The Royal Succession (11 page)

An argument soon arose between Mahaut and Philippe. The Countess of Artois thought that her daughter should be moved to the palace at once, to share her husband's apartments. Philippe took the opposite view and wished Jeanne to remain in the Hotel d'Artois. He put forward several arguments, sound in themselves, though they did not reveal the whole of his thought and failed to convince Mahaut. The palace, during the next few days, might be the scene of violent assemblies and considerable turmoil, dangerous to a woman in labour; besides, Philippe
thought it more fitting to await Clemence's departure for Vincennes before installing Jeanne in the royal palace.

`But look at her, Philippe!' cried Mahaut. `Tomorrow she may no longer be able to be moved. Don't you want your child to be born in the palace?'

`That is precisely what I do not want.'

`Well, really, I don't understand you, my son,' said Mahaut, shrugging her powerful shoulders.

The argument wearied Philippe; he had not slept for thirty-six hours, had ridden thirty-seven miles the previous night, and had followed it with the busiest and most difficult day of his life. He felt the stubble on his chin and, at moments, his eyes seemed to close of their own accord. But he had made up his mind not to give way. `Bed,' he thought; `let them obey me, so that I can go to bed!'

`Let us ask Jeanne's opinion. What do you wish, my dear?' he said, certain of his wife's submissiveness.

Mahaut had a man's intelligence and strength of will, as well as a constant determination to assert the prestige of her family. Jeanne, whose nature was quite other, had become accustomed through fate to never being at the summit of events. Betrothed first to the Hutin, merely to have been given later, by a sort of exchange, to the second son of Philip the Fair, she had missed both the Crown of Navarre and the Crown of France. In the affair of the Tower of Nesle, if she had been compromised in the loves of her sisters-in-law, she had skirted adultery without committing it; and in her punishment, imprisonment for life had been avoided. She had been implicated in every drama, but had never taken the leading part. Out of a sort of delicacy, rather than from any moral consideration, she disliked all excess; the years she had spent in the Fortress of Dourdan had reinforced her prudence. She was shrewd, sensible, intelligent and knew how to make use of that entirely feminine weapon: submission.

Guessing that Philippe's insistence was based on strong reasons, she suppressed a slight feeling of legitimate vanity and said: `I should like to have my child here, Mother. I should be more comfortable.'

She did not care overmuch whether her fourth child was born in the palace or elsewhere. Philippe thanked her with a smile. Sitting in a great, upright chair, his crossed legs extended, he inquired the names of the matrons and midwives who were to attend Jeanne, wishing to know where each came from, and whether she, could be completely relied upon. He recommended
that they should be made to take an oath, a precaution which was normally taken only at the birth of the King's children.

`What a good husband I have, and what care he takes of me!' Jeanne thought, as she listened to him.

Philippe ordered also that, from the moment the Countess of Poitiers' pains began, the gates of the Hotel d'Artois should be closed. No one was to leave it, except for one person who would bring him news of the birth.

`You,' he said, indicating the beautiful Beatrice d'Hirson, who was present at the conversation. `Orders will be given to my chamberlain that you may come to me
at any hour, even if I am in Council. And if there are people about me, you will give me the news in a whisper, and tell it to no one else, if it is a son. I trust you, because I remember that you have already rendered me good service.'

`And greater indeed
than you know of
Monseigneur,' replied Beatrice, making a slight bow.

Mahaut threw Beatrice a furious glance. The wench, with her meek expression, her false ingenuousness and her sly audacities, made her tremble. Beatrice continued to smile. These facial
expressions
did not escape Jeanne, who nevertheless asked no questions. Between her mother and the lady-in-waiting there were dark secrets of which she preferred to know nothing.

She looked anxiously, at her husband, but he had noticed nothing. With his head against the back of the chair, he had suddenly dropped off, overcome with the sleep of victory. On his angular face, normally so severe, was an expression of sweet concern in which could be traced the child he once had been. Jeanne, much moved, went to him silently and kissed him lightly on the forehead.

