Louis: The French Prince Who Invaded England (32 page)

The next year or so would see a series of complex negotiations between Louis and Hubert de Burgh about peace and over merchant and shipping rights. For once out of his armour and his saddle and away from military camps, Louis was able to carry out this task from the comfort of Paris and the various royal residences, giving him at last some time in which to enjoy family life.

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In May 1225 Louis and Blanche had been married for twenty-five years – two-thirds of their lives. During that time Louis had remained utterly faithful to her: unusually for a medieval king he fathered no illegitimate children, and no chroniclers, not even the hostile ones, mention any kind of mistress or even a passing liaison. Indeed, they show the opposite: the worst anyone could say on the subject was Matthew Paris’s comment that Louis was so devoted to his wife that he was too much under her influence. But then, she was an exceptional woman.

Blanche was as devoted to Louis as he was to her; she supported him in all endeavours to the point of facing down his all-powerful father, as we have seen, and riding around to harangue the nobles of France into raising troops for him. Blanche makes very few appearances in official documents. Of the 460 acts of Louis’s reign she appears in just three, all to do with family matters: the confirmation of her dower lands, the appointment of a chaplain to sing Masses in memory of their late son Philip, and Louis’s testament providing for his children, which we will explore later in this chapter. But it would be a mistake to assume that she played no part in Louis’s government – it is likely that they discussed matters in private and that he benefited from her advice. The intermediary role of queens during this period was well established, and indeed Pope Honorius wrote to his ‘dear daughter in Christ, the illustrious queen of France’ in May 1224 to ask her to intercede with her husband on the subject of aid for the emperor of Latin Constantinople.

Blanche was loyal not just to Louis but to France; by now she saw herself as a Frenchwoman, having left her home country when she was twelve and never returning. She had few remaining ties to Castile: her parents had died within three weeks of each other in October and November 1214, and she had never met her younger brother Henry, who inherited the crown of Castile, as he had been born four years after Blanche’s departure.

One of the principal duties of a medieval queen was to bear children, and in this regard Blanche was very successful; allowing for Louis’s frequent absences on various campaigns, she became pregnant at almost every opportunity. The agonising waits for a male heir, with the Capetian dynasty hanging on a single thread, which had characterised the previous two generations, became a thing of the past as son after son was born to the couple: after their short-lived daughter in 1205 Blanche gave birth to Philip in 1209; twin boys, possibly called John and Alfonso, in 1213; Louis in 1214; Robert in 1216; John in 1219; Alfonso in 1220; and Philip-Dagobert (the second half of the name being a reference to his Carolingian ancestors) in 1222. But a king needed daughters as well as sons, in order to form advantageous matrimonial alliances, so it was probably with more celebration than was usual at the birth of a girl that Isabelle, named for Louis’s barely remembered mother, joined the family in 1224. And two more sons were to follow: Stephen in 1225 and Charles in 1227.

We have already noted that child mortality was endemic in the thirteenth century, and unfortunately for Louis and Blanche, their royal rank did not exempt them from tragedy. Of their twelve children only five would reach adulthood; four (their first-born daughter, the twins and Stephen) would die in infancy, while Philip, John and Philip-Dagobert would all perish between the ages of eight and ten.

Royal children needed providing for. Louis might have many offspring, but he also had significant lands in his gift thanks to his own conquests and those of his father. In June 1225 he drew up a testament to distribute lands and to provide for his children. His eldest son, Louis, then eleven, was of course to be the next king of France, inheriting the crown and the royal domains, but what of the others? There were to be titles for almost all his sons: Robert, aged nine, was to be count of Artois, lord of Louis’s inheritance from his mother; John, six, would be count of Anjou and Maine; Alfonso, five, would be count of Poitiers and Auvergne. Three-year-old Philip-Dagobert would enter the Church, as would any further sons born to the king and queen. This giving of children to a religious life was common at this time, particularly in large families where there were too many sons to provide for comfortably. The boys in question would not end up as simple priests but rather as high-ranking clerics – bishops and archbishops who were socially and politically on a par with the great noblemen of the land. Unfortunately they tended to be chosen based on their order of birth within the family rather than on any particular aptitude or piety, so the end results varied considerably from great and ascetic scholars, to canny politicians such as Peter des Roches, to bullish warriors such as Philip Augustus’s cousin the bishop of Beauvais, who had battered the earl of Salisbury into submission at Bouvines and fought in the Third Crusade, his clerical status notwithstanding. Surplus girls could also be handed over to the Church – again, generally to become abbesses rather than simple nuns – but Louis had only one daughter, so it was envisaged that baby Isabelle would make a great marriage; she would have the enormous sum of £20,000 as her dowry.

