The King Without a Kingdom

2
The Cardinal of Périgord speaks

IT IS NOT THAT I am loath to ride on horseback, Archambaud, nor that old age has made me incapable of doing so. Believe me, I am fully able to cover fifteen leagues on my mount, and I know a fair few younger than I that I would leave far behind. Moreover, as you can see, I always have a palfrey following me, harnessed and saddled in case I should feel the desire or need to mount it. But I have come to realize that a full day cantering in the saddle whets the appetite but not the mind, and leads to heavy eating and drinking rather than clear thinking, of the sort I often need to engage in when I have to inspect, rule or negotiate from the moment I arrive.

Many kings, first and foremost the King of France, would run their states more profitably if they wore their backs out less and exercised their brains for a change, and if they didn’t insist on conducting their most important affairs over dinner, at the end of a long journey or after the hunt. Take note that one doesn’t travel any slower in a palanquin, as I do, if one has good wadding in the stretcher, and the forethought to change it often. Would you care for a sugared almond, Archambaud? In the little coffer by your side. Well, pass me one would you?

Do you know how many days it took me to travel from Avignon to Breteuil in Normandy, in order to join King John, who was laying a nonsensical siege there? Go on, have a guess? No, my nephew; less than that. We left on the twenty-first of June, the very day of the summer solstice, and none too early at that. Because you know, or rather you don’t know what happens upon the departure of a nuncio, or two nuncios, as there were two of us on that occasion. It is customary for the entire College of Cardinals, following Mass, to escort the departing officials for a full league beyond the edge of town; and there is always a crowd following them, with people watching from both sides of the route. And we must advance at procession pace in order to give dignity to the cortège. Then we make a stop, and the cardinals line up in order of precedence and the Nuncio exchanges the kiss of peace with each one in turn. This whole ceremony takes up most of the morning. So we left on the twenty-first of June. And yet we were arrived in Breteuil by the ninth of July. Eighteen days. Niccola Capocci, my co-legate, was unwell. I must say, I had shaken him up no end, the spineless weakling. Never before had he travelled at such a pace. But one week later, the Holy Father had in his hands, delivered by messengers on horseback, the account of my first discussions with the king.

This time, we have no such need to rush. First, even if we are enjoying a mild spell, days are short at this time of year. I don’t recall November in Périgord being so warm, as warm as it is today. What beautiful light we have! But we are in danger of running into a storm as we advance to the north of the kingdom. I plan on taking roughly one month, so that we’ll be in Metz by Christmas, God willing. No, I am not in nearly as much of a hurry as last summer; despite all my efforts, that war took place, and King John was taken prisoner.

How could such ill fortune befall us? Oh! You are not the only one to be flabbergasted, my nephew. All Europe felt not inconsiderable surprise and has since been arguing about the root causes and the reasons. The misfortunes of kings come from long ago, and often one takes for an accident of fate what is really the fatality of their very nature. And the bigger the misfortunes, the longer the roots.

This whole business, I know it all in great detail – pull that blanket over towards me a little would you? – and I might say I even expected it. I expected a great reversal of fortune, a humbling, would strike the king down, and thus, alas, bring down his kingdom with it. In Avignon, we in the Church need to know all that may interest the courts. Word of all the scheming, all the plotting, finds its way back up to us. Not a single marriage could be planned that we don’t know about before the betrothed themselves. ‘In the event of lady such-and-such accepting the hand of lord so-and-so, who is in fact her second cousin, would our Most Holy Father bestow upon us his permission to thus join their two crowns?’ Not a single treaty would be negotiated without our receiving visits from agents of both sides; not a single crime committed without the instigator coming to us in search of absolution. The Church provides kings and princes with their chancellors as well as most of their jurists.

