Chapter V: Part 5

There is a little hill, not steep at first sight and seemingly very low, which rises bare enough to-day over the African Sea. The Mediterranean breaks (when in that sheltered gulf it breaks at all) in waves upon a straight and narrow beach at the foot of this hill. Beyond, not farther inland but farther up the coast, another hill, somewhat higher but still insignificant, is joined by a saddle to this first; to the south the land sinks altogether and admits (by a narrow passage) the sea into the broad and stagnant lagoon of Tunis.

A few isolated houses, with no pretense to comfort or to charm, a sort of villas, are to be found upon the quarter of mile of flat by the seashore, and one or two stand on the rise of the little height. Between them, for here a hundred yards and here two hundred, and all around them for half a mile and a mile again, is dry, burnt, dirty land, brown in summer, and empty save for here and there some tufts of coarse grass. Far off, in two great horns or arms leading to the horizon, run the mountain promontories that enclose this bay like a pocket--a side pocket of the sea. A tramway, come from Tunis and spanning the lagoon upon the embankment, runs past the base of the hill at the edge of the sea flat. There is a halt rather than a station, a deserted wooden platform without rooms or master. On that platform is the name of the place, “CARTHAGE”; and thus does a man to-day know where it was that the mighty Carthaginian aristocracy stood, where the ships rode innumerable, where Elissa died, and where the Roman armies, masters at last as armies always are of merchants and the sea, stormed yard by yard the rise to the Citadel.

It was upon this hill and near the summit of it, upon the eastern side which overlooks the water below, at a spot just in front of the place where the Saracens had built out of the blocks of Carthaginian ruin a castle of their own, that the King of France lay dying.

He was in his splendid tent, the baking air within hardly relieved by the lifting of its side and the spraying of water on the canvas. With him were his sons, and round that poor camp-bed were the many men of his house. It was the day after St. Bartholomew’s feast, an awful day of heat in August, when the distant blue of the promontory hills trembled in the air, and when the iron of men’s accoutrements, the rings of the saddle and of the bridle, were burning to the hand, and the baked earth of that low hill camp scorching to the feet.

St. Louis, who thus lay feeble in the last moments of his life, was but fifty-five years of age, nor did even these years fit him well, for his face had always something boyish in it and too tender for the approach of age. But the coming of death was clearly imprinted upon his pinched features, his lips without blood, and the droop of his mouth after so many days of pain. Before his voice fell low, while he yet had the power, he already had ordered a layer of ashes to be spread--as custom was then with pious rich men, that they might pass the more humbly. He said that Philip, his son, who was to reign after him, should be sent to him. This soldier was also weak from illness, but he came; and when that lord had come St. Louis said from his bed many things to this his heir, which things he ordered to be put down in writing as he spoke them, and to be kept as a testament for the governing of the realm of France, of which, years before, he had said to this same son as a child,--

“Rather would I that a Scot should come out of Scotland to govern this land of France than that it should be governed other than in Christian wise.”

Of these things which he gave for commandment to his son he said (among other things),--

“Fair son, the first thing I teach you is that you order your life to the love of God, for lacking this no man can be saved. If God sends you adversity, receive it in patience; if He sends you prosperity, give thanks humbly lest you become worse through pride. Confess thee often, and choose a wise confessor, who can guide you in what should be done, and what should be left undone; follow devoutly with heart and with lips the service of the Church, but especially the Mass, where Consecration is. Keep your heart soft and piteous to the poor, the misshapen, and all men ill at ease, and comfort and aid them within your power. Do not take all to which you have a right. If you have torment in your heart, share it with your confessor or some other man who is discreet. Thus will you bear it more easily. Cherish what is yours and your goods. Allow none to blaspheme God to your face. Be very stiff to insist on justice and on the fulfilment of rights, veering neither left nor right as between your subjects, and follow up the quarrel of the weak until full truth is declared. If you hold anything that you think another’s, give it back at once, and if you are in doubt put the matter into the judgment of a third. Remember the chief townsfolk, for if you will rely on them, the foreigner and the great man within will fear to attack you. Revere your father and your mother in memory, and keep their commandments. Give the benefices of the Church not only to wise men but to clean. Do not fight against Christian men, at least without taking counsel, and in your wars spare the Church and all those who have done you no harm. Lastly, very dear son, have Masses sung for me for my soul, and prayers said throughout your realm, and I pray you put apart for this a fixed sum of all you receive. Dear and fair son, I give you all benedictions, whatever a good father can give his child, and may the Blessed Trinity and all the Saints guard and defend you from all evils, and God give you grace to do His will always, and to have Himself honoured by you so that you and I both, when we have done this mortal life, may be together with Him and praise Him for ever.”

Then added King Louis, “Amen!”

But these are only certain few words out of all that St. Louis said, for the whole that he said was longer by far, and when he had done, it was the full heat of the day, and already he was failing.

