Louis: The French Prince Who Invaded England (9 page)

CHAPTER TWO

FATHER AND SON

I
F
L
OUIS THOUGHT
that life would be straightforward now that he was, at twenty-one, considered of full age, he was mistaken. The problem was that his status as ‘eldest son of the king’ was not actually an official position with duties attached, and nobody knew quite how best to fit him into the existing governmental arrangements. There was no recent precedent for an adult heir to the throne: Louis’s father and grandfather had both acceded when they were in their teens, and there had not been an adult heir for over a hundred years.

All previous Capetian eldest sons had been crowned and associated with the throne during their fathers’ lifetimes. In turbulent times this practice of having a ‘junior king’ provided scope for a useful division of responsibilities, and it gave the heir a chance to learn the ropes before he became king on his own, on the assumption that he would later do the same for his own son; it also reduced the possibility of conflict over who would succeed to the throne next. However, Philip chose to break with tradition: he did not have Louis crowned and did not even suggest the possibility of such an event. Why? The chroniclers are silent on this point, but there are two main theories. The first is that Philip now felt that the Capetian dynasty was so secure in its position that there was no need for such a precaution: when he died, nobody would challenge his son’s right to inherit the throne. If Philip had suspected that his line was in any danger of being pushed aside, then surely he would have associated Louis with the throne in 1190 when he had departed on crusade, leaving a single two-year-old child as his heir – but he did not. Instead he left a testament which simply assumed that Louis would be accepted as king and which made arrangements for a regency should one be required. The second (and given what we know of the French king, eminently plausible) explanation is that Philip simply did not want to give up any part of the power and authority which was his. Since his illness in the Holy Land he had been afflicted by a paranoia which meant that he could not bring himself to trust anyone fully, not even his own son who had hitherto been entirely loyal and who showed no signs of disaffection.

Although Philip had experienced no problems in his relationship with Louis, there was abundant recent precedent for royal father–son conflict in the family of Henry II of England. The formal association of an heir with the throne was not a tradition in the Anglo-Norman royal family, but taking a leaf from the Capetian book Henry had crowned his eldest son (also called Henry and generally known as the Young King in order to distinguish him from his father) when the boy was fifteen; this had proved an unmitigated disaster. Young Henry technically had the same status as his father, and not unsurprisingly he wanted some of the power and the money which went with it, but Henry II refused to relinquish any authority. Young Henry rebelled openly against his father in 1173, and the consequent civil war came perilously close to resulting in Henry II losing his throne. Although they were later reconciled, young Henry rebelled again some years later, this time fighting against his brother Richard as well as his father and almost bringing the family to its knees. His death in 1183, at the age of twenty-eight, caused Henry II much grief but it probably saved the Plantagenet-controlled realms from greater peril.

Having witnessed all of this at close quarters – and, indeed, having supported various parties against others as part of his own long-term plan – Philip can have had no desire to replicate such strife in his own kingdom. Although generally considered a good king by his contemporaries he was not universally popular in France, and at about the same time that Louis attained his majority Philip was experiencing discontent from some of his nobles and most of his clergy over his continuing and increasingly cruel treatment of Ingeborg. Running out of excuses for keeping her incarcerated and not reinstating her to her rightful position, he was by now accusing her of sorcery, a very serious allegation. Agitated correspondence travelled back and forth from the royal court in Paris to the papal court in Rome, and there was some question over whether the discontent in France might possibly coalesce with Louis as its figurehead, to the detriment of his father. After all, Louis provided an opportunity for those who were unhappy with the king to turn away from Philip without being disloyal to the Capetians; suddenly all those prophecies about Louis heralding the start of a new dynasty due to his descent from Charlemagne started to surface again.

From the available evidence it would seem that there was no suggestion that Louis himself was fomenting discord or that he had any idea of taking up arms against his father or even challenging him judicially. He had no close interest in Ingeborg – she was a stepmother in name only and he is unlikely to have met her more than once or twice, if at all – and although his natural piety would have meant that he was unhappy with the Interdict and the conflict with the pope, he kept quiet and raised no hand or word against the king. He also took no official part in government, as Philip and his closest adviser Guérin, bishop of Senlis, kept a firm hold on everything themselves.

In hindsight it would seem that Philip’s caution was the correct course of action. If he really had no intention of delegating any authority to Louis, as seems the case, Louis was better off not being crowned as this would have raised unrealistic expectations. But still, in the light of previous practice it could certainly be considered a slight, if not an outright insult. As indeed were some of Philip’s other acts towards his son in the years 1209 to 1212, all designed to lessen his influence and authority just at the time and age when Louis might have been expecting them to increase.

Take, for example, Louis’s knighting ceremony, which we have already heard described by William the Breton. Lavish though it was, it had actually been put off until the latest possible time which would not be considered an affront. Twenty-one was considered a correct age for knighting, as it was also the official age of majority: lords who had inherited their estates as minors could legally take control of their own lands and affairs once they reached that age. However, this meant that for those of high rank it was also considered the latest age for entry into manhood – it would be an insult for a young count, duke or prince
not
to have been knighted after he turned twenty-one – and the higher the rank, the younger the acceptable age for the ceremony. Royal youths were often knighted much earlier, in their mid-teens, and Henry the Young King, Richard the Lionheart, King John, Arthur of Brittany, and indeed Philip Augustus himself had all received the accolade well before they reached the age of twenty, while Louis was actually only a few months away from his twenty-second birthday before his own ceremony took place. As someone who was so keen on chivalric pursuits he must have been impatient for knighthood, and there was only one person to blame for the delay.