For eighteen years now the houses of France and England have been in open conflict. But what is the cause of this war? King Edward’s claims to the French crown most certainly! That is indeed the pretext, a fine legal pretext is how I see it, as we could debate the issue ad infinitum; but it is neither the only, nor the true motive. There are age-old ill-defined borders between Guyenne and neighbouring counties, such as ours to begin with, Périgord, borders suggested by unintelligibly written land charters, where feudal rights overlap; it is difficult for vassal and suzerain to come to an understanding when they are both kings; there is trade rivalry, primarily for wool and cloth, which was the cause of the fight for Flanders; there is the support France has always offered the Scottish, who represent a threat to the English king to the north. War didn’t break out for one reason alone, but rather for the twenty that had been smouldering like embers and glowing in the night. When Robert of Artois was banished from the kingdom, with honour lost, he went to England to blow on the firebrands there. The pope at that time, Pierre Roger, that is Clement VI, did everything in his power to prevent this war, and pulled as many strings as he could to counter the malicious warmongers. He preached compromise, inviting concessions on both sides. He too dispatched a papal legate, who was by the way none other than the current pontiff, at the time Cardinal Aubert. He wanted to revive plans for a crusade in which the two kings were to participate, taking their noblemen along with them. It would have been a fine means of diverting their warring urges, with the added hope of reuniting Christendom. Instead of the crusade, we got Crécy. Your father was there; you had word from him of this disaster.

Ah! My nephew, you will see it throughout your life, there is no merit in serving a good king with all one’s heart; he leads you to do your duty, and the pains one takes don’t matter because one feels that they contribute to the greater good. What is difficult, however, is to serve a bad monarch well … or a poor pope. I saw how happy they were, those men at the time of my distant youth who served Philip the Fair. Being loyal to the vainglorious Valois requires far more effort. They are only prepared to heed advice or listen to reason when defeated and trounced.

It was not until after Crécy that Philip VI accepted a truce based on the proposals I had drawn up. Not so bad after all, or so it would seem, as the truce lasted roughly, despite a few local skirmishes, from 1347 to 1354. Seven years of peace. For many, potentially, a time of contentment. But there you are; in our accursed century, no sooner war is over than the plague takes hold.

You were spared in Périgord. Admittedly, my nephew, admittedly, you paid your tribute to the scourge; yes, indeed you have had your share of honour. But it is nothing beside the deaths that occurred in the numerous towns surrounded by populous countryside, like Florence, Avignon or Paris. Did you know that the disease came from China, via India, Tartary and Asia Minor? It spread, or so they say, as far as Arabia. It is indeed an illness for the unbeliever, sent to us to punish Europe for too many sins. From Constantinople and the shores of the Levant, ships transported the plague to the Greek archipelago, whence it gained the ports of Italy; it crossed the Alps and came to wreak havoc upon us, ahead of countries northward, moving on to England, Holland, Denmark and finishing up in the far north, Norway, Iceland. Have you had both forms of the plague here, the one that kills in three days, with burning fever and coughing up of blood … the unfortunate ones afflicted said they were already enduring the wrath of hell, and the other, with its more drawn-out agony, five or six days, with the same fever and great carbuncles and pustules appearing in the groin and armpits?

Seven long months we suffered this in Avignon. Retiring every evening we wondered if we would see the light of day. Every morning we would explore our underarms and crotches. To feel the faintest heat in those places was terrifying; people would be seized with dread and stare at you with mad eyes. With each breath we said to ourselves perhaps it will be with this mouthful of air that evil will enter. We never left the presence of a friend without thinking ‘will it be him, will it be me, or will it be both of us?’ Weavers were dying in their workshops, falling to the ground beneath their stilled looms, silversmiths dead beside their crucibles gone cold, moneychangers rotting under their counters. Children were dying on their dead mother’s pallet. And the smell, Archambaud, the stench in Avignon! The streets were lined with corpses.

Half, you hear me well, half the population perished. Between January and April of the year 1348 we counted sixty-two thousand dead. The cemetery that the pope bought in haste was full within just one month; we buried eleven thousand bodies there. People departed this life without servants, and were committed to the grave without priests. The son no longer dared visit his father, nor the father his son. Seven thousand houses closed up! All those who could, fled to their properties in the country.