The suffering he was in grew greatly. He called for the Sacraments. He received them with a whole mind, as was clearly apparent from this, that they could hear him murmuring the verses of the Psalms as they anointed him; and his younger son, the Count of Alençon, heard him as he whispered in death. He was calling in whispers upon the Saints, and in particular on St. James, the guardian of pilgrims and of men who take long voyages; also he called on St. Denis of France, and on St. Geneviève, who is the Queen of Paris, as all must know. But by this time, noon being long past, all strength was deserting him. He could make some sign, so that they lifted him as he desired down upon the bed of ash where he would pass; and lying there he found the strength to cross one hand above the other on his breast, and so lying backwards, and still looking up to Heaven, he gave up his spirit to God who made us, in that same hour of None--that is three o’clock in the afternoon, which is the hour in which God the Son died upon the Cross for the salvation of the world.

Thus, upon the morrow of the Feast of St. Bartholomew the Apostle, passed wholly out of this world the good King Louis, in the year of the Incarnation of our Lord, the year of Grace 1270. And his bones were put into a chase and buried at St. Denis in France, there in the place where he had chosen his sepulchre. In which place he was laid away in earth, there where God has worked many a miracle for him through his deserts.

THE TEMPLARS

(_October 13, 1307_)

In that quarter of Paris which lay to the north, built on the old marsh that had been so laboriously drained, and close to the wall which Philip Augustus had thrown round the city a century before, stood wide, with its open spaces and innumerable roofs, the enclosure of the Templars. It was a polity within a polity. No thoroughfare ran through those many acres, and gates admitted outsiders through the walls just as gates similarly guarded admitted outsiders through the walls into that larger unit of the city.

This fortification of stone all about, this high curtain flanked with towers and containing within its defences a whole population, was the very symbol of what the Temple had become. Wherever Christian men (now that the Crusades had failed) still held their own against the pressure of Baltic heathendom or of Islam insolent upon the east and south, there the Temple, over wide estates or commanding great castles armed, boasted its power.

Within the fields of Christendom, far within, wherever long immunity from heathen or from Saracen pressure had half corrupted the life of Christian men, the Temple boasted its wealth or exalted its luxury. In London, in Ravenna, in Aragon--principally here in Paris--everywhere it was the richest and the greatest thing. Christendom counted perhaps one hundred thousand manors; nine thousand were in the hands of the Temple. Saving perhaps the Papacy itself, the enormous wealth of the Jewish financiers, and the Courts of the Angevins and of the Capetians, there was no such strength of gold anywhere in Europe. It was the rival of all of these, and I think their superior.

And this vast Order, as it was thus so enormously strong through gold, was strong also through two other things--ubiquity and noble lineage; and through a third thing it was strong--secrecy. For those younger sons of the great nobles, those many squires and those knights returned from wars in Spain or in the Levant, who formed its not very numerous but dominating body, were bound by so strict a discipline and acted with such solidarity behind their fortress gates in every capital and garrison, that it seemed as though Christendom had now within it some alien body separate from itself, and already half an enemy to the great traditions of the common people and of the universal Church, and of those open public servants, the kings. There was a grumbling and a hatred against Templars everywhere. It had endured for fifty years. What was all this wealth and all this secrecy? Of what sort was the evil that hid behind those walls? And how could there be tolerated in Christendom, whose nature it is to be both homogeneous and free, something so jealously separate and possessed of such unaccredited dominion?

And more: were not these men, by the very tenure of their office, the defenders of the Holy Sepulchre, and had not that charge of theirs been lost? St. Peter men knew, and his successor, and the kings they knew, and the great lords their barons; but what was this other thing established in their midst, irresponsible and giving no man account of their worship--whatever it was they worshipped? Some said it was an idol. All feared it was Satan. The great Orders, the preachers coming right out of the populace, mixing with them, and haranguing in the market-places, were no such peril. The Jews, in the mass small men and poor, some few composing that strong oligarchy of finance which had long dominated Europe, were exposed to constraint; but even those that hated them could jest with them. They were neighbours. The pitiless executors of royal orders were still neighbours too. Whatever had power for whatever reasons over the lives of common men was at least known and openly judged--save only the Temple. All the West in the great mass of its people was inflamed and alarmed, the little children playing in the street put forth their fingers to ward off bad influence whenever two Templars went by. Men loved to repeat whatever tales were told against them; and the pride of their demeanour, sprung from a general nobility of blood as much as from the consciousness of unchallenged strength, exasperated the public soul.

Of all such angers the Capetian monarchy was about to become the spokesman. It was a rôle perilous in the extreme; for to strike at such a thing a man must strike at once with a secrecy equal to its own and with a power almost as universal. Time and again, for a generation past, it had been said that the thing would be done. Philip the Fair, King of France, discovered in his jealousy, and perhaps in his indignation, the strength required for the blow.

