Part 7

After some years of widowhood, a family council was held, and it was determined that she should marry her cousin John duke of Brabant, son of Antony of Burgundy and Elizabeth of Luxembourg. Antony who was brother of John-the-fearless, had fallen at Agincourt. Jaqueline and the duke of Brabant being first cousins, a dispensation was of course necessary to their marriage; and they applied for one to the Roman pontiff Martin V. In the family council referred to, an active part had been taken by an uncle of Jaqueline on her father’s side, namely John-the-pitiless, bishop of Liége, whom we have already introduced to you in our paper on the House of Burgundy. He had approved of the betrothal, and had joined in the application to the pope; but he was secretly resolved to leave no stone unturned to seize his dead brother’s estates, the inheritance of Jaqueline; and indeed it is alleged that he was even manoeuvring to espouse her himself. He despatched furtively a messenger to the pope praying him to withhold the dispensation, or to revoke it if already granted, pleading that he had just discovered a flaw in his brother’s marriage with Margaret of Burgundy, that would render Jaqueline illegitimate. The dispensation was already on its way to Flanders; so the pontiff instantly put forth an annulment, and the one document arrived at the heels of the other. But when they came to unroll them they found that there was wanting to the revocation a bit of red tape and a leaden seal. In the great haste some functionary through whose hands it had passed, had neglected to attach those ornaments; and for the want of an ounce of lead, the annulment was of no weight, while the dispensation duly ballasted with that metal, was of force. The wedding party did not give the bishop time to have the error corrected, and the nuptials took place.

The bishop immediately levied ban and arrière ban and invaded the provinces of his niece. It was a favorable moment for him. Holland was convulsed with civil strife between two factions called the Fishhooks and the Codfish. The latter sided with the bishop, and the former with Jaqueline who flew in an undaunted manner to the rescue of her patrimony. The duke of Burgundy sent to the seat of war his son afterwards Philip-the-good; and that prince compelled both parties to lay down their arms. The duke then thought to pacify the bishop by investing him with the revenues of certain of his niece’s estates.

John-the-pitiless was bishop by brevet only. He had taken no orders higher than those of deacon, and therefore was not irrevocably a churchman. His plan to marry Jaqueline having failed, he fixed his eye on another bride. In order to carry out this fresh design upon the peace and tranquillity of the sex, he appealed to the pope for a decree of secularisation unfrocking him. The pope was compliant and the ex-bishop led to the altar, Elizabeth of Luxembourg relict of Anthony of Burgundy, mother of the duke of Brabant and mother-in-law of Jaqueline.

Jaqueline had been so busy fighting her demi-reverend uncle who had just assumed a nearer and dearer relationship to her, that she had given herself no time to see what sort of a husband she had married. She now took a good look at him and found that he was a puny, misshapen invalid, while her looking-glass and her friends told her that she had grown up into a handsome, wholesome, vigorous woman. They went to housekeeping however, and quarrelled like man and wife. One day while she was absent, her husband of Brabant took it upon him to dismiss all her Dutch hand-maidens, and send them back, bag and baggage, to Holland. The reason he gave for it was that they talked Dutch, a dialect he did not understand and did not commend. Jaqueline was not disposed to put up with this affront. She left him and went back to her mother who was residing at Valenciennes. She soon found life too dull there for a spirit as restless as hers, and planned an expedition to England. A retinue suitable to a princess of her rank was furnished her, and she crossed the channel.

England was at that time ruled by Henry V. the second king of the house of Lancaster. His queen was Catharine of France daughter of Charles VI., and sister of Jaqueline’s first husband prince John. Catharine was therefore her sister-in-law and her cousin. Henry was also related to her but more remotely through their common descent from Charles of Valois. Henry and Catharine received Jaqueline with great distinction, and invited her to stand godmother to their infant son afterwards the good and pious but unfortunate Henry VI.

In the family party assembled at the baptism, was the king’s youngest brother Humphrey duke of Gloucester, called by historians and by Shakspeare, the good duke of Gloucester. He looked wistfully across the font at his blooming Dutch cousin; and she, I am sorry to say, looked wistfully back at him. They fell in love and so desperately that they resolved that nothing should prevent their union, not even the crooked little duke of Brabant who was already the husband of Jaqueline. They applied to pope Martin to annul that marriage; and the pontiff usually so compliant, was obstinate in his refusal. We shall see by and by what was the cause of his obstinacy. But he was not the only pope. These were still the days of the Great Schism: a pope at Rome, and a pope at Avignon. To such a degree however, had the Eternal City regained its prestige, that at the epoch of our story, the greater number of the powers of Europe, had renounced the obedience of Avignon and gone over to that of Rome. Among the first that had done so, were the houses of Plantagenet and Bavaria, the houses to which our two lovers belonged. But to them the true pope was the pope who would let them marry. They had failed before Martin V., so they appealed from him to Benedict XIII. who sat in a kind of survival of grandeur on the throne of Avignon. Benedict, flattered that an English prince and a Flemish princess should abjure his rival and come over to him, granted a bull in due form annulling Jaqueline’s marriage with the duke of Brabant, and anathematising Martin V. Gloucester and Jaqueline were immediately united.