Then there was the question of Artois. The county of Artois was Louis’s maternal inheritance from the late Queen Isabelle, who had brought those lands into her marriage and would pass them down to her descendants. The normal custom at this time was for the eldest son in a family to be given the paternal inheritance, the lands which had been passed down through the family line, and for the second son to receive any supplementary gains which had been acquired by marriage or conquest. But Louis was Isabelle’s only son, so he had been entitled to Artois since her death, even though his father was still alive. While he was a minor there was of course an excuse for Philip to keep the lands under his own control, but once Louis reached the age of majority he should by right and by custom have been named count of Artois. But Artois was a significant region in the north of France, fertile land bordering Flanders and reaching towards the Channel coast, and endowing Louis with it would mean that he had men and revenues of his own, thus giving him enough autonomy potentially to constitute a threat. However, postpone as he might the day when Louis was named count, Philip could not simply annex Artois to the royal domain, as that would be against feudal custom and might cause discontent in others who felt their own lands to be correspondingly less safe. So Philip steered a middle course, giving Louis some nominal legislative control over the lands – he could start to learn about governance – but without officially investing him as count of Artois.

Louis’s treatment at the hands of his father while he was in his early twenties leads us naturally to wonder what he himself thought of his situation. Given all the apparent provocation and his own presumed ambition, why did he not rebel against the king? Louis is a shadowy figure in the chronicles between 1209 and 1212, seemingly passive, though he was undoubtedly still present at court, learning from his father and keeping up with his military training. We do know that he was devout, a strict and orthodox Catholic who would have held fast to the tenet of ‘respect thy father’, but further than that we cannot second-guess what he felt. However, we can judge him by his actions and the one undoubted fact is that, unlike the quarrelsome sons of Henry II, he did not rebel. Instead he accepted Philip’s wishes and came to terms with him, living in some kind of harmony. What else could he have done? His choices were really only between acquiescence and outright rebellion, the consequences of which could have been disastrous. So he bided his time and acted with dignity, making the best of difficult circumstances. And it is, of course, possible that he was actually happy with his situation: although he wielded no real power, he benefited both from a settled court life where he could gain experience without having an enormous weight of responsibility on his shoulders, and from a settled home life with his wife and son and the other children in their care.

Philip and Louis were quite different from one another. For a start, they presented a physical contrast: in 1212, when Louis next comes to the fore in his own story, Philip was approaching fifty, ruddy, bald, corpulent and given to good living; while his son, in his mid-twenties, was blond, slim (some have even called him frail and sickly but his military exploits show he was not physically weak, as we shall discuss later), religious and chaste. They also presented a contrast in personality: Philip had always been ready to take up arms if he really needed to – France would not have been in the healthy position it currently enjoyed if he had shied away from military campaigns – but he was more given to political scheming, whereas Louis was more impulsive and liked nothing better than warrior-like pursuits. It may have been their very dissimilarity which saved their relationship: Philip might not have wanted to hand over any political power to his son, but he recognised a formidable warrior when he saw one, and this would shortly be to both their advantages. For there was trouble in France, trouble that was to foreshadow the next phase of the conflict against England.

* * *

For some years, the county of Flanders had been causing a problem. The previous count, Baldwin IX, had died in 1205 while on crusade, leaving two young daughters who were being brought up in Louis and Blanche’s household. Before he left Flanders Baldwin had seized two towns, St Omer and Aire, which were actually part of the dowry of Isabelle of Hainaut, Louis’s mother, and therefore part of the county of Artois to which Louis had in theory succeeded at her death. In January 1212 Baldwin’s elder daughter Joan had been given in marriage to Ferrand, fourth son of the king of Portugal, who became count of Flanders in right of his wife. Ferrand promised to serve the French king faithfully, but he would not cede the two towns of St Omer and Aire. Rather than seeking a political solution Louis now acted decisively, if a little impetuously, taking matters into his own hands and riding with a host (including the counts of St Pol and Dreux and their sons Guy de Châtillon and the Dreux brothers) to Flanders. In a lightning military operation, he captured the towns. Louis did not seek to attack the rest of the county, but instead concluded a treaty with Ferrand in February which gave him St Omer and Aire, and the lands and fiefs which made up his mother’s dowry, in return for promising not to claim anything else in Flanders.

If Philip and Louis had really been at loggerheads, and if Philip had seen this as a usurpation of royal power, he would no doubt have taken steps against his son, but in fact he agreed to recognise the treaty. He allowed Louis to increase his patronage among the nobles of Artois and to accept their homage – although the nobles also had to take an oath of loyalty directly to the king – and Louis began to issue his own charters in Artois. Meanwhile, the defeated and discomfited Ferrand turned his attentions to the other side of the Channel and began to make overtures of friendship to King John.