Clement VI stayed in town along with several cardinals including myself. ‘If God wants us, He will take us.’ And although he compelled most of the four hundred officers of the papal household to stay on, they were scarcely enough to organize relief operations. The pope handed out wages to all the doctors and physicians; he hired carters and gravediggers, had supplies distributed and prescribed sound enforcement measures to limit contagion. Nobody at that time accused him of recklessly squandering resources. He reprimanded monks and nuns alike who shirked their charitable duties towards the sick and the dying. Ah! I heard a few things during confession: the repentance of the high and mighty, even those of the Church, who came to cleanse their souls of all their sins and seek absolution! Even the big Florentine and Lombard bankers, who confessed through chattering teeth and suddenly discovered their generous selves. And the cardinals’ mistresses … oh yes, oh yes, my nephew, not all, but a fair few cardinals … these beautiful ladies came to hang their jewels on the Holy Virgin’s statue! They held handkerchiefs under their noses, impregnated with aromatic essences, and threw away their shoes before entering their homes once more. Those who accused Avignon of impiety, of being the new Babylon, didn’t see it during the Great Plague. We were pious all right, I assure you!

What a strange creature is man! When everything goes his way, when he is blooming with health, when his business is flourishing, his wife fertile and his province in peace, isn’t it precisely then that he should constantly lift up his soul unto the Lord and give thanks for such blessings? Not at all; he is quick to forget his creator, proudly flying in the face of all the commandments. However, as soon as misfortune and disaster strike, then he rushes to God. And he prays, and admits his guilt, and he promises to mend his ways. God must be right to burden him, since it is the only way, or so it seems, to bring man back to Him.

I didn’t choose my condition. It was my mother, perhaps you know, who designated me when I was a child. If I accepted this fate, it was, I believe, because I have always been grateful to God for all He has given me, especially, the gift of life. I remember, when I was very young, in our ancient castle in Rolphie, Périgueux, where you yourself were born, Archambaud, but which is no longer home to you since your father chose to take up residence in Montignac fifteen years back … well there in that huge castle, set amongst the ancient stones of a Roman arena, I remember the wonder that filled me suddenly, the wonder of being alive at the centre of the big, wide world, to breathe, to see the sky; I remember this feeling came to me on summer evenings, when the light is long and I was put to bed well before nightfall. The bees buzzed in a vine that climbed the wall beneath my room, the shadow slowly filled the oval courtyard with its enormous stones; birds flew across the still-light sky and the first star appeared amidst the rose-tinged clouds. I had a great childish need to say thank you, and my mother made it clear to me that it was to God I should give thanks, the Organizer of all this beauty. And that thought has never left me.

On this very day, all along our route, often I feel a thank you in my heart for this warm weather, for these russet-coloured forests we ride through, for these still-green pastures, for these loyal servants who escort me, for these fine, fattened horses that I see trotting alongside my palanquin. I enjoy watching the faces of men, the movements of the beasts, the shapes of the trees, all this infinite variety that is the infinitely wonderful work of God.

All our doctors who fight over theology in closed classrooms, and cram themselves full of empty words, and shout bitter abuse at each other, and who bore everyone to death inventing words to name otherwise what we already knew before them, all of these people would be better off contemplating nature, thereby healing their minds. I have the theology that I was taught, handed down from the fathers of the Church; and I have no desire to change it …

Did you know that I could have been pope? Yes, my nephew. Many tell me so, as they tell me that I could yet be pope if I outlast Innocent. It will be God’s will. I do not complain about what he has made me. I thank him that he put me where he has put me, and that he has kept me on to be the age I am, an age that few attain: fifty-five years, my dear nephew, that is my age, and in as fine form as you see me. That is also the Lord’s blessing. Those whom I haven’t met for ten years cannot believe their eyes: that I have changed so little in appearance, my cheeks still as rosy, and my beard scarcely whitened.

The idea of being made or not being made pope only bothers me, in truth – I confide this to you as a relative – when it occurs to me that I could act more wisely than the one who wears the papal tiara. And yet I never had that feeling with Clement VI. He fully understood that the pope should be a monarch above all monarchs, God’s right-hand man. On a day when Jean Birel or some other preacher of asceticism accused him of being too extravagant, and too generous to the supplicants, he responded: ‘Nobody should leave the prince’s company dissatisfied.’ And, turning to me, he added between his teeth: ‘My predecessors didn’t know how to be pope.’ And during the Great Plague, as I was saying, he really proved he was the best. I don’t believe, in all honesty, that I could have done as much as he, and I thanked God, once again, that He hadn’t designated me to lead an ailing Christendom through this ordeal.