9. Friday's child

ON THE following day the Count of Poitiers began to make preparations for the Assembly to be held on Friday. If he emerged from it the victor, no one for many long years would be able to contest his power.

He sent messengers and couriers to summon, as had been arranged, all the great men in the kingdom - all those, that is,
who lived no farther away than two days' journey on horseback, thus allowing him to prevent the situation from getting out of hand and to eliminate certain great vassals, whose enmity Philippe had reason to fear, such as the Count of Flanders and the King of England.

At the same time he entrusted to Gaucher de Chatillon, to Mille de Noyers and to Raoul de Presles the task of preparing the Act of Regency that would be submitted to the Assembly. The following principles, based on the decisions already made, were incorporated: the Count of Poitiers was to administer both kingdoms with the provisional title of Regent, Governor and Guardian, and would receive all the royal revenues.

If Queen Clemence bore a son, the latter, would naturally be King, and Philippe would hold the Regency until his nephew's majority. But if Clemence bore a daughter ... This was where all the difficulties began. For, in all justice, in these circumstances the crown should go to the little Jeanne of Navarre, the Hutin's elder daughter. But was she really his daughter? That was the question which the Court, indeed the whole kingdom, was asking. Without the love affair of the Tower of Nesle, without the scandal and the sentence pronounced at Pontoise, the rights of this child would have been unquestioned and, in the absence of a male heir, she would have had to be made Queen of France. But there hung over her a grave suspicion to which Charles of Valois, in particular, had given weight when arranging Louis X's second marriage, and of which Philippe, in the circumstances, did not fail to take advantage. The dates of the beginning of Marguerite's guilty love affair and the birth of Jeanne corresponded suspiciously. It was also suspicious that Louis had always shown a dislike for this child, and had always kept her at a distance. There was, therefore, some reason for pe
ople to whisper
: `She is the daughter of Philippe d'Aunay.'

Thus the affair of the Tower of Nesle, which popular imagination through the ages turned into a sort of mythical fable of legendary love, vice, crime and horror, though it was in fact a fairly simple case of adultery, created, two years after the event, a grave dynastic, problem altering the natural succession of the French monarchy.

Someone suggested that it should be decided at once that the crown should definitely go to Clemence's child, whether it were a boy or a girl.

Philippe of Poitiers did not welcome the suggestion, and found good arguments for putting it aside. Certainly the suspicions about Jeanne of Navarre were strongly based, but there was no formal proof. Neither Marguerite's mother, old Agnes, dowager Duchess of Burgundy, nor her son, Eudes IV, the present Duke, could subscribe to this harsh barring of their niece. All the enemies of the Crown, beginning with the Count of Flanders, would not fail to use it to serve their personal interests. There was a risk of giving France over to an immediate civil war, the War of the Two Queens.

`In that case,' said Gaucher de Chatillon, `let us decree here and now that girls are unable to inherit the crown. There must be some precedent to support it.'

`Alas, Brother-in-law,' replied Mille de Noyers, `I have already had search made, for your idea also occurred to me, but nothing has been found.'

`Further search must be made! Put your friends, the masters of the University and of Parliament, on to the research. Those people can always, find precedents for everything,
if they take the trouble. They
go back to Clovis in order to prove that you ought to have your head cut off, be burnt at the stake or quartered.'

`It's true'' said Mille, `that I haven't had the researches carried as far back as that. I was thinking only of royal precedents since the great Hugues. We must look earlier than that. But I don't think we shall find anything between now and Friday.'

The Constable was a misogynist like all good soldiers, and he jutted his square chin and screwed up his saurian eyes. `It would be madness to allow a girl to ascend the throne,' he went on. `Can you see a woman or a wench commanding the armies, unclean every month, pregnant every year? Can you see them dealing with the vassals when they cannot even control their own bodies' heat? No, I don't see it, and I should put up my sword at once. Messeigneurs, I tell you France is too noble a country to fall to the distaff and be handed over to a woman. Lilies do not spin!'