Leaving them to enjoy the honey-moon, we will go back and take a rapid survey of the events which gave political importance to their marriage.

One hot day in August 1392, Charles VI. had a sun-stroke and went crazy. The reins of government fell once more into the hands of his uncle Philip. (See House of Burgundy.) At the death of Philip a bitter contest for the supremacy broke out between his son John-the-fearless and Louis of Orleans, the king’s brother. This rivalry led to a desultory civil war interrupted by truces and pacifications during one of which, John-the-fearless thought to settle the dispute once for all, by a touch of his fearlessness. He assassinated his rival in the streets of Paris.

The stroke was to a great degree successful, and John duke of Burgundy was the greatest man in the realm. But the faction of Orleans though disorganised for the moment by the death of its chief, was not extinguished. The young duke son of the murdered man, had taken for his second wife the daughter of the count of Armagnac an energetic leader who put himself at the head of the Orleansists, and even gave them his name; and France was torn by the bloody strife between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs.

It was this state of things that tempted Henry V. of England to revive an absurd claim to the crown of France which had been trumped up as a pretext for plunder, by his great grandfather Edward III. Henry invaded France and won the battle of Agincourt. Both factions courted his alliance, each being more anxious to wreak vengeance on the other than to save their common country. Henry after some coquetting, sided with the Burgundians who were the stronger of the two, and held the north of France including the capital which they put into his hands. In that city he afterwards married Catharine daughter of Charles and Isabella, and was declared heir of the monarchy, in contempt of the rights of Catharine’s young brother the dauphin Charles. The demented king and his disreputable queen deserted the cause of their son and of France, and went over to the English. The dauphin himself was rescued from the clutches of his father and mother, by a bold stroke of Tanneguy du Châtel an Armagnac noble who broke into the boy’s lodging one night, snatched him out of bed, wrapped him up in his cloak, mounted his horse with him, and made good his escape; and Charles lived to recover his inheritance and more besides. The Armagnac faction thus became the party of the dauphin, the party of the nation and of the independence of France.

There were among the Burgundian barons some who remembered they were Frenchmen and who fought reluctantly on the side of England. These projected an interview between the dauphin and duke John, with a view of reconciling their differences, and uniting their arms against the common enemy. The meeting took place on the bridge of Montereau, and John-the-fearless was struck dead at the feet of the young prince. Thus did one foul murder avenge another murder equally foul committed twelve years before.

Some English writers inform you that John-the-fearless was assassinated by orders of the dauphin. Charles at that time was an indolent boy of sixteen; and he probably was not allowed to know that such an act was meditated. Indeed so impolitic was the murder that it is far from certain that there was any premeditation about it. It is much more likely that duke John fell a victim to a sudden outbreak of revenge on the part of nobles he had long pursued.

His son and successor Philip was in his twenty-third year. He is called in history Philip-the-good for reasons perhaps as satisfactory as in the case of his great grandfather king John II. He was good tempered however, and whenever his domestic servitors, his equerries and his chamberlains came to talk with him about household matters he received them affably instead of kicking them on the shins with his jack-boots as his sire had done, and as was indeed the style in those days.

Philip had married Charles’s sister Michelle of France; but he eagerly adopted the theory of his English counsellors, that Charles was the assassin; and he went home and exclaimed O Michelle your brother has murdered my father! The poor princess threw herself into his arms and declared that his enemies were her enemies, and the tragedy worked no breach between them.

But Philip thought of nothing but revenge. He sent an envoy to the English king offering a formal alliance with him for the destruction of the French monarchy. The _astonishing treaty_ as Hume calls it, by which this prince of the blood royal of France declared himself the enemy of his family, of his country and of that throne to which he was so nearly related that in the chapter of chances he might become its heir, is called the treaty of Troyes from Troyes in Champagne where it was signed.[8]

It was about the time of this treaty that the English court was set agog by the flirtation between Jaqueline and the duke of Gloucester, and by the application they were making to both popes to open the way to their marriage. Nothing could be more threatening to the House of Burgundy than that an English prince should acquire Holland and the other provinces that had fallen to Jaqueline; and duke Philip, notwithstanding his alliance with Henry, interfered vigorously and successfully to prevent pope Martin from annulling the previous marriage of Jaqueline. When the annulment was finally obtained from Benedict, Philip appealed to Henry himself to stop the espousals by his royal authority. But Henry was quite willing his brother should win so great a prize. There was to be sure, hazard in it; but he trusted to his own address to keep Philip quiet, and allowed the marriage to take place. Nor did he trust in vain. That gifted monarch had sounded the depths and the shallows of his ally. He knew that Philip was the most pig-headed of mortals; and that he would submit to still greater humiliations rather than give up his schemes of vengeance.

