CHAPTER VI

THE MOTHER AND THE WIFE OF A SAINT

As the regency of Queen Blanche had begun without formality, so it ceased insensibly. There was no set day upon which she formally relinquished the reins to Louis; and so one can but determine an approximate date. On April 25, 1234, Louis may be considered to have attained his majority. Though we find the name of Blanche figuring in royal acts after this date, it becomes less frequent: her share in the government is growing less, though throughout her life she never ceased to stand by her son and act with or advise him. At the very close of her regency we find her once more the central figure with that unaccountable person Thibaud de Champagne. It must be remembered that he was now King of Navarre, a dignity which brought with it less of real power in France than one might suppose; for the French and the Spanish dominions, Champagne and Navarre, were separated. His elevation to the throne may have momentarily turned the head of the poet-king; at any rate, he began to show dissatisfaction and to demur about fulfilling some of the conditions incident to the settlement of the claims of Alix de Champagne. In defiance of his duty as a vassal he gave his daughter, without the king's consent, to Jean le Roux, son of Pierre Mauclerc. He formed alliances with Mauclerc and with others of the old league; the hostile intent could not be mistaken. The king mobilized his forces and went to meet those of Thibaud. As the latter had not had time to effect a junction with his Breton allies, the royal forces were overwhelming, and he was compelled to find some way out of his difficulty other than fighting. Remembering that he had assumed the Cross, and was, therefore, under the protection of the Church, he persuaded the Pope to enjoin Louis from attacking him, declaring that his person and his lands were, on account of his crusading vow, under the protection of the Church. Even this intervention might not have saved him from severe punishment at the hands of his incensed sovereign; but when he sent to make submission and to ask mercy, Queen Blanche, to whom he especially appealed, summoned him to her presence and promised to obtain fair terms for him. The terms, indeed, were not hard, nor were the reproaches unduly severe which Blanche is said to have made in her last interview with Thibaud: "In God's name, Count Thibaud, you should not have taken sides against us; you should have called to mind the great goodness of my son, the king, when he came to your aid to protect your county and your lands from all the barons of France, who would have burned everything and reduced it to ashes." Then came the courteous reply of the gallant and contrite Thibaud: "By my faith, madame, my heart and my body and all my lands are yours; there is naught that could please you that I would not do willingly; and never again, please God, will I go against you or yours."

The romance of this scene, almost pathetic, is ruthlessly disturbed by the scene that is said to have followed, yet we must tell of this also. The young Prince Robert, always of a violent temper, took it upon him to insult the vanquished King of Navarre. He had the tails of the latter's horses cut off a--shameful insult to a knight--and as Thibaud was leaving the palace Robert threw a soft cheese on his head. Thibaud returned to Blanche indignant at the insult offered him despite her safe conduct; and she was preparing to punish the offenders summarily when she discovered that the ringleader was her own son.

During the ten or twelve years that now intervened before Blanche was again to take the regency during Saint Louis's crusade, her role in public life is of less importance; there will be a fact in history to note here and there, but most of that which we shall say concerns the woman, the mother, rather than the queen. Though eminently fitted in intellect and temperament for exercising the powers of an active ruler, Blanche never forgot that she was only the king's mother, and that she held the royal power in trust for him. In all her acts--they were really done on her own responsibility--she sought to associate the name of her son, as if she would keep for him the honor. In that speech to Count Thibaud she does not reproach him for ingratitude to her; it is, "you should have called to mind the great goodness of my son, the king." Her whole life was devoted to the service of this son, whom she loved with a love painfully intense, cruelly jealous.

