The Strangled Queen

THE

STRANGLED
QUEEN

Maurice Druon

Translated from
French by
Humphrey Hare

ARROW BOOKS

Arrow Books Limited,
62-65 Chandos Place, London WC2N 4NW

An imprint of Century Hutchinson Limited

London Melbourne Sydney Auckland
Johannesburg and agencies throughout
the world

First published in Great Britain by
Rupert Hart-Davis 1956

Century edition 1985 Arrow edition 1987

C Maurice
Druon 1956

This book is sold subject to the condition that it
shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re
sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the
publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or
cover other than that in which it is published and
without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent
purchaser

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Anchor Brendon Limited, Tiptree, Essex

ISBN 0 09-954040 1

"History
is a novel
that
has been
lived"

E
&
J
DE GONCOURT'

CONTENTS

Prologue

I: The Dawn of a Reign

I
The Prisoners of
Chateau-Gaillard

2
Robert of Artois

3 Shall She
be
Queen.?

4
Long
Live the King!

5 The Princess in Naples

6 The Royal
Bed

II: Dog Eats Dog

I
The Hutin's First Council

2
^,
Marigny
Remains Rector-General

3 Charles of Valois

4 Who Rules France?'-

5 A Castle by the Sea

6 Chasing Cardinals

7 A Pope is Worth
an
Exoneration

8 A Letter's Fate

III: The Road to Montfaucon

I
Famine

2
Vincennes

3 A Slaughter of Doves

4 The Night
Without
a
Dawn

5 A Morning of Death

6 The
Fall of
a Statue

Historical Notes

The Characters in this Book

THE KING OF FRANCE Louis X, called THE HUTIN, son of Philip IV the Fair, great-grandson of Saint
Louis,aged 25.

HIS BROTHERS
MONSEIGNEUR PHILIPPE
: Count of Poitiers, a peer of France, aged 21.

MONSEIGNEUR CHARLES
; Count of LaMarche, aged 20.

HIS UNCLES: MONSEIGNEUR; CHARLES, Count of Valois, titular -Emperor of Constantinople, Count of Romagna, peer of France, aged 44.

MONSEIGNEUR Louis, Count of Evreux, aged about 41

HIS WIFE: MARGUERITE,
daughter of the Duke of Burgundy, grand-daughter of Saint Louis, aged 21.

HIS DAUGHTER: JEANNE OF FRANCE-AND NAVARRE, aged 3.

HIS SISTER-IN-LAW: BLANCHE, wife of Charles of La Marche,
daughter of the Count Palatine of Burgundy and of Mahaut, Countess of
Artois, aged about 19.

THE ARTOIS BRANCH
DESCENDED FROM
A
BROTHER OF SAINT? LOUIS

ROBERT III-OF ARTOIS, Lord of Conches,
Count of Beaumont-le-Roger, aged 27.

THE BRANCH OF ANJOU-
SICILY DESCENDED FROM
ANOTHER BROTHER OF

SAINT LOUIS:

MARIE OF HUNGARY, Queen of Naples,
widow of
Charles II of Naples, mother of the Kings Robert of Naples and Charles of Hungary, aged about 70.

CLEMENCE OF HUNGARY, her grand
daughter, daughter of Charles Martel and sister of Charobert, King of Hungary, aged 22.

THE BROTHERS MARIGNY: ENGUERRAND, Coadjutor of King
Philip the Fair and Rector-General of the kingdom, aged 49

JEAN, Archbishop of Sens and Paris, aged about 35

THE LOMBARDS:

SPINELLO TOLOMEI, a Siennese banker
living in Paris, Captain-General of the Lo
mbard Companies, aged about 60.

GUCCIO
BAGLIONI, his nephew, aged 18.

S
IGNOR
BOCCACIO
, traveller for the Bardi Company.

THE CRESSAY FAMILY:

DAME ELIABEL, widow of the Squire of
Cressay; aged about 40.

PIERRE and JEAN, her sons, aged
about 20
and 22.

MARIE, her daughter, aged 16.

AND THESE:

EUDELINE,
Louis X's
mistress, aged about 32.