* * * * *

That fortress, which stood, an isolated thing, challenging the greater fortress which Paris was, had in its centre, overlooking the many low gables of its outhouses and servants of those who lived under its protection, of its guests, and of its treasure rooms, one great square tower, capped with the high, pointed slate roof which could be seen from miles around. The tower was as tall and as menacing as the huge round tower of the Louvre itself; it lifted above Paris as high as the old belfry of St. Germanus, or as the twin praying towers of Notre-Dame.

Within that tower certain men, among the chiefs of the whole Order, sat upon an autumn evening, feasting. It was a Friday in October, and Friday is a day big with the superstitions or the disasters of Christendom. It was in October, the 13th of the month, and thirteen is a number which Christendom has consented to regard with some similar dread.

But these men suffered no great fear, although so much had been rumoured now year after year. The greater part of them had come to Paris upon the invitation of the king but recently. That Burgundian squire, who was the chief of them all, had only the day before walked, by the king’s own order, in a funeral of the king’s own Court, holding the pall and playing his great part. Certain of these men, the lesser ones, spoke as they sat at meat in this high tower, which in a fashion commanded the city, of the talk that was everywhere about, and the dangers which all might feel to be in the air they breathed. But their timorous suggestions were ridiculed both by the gayer of their colleagues and by the grave reproof of the superiors who sat there eating and drinking with them.

It was not yet quite dark, for this meal of the day was a meal begun at five o’clock as we now reckon time.

“There is such power in the Temple,” said that Burgundian knight, the old Grand Master, gravely, “that if there were but allied with them those others of the Knights Hospitallers which are not of our body, freely could they rule the whole world.”

Then another said, after a little pause,--

“Though the King of France himself should seek to do us some evil, others as powerful as he would stand our sponsors. The King of Aragon was with us when last the dogs growled and dared not bite.”

Then a third, who had a subtle face and spoke in a high voice, said, not pleasantly,--

“Were my own father to seek admission to this Order of ours I would warn him that there are things known to us which should bid him pause, for there are secrets we hold” (and here he smiled at the brethren) “which are known only to God and to the Devil--and to you: three partners.”

As the last man said this, the youngest of the Templars there present showed in his face at once so great a terror and so great a pain that the speaker sneered. That young man was muttering to himself. The Grand Master, speaking still gravely but somewhat sharply from his old lips, asked him what words he was thus saying secretly.

“I was praying to the Mother of God,” said the young man, “and I was thinking of the dead.”

From the streets below, as evening gathered, there came a sound perhaps a little louder than the common sound of the tradesmen at their booths and of the passing crowds, but not much louder. Over the river, in the king’s garden under the new white walls and squat turrets of the palace on the island, a strange gathering had met. There assembled at the king’s express command members chosen from all the guilds and trades of Paris. They sat in rank, some hundreds in number, by parishes and by mysteries beneath certain wooden pulpits that had been hastily set up; and, from these, monks of the preaching Orders cried out in tones of violence and of condemnation, preparing them for what was to come.

“A thing deplorable and horrible to the mind is among us, and a thing terrible to the ears.... Natures that have exiled themselves beyond the bounds of nature, treasonable to the dignity of man. Christ is betrayed, and their initiation is the initiation of devils. They spit upon the Cross.”

Also to these men admissions made by Templars who had betrayed their Order were related, and truth and rumour, and blasphemy and justice, were commingled in these high denunciations.

The congregation of these picked men chosen to spread the thing immediately throughout Paris were ready to believe, and most of what they believed was true.

But still in that high tower, as the darkness came, the chiefs of the Templars were confident and immune. Nothing in Christendom was so strong as they. The noise from the streets beyond their walls grew less, then suddenly rose and was more ordered and, as it were, more menacing. They could catch the regular footfall of men in rank and the clank of metal. Some rose, and going to the deep western windows of their high place, whence the sunset beyond Valerian and the hills of St. Cloud still warmed all the sky, they saw torches lit in the gloaming, and they heard a challenge at the gate. The gate opened, and a troop poured in. It was the king’s men.

No resistance was held or opposed. That great door of the tower itself, which was to stand as the tower stood for so many centuries more (until it fell at the orders of Napoleon), was opened to the order of the king. The men who opened it at first looked at one another. None spoke save the Grand Master, who only said, “Woe to him that betrays his brethren,” and who, as he said it, looked fixedly at the youngest man. Then the worked hanging, which hung by rings before the archway of their room, was drawn clattering aside. The archers entered in a body, and these men were prisoners. Before it was night Philip himself, the king, had taken possession of that tower. He had filled it with his scribes. The treasury was forced. The rolls of parchment were brought forth, the accounts were rendered, and the vast fortunes of that place were beneath the grasp of the monarchy, which would proceed to the full revelation of so many crimes and of the humbling of so much pride, to the torture and to the death.