As it transpired, Louis and Blanche’s son Philip-Dagobert died at the age of ten and so never started on his ecclesiastical career; John had passed away four years earlier, at nine, and his inheritance of Anjou and Maine eventually went to the youngest son, Charles, who had not yet been born when Louis drew up his testament. Great futures awaited all Louis’s surviving children. Charles would inherit his counties and would later be crowned king of both Sicily and Naples. Alfonso became, as envisaged, count of Poitiers, and also subsequently count of Toulouse via his marriage to Joan, only child of count Raymond VII. When Alfonso and Joan both died in 1271, without heirs, the county of Toulouse reverted to the French crown, adding considerably to the royal domain. Robert, count of Artois, was a steadfast and loyal retainer of his elder brother, accompanying Louis on crusade, where he was killed at the battle of Mansourah in 1250. And Louis went on to become one of France’s greatest kings, a crusader and a reformer of justice who reigned for forty-four years, renowned throughout Europe for his piety and known to posterity not as King Louis, but as Saint Louis. Isabelle would never marry, despite being pressed by Pope Innocent IV to marry Conrad, the son of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II who had been Philip Augustus’s ally; she chose instead a religious life, and supported by her brother she founded a convent of poor Clares in honour of St Clare of Assisi, one of the first followers of St Francis. Isabelle never took holy orders, preferring to avoid the inevitable rise to the rank of abbess which would follow; instead she lived quietly in the community she had founded until her death in 1270. She was later beatified; she is revered as a saint in the Franciscan order, so Louis and Blanche, although they did not know it in their own lifetimes, would be in the unusual and distinguished position of being the parents of two saints.

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Louis would no doubt have been delighted if, in the summer of 1225, he could have looked into the future to see the destinies of his children, particularly the religious lives of Louis and Isabelle. But in thirteenth-century France religion meant conflict as well as comfort, and the king now found himself faced once more with the Albigensian question.

The war in Languedoc had been continuing on its bloody and destructive course. Raymond VI of Toulouse had died in 1222 but his son Raymond VII proved a more effective military leader; aided by the teenage Raymond-Roger de Trencavel, son of the old count of Carcassonne – and now titular holder of that honour although all his lands were in the hands of the de Montforts – he oversaw victory after victory. Conversely, Amaury de Montfort had proved less able than his late father, and he suffered loss after loss: Lavaur, Puylaurens, Montauban, Castelnaudri, Agen and Moissac were taken from him one by one by the resurgent southerners. The Cathars and the Perfecti who had been in hiding during the ascendancy of the crusaders emerged in public once more, and Catharism regained much ground at the expense of orthodox Catholicism. Amaury’s position became so perilous that he fled Languedoc altogether in January 1224. The cause was in danger of being lost beyond repair, and the pope appealed to Louis. Only a large-scale intervention from the king of France himself could swing the balance.

Before Louis mounted any military action he needed legal and ecclesiastical justification. The pleas of the pope were weighty, but what of the French clergy? A council was held at Bourges on 30 November 1225 at which the cases of the two claimants to the title of count of Toulouse were put to a council of forty archbishops, 113 bishops and 150 abbots, presided over by the new cardinal legate to France, Romanus of St Angelo. The result was something of a foregone conclusion: on the one hand there was Amaury de Montfort, son of the great crusader and champion of the Church; on the other was Raymond VII, excommunicate and suspected of being a sympathiser of the heretics. Amaury’s claim was upheld. The sentence of excommunication against Raymond was reaffirmed on 28 January 1226 at a general assembly of the nobles and clergy of France, at which point Amaury ceded his territorial rights to Louis, who became, officially, the overlord of Languedoc.