Up to this time the arms of England had been successful; but they now met with a reverse the consequences of which were far-reaching; though English historians affect either to ignore the transaction, or to refer to it as an affair of no importance. Henry had gone back to England, leaving his victorious army under the command of his brother Thomas duke of Clarence. Thomas could not forgive himself for not having been at Agincourt on that day of glory; and he resolved to have an Agincourt of his own. The French under the Marshal de Lafayette--an ancestor of our own Lafayette--were in a strong position at Beaugé. A little way off lay a body of Scotch under the earl of Buchan, ready to second the French; but the English despised the Scotch even more than they did the French, for they had beaten them oftener and at greater odds.[9]

Clarence did not hesitate to attack the French position. He was received with steadiness; and at the critical moment Buchan and his red-headed crew bore down upon the field. Clarence was slain, and his army defeated.

Henry whose opinion of the disaster was different from that of the English historians, flew back to France, and in the most obstinate of all his campaigns, succeeded in winning back the ground that had been lost. But that campaign which the defeat of Beaugé alone had rendered necessary, was fatal to him. Worn out with care, fatigue and exposure he lay dying at Vincennes.

He called to him his next brother John duke of Bedford, appointed him regent of France, and enjoined upon him always to preserve the friendship and alliance of the duke of Burgundy, as essential to the conquest of the kingdom. He constituted his brother Humphrey regent of England, and adjured him never to leave that island while the war lasted. These two injunctions had the same drift, and showed what was weighing upon Henry’s mind. He had been confident of his own power to obviate the mischief threatened by the English marriage of Jaqueline, but he was not sure his brothers would be equal to it; and the apprehension was not ill founded.

The monarch died and was embalmed and sent to England. He was perhaps the greatest of England’s kings. His chief faults were cruelty and arrogance, and they both stood in his way. Assuming to be king of France he regarded as a traitor worthy of death every Frenchman who resisted him. This theory drove the French into that tenacious defence of their towns which checked his progress; and at the same time his haughty airs alienated the Burgundian nobles. Dare you look me in the face when you speak to me? said he to L’isle Adam, Philip’s governor of Paris. Sire, replied the Burgundian, there lives not the man that I look not in the face when I speak to him.

A few weeks after Henry’s death, his poor crazy father-in-law Charles VI. was laid beside his ancestors in the abbey of Saint Denis. Not a single prince of the House of Valois followed him to his grave. Not a single prince of any blood save the duke of Bedford alone who conducted the obsequies. As they turned away from his tomb, the good monks of the abbey who had sung the requiem, fell into a dispute with the servants of the king’s household about the possession of some ornaments that had been used in the funeral. From words they come to blows, and the battle waxed so fierce that Bedford and his suite were fain to turn back and strike right and left to quell the tumult.

Henry instead of naming one of his brothers guardian and governor of his infant son now king, had conferred that office on his uncle the bishop of Winchester.[10] That bishop is the Cardinal Beaufort of Shakspeare; and we shall now call him by that name though pope Martin had not yet sent him the red hat. These Beauforts were the natural children of John of Gaunt and Catharine Swinford. In the reign of Richard II. John’s nephew, they had been legitimated; but when John’s son Henry usurped the throne, he was fearful of the ambition of his half brothers and caused his parliament to modify the legitimation so far as to exclude them from the throne. The exclusion was futile: the line of Beaufort reigns over England at this present moment, while that of Henry is extinct.

Cardinal Beaufort possessed great abilities but an imperious temper. He and his nephew of Gloucester Jaqueline’s husband were rivals, the one being regent of the king, the other of the kingdom; and this rivalry soon lapsed into a hatred so bitter that they sought only to destroy each other.

The cardinal had raised six thousand men to reinforce Bedford, when Gloucester, exercising his prerogative of regent, assumed the command of them. Then in spite of Henry’s dying injunction that he should not leave England, he took Jaqueline with him and at the head of those troops, landed at Calais. Instead of going south to join Bedford as he had promised, he marched east across the territories of the duke of Burgundy without his permission, and entered upon the provinces of Jaqueline. At their coming the war of the Codfish and the Fishhooks broke out afresh. He and Jaqueline sided with the Fishhooks which gave the Hooks a temporary superiority.