Not once did Clement abandon his majesty; and indeed he demonstrated that he was the Holy Father, the father of all Christians, and even father to all others, as when peoples almost everywhere, but especially in the Rhineland provinces of Mainz and Worms, turned against the Jews, accusing them of causing the scourge, he condemned such persecutions. He went further and took the Jews into his own protection; he excommunicated their tormentors; he offered asylum to the hounded Jews and relocated them within his states, where it must be said they re-established prosperity in just a few years.

But why was I going on so long about the plague? Ah, yes! Because of the dire consequences it had for the French crown, and for King John himself. Indeed, towards the end of the epidemic, during the autumn of 1349, one after the other, three queens, or rather two queens and one destined to be …

What are you saying, Brunet? Speak louder. Bourdeilles is in sight? Ah, yes, I want to see that. It is a stronghold indeed, and the castle well placed to monitor those approaching from afar.

There it is, Archambaud, the castle my younger brother, your father, gave up to me to thank me for liberating Périgueux. While I haven’t succeeded in freeing King John from the hands of the English, at least I saved our county town from their clutches and re-established our authority here.

The English garrison, you remember, didn’t want to leave. But the lances that accompany me, and which certain people make mockery of, proved themselves once again most useful. It was enough for me to appear with them, coming from Bordeaux, for the English to pack up and leave without further ado. Two hundred lances and a cardinal, it is quite something to see … Yes, most of my servants have been trained for combat, as well as the secretaries and the doctors of law that travel with me. And my faithful Brunet is a knight; I obtained his ennoblement not long ago.

In the end, by giving me Bourdeilles, my brother is strengthening his position. Because with the castellany of Auberoche, near Savignac, and the walled town of Bonneval, near Thenon, that I bought for twenty thousand florins from King Philip VI ten years ago … well I say bought, but in reality it offset in part the sums that I had loaned him … and with the fortified Abbey of Saint-Astier, of which I am the abbot, and my priories of Fleix and Saint Martin of Bergerac, that now makes six fortresses at a good distance all around Périgueux which belong to a high representative of the Church, almost as if they belonged to the pope himself. And one would be reluctant to cross swords with him. That is how I keep the peace in our county.

You know Bourdeilles, of course; you have come here often. I haven’t been here for a long time. Fancy that, I don’t remember that great octagonal keep. It cuts a fine figure indeed. Here we are at last, this is mine, but only to spend one night and one morning, the time it takes to install the governor I have chosen, without knowing when or whether I would return. It is too short a break to enjoy. Well let us thank God for this time that he has given me here. I hope they have prepared us a good supper, travelling gives you quite an appetite, even in a palanquin.

3
Death knocks on every door

I KNEW IT, MY NEPHEW, I told you so, today we shouldn’t count on going further than Nontron. And even so we will only arrive there long after evensong, in the black of night. La Rue kept on at me: ‘Monseigneur is losing ground, monseigneur will not be satisfied with a stage of just eight leagues …’ Oh yes! La Rue always goes like the clappers. Which is no bad thing at all, as at least with him my escort never dozes off. But I knew that we wouldn’t be able to leave Bourdeilles before midday. I had too much to do, too much to decide upon, too many signatures to dispense.

Because I love Bourdeilles, you see; I know that I could be happy there if God had assigned me not only to possess it but also to reside there. He who has just one single, unique and modest possession may enjoy it to the full. He who has vast and multifarious possessions enjoys only the idea of them. Heaven always evens out what we are honoured with.

When you return to Périgord, would you grant me the favour of revisiting Bourdeilles, Archambaud, to see if the roofing has been repaired as I requested earlier. And the fireplace in my room was smoking … It is lucky indeed that the English spared it. You saw Brantôme, we just passed through: you saw the devastation they caused, a town that used to be so lovely and so beautifully set on the banks of its river, razed! The Prince of Wales stopped over for the night of the ninth of August, according to what I have been told. And in the morning, before leaving, his coutiliers and valets3 set the place ablaze.