When she was left a widow, there was entrusted to her not merely the ruling of a kingdom but the rearing of a large family of children. To this latter task Blanche devoted herself with as much energy and as much good sense as she displayed in larger affairs. She reared with particular care the son who, though not the eldest, had become the heir to the crown. She tried to make of him a good man. It was certainly not her training or her example that taught him excessive devoutness; for, though a good Christian, she was not a devotee. When he was a boy she gave him over to the care of masters who were to instruct him in all things. There was physical exercise and recreation as well as study; the young prince was not even exempt from discipline: according to his own testimony, one of his masters "sometimes beat him to teach him discipline." His days were regularly portioned off into periods of work, of play, and of religious devotion; in the midst of his teachers, most of whom were Dominicans, the little prince led a very sober life. He was of a quiet and docile disposition, and received instruction willingly and readily, and became a man of considerable learning. From his youth he manifested a tendency to extreme piety, going daily to church, where he entered into the services with strange fervor; he sang no songs but hymns, and led a pure and temperate life. It is said that a religious fanatic, who had listened to some of the calumnies circulated against the queen, one day came to her and rebuked her bitterly for encouraging her son to live a life of licentiousness, in the society of concubines. She corrected his mistaken impression, and said that if her son, whom she loved better than any creature living, were sick unto death she would not have him made whole by the commission of a mortal sin. Saint Louis never forgot this saying of his mother's, which he was fond of repeating to Joinville, and by which he sought to regulate his conduct.

Another of Blanche's children was of the same disposition as Saint Louis in regard to religion. This was the Princess Isabelle, whom her mother had trained as carefully as Louis. On one occasion, when the family was going on a journey and there was much noise of preparation in the midst of the packing, Isabelle covered herself up in the bedclothes in order to pray undisturbed. One of the servants, occupied in packing, picked up child and bedclothes together, and was about to put her with the rest of the baggage, when she was discovered. Even as a child she would take no part in games, and as a young girl shunned all the gayeties of the court, devoting herself to study, to reading the Scriptures, and to devotional and charitable works, leading a life of the utmost austerity. It is pleasant to know that this timid, pious little lady was not forced into a distasteful union and passed her days in the pursuits she liked best.

Blanche's devotion to her son Louis was repaid by the greatest deference and affection. Her ascendency over him lasted as long as she lived, and was responsible, no doubt, for much unhappiness to his wife. Blanche's love was full of jealousy; she would brook no rival; she must always be first in the affections of her son. And one cannot deny that the great queen was selfish even to the point of positive cruelty in her treatment of Marguerite de Provence. A mere child when she came to the court of France, Marguerite was made to feel that she was not to be first there, though her position as the wife of Louis gave her a claim to first place. She was not of masculine temperament, like Blanche, and she did not seek even the show of power; but Blanche grudged her even the love of her husband, though we have no evidence that Marguerite ever reproached Saint Louis with excessive filial devotion or sought to detach him from his mother. Many stories have come down to us of how "the young queen" was treated by the one whom all France continued to call "the Queen." From the testimony of those intimate with the habits of the royal family come to us details of espionage, petty malice, and cold-heartedness on the part of Blanche: we could not believe these things if they came from less competent witnesses. They are not to the credit of Blanche, for they show the worst side of her nature. The confessor of Saint Louis says: "The queen mother displayed great harshness and rudeness towards Queen Marguerite. She would not permit the king to remain alone with his wife. When the king, with the two queens, went in royal progress through France, Queen Blanche commonly separated the king and the queen, and they were never lodged together. It happened once that, at the manor of Pontoise, the king was lodged in a room above the lodging of his wife. He had instructed the ushers in the anteroom that, whenever he was with the queen and Queen Blanche wished to enter his room or the queen's, they should whip the dogs to make them bark; and when the king heard this he hid from his mother." Imagine the King of France, the man whose peculiar piety won for him the name of a saint, dodging about like a guilty urchin to keep his mother from finding him in the company of his wife!

The honest old Sieur de Joinville, who feared not to tell his master when he thought him in the wrong, tells us that on one occasion, when Marguerite was very ill after the birth of a child, Louis came in to see her, fearing she was in danger of death. Blanche came in, and Louis hid himself behind the bed as well as he could, but she detected him. Taking him by the hand, she said: "Come away, for you are doing no good here." She led him out of the room. "When the queen saw that Queen Blanche was separating her from her husband, she cried out with a loud voice: 'Alas! will you let me see my husband neither in life nor in death?' And so saying she fainted away so that they thought she was dead; and the king, who thought so too, ran back to her and brought her out of her swoon." There is nothing in these stories to the credit of Blanche or of her saintly son.