This last suggestion was not adopted on the spot, but it made a strong impression,
and was put to good use later.

Philippe of Poitiers gave his assent to a somewhat tortuous document; it postponed all these decisions for a long time to come.

`Draft it in such a way that the difficulties are apparent, but without our proposing solutions,' he said. `Confuse the issues a little so that everyone may believe he finds in it something to his own advantage.'

Thus, if Queen Clemence gave birth to a daughter, Philippe would keep the Regency until the majority of his eldest niece,
Jeanne. And only then would the devolution of the Crown be decided, either to the advantage of the two princesses, who would then share between them France and Navarre, or to the advantage of one of them, who would preserve the unity of both kingdoms, or again to the advantage of neither should they renounce their rights or if the Assembly of Peers, summoned to debate the issue, decided that a woman could not rule over the Kingdom of France; in this last case, the crown would go to the nearest male relative of the late King, which was to say, Philippe. In this way his candidature was officially put forward for the first time, but subject to so many conditions that it looked as if the eventual solution must be made by compromise or arbitration.

This law, submitted individually to the chief barons who favoured Philippe, received their acquiescence.

Only Mahaut seemed strangely to have reservations about an act which, in fact, was preparing the accession of her son-in-law and her daughter to the throne of France. Something in the draft upset her.

`Could you not,' she asked, `declare simply: "If the two daughters renounce their rights ." without talking of submitting the question of whether women may reign or not to the Assembly of Peers?'

`Well, Mother,' Philippe replied, `in that case they would not renounce their rights at all. The peers, of whom you are one, are the only Court of Appeal. Originally they were electors of the King, as the cardinals, are of the Pope or the palatines of the Emperor, and it was thus, that they chose Hugues, our ancestor, who was Duke of France. If they no longer elect, it's because for three centuries our kings have always had a son to ascend the
throne.'
13

`It's a purely chance custom!' replied Mahaut. `Your new law is precisely calculated to serve the pretensions of my nephew Robert. You'll see that he will not fail to use it to try and take my county back from me.'

She was thinking only of the quarrel over the succession of Artois, and not of the whole of France.

`The custom of the kingdom is not necessarily the custom of a fief, Mother. And you'll be more likely to keep your county with your son-in-law as king, than by the arguments of jurists.'

Mahaut surrendered without being convinced.

`There's the gratitude of sons-in-law for you,' she said a little later to Beatrice d'Hirson. `You poison a king so that they may
take his place, and then they do exactly as they please without consideration for anyone!'

`The fact is, Madame, he doesn't know what he owes you, nor how our Lord Louis came to die.'

`And, Lord, he must never know!' cried Mahaut, quickly putting her hands to her dress and
feeling for the relic of Saint
Druon, as she always did when she spoke of her crimes. `It was his brother, after all, and Philippe has strange ideas about justice. Hold your tongue, for God's sake, hold your tongue!'

During these days Charles of Valois, with the assistance of Charles de la Marche and Robert of Artois, was very active everywhere, spreading the view that it was lunacy to confirm the Count of Poitiers in the Regency, and still more so to consider him as heir-presumptive. Philippe and his mother-in-law had made too many enemies; and the death of Louis served their designs, now openly avowed, too well for this suspect death not to be their work. Valois was in a position to offer other
gu
arantees and put himself forward as the only man who could find a solution for the kingdom's difficulties. He was on the best possible terms with the King of Naples, and declared that he could put a stop to any difficulties likely to be made by Queen Clemence. He was the only member of the royal family who, despite the wars, had preserved relations with the Count of Flanders, Having served the Roman Papacy, he had the confidence of the Italian cardinals, without whom a pope could not be elected, in spite of the infamous procedure of locking up the Conclave. The ex
-
Templars remembered that he had never approved the suppression of their order, and on this account, too, he carried considerable weight.