But later, months and months later, when the last of these men were themselves brought out for public recantation before the cathedral, the old Grand Master, that Burgundian knight, standing forward on the high platform before the thousands of the people to declare the guilt of the Templars to the astonishment of Europe, for all his avowals acted a most memorable part. Loudly he denied whatever wrongs he had himself admitted, whatever blasphemies, whatever obscenities, whatever denials of the Christ. They burnt him with his companions after that relapse (for so they called it); they burnt him on those little islands which lay westward of the palace, and which are now a green place beneath the Place Dauphine; and the awestruck crowd that watched his death whispered among themselves that the man in his agony had summoned to the tribunal of God within one year and a day the Pope and the King. Before the term of that citation had expired the Pope and the King were dead.

BLANCHETAQUE

(_August 24, 1346_)

[_I have corrected Froissart by the map and local knowledge.
Hence Boismont, not Oisemont, etc._]

Edward the Plantagenet sat in Boismont at his evening meal upon Wednesday, August 23, 1346. He, and his nobles about him. He had marched from Acheux that day, an easy journey. He had found at Boismont, before sunset, the advance guard of his force; now, by evening, it had all concentrated, and the division (as we should call it to-day, for it was about that strength) lay, some in bivouac, some billeted, some under canvas, grouped round the village. The moon was at the full; through the late summer air, still warm, the flood of her light was over those miles of stubble, the open high fields of Picardy.

Edward the Plantagenet, in a chance room of the village, chosen in its best house, still sat at a table well furnished and spoke to those about him of the campaign.

There sat among these who were that night the guests of the king one or two useful upland squires, a little doubtful of their French, a little afraid, therefore, of speaking in such company; but Edward could understand, and could even make himself understood in the local idioms of north England which sounded so harsh in such a place; and, intermingled with the play of French at that table--with the advice and the jests and the courtesy of the greater men--he would demand the opinion and listen carefully to the reply of those few whom he had also bidden to meet him, and who, in their ignorance, hesitated to use the tongue of their rank.

But there was little to learn, either from these few who were easier in their half-Saxon dialects, or from the main group of guests with whom, as with the king, French was the only talk. The position was known, its character was simple, its issue was desperate.

Headquarters take tragedy in war with a strange ease, partly because it is their duty to check emotion, partly because they have to handle affairs as a problem in the void, and to forget the too human reactions of peril; partly because they have grown too familiar with an evil situation, if that situation has arisen gradually and enforced itself; partly because instruction, and the habit of a cultured class, has taught them how futile in such a pass is any waste of energy upon grieving.

In the billets and posts around, the polyglot gossip at the camp fires and hearths, where sergeants saw to the cooking of the common meals, was less restrained; and in Welsh, and in the Saxon or nearly English phrases, in the rare French, in the mingled speech of the men from the sea coast, there was a note always of gloom and sometimes of alarm. Though the solid organization of the sergeants saw to it that the muttering should not spread too far, there could be no mistaking the temper of the troops. They knew, by that curious unexplained process through which the common soldier absorbs a position which he could not understand from a map, that things were desperate.

But around the king’s table a much clearer appreciation of the peril led to no corresponding words, nor would any stranger present have imagined, from the tone of that room, how close and apparently inevitable was disaster.

The little force had now been in retreat, and rapid retreat, from the failure before Paris, through one feverish week, pounding up northward for Calais; not with forced marches, indeed, but with full days’ marches. Now, at the end of that effort, it found itself headed off. The long, straight, marshy trench of the Somme lay between them and their Channel transports home. They had attempted its crossing a first, a second, a third time, and every attempt had been thrust back. They had felt down river with increasing anxiety, as the host upon the farther bank grew; and, while they had failed to make the crossing good, and while, as they were thus impelled northward, the breadth of the valley which defied them increased. Here they were at last at Boismont, on the lower estuary, with a huge sea tide swirling back and forth, at its height--a mile and a half of deep tumbling water--twice the depth that would drown a man. At its lowest it became a mass of marsh and mud, through which the hurrying ebb ran tumbling to the sea in varied channels.

Boismont stood upon the eastern bank of that broad water flank, grouped upon the dry steep above the edge of the marsh and the mud. There were rumours of some available passage, but no one caught sight of it, and even were it known, what chance had the army of forcing a long and narrow and perilous traverse when they had been unable to force the short bridges of the upper stream?

Yet that very difficulty was to prove their salvation. There was a ford, as the king was to learn, but its farther end upon the eastern bank was ill guarded with an insufficient force detached from the French vanguard upon the farther shore. For it was imagined that the crossing could hardly be attempted, or, if attempted, easily repelled.

Edward Plantagenet turned to one of the lesser commanders, who had spoken of the rumour of a ford, and said,--

“What was the name of your prisoner?”

The soldier replied,--

“Gobain Agache. He is a farmer of Mons, through which we marched but yesterday. We took him with us because he had been talking too much.”

“One might have thought that you could have found intelligence.”

“No, sir; they were all dumb. But we had heard that this man had talked, so we took him with us.”

“What has he told you?”

“He has told us nothing.”

“What have you offered him?”

The commander mentioned a sum large in his eyes. Edward Plantagenet laughed.