I strongly condemn the way they destroy everything, burning, exiling, ruining, as they seem to be doing more and more often. I can understand men-at-arms will slit each other’s throats in wartime; if God hadn’t designated me for the Church, I should have had to take arms and fight, and I would have shown no mercy. Pillaging is acceptable: one must give some of life’s pleasures to those men of whom we require the shedding of blood, including their own. But raiding for the sole purpose of leaving behind a destitute people, burning thatch and crops to expose them to famine and chill, consumes me with rage. I am aware of the intention; the king can no longer draw taxes from a ruined province, and by destroying his subjects’ goods and belongings a monarch can be weakened. However, this doesn’t hold true. If the Englishman purports to have a claim to France, why would he lay the country to waste? And does he imagine that he will ever be accepted, acting this way? Even if he prevails in the signing of treaties after prevailing in the winning of battles, does he really think that? He sows seeds of hatred. He most probably deprives the King of France of money, but at the same time he supplies this monarch with many souls spurred on by anger and a desire for vengeance. King Edward will inevitably manage to find a few overlords here and there willing to swear allegiance to him in pure self-interest, but the people will be set against him for ever from the time he committed these inexpiable acts of destruction. Take a look at what is happening already; good people don’t resent King John for having lost in battle; they take pity on him, calling him John the Brave, or John the Good, when they should be calling him John the Fool, John the Obstinate, John the Incapable. And you will see that they will willingly bleed to pay his ransom.

You ask me why I told you yesterday that the plague had had such a disastrous effect on John and on the kingdom’s fate? Ah! My nephew, for its own reasons, death, a handful of deaths in the wrong order, the deaths of women, first of all his own wife, Madame Bonne of Luxembourg, before he became king.

Madame of Luxembourg was taken by the plague in September of the year 1349. She was to have been queen, and would have been a good queen. She was, as you know, the daughter of the King of Bohemia, John the Blind, who so loved France he maintained that Paris was the only court in which one could live nobly; he was a model of chivalry, albeit not entirely of sound mind. Although he could not see a thing, he insisted stubbornly on fighting at Crécy, and in order to do so, had his horse attached to the mounts of the two knights who rode on either side of him. And that was how they flung themselves into the fray. All three of them were found dead, still tied together. Now the King of Bohemia wore three white ostrich feathers on the crest of his helmet. The young Prince of Wales was struck by his noble demise – the prince was then nearly sixteen; it was his first battle – and he did well, notwithstanding King Edward considered it politic to exaggerate the deeds of his son and heir in the matter. The Prince of Wales was thus so hard hit he begged his father to allow him to adopt the same emblem as the late, blind king from that day on. And that is why three white feathers can now be seen on the prince’s helmet.

However, the most important thing about Madame Bonne was her brother, Charles of Luxembourg, whose election to the crown of the Holy Roman Empire we, Pope Clement VI and I, actively encouraged. Not that we were unaware that we would have a good deal of trouble with as sly an old fox of a yokel as he … Oh! You will soon see for yourself he is nothing like his father; but as we had justifiable fears that France would fall on wretched times, it could only strengthen the country to make its future king the Emperor’s brother-in-law. But with the sister dead, the alliance was no more. And though troubles indeed we have had with his Bulla Aurea,4 he has never given support to France, and that is why I am leaving for Metz.

King John, who was then still Duke of Normandy, showed little despair upon the death of Madame Bonne. They hadn’t got along well, with more stormy outbursts between them than harmony and understanding. Although she possessed grace, and he had made her round with child every year, eleven in all, since he had been given to understand that it was time for him to draw closer to his wife in bed, Monseigneur John was more inclined to shower his affections upon his very own cousin, eight years his junior and of rather fine bearing. Charles de La Cerda, who was also known as Monsieur of Spain,5 as he belonged to a supplanted branch of the throne of Castile.

