Louis: The French Prince Who Invaded England (8 page)

And so, with no choice in the matter, which she would have known was the usual lot of the daughters of kings, Blanche was to leave her home. She must have been aware as she said goodbye to her parents that she would probably never see them again. Then came the journey through the mountain passes of the Pyrenees and northwards through France; their cavalcade was well guarded and not in particular danger of attack by brigands, but travelling in a slow, creaking, jolting cart for weeks on end was arduous. One of the stops they made on the way was at the abbey of Fontevrault, and it was here that Eleanor concluded that old age (she was in her late seventies) had at last got the better of her, so she decided to retire there. Blanche continued her journey into a foreign land with no family at all around her.

Due to the Interdict which was still in force over France the wedding could not take place in French territory, so the end point of Blanche’s journey was Port-Mort just over the border in English-controlled Normandy. When Blanche arrived she may have been surprised to find that neither of the kings who had arranged the match was there: before letting his young son travel to English territory Philip, ever cautious, had demanded that John should give himself up as a hostage for Louis’s safety, so both kings were in Paris. At Port-Mort were those nobles who had witnessed the treaty of Le Goulet, including the French counts of Dreux and Perche, and John’s representative William Marshal; also the archbishop of Bordeaux, who was to preside over the ceremony; and of course Blanche’s future husband.

When she first came face to face with Louis Blanche would have seen a slight, blond youth of about her own age. That was a reasonable start: numerous royal princesses were married off to men much older than themselves. Although many of these husbands were no doubt kind, they could also range from lecherous to distant, uncaring or downright cruel, and young girls had no right to reject them for these reasons; women, even royal ones, had very little power in their marriages and no real control over their husbands’ behaviour or the way they were treated. The course of the rest of Blanche’s life would be determined by Louis, and she had no doubt spent much of the journey praying that he would be kind.

The wedding was a quiet affair. There were no great feasts or celebrations afterwards: instead Blanche and her new husband travelled straight to Paris, where she met her father-in-law the king for the first time. Despite his intimidating status and fearsome political reputation, Philip was in his personal life something of a
bon viveur
, enjoying food, wine and good company, and there is no reason to suppose that he was not kind to his little daughter-in-law – she had, after all, been one of the means by which he had achieved his aims in the treaty so he had no cause to be anything other than favourably disposed to her. Indeed, Blanche actually found herself the first lady at court: she arrived after Agnes had been banished and while Ingeborg was still incarcerated in her convent; queen mother Adela, shocked at her son’s marital behaviour, preferred to live away from the court. This may have enhanced Blanche’s social position but it caused problems of its own as she had no older women of suitable rank on hand to whom she could turn if she needed help or advice in her new role.

At first Blanche struggled to adjust to life at the French court, as might any young girl uprooted from her home and large family and sent to live in a foreign environment, but she at least met with some sympathy, as one small incident which has come down to us illustrates. Some months after the wedding, Blanche was suffering from a bout of particular sadness and homesickness, and was crying inconsolably. This was during the visit of the saintly bishop Hugh of Lincoln to Paris, so, seeing his wife upset, the young Louis begged the bishop to go and see her. He did, and succeeded in offering her words of comfort which dried her tears. It must have been reassuring for Blanche not only to receive the prelate’s visit, but also to know that Louis was considerate enough to have arranged it. Her loyalty to her new family grew.

A first test for Blanche occurred within a year of her wedding when King John and his queen made a state visit to the French court. As both Philip’s daughter-in-law and John’s niece Blanche could have been caught in the middle of their negotiations, but she came down squarely on the side of the Capetians, and according to the Anonymous of Béthune’s
History of the Dukes of Normandy and the Kings of England
it was actually she who asked John to hand over the last areas of the Vexin which he still controlled. If John had hoped she would be his Plantagenet ally in the Capetian household, he was disappointed.

As Blanche and Louis grew older, it became apparent that they were well matched in both intellect and character. She was clever and literate: she enjoyed listening to poetry, and now had the means to employ jongleurs to recite the latest works to her and to compose new ones. She even wrote some of her own, and one poem of hers survives to this day. Blanche was also known to be very devout so she and Louis would have been able to share religious discussions and divine worship.

Together they headed a household which functioned almost entirely separately from the rest of the court. Blanche had companions as Louis did, daughters of the nobility, and they all formed a glittering company which drew to itself the noblest and brightest youth as well as the fashionable poets and writers of the day. A fragment of the royal household accounts for 1202–3 survives, and it details some of the clothes and fabrics which were bought for them: tunics, surcoats, an expensive dress; fabrics of wool, satin and brocade in different colours; expensive camlet imported from the east; the services of a tailor. The young couple were secure in their companions and well looked after. Paris at this time was an exciting place, home to somewhere in the region of 50,000 people and attracting not only scholars and poets but also artisans and craftsmen; during the first decade of the 1200s there was a thriving trade in books and book production, and building work was ongoing on the walls of the city, the tower of the Louvre and the great cathedral of Notre Dame. Louis and Blanche were at the centre of the city which was the central focus of much of Europe.

As time went by smaller children were also confided to the care of the prince and princess to be brought up in their household; Louis and Blanche were kind to his younger half-siblings Marie and Philip Hurepel, to Joan and Margaret, young orphan daughters of the late Count Baldwin IX of Flanders, and to little Theobald IV, posthumous son of the late Theobald III, count of Champagne. All of these young people, whether deliberately or inadvertently, would play a role in Louis’s future.

