains of paradise, mace, and pickled pepper and thickened with bread. The roasts, often served with verjuice, would have included pork, tripe, mutton, kid, goslings, pigeons, larks, quail, thrush, plovers, woodcock, partridge, turtle doves, swan, peacock, pheasant, stork, heron, bustards, bitterns, cormorant, spoonbills, and teal. There would have been a great deal of soup, such as cuminade offish, bright green brewet of eels, gravy of Loach, chaudumel of pike, oyster stew, mustard sops, egg stew, and brewet of stag testicles. Among the more exotic dishes there may have been faulxgrenon (chopped livers and gizzards with bacon grease, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, grains of paradise, and egg yolk), pettitoes (feet, livers, and gizzards), frumenty (grains of wheat, boiled and mashed with milk, saffron, and egg yolk), fried milk, Spanish farts (boiled egg whites stuffed with meatballs and glazed with batter), and swans redressed in their skin. The predominant seasonings were ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, grain of paradise, long pepper, aspic, round pepper, cassia buds, saffron, nutmeg, bay leaf, galingale, mace, laurel, cumin, sugar, almonds, garlic, onions, and shallots.

  Perhaps the most unusual dish on the medieval menu was the cockentrice. You start with a piglet and a capon, each of which is neatly bisected. The front part of the piglet is then sewn on to the back end of the capon, and the fron
t part of the capon to the back end of the piglet. These two creatures are then stuffed with forcemeat, roasted on a spit, and repeatedly glazed with saffron, egg yolk, and powdered ginger until they appear to be gilded with gold leaf. There was something about these perverse hybrids that appealed to the medieval sense of awe and mystery, like the ubiquitous dragons, griffins, and unicorns of heraldry. There was also something strangely ambiguous and subversive about them in an age when everything had its divinely ordained place and identity that no human interference could disrupt. To be confused about who or what you were in feudal society was to be nothing at all.

  But food was hardly the central element of a medieval banquet. Dinner was theater, replete with music, religious pageants, dancing, plays and poetry on historic themes, acrobats, dwarves, ogres, giants, wild animals, elaborate sculptures, and mechanical wonders known as entremets. The Feast of the Pheasant had featured a twenty-eight-piece orchestra in an enormous pie crust. The wedding banquet, of course, was no less dramatic. The duke wore a robe woven with gold and encrusted with diamonds, pearls, and enormous jewels. The courses were served in thirty gold and azure ships, fully rigged, each one bearing the arms of one of Charles's seignories, including five duchies and fourteen counties. Harts carried baskets of fruit to the guests. A silk-clad unicorn entered, ridden by a leopard bearing the arms of England and a daisy (marguerite) in honor of the bride. Next came a gilded lion, ridden by Madame de Beaugrand, Lady Mary's dwarf. The lion sang a song, then kneeled in homage before the new duchess. It was followed by a dromedary ridden by a wild man, who threw brightly painted birds among the guests. Later, there were monsters and griffons and a staging of the deeds of Hercules and the marriage of Clovis.