HUGUES DE BOUV
ILLE, First Chamberlain
to King
Philip the Fair.

ALAIN DE PAREILLES, Captain-General of
the Archers.

JACQUES DUEZE, Bishop of Porto, Cardinal of the Curia, aged 70

ROBERT BERSUMEE, Captain of Chateau
Gaillard, aged 35.

ROBERTO ODERISI, a Neapolitan painter, pupil of Giotto.

All t
he above are historical names,
as are those of the barons, justiciars, chamberlains, members of the Council, chancellors, the Abbot of Saint-Denis and the great officers of the Crown; all these people really existed. The only imaginary names are those of a few extras, of whom no trace
ca
n
be found, such as Robert of Artois's servant and the Provost of Montfort-l'Amaury.

Prologue

ON
the 29th November 1314, two hours after vespers, twenty-four couriers, all dressed in black and wearing'; the emblems of France, passed out of the gate of the Chateau of Fontainebleu at full gallop and disappeared into the forest. The roads were covered with snow the sky was more sombre than the earth darkness had fallen, or rather it had remained constant since the evening before.

The twenty-four couriers would have no rest before morning, and would, gallop onwards all next day, all the following days, some towards Flanders, some towards Angoumois and Guyenne, some towards Dole in the Comte, some towards Rennes and Nantes, some towards Toulouse, some towards Lyons, Aigues
-
Mortes and Marseilles awakening bailiffs provosts and seneschals, to announce in, town and village throughout the kingdom that King Philip IV, called the Fair, was dead.

All along the roads the knell tolled out in dark steeples, a wave of sonorous, sinister sound spreading ever further till it reached all the frontiers of the kingdom.

After twenty-nine years of stern rule, the Iron King was dead of a cerebral-hemorrhage-at the age of forty-six. It had occurred during an eclipse of the sun, which had spread a deep shadow over the land of France.

Thus, for the third time, the curse laid eight months earlier by the Grand Master of the Templars from, the middle of
a flaming pyre was fulfilled:

King, Philip, stern, haughty, intelligent and secretive, had reigned with such competence and so dominated his period that, upon this evening, it seemed that the heart of the kingdom had ceased to beat.

But nations never die of the death of a man, however great he may have been; their birth and their death derive from other causes.

The name of Philip the Fair would glow down the centuries only by the flicker of the faggots he had lighted beneath his enemies and the glitter of the gold he had seized. It would quickly be forgotten that he had, curbed the powerful, maintained peace in so far as it was possible, reformed the law, constructed fortresses that the land might be cultivated in their shelter, united provinces, convoked assemblies, of the middle class so that it might speak its mind, and watched uremittingly over the independence of France.

Hardly had his hands grown
cold, hardly had the great power of his will become extinguished, than private interest, disappointed ambition, and the thirst for honours and wealth began to proclaim their presence.

Two parties were in opposition, battling mercilessly for power: on the one hand, the clan of the reactionary Barons, at its head the Count of Valois, titular Emperor of Constantinople and brother of Philip the Fair; on the other, the clan of the high administration, at its head Enguerrand de Marigny, first Minister and Coadjutor of the dead king.

A strong king had been required to avoid or hold in balance the conflict which had been incubating for many months. And now the twenty-five-year-old prince, Monseigneur Louis, already King of
Navarre,
who was succeeding to the throne, seemed ill
-endowed for sovereignty; his
reputation was that, merely, of a cuckolded husband and whatever could be learned from his melancholy nickname of The Hutin, The Headstrong.

His wife, Marguerite of Burgundy, the eldest of the Princesses of the Tower of Nesle, had been imprisoned for adultery, and her life was, curiously enough, to be a stake in the interplay of the rival factions.

But the cost of faction, as always, was to be the misery of the poor, of those who lacked even the dreams of ambition. Moreover, the winter of 1314-15 was one of famine.

PART ONE

THE DAWN OF A REIGN

1. The Prisoners of Chateau-Gaillard

BUILT six hundred feet up upon a chalky spur above the town of Petit-Andelys, Chateau-Gaillard both commanded and dominated the whole of Upper Normandy.