Due to their tender ages at the time of their wedding, Louis and Blanche’s marriage was not consummated straight away. And political as the match was, King Philip had a vested interest in keeping them in separate beds: the revenues from the fiefs which John had offered as a dowry would go directly to him until such time as the marriage was consummated. Whatever the reason, the delay gave Blanche some time in which to adjust to her new life without the added pressure of producing an heir, in which she was more fortunate than Louis’s mother had been, and it also allowed her to develop physically without the strain of very early pregnancies. Other royal brides with older husbands were not always so lucky and there are various medieval examples of girls giving birth at thirteen or fourteen, to the detriment of their health. But as Louis was Philip’s only undisputedly legitimate son, the demands of the succession meant that the pressure could not be delayed for too long. The right time arrived in due course, and in 1205, at the age of seventeen, Blanche found herself pregnant. She gave birth to a daughter who, sadly for the young couple, did not live long enough to be named. The one consolation was that no public condemnation came Blanche’s way, and we may also imagine that Louis was sympathetic in private. Their marriage had started as political but there is no doubt that they developed strong bonds of affection, that they shared a mutual respect, and that after a time they genuinely cared for each other. Blanche was not to become pregnant again for another four years, but there were no moves for a divorce.

Meanwhile Louis went on with his knightly training, which was now in earnest. He moved from the wooden replicas of his boyhood to sharp steel weapons, and needed to train daily in order to become used to the weight of the armour which was worn at the time by those able to afford it. A full set of harness included a heavy gambeson made of layers of fabric, wadding and horsehair; a long-sleeved, knee-length mail hauberk made of riveted links; separate mail leggings known as chausses; a padded fabric arming cap under a mail hood or coif; mail mittens with leather palms; an iron or steel helmet; and a shield made of layers of wood and leather. Add in a lance and a side-arm such as a sword, axe or mace, and in total this could weigh in at about 100 lbs (45 kg); a man not used to wearing and carrying it would tire quickly and be of little use in battle. Louis’s skills with sword and lance would need to be honed through constant practice with his companions, his horsemanship perfected.

All of this might have been enough for a man destined to be a simple knight, but Louis was to be a commander, a leader of men. He needed to learn about statecraft, and there could be no better example than his own father. Philip had masterminded France’s relationship with England and other neighbours for most of his life, fighting when necessary, negotiating when expedient, and scheming constantly with a view to the long term. He had seen off two kings of England and now had a third almost where he wanted him. The whole background to Louis’s youth was a situation where the borders of lands and kingdoms were fluid; an able ruler was ever alert to the opportunity to add to his lands, taking what he could whenever he could, by force or by diplomacy, and then defending his gains. Louis accompanied his father on a short campaign to Brittany in 1206 which would have added to his theoretical knowledge the practical experience of strategy, the deployment of troops and the logistics of a military campaign, all of which was useful experience for the future.

One important lesson to learn in the field of early thirteenth-century statecraft was that casualties were to be expected, even among those who were close friends or relatives. Louis’s boyhood companion (and Blanche’s cousin) Arthur of Brittany had continued his quest for the English throne even after Philip had recognised John’s claim, this recognition being one of the conditions of Louis’s marriage agreement. But Arthur had been captured by John’s forces at the castle of Mirebeau in 1202, taken to Rouen and imprisoned, and disappeared in mysterious circumstances in April 1203, at the age of fifteen. He was widely rumoured to have been murdered, with the Minstrel of Reims even claiming that John carried out the murder personally. However, as the Minstrel depicts John as some kind of pantomime villain (he is variously ‘the worst king who was ever born since the time of Herod’, ‘evil and cruel’, ‘a cowardly knight, perverse and traitorous’ and a man who ‘shamed his barons, and lay with their wives and their daughters by force, and took away their lands, and did such evil that God and everyone should hate him’), it may safely be assumed that John’s personal involvement is an exaggeration. But Arthur was never seen again and there is little doubt that he was murdered. His sister Eleanor, another possible rival for the English throne, was taken by John and imprisoned in Corfe Castle in the south of England; she spent the remaining forty years of her life in captivity.

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The accepted entry point for a youth of noble birth into manhood was the occasion of his knighting. Louis’s ceremony took place at the royal castle of Compiègne, some 50 miles (80 km) north-east of Paris, on 17 May 1209, the great Church feast of Pentecost. Philip, as might be expected, fenced in the occasion with a number of conditions to which Louis had to agree before the knighting could go ahead. Chief among these were that he had to swear not to take into his service any knight or man who had not taken an oath of allegiance to Philip, and that he had to promise not to take part in any tournaments. This latter was not aimed at curtailing Louis’s enjoyment of these martial events, but rather a recognition that tournaments were dangerous: they were not the elaborate individual jousts of later centuries but involved actual mass combat, and fatalities were common. Indeed, no less a personage than Geoffrey of Brittany, son of Henry II and father of Arthur, had been killed taking part in a tournament in 1186, leading to the eventual conflict over the English throne between John and Arthur. Philip was not willing to risk the Capetian succession in this way.

The conditions agreed, the ceremony could take place, and it was magnificent. The king himself presided, and in front of a large crowd he presented Louis with his sword and sword belt, the symbols of knighthood. His golden spurs were carried by the marshal Henry Clément who had trained him for so many years. A number of Louis’s companions including the brothers Robert and Peter de Dreux were knighted alongside him, and there was a huge feast afterwards at which Louis was served each course by a different noble lord. It was, says William the Breton, such a dazzling assembly of the great men of the realm, with such an abundance of food and gifts, that nothing like it had ever been seen since.

At the time of Louis’s knighting Blanche was some five months pregnant with the couple’s second child. To great jubilation she gave birth on 9 September 1209 to a healthy son, who was named Philip; it was the first time since the accession of the Capetians in 987 that three generations of royal males had been alive together. France’s future was safe, and Louis was a man of substance: a prince, a knight, a father.

He was now ready to take his place at the king’s side.