Let us turn from this unpleasant picture to glance at some of the facts in the domestic economy of the royal household. The expenditures of the court were not great; the household was kept on a scale befitting its rank, but there was no vain display. Besides the queen's children there were always a number of dependents, ladies and gentlemen in waiting, etc., and the expenses for the whole establishment were kept in a common account.

Blanche de Castille loved her native land, which she never saw again after she left it to become the wife of Louis VIII., and she kept up as active relations as possible with her relatives, particularly with Queen Berengère; but she had too much good sense to flood her court with Spanish dependents and Spanish customs, and, therefore, we do not find a great number of Spaniards occupying important posts in the court. A certain number of her special attendants appear to have been Spaniards; we may note a lady in waiting called Mincia, who is often mentioned in the accounts, and who is granted money and horses for a journey into Spain. Then there are two Spaniards to whom gifts of clothing and the like are made at the time of the coronation of Queen Marguerite. But these and other Spaniards whose names one can pick out belonged to the personal suite of the queen, and had nothing to do with politics. There was nothing like the incursion of foreigners which, the people complained, Italianized France in the time of the Medicis.

Among the legitimate expenditures of the court, but rather surprising in the household of a saint, are certain sums set down for the payment of minstrels. Prince Robert of France loved to give presents to minstrels, and when he was knighted, in 1237, more than two hundred and twenty pounds went to the payment of these singers. The horses and their furnishings form no small item in the expenses, since most of the travelling had to be done on horseback, and a numerous retinue of mounted attendants must be provided. Common pack horses were not costly, but the easy-riding palfrey and the war horse ranged in price from thirty to seventy-five pounds. There were carriages and other vehicles also, though the carriages were few. The state of the roads, indeed, often precluded their use; we find Blanche de Castille excusing herself from going to Saint-Denis because the state of her health forbids her going on horseback: the roads were probably impassable; or, perhaps, it was in attempting this little journey that her carriage suffered the damages recorded in a bill of repairs of 1234, when it seems the unlucky vehicle needed new wheels. There was a carriage for _la jeune reine_ Marguerite, too, and a new one was purchased in 1239.

Aside from the money expended in the actual maintenance of her family, Blanche herself spent, and taught Louis to spend, considerable sums in charity. With the miserable economic conditions prevailing in the Middle Ages, poverty must have been far more general and far more distressing than it has ever been since those days. During Blanche's regency the kingdom had been repeatedly ravaged in the course of the wars of the nobles, and there is record of famine, notably in the southwest of the kingdom, where one chronicler asserts that in 1235 he saw a hundred bodies buried in one day in a cemetery at Limoges. On their frequent journeys throughout the country, Blanche and Louis did what could be done to alleviate the condition of the unfortunate, who gathered on the wayside in crowds. There were regular officers to allot the alms properly, and considerable sums were distributed, usually at every stage on the journey. At home, in Paris, there was a regular distribution of money and of bread, with occasional special bounties on the feasts of the Church. One special charity of Queen Blanche's deserves notice. When a girl was to be married, one of the first questions was, and still is, in France, what dower her parents could give with her; if the dower were insufficient, the poor girl ran a serious risk of not being married at all. Blanche often came to the aid of deserving girls so situated, and her gifts were not confined to her immediate attendants and their families; for example, a poor woman from Anet, a stranger to the court, received one hundred sous parisis for the marriage of her daughter; and while on her way back from Angers, Blanche met a young girl of Nogent, to whom she gave fifteen pounds for her marriage.

Blanche had always been respectful in her attitude toward the Church, and pious in her habit of life; but she was never servile in her attitude toward churchmen, whom she would no more allow to interfere with her rule than the greatest of the barons. The higher clergy, as a body, were faithful to her; but, here and there, bishops and archbishops arrogated to themselves powers not theirs, or refused to recognize the rights of the crown, whereupon Blanche did not hesitate to join issue with them. One celebrated case is that of the riots at Beauvais, in 1233, when, under Blanche's direction, Louis restored order and asserted the royal power in spite of the objections of the bishop, and continued to sustain the position taken, even after an interdict had been proclaimed in Beauvais.