“We will give him the worth of his whole farm,” he said, “and his freedom, and that of any twenty of his comrades. Are there so many from his part?”

“No doubt, sir,” said the officer.

They sent for Gobain Agache, and they made him their offer pleasantly enough. He stood before them stolid for a moment. They did not press him.

As to which of these two kings should prove himself by ordeal of battle to be the rightful king Gobain Agache cared nothing. The jabbering of Welsh and of half English in the billets had sounded to him very foreign indeed, but then many of the others there were also of his own kind. He was disturbed in the matter of loyalty to his lord, who, he was told, had followed the Valois king upon the farther side of the river. He was disturbed about his farm, and what would happen to it if the battle were decided one way or the other; and here he was, with the value of his farm to his hand for the taking! So he spoke.

“The ford is close by. Your men ought to have seen it. Any stranger could see it. It is clearly marked at low tide from the hard to the hard, a broad made way of marl and chalk and great stones going right across the river.”

Edward looked at that one of his subordinates chiefly responsible, who murmured at once,--

“Sir, we did not reach this bank until the tide was already flowing.”

“Did you see a hard going down into the water?” said the king sharply.

“I thought it was a village wharf.”

The king smiled, and turned again to Gobain Agache.

“How broad is it?”

“About twenty paces,” said the farmer.

“Who is the best fisherman here?” said the king abruptly.

Gobain hesitated.

“I do not know the place,” he said.

The king nodded his head slightly to a younger man who stood ready. That younger man went out. Edward bade the farmer be seated on a form near the wall, and spent the next few minutes talking of this and that at random, until the young man who had gone out came back with an old, wooden-faced fellow, who pulled his hair as he entered and stood stooping somewhat and stroking his beard with his left hand.

Of him the king asked at what o’clock the tide was full. He said, but in the speech of St. Valery,--

“At midnight, for it is the full moon.”

“That means that the last of the ebb,” said Edward, half to himself and half to his companions, “will be a little after six in the morning.”

The fisherman shook his head and grinned at hearing such strange errors.

“After seven,” he said. “Seven hours ebb, five hours flow.”

An old man, half servant, half vassal, who looked after the king’s land round the waters of Chichester harbour, and who could always be straight with his master, looked him full in the face and said,--

“Never argue about the tide.”

And Edward answered,--

“All the better, so long as it is not too late.”

Then he turned to the old fisherman for a last question,--

“What depth is there at the very lowest of the passage on this ebb?”

“No more than knee-deep water,” said the old man, “for the springs are making, and we shall have the lowest ebb in three more tides.”

All this the king fitted together in one. He saw his opportunity. The ford close at hand, its hardness, the chance of the tide just at the right moment; he saw how all depended upon the defence of the farther shore. He saw that his chance of crossing and escaping to Calais had come.

He told the young man to lead the fisherman out and to give him a piece of gold, and to see that no one took it from him.

* * * * *

The king gave orders for a march in the first hours of the morning, long before dawn, while still they had the full moonlight to guide them. The sergeants were warned. The Court and the army took but little sleep. The grooms had none.

The accustomed delays and rearrangements, without which no force is gathered, kept them to within two hours of dawn. There was but one road leading parallel to the shore along the higher dry land southward; the very long column followed it under the moonlight. They reached Saigneville, those few miles to the south, just as the beginnings of daylight, mixing in with the last gold of the moon, was restoring colour to the world. Yet an hour more was the division occupied in marshalling under three columns to face the river. It was broad daylight by the time everything was done, and the sun was very near the edge of the uplands on the farther shore.

In front of the army ran rapidly the broad stream of the estuary, racing at more than half ebb to the sea. Already the mud flats below the village were widely exposed, and were similarly showing upon the farther bank, and there, running out boldly to the water, which still submerged it, was the causeway of the ford. Its prolongation, now that they knew its character, could be caught by the eye nearly a mile beyond, upon the farther flats. It was Blanchetaque, the ford, broad and raised as Gobain had described it. Far away upon the low bluff there could just be made out doubtfully the small--the too small--force which the advance guard of the Valois had sent to protect that scarcely threatened issue. It numbered not a sixth of the Plantagenet’s columns.

Those three columns waited for the fall of the tide. Before them, in a small, close group, some four hundred knights, fully armed, stood for the order to mount. It came somewhat before seven in the morning. The thing had to be calculated closely. Too early a start would find unfordable water. Too late would mean the catching of the ends of the column by the tide; for the rearguard of that army, as it crossed on so narrow a front, was two miles from the head.

The signal sounded, and that trumpet was heard by Godemard de Fay, the commander of the Valois on the farther bank. He saw Edward’s knights mount, and the three columns, each four abreast, coming across the covered causeway, formed. Against Edward’s mounted squires he sent knights, equally mounted and armed, down into the water to take the shock. These two small bodies of cavalry met, struggling and thrusting and hacking at each other, with the salt ebb swirling round the horses’ knees as the beasts slipped and struggled on the slime of the causeway floor. But not the wrestling between those handfuls of heavily accoutred nobles was to decide the passage. That was determined by the long-bow.