No sooner was Madame Bonne buried than Duke John withdrew to Fontainebleau in the company of the handsome Charles of Spain, in flight from the epidemic. Oh! This vice is by no means rare, my nephew. I can’t understand it and it annoys me no end; it is one of the vices for which I have the least indulgence. We must admit however that it is widespread, even amongst kings, to whom it does a great deal of damage. Look no further than to the case of King Edward II of England, father of the current king. It was sodomy that cost him both his throne and his life. Our King John doesn’t flaunt his depravity quite so openly; but he does have many of the characteristics of a sodomite, and he revealed these traits particularly in his consuming passion for this Spanish cousin with the too-pretty face.

Whatever is the matter, Brunet? Why are we stopping? Where are we exactly? In Quinsac. This was not planned. What do these yokels want? Ah! A blessing! We shall not stop my retinue for such a thing; you know perfectly well that I only bless on foot. In nomine patris … lii … sancti. Go, good people, may you be blessed, go in peace. If we had to stop every time I am asked for a benediction, we would be six months in reaching Metz.

So, as I was saying, in September of the year 1349, Madame Bonne died, leaving the heir to the throne a widower. In October came the turn of the Queen of Navarre, Madame Jeanne, whom they used to call Little Joan, the daughter of Marguerite of Burgundy and perhaps, or perhaps not, Louis Hutin,6 the one who was kept from succession to the French throne under suspicions of illegitimacy – yes, the child of the Tower of Nesle affair – she too was taken by the plague. Neither was her demise met with many tears. She had been widowed for six years by her cousin Monseigneur Philip III of Évreux, killed fighting against the Moors somewhere in Castile. The crown of Navarre had been ceded by Philip VI upon his accession to remove any claims they could have made to the French throne. That was just part of the bargaining that ensured the throne to the Valois.

I have never approved of this Navarrese arrangement, it was neither valid de jure nor de facto.7 But I didn’t then have a say! I had just been appointed Bishop of Auxerre. And even if I had said something … It just didn’t make legal sense. Navarre was inherited from Louis Hutin’s mother. If little Joan wasn’t Louis’s daughter but that of any old equerry, she would have been no more entitled to Navarre than to France. Therefore, if one acknowledged her right to one of the crowns, then ipso facto one substantiated her claims, and her descendants’ claims, to the other. One admitted rather too easily that she had been kept from the throne, not for her alleged illegitimacy, but rather because she was a woman, and thanks to the artifice of a law invented by, and for, males.

As for the facts themselves, never would King Philip the Fair have agreed to the severing, for whatever reason, of a part of the kingdom’s territory, one that he himself had annexed! One doesn’t secure one’s throne by sawing off one of its legs. But it was a peaceful arrangement; Joan and Philip of Navarre remained most docile, Joan still under the cloud of her mother’s reputation, Philip by virtue of a dignified and thoughtful nature bequeathed him by his father, Louis of Évreux. They seemed to be happy with their rich Norman county and their small Pyrenean kingdom. Things would change when their son Charles, a boisterous young man of eighteen years, began to cast about vindictive looks, filled with condemnation for the failures evident in his family’s past, filled with ambition for his own future. ‘If my grandmother hadn’t been such a brazen whore, if my mother had been born a man, I would be King of France by now.’ I heard him say these things with my own ears. It was therefore considered advisable to show some interest in Navarre, the position of which, to the south of the kingdom, had secured the region even more importance since the English had conquered all of Aquitaine. So, as always in such circumstances, a marriage was to be arranged.

Duke John would have happily refrained from contracting a new marital union. But he was destined to be king, and the royal image required him to have a wife at his side, particularly in his case. A wife would prevent him appearing to walk too openly on the arm of Monsieur of Spain. Moreover, how could he better pander to the boisterous Charles of Évreux-Navarre, and how better tie his hands, than by choosing the future Queen of France from amongst his sisters? The eldest, Blanche, was sixteen years old. She was beautiful, and blessed with a sharp wit. Plans were coming along well, the pope’s permission had been secured and the wedding was practically announced, even though during the terrible period we were living through, we were all wondering who would still be alive the next week.