During the period between her two regencies, Blanche continued to reside at the court; her jealousy of Marguerite would in part account for her preferring this to retirement to some one of the chateaux belonging to her private estate. At the time, it must be remembered, the queen of Philippe Auguste, Ingeburge, was living in this way at Orléans. Queen Blanche, indeed, enjoyed a considerable revenue from her estates, which she generally intrusted to the care of the Knights Templars, the financial agents of many a crowned head in Europe. Part of her estates she administered in person. As a further occupation, she devoted herself to various charities. In 1242 the famous abbey of Notre Dame, generally known as Maubuisson, at Pontoise, was completed, thanks to the queen's munificence and to her careful supervision. Maubuisson, with its many dependencies, its beautiful gardens and buildings, became one of the most splendid monastic institutions in France. It was frequently visited and enriched with new gifts by its foundress and her son, and noble ladies chose it as the place to take the veil. One of these ladies, Countess Alix de Macon, became abbess of another convent, Notre Dame du Lys, near Melun, founded by Blanche de Castille.

The management of her estates and the foundation of convents did not, however, monopolize the queen's time and energies; she was always the careful mother, looking out for the interests of her children, and always the queen, ready to act or to decide promptly and firmly in the affairs of the kingdom. She arranged the marriages of her sons, Robert and Alphonse. The former married, in 1237, Mahaut, daughter of the Duke of Brabant, and there were magnificent festivities at Compiègne in honor of the event, the young prince being knighted and made Count of Artois. Alphonse, betrothed to the daughter of Raymond of Toulouse, was married in 1238. The next year Blanche provided a rich and most desirable bride for her nephew, Alphonse de Portugal, who had been reared at the French court. He married the widow of Philippe Hurepel, Mahaut de Boulogne, and was a faithful vassal of France until he became King of Portugal in 1248. For each of these weddings Blanche saw that there was suitable provision in the way of new and elegant clothes and entertainments in keeping with the occasion.

In the larger world, Louis IX. still sought the counsel of his mother: "He sought her presence in his council, whenever he could have it with profit or advantage." In judicial proceedings particularly, we still find her acting in her sovereign capacity; and she continued to keep an eye upon those who had formerly been the rebel barons, her name being associated with that of Louis in various acts concerning the shifty Pierre Mauclerc. For her unfortunate cousin, Raymond of Toulouse, she still exerted her influence with the Pope to obtain some relief from the obligation which he had been forced to assume of spending five years in the Holy Land. It was at his mother's instance, too, that Louis IX. bought from the young Emperor Baldwin of Constantinople those most holy relics, the Crown of Thorns and the large portion of the true Cross, to receive which Louis built the beautiful Sainte-Chapelle. The purchase was really arranged as an excuse for contributing largely to the depleted treasury of the Christian Empire of the East, whose emperor was doubly related to Saint Louis through his father and through Blanche de Castille. The Crown of Thorns, indeed, had been in pawn to Venice. Louis and Blanche went to meet the sacred relic, which was escorted to its resting place in Paris by great crowds singing hymns and displaying every mark of the utmost reverence. For the piece of the Cross, bought three years later, in 1241, the same elaborate ceremonial was observed; and in the great procession which accompanied Saint Louis as he bore the Cross on his shoulders through the streets of Paris walked Blanche and Marguerite, barefooted.

When the Tartar hordes of Ghenghis Khan overran Poland and Hungary, the whole of Christian Europe trembled with fear and horror. If these barbarians could not be checked, and they continued to pour in resistless floods over the land, what was to become of Christendom? "What shall we do, my son?" cried Blanche; "what will become of us?" "Fear not, mother," replied the brave king; "let us trust in Heaven." And then he added that famous pun which all his biographers repeat: "If these Tartars come upon us, either we shall send them back to Tartarus, whence they came, or they will send us all to Heaven."