Behind the French knights, on the hard above the falling water level, a detachment of the Genoese with their cross-bows supported the horse and sent their shafts into the mass of Edward’s knights, perhaps just reaching the infantry behind. But that infantry was here in the van, wholly made up of the archers, the superb arm of all that command, and it was _they_ who forced the advance. For the Welsh long-bow, with its greater precision, its sharper impact, its longer range, and the discipline of the force that used it, firing with exactitude and command, not only threw Godemard’s horse into a confusion, stampeding from the causeway into the mud and breaking back towards the shore, but threw into an equal confusion the Genoese archers and the French infantry behind. Edward’s knights, acting as a sort of spearhead, could go forward, but only through the perpetual support of the long-bow men as they advanced steadily through the narrowing water and up towards the shore.

There was a moment of hesitation and of last resistance, then that break in the line which is the end. Edward could see from far off the horse of his small group of knights vigorously mounting the bluff, and the scattering of the small force that opposed them. The bridgehead was held; the main army began to file across.

So close was the issue that it could hardly save its baggage. A detachment of the King of France’s forces had already appeared upon the sky-line above Saigneville before the wagons could follow the last of the English infantry on to the ford. Much of Edward’s train had to be abandoned. But that same accident which caused so severe a loss in provision saved the army. The Plantagenet’s command, nearly all its fighting men at least, had crossed the Somme, and the rising tide had made pursuit impossible by the time the Valois’ men had made secure of their booty and had reached the eastern bank. They watched the growing flood of water between, as, far away upon the farther bank, the triple column of the English king disappeared over the western folds of the land.

This was the crossing of Blanchetaque, and this it was which founded, two days later, the decision of Crécy.

Edward had said “God and our Lady and St. George will find me a passage.”

VILLE GAGNÉE

(_Friday, April 13, 1436_)

In Paris never was such confusion of mind, such exhaustion of argument! It had gone on for twenty years, for twenty-one years--and you would have said that no man knew where he stood. For who was king? And where stood Burgundy? And what had come to what had been the Armagnacs? Never was such a generation of conflict since the city had been founded!

There are two currents in such turmoils: the young men, and the fathers. Now the young men, from those of thirty who could just remember the news of Agincourt, and who, in their teens, had seen the great massacres when the Burgundians had retaken the city from the Armagnacs, had lived all their lives under a king--the grandson of a king of France, the son of a daughter of France--but a king also of England, and himself a child whom they hardly saw. Still, that was their king. Their priests, their notables, their magistrates--all the world about them, took such a king for granted, and Burgundy, that great house which the populace of Paris had always loved to follow, still swore by such a king. The old men would some of them remember this child-king as a usurper, but some of them as a restoration of good things; for was not this new Plantagenet kingship the work of Burgundy and the end of the hateful Armagnac? Was it not a true Parisian thing?

All the great story of Joan, those intense two years, had not passed unheeded. The loud echoes of it had sounded through Paris on that memorable day when the armoured girl had fallen wounded in the fruitless assault upon the St. Honoré Gate. But not even that great sweep of reconquest could wholly shake the city. All the country round fell away from the Plantagenet to the Valois, but Paris was still Plantagenet. For nearly half a lifetime one state of things had endured, and after so many miseries it seemed well enough.

But latterly there had come a change. For the people, and especially the young men, were telling each other that Burgundy was no longer friends with their boyish, weak, and distant king; and at the same time had come a petty but significant alteration in the air of the city, something that the men of the time hardly noticed--something of profound significance for posterity was at work. The forces within the city were no longer of one kind. Even of the nobles, some were wholly foreign. The English tongue had arisen, and Willoughby, in command of the garrison, was of that tongue. The conqueror of Agincourt had spoken, thought, and lived in French. It was as a man indistinguishable from their own nobles that he had ridden all the way down the narrow St. Martin’s street, kissing the relics at the church doors when he made his entry into Paris, all those years before. But even by his time the tide had turned in England. The Black Death had done its work before he was born. Henry V. himself could use the English tongue, and to all the lesser men about him it was native. Many nobles even could then speak no other. Now, after the working of a full seventeen years, the estrangement was more pronounced still; and the populace of Paris knew not, when a patrol passed by at night, whether its few men would chance to be men of like speech with themselves or of alien tongue.

And there was yet another matter, perhaps decisive of the issue that came--in part because a reliance upon Burgundy had made the populace seem secure for the young Plantagenet king, in part because the heavy drain of men in the losing campaign all around left few to spare for Paris: _the garrison in arms under Willoughby was too small_--hardly more than a battalion (as we say to-day) and a couple of squadrons.