At this point the river Seine
describes a large loop through rich pastures; Chateau-Gaillard held watch and ward above the river for t
wenty miles up and down stream.

Today the ruins of this formidable citadel can still startle the eye and defy the imagination. With the Krak des Chevaliers in the Lebanon, and the towers of Roumeli-Hissar on the Bosphorus, it remains one of the most imposing relics of the military architecture of the Middle Ages.

Before, these monuments, constructed to
make conquest good or threaten
empire, the imagination is obsessed by the men, separated from us by no more than fifteen or twenty generations, who built them, used them, lived in them, and sacked them.

At the period of, this story, Chateau-Gaillard was no more than a hundred
and twenty years old. Richard Co
eur-de-Lion had built it in two years, in defiance of treaties, to defy the King of France. Seeing it finished, standing high upon its cliff, its freshly hewn stone white upon its two curtain walls, its outer works well advanced, its portcullises, battlements, thirteen towers, and huge,
two-storied keep, he had cried: "Oh, what a gallant (gaillard) castle!"

Ten years later Philip Augustus took it from him, together with
the whole land of Normandy.

Since then Chateau-Gaillard had no longer served a military purpose and had become a royal prison.

Important state criminals were confined there, prisoners whom the King
wished
to preserve alive but incarcerate for life. Whoever crossed the
drawbridge of Chateau-Gaillard
had little chance of ever re-entering the world.

By day crows croaked upon its roofs; by night wolves howled beneath its walls. The only exercise permitted the prisoners was to walk to the chapel to, hear Mass and
return
to their tower to await death.

Upon this last morning of November 1314, Chateau-Gaillard, its ramparts and its garrison of archers were employed merely in guarding two
women, one
of twenty-one
years of age, the other of eighteen, Marguerite and Blanche of Burgundy, two cousins, both married to sons of Philip the Fair, convicted of adultery with two young equerries and condemned to life-imprisonment-as the result of the most resounding scandal that had ever burst upon the
Court of France.'
1

The chapel was inside the inner curtain wall. It was built against the natural rock; its interior was dark and cold; the walls had few openings and were unadorned.

Before the choir were placed three seats only: two on the left for the Princesses, one on the right for the Captain of the Fortress.

At the rear of the chapel the men-at-arms stood in their ranks, manifesting an air of boredom similar to the one they wore when engaged upon the fatigue of foraging.

"My brothers'," said the Chaplain, "today we must pray with peculiar fervour and solemnity.'

He cleared his throat and hesitated a moment, as if concerned at the importance of what he had to announce.

"The Lord God has called to himself the soul of our much
beloved King Philip," he went on. "This is a profound tragedy for the whole kingdom."

The two Princesses turned towards each other faces shrouded in hoods of coarse brown cloth.

1
The numbers appearing in the text refer to the historical notes at the end of the book.

"May those who have done him injury or wrong repent of it in their hearts," continued the Chaplain. "May those who had some grievance against him when he was alive, pray for that mercy for him of which every man, great or small, has equal need at his death before the tribunal of our Lord . . .

The two Princesses had fallen on their knees, bending their heads to hide their joy. No longer did they feel the cold, no
longer the
p
ain and grief; a great surge of
hope rose within them; and had the idea of praying to God crossed their minds, it would but have been to thank Him for delivering them from their terrible father-in-law. It was the first good news that had, reached them from the outside world in all the seven months of their i
mprisonment in Chateau-Gaillard
.

The men-at-arms, at the back of t
he chapel, whispered-together,
questioning each other in low voices, shuffling their feet, beginning to make too much noise.

"Shall we be given a silver penny each?"

"Why, because the King is dead?"

"It's usual, at least I'm told so."

"No, you're wrong, not for his
death; only, perhaps,' for the
coronation of the next one."

"And what's the new king going to call himself?"

"Monsieur Saint Louis was the ninth; obviously t
his one will call himself Louis
X."

"Do you think he'll go to war so that we can move around a bit?'"

The Captain of the Fortress turned about and shouted
harshly, "Silence!
"

He too had his worries. The elder of the prisoners was the wife of Monseigneur Louis of Navarre, who was to become king today. "So I am now in the position of being gaoler to the Queen of France," he thought.