Philip behaved with signal imbecility. Instead of withdrawing his contingent from France, and using it to drive Gloucester out, he expostulated with Bedford concerning the invasion, and clamored for the withdrawal of the English troops. Most gladly would Bedford have withdrawn them, for he needed them himself; but Gloucester was not subject to his authority, and would not listen to him. Philip at last woke up to what everybody else saw, that he was in the predicament of fighting for the English in France and against them in the Netherlands. He levied a fresh army, took the command in person, and marched toward Holland.

When Gloucester heard of these preparations, he wrote Philip a wheedling letter saying that he had come to the continent solely in the interest of Philip and of Philip’s dear double cousin Jaqueline; and he called Heaven to witness to the purity of his intentions. Philip told him he was a liar; Gloucester told Philip he was another. Philip immediately challenged him to mortal combat, declaring that by the help of God and of God’s Virgin Mother our Lady, he would convince him of his error by running him through the body. Gloucester accepted the challenge, vowing to put Philip to death in the name of God, of our Lady and of Monseigneur Saint George. The duke of Bedford and cardinal Beaufort interfered and persuaded these two blusterers to leave the matter out to a council of doctors of law and theology at Paris. These philosophers arrived at the verdict that the two challengers had come out so even in the missives they had discharged at each other that further duelling was superfluous; and so it ended.

Philip entered Holland at the head of his army. The Codfish joined him, not that they preferred him to their lawful suzerain Jaqueline, but because those worthless Fishhooks had adhered to the other side.

At this critical moment Gloucester went back to England, leaving Jaqueline to see to her own affairs as best she might. He was called home he said, by the untoward proceedings of his uncle the cardinal. He sent to Jaqueline however, a reënforcement of three thousand men. The two armies met at Browershaven where after a day of carnage in which Englishman and Frenchman, Fleming and Burgundian, Codfish and Fishhook fell indiscriminately, the star of Philip prevailed. He was not a great general; but in the hour of combat he was an active and intrepid soldier.

Not wholly crushed by this defeat, Jaqueline donned her armor and took the field in person, and in more than one bloody conflict behaved with the steadiness of a veteran. But there was no repairing the disaster of Browershaven, and her fortunes sank. She wrote imploringly to Gloucester to come back to her. One of her letters full of affection, still exists. But they never met again. The good Humphrey had fallen in with a handsome English girl named Eleanor Cobham, and had become more intimate with her than comported with his duty to his Dutch wife.

Philip by the success of his arms and by this infidelity of Gloucester, became master of the fate of Jaqueline. He prayed pope Martin to annul her English marriage and to reinstate the one with the duke of Brabant. Martin consented and put forth a bull accordingly; and as the English marriage had been sanctioned and blessed by his Avignon rival, he let fly at him an anathema so comprehensive that it is doubtful whether he has yet been able, even after the lapse of five centuries, to dodge all its provisions.

As there was reason to fear that Jaqueline still loved her truant Humphrey, the bull in question decreed that if she again espoused him, even after the death of Brabant, she would be guilty of adultery. This at first seems illogical; but the Church is never illogical: admit her premises and you are swept to her conclusions. Let us see: According to the Church, if a woman marries again having a previous husband living, she commits adultery. If Jaqueline after the death of Brabant, should marry Gloucester, she would marry again, having a previous husband living. If you should ask who that previous husband would be, I answer the duke of Gloucester.

At all events, this syllogism was so convincing to Gloucester himself, that like a submissive son of the Church, he turned round and married his mistress Eleanor Cobham.

Nemesis followed up that marriage, and Jaqueline was avenged. A few years later, the duchess Eleanor was arraigned for witchcraft and made to do public penance at Saint Pauls. Humphrey was implicated in his wife’s sorceries; but it would not answer to make a prince of the blood do penance at Saint Pauls, so he was found one morning, dead in his bed.

As for his murderer, stop here O reader! turn to your Shakspeare, Henry VI. part II. act III. scene III.; and stand at the bedside of the dying cardinal--that scene of which Doctor Johnson says “the profound can imagine nothing beyond”--that scene of which Schlegel says “it is beyond praise; no other poet has ever drawn aside the curtain of eternity in so awful a manner”--that scene which John Richard Green says “is taken bodily from some older dramatist!”[11]

The annulment of Jaqueline’s English marriage, threw her back into the arms of the duke of Brabant who however, did not long enjoy the wife thus restored to him. He died, and his estates fell to his brother Philip who died soon after, and so suddenly that Philip of Burgundy who was, or rather claimed to be the next heir, was suspected of having poisoned him. But the fifteenth century had fairly set in, and knowledge had revived. Two intelligent surgeons cut open the dead Philip, to see what ailed him, and found in his stomach an ulcer which sufficiently explained his demise, so that Philip-the-good escaped passing into history as a poisoner.