Already by the spring of the year the regency of England and of France was troubled, and a month before Easter the citizens had been summoned to take oath, individually, in support of that treaty of Troyes by which the young king reigned. For his mother, a princess of the blood royal of France, was dead. Very few refused to swear. All the great notables swore. The Bishop and the Abbots and the Prior of St. Martin, and the chiefs of all the Courts of Justice and of the Exchequer, and all the Bar, and all the City Companies, and every priest and monk. It seemed a unanimity; though some few had taken advantage of the liberty to leave the town, if their allegiance was to him, the Valois, who called himself King of France outside the walls.

Beneath that official surface the quarrel between the government at Westminster and Burgundy had changed the Parisian mind. Already, secretly, letters were passing between a little group of the livery-men of the city and Charles of Valois, the king who was reconquering his kingdom. They treated for amnesty; they assured Charles (with too much assurance) that he had the support of the populace in the streets.

So passed Easter. Arthur of Brittany, Count of Richemont and Constable of France, received those letters and made his plan. No very great force accompanied him as he marched up northwards towards Paris through the night, but from within the city there was nothing strong enough to meet him. There is a curious air of ease, simplicity, and silence about that last revolution which suddenly slipped the great capital away from the hands of the Lancastrian Plantagenets, kings of England.

They had marched, I say, through the night. Richemont the Constable, and Dunois with him: Dunois, who had been through all those battles with Joan, and was now to see their last fruit fall ripe into his hands.

It was the morning of Friday, the Friday after Easter, the 13th of April, 1436, just at dawn. The two flanking towers of St. Michael’s Gate, the southern gate of the city, stood clear in the new light, just before the rising of the sun. The grey of their old stones, and of their old slate, pointed, conical roofs (for the new wall covered only the north of the city, and in the south the old wall remained), was marked in every detail, and against the sky stood one man mounting guard upon the parapet.

Henry of Villeblanche, a gentleman of Brittany, bore the white lilies, the banner of the Valois, by the Constable’s side. Him did Richemont send forward to challenge the guard, and to him that lonely man upon the parapet gave the simple answer: “Not this gate, the next.” Such was the mood of the garrison. The commanders rode round, certain that none would challenge. They came to St. James’s Gate, little more than a bowshot away to the east; the postern was opened to him. He sent through a handful of his men; the men of the guard looked on, neither aiding nor resisting. The newcomers broke the links of the drawbridge chain and the heavy gangway came down with a clang, bridging the ditch. Across it rode at once the Constable and Dunois, then Philip of Ternaut, the fourth a plain knight, Simon of Lallain, and behind them the little force of men-at-arms and grooms, hardly two thousand all told, filed under the dark ogive archway and on into the city street, which pointed with its old Roman straightness right down the hill to the island. As they so rode L’Isle-Adam, the Marshal, climbed up the winding stair behind the guardroom to the top of the gate, carrying with him the flag of the lilies, the flag of the Valois. He ran it up in the growing morning light, and cried out, “_Ville gagnée!_” Never was there an odder capture of any walled strong city, famous throughout the world.

That troop of horse went on down the hill and through the streets in turn to the island, to the cathedral, to the town hall, to the market. The townsmen were just astir; few took heed. The Constable, he and his men, rode back to the cathedral again--Notre-Dame--and, leaving the horses outside, four to a groom, they dismounted in their full armour and heard the early morning Mass all together; and the canons who had so recently sworn for the rival king received them. But as the priests offered food, after the Mass, the Constable answered, “I hold the custom of fasting on a Friday, and I shall eat nothing.” As they came out from the great church the alarm was already raised. The little garrison was afoot, and Willoughby, at the head of it, raised the official part of the city. No one knew at that hour what would follow. All was still in doubt.

It was the populace, not the two opposing troops, which took the shock. It rose in a sudden tide, turned by we know not what preparatory workings of the last few weeks, or perhaps by a gusty mood. A group of unarmed men, running up to the northern gate, seized the cannon there, four or five small pieces, turned them down the street, and just as they did so saw Willoughby coming up with his little column of horse and foot. A volley of round shot pulled up Willoughby with some loss and turned him back.

The official world failed to raise a force. The leaders of the merchants, the greater lawyers coming into the street and shouting for King Henry, the bishops themselves, two of whom had begun to harangue, all failed; and the mob, growing greater street by street, shut off the issues with chains and ran back to attack Willoughby’s men-at-arms with anything that came to hand. That soldier kept his small troop well together, and through the increasing flood made eastward down St. Anthony’s Street to the Bastille. He had hardly twelve hundred men with him, counting both the French and the English-speaking sort, all told. He shut himself up in the Bastille, having saved his command. There he awaited terms.

The Constable at once organized the city: put garrisons to all the gates, had convoys of wheat brought in, and a market opened at once; put men of his own at the town hall and over the city companies, strongly holding all that merchant class which was the foundation of the Plantagenet power; he proclaimed the decree of his master, the French king, Charles--a decree of general amnesty--and all the Saturday organized the city and brought it to order. On Sunday, the 15th, he prepared to establish his lines round the Bastille with troops whom he had sent for from the neighbouring garrisons outside the town. Willoughby asked for terms, and generous terms were granted. The council round the Constable demanded that the Bastille be handed over to Ternaut; as for Willoughby himself and his men and his civilian notables, they should be convoyed safely, not through the now hostile streets, but round by the north, outside the new city wall.