Having the title in theory was one thing; claiming it in practice was another. Louis needed to ride at the head of an army and take his new lands by force. Fortunately for him, this is something he was more than willing to do: not only would he be in the situation of being able to enlarge the royal domain, to his lasting fame and the credit of his dynasty, but he would also be fighting for his beloved Church in a legitimate cause. The campaign would be given the status of a crusade, meaning that Louis and his men would be granted the same privileges extended to crusaders in the Holy Land: they, their families and their lands would be placed under specific papal protection, and if they died on campaign they would go straight to heaven.

But there was more for Louis to take into account than there had been previously in 1219 and 1222. The last time Louis had mounted an expedition to Languedoc he had been a prince; now he was a king with the welfare of the rest of his realm to consider. The support of the laity, as well as that of the Church, must be gained: twenty-nine of the principal nobles of France put their names to an act confirming that they had advised him to undertake the crusade and that they would support him in it. Finances must be considered, so that the national coffers would not be emptied: taxes were levied, including a tithe of 10 per cent of the income of all clergy. And Louis must be able to prioritise the needs of France over the needs of the Church if necessary: he agreed with the pope that he would stay in Languedoc ‘only as long as he pleased’; that his vow to complete the crusade was not binding on his heirs if anything should happen to him; and that if Henry III of England should attack any French lands while Louis was away, he would fall under sentence of excommunication.

A huge army was mustered. The figures of tens or even hundreds of thousands of men given by the chroniclers are exaggerated, but it is safe to say that it was a larger army than was normally seen in western Europe at the time. It set out on the road in June 1226, travelling south via the Rhône valley and using the river to transport some of the baggage and supplies. There was a great deal to be moved: as he was making his way through friendly parts of his own realm Louis brought food, cattle and fodder with him so that his army was self-sufficient and had no need to ravage, requisition goods or live off the land. News that the king was on his way in person sped ahead of the host. Louis’s reputation both for victory and, when called for, for ferocity preceded him and many of the minor southern nobles fell over themselves to submit to him. ‘We are zealous to place ourselves beneath the shadow of your wings, and under your wise dominion,’ wrote one Bernard-Otho de Laurac. How much of this zeal was motivated by fear it is impossible to guess. Cities followed suit: Béziers, Nîmes, Puylaurens and Castres had all submitted before Louis got anywhere near them.

But Raymond of Toulouse was not going to give up so easily. He summoned those vassals still loyal to him, and appealed for help to his cousin Henry III of England (Raymond’s mother had been Joanna, sister to King John) and to Hugh de Lusignan, count of La Marche and Angoulême. He was unsuccessful: Henry was a pious son of the Church and did not wish either to associate himself with the forces allied with heresy or to put himself at risk of excommunication due to Louis’s agreement with the pope. More pragmatically, Hubert de Burgh would have seen the benefits of Louis being occupied in Languedoc, slugging it out with Raymond while England stood on the sidelines. Hugh de Lusignan, meanwhile, was – for now – comfortable in his alliance with Louis, which, as we have seen, had brought him great benefits, so he declined to join Raymond.

As the royal army advanced further south into Languedoc, one of the obstacles in its path was the great and supposedly impregnable city of Avignon, with its large bridge across the Rhône. Avignon was in the county of Provence rather than the county of Toulouse, so it had no reason to hold out against Louis, and he had no quarrel with it. Initially it appeared that the king and his host would have free passage through or around Avignon to cross the river and continue their journey, but this turned out not to be the case. Accounts differ as to how and why this happened.

A story which appears in Nicholas de Bray’s work and in another chronicle by a cleric from Ghent named Philip Mousket, but not in any of the official acts and documents of the campaign, is that Louis sent an embassy into Avignon led by Guy the count of St Pol, but the citizens, mistaking the count for the king himself (they were of similar age, and we may imagine that the embassy carried some kind of French royal banner), shut the gates behind them and celebrated their capture of the king, at which point Louis recognised their treachery. Other sources, including the generally reliable
Chronicle of Tours
and some letters of various barons, as well as Nicholas de Bray (who, rather confusingly, includes both tales), say that some of Louis’s army were already on or over the bridge when the citizens suddenly took fright at the sight of so many approaching armed men, refused entry to the king and the legate, shut the gates and sent out a party to destroy the bridge.