As they passed, the men from the wall insulted them, and particularly that Bishop of Therouenne, who had been chancellor for the late government, to whom they called out, “_Ah, the fox! The fox!_” But he grumbled, not at the insult but at the loss of his jewels, and no man heeded him. Just behind the Louvre, where the city wall ended at the water, and where the footbridge runs to-day across the river, they embarked that little force to go down the Seine to Rouen, honourably enough. And so ended the rule of the Plantagenets in Paris.

LOUIS XI AND CHARLES THE BOLD

(_January 5, 1477_)

In a small room, the large grey stones of whose walls were partly hidden under tapestries, there sat at evening a man too wizened to show his full age. He was in the fifties. He might have been fifteen years younger or fifteen years older--he would have looked the same. He was simply dressed--it was winter--in warm grey clothes, and though a great fire of logs burnt in the huge open hearth of the small room, he had a thick cloak over his shoulders. He was cold, and thrust forward to the flames long, thin and somewhat grasping hands. His keen, narrow eyes, closely set together and very bright, shone in the firelight. On a large oak table to his left stood carefully ranged a mass of papers, and one great parchment which he had been consulting. But for the moment he read nothing. He muttered to himself.

One soldier was in the room, standing silent by the curtain which hid the door. Without could be heard from time to time the metallic clinking of arms and the steps of men coming and returning. At long intervals there came from distant roofs of the castle the cry of the sentry. For the rest there was no sound in that room save the crackling of the fire and the continued muttering of this man.

It was the king--Louis XI.

To his hand there upon the table, and docketed and filed minutely, stood his immediate affairs; accurately, in shelves which lined the larger rooms of the castle, and served by a great staff of clerks, was further stored the whole business of the realm.

In his childhood that realm was ruined. As a little frail child of five he had seen Joan passing through his father’s palace at Bourges. In his boyhood had come the difficult reconquest; his manhood had been filled with exiles, with quarrels against his father, the reigning king, and with a long apprenticeship in intrigue.

It was his business to rebuild the realm. And for now nearly sixteen years he had plunged into that business as private men of the same sort will plunge into the accumulation of a fortune. It had absorbed him altogether, and his soul, never sane, had suffered from that absorption, much as suffer the souls of men who devote themselves in the same fashion to gold.

But his zeal was for the re-establishment of the realm. This, the unceasing pressure of a spirit which for centuries had urged and spurred the Capetian line, which had made them--some quite unconsciously, none quite consciously--the agents of a great purpose, had urged Louis continually. His task was nearly done. Only one great rival still loomed to the east of him. It was Burgundy.

All that Rhineland, all that great street from south to north, from the Alps to the Low Countries, all that belt of true French soil, and of its extension into the Germanies, was under a man--Charles the Bold--ten years younger than himself, who, building on his father’s power, had dared to conceive independence. He would make a new State, breaking the vassalage with the King of France. He would leave France halved.

This man, Charles, stood against that older man, Louis, in a contrast more complete than any two rivals you can name: Louis frail, cunning, tenacious, garrulous, delighting in a millioned web of detail, patient, cruel, diseased: Charles, short but strong in the saddle, square-shouldered, violent in action, somewhat silent, his mass of thick black hair ponderous upon his enormous head, living in the midst of charges, and thinking that the world could be carried at a charge.

The last issue between these two men had come. The one was sitting here in his narrow room, in the heart of France, holding the threads which stretched to the ends of Europe. The other, in camp, pursued the siege of Nancy, and was in the act of taking that capital, destroying Lorraine: confirming his power.

* * * * *

As King Louis sat there, his hands and feet toward the flame, muttering to himself, and his bright, narrow eyes seeing scheme after scheme conjointly in the dancing of the fire, his mood suddenly changed and, as though he were alone, careless of the attendant, he suddenly threw himself upon his knees at the chair where he had been sitting, and raised his mutterings somewhat into prayers. He groped in his breast for an amulet and kissed it fervently, and continued in a litany name after name of those who should protect him and his race, and all his land. But the name which occurred most often in that confused torrent of intense mumbling was the name of St. Martin of Tours, his neighbour, his protector, he to whom Louis the King had shown such generosity; he upon whom Louis the King had showered so much wealth, and before whom he continued to bow.

* * * * *

In the first light of a very cold morning the king rode out with half a dozen familiars. He was helped with difficulty not on to a horse but on to a mule. His long, thin, somewhat deformed legs with difficulty held the saddle, and he stooped forward gracelessly as he rode. No one could have told him from a chance traveller of the poorer sort. He was in grey, as always--a thick, coarse cloth--and on his head a rough, pointed hat, with a leaden medal stuck in the band of it, and on the medal, stamped, an image of Our Lady.