Out of this threatening of the Tartars grew a religious persecution, in which Blanche took a part not discreditable to her. When things went wrong in the Middle Ages, it was the fault of the weak and oppressed; if it was not the witches, it was the Jews who had brought misfortune upon the land, and who must be punished before God would be pleased again. In this case it was the Jews, who were accused of lending aid to the Tartars. The popular odium incurred by this accusation encouraged the prosecution of an investigation, ordered by Pope Gregory IX., into the doctrines of the Talmud. France appears to have been the only country where the investigation was actually made. Several Jewish rabbis were haled before the court, presided over by Blanche, to explain and answer for their books. The fairness with which Blanche presided is indeed remarkable when one remembers the severity of the common judicial procedure of the time. The chief rabbi, Yehiel, appealed to her several times against the injustice of being forced to answer certain questions, and she sustained his plea. When Yehiel complained that, whatever the court decided, he and his people could not be protected from the blind rage of the populace, Blanche replied: "Say no more of that. We are resolved to protect you, you and all your goods, and he who dares to persecute you will be held a criminal." When he protested against taking an oath demanded by his persecutors, because it was against his conscience to swear, Blanche decided: "Since it is painful to him, and since he has never taken an oath, do not insist upon it." She reproved the Christian advocates, the learned doctors of the Church, for the unseemly violence of their language, and sought in every way to maintain some sort of impartiality, or at least of decency, in the trial. If she had conducted the trial to the close, there might have been a different sentence from that which condemned the Talmud and ordered it to be committed to the flames.

It was through an agent of Blanche, apparently a burgess of Rochelle, that Saint Louis obtained most valuable and timely information in regard to the rebellious preparations of Hugues de Lusignan, Comte de la Marche. This Hugues de Lusignan was the vassal of Alphonse, brother of the king. He had always been inclined to revolt, and this inclination was not lessened by the incitement of his wife, the haughty, high-tempered Isabelle d'Angoulème, widow of King John of England. To have started as Queen of England, on an equal footing with her contemporary, Blanche de Castille, to have seen her miserable husband gradually lose his rich possessions in France, and to find herself now merely a countess and compelled to do homage to a son of her rival,--this must have been the very wormwood of bitterness for Isabelle. The secret agent of Queen Blanche writes a very elaborate account of the conduct of Isabelle and Hugues in 1242.

Hearing that Hugues had received King Louis and his brother, Alphonse, in her absence, Isabelle carried off part of her property and established herself in Angoulème. For three days she refused to admit her husband to her presence, and when he did appear she lashed him with her tongue in furious fashion: "You miserable man, did you not see how things went at Poitiers, when I had to dance attendance for three days upon your King and your Queen? When at last I was admitted to their presence, there sat the King on one side of the royal bed and the Queen on the other.... They did not summon me; they did not offer me a seat, and that on purpose to humiliate me before the court. There was I, like a miserable, despised servant, standing up in front of them in the crowd. Neither at my entry nor at my exit did they make any show of rising, in mere contempt of me and of you, too, as you ought to have had sense enough to see." After scenes of this kind in the bosom of his family it is not surprising that the unfortunate Comte de la Marche sought the more peaceful atmosphere of the camp, and engaged in a revolt against his sovereign. Louis, however, had little difficulty in bringing him to reason and obtaining another victory over England, whom the rebels had enlisted on their side. "And it was no marvel," says Joinville, writing of this campaign of Saint Louis's, "for he acted according to the advice of the good mother who was with him."

One of the severest trials in the life of this _bonne mère_ was approaching. Louis, always of a delicate constitution, had contracted a fever during the campaign against the Comte de la Marche, and the effects lingered with him until, at the close of 1244, he had a violent recurrence of the attack, accompanied by dysentery. In spite of the tender care of Blanche, his life was despaired of. He lost consciousness and, says Joinville, to whom we shall leave the telling of the story, "was in such extremity that one of the ladies watching by him wished to draw the sheet over his face, and said that he was dead. And another lady, who was on the other side of the bed, would not suffer it, but said that there was still life in him. And as He heard the discussion between these two ladies, Our Lord had compassion on him, and gave him back his health. And as soon as he could speak he demanded that they give him the Cross; and so it was done. Then the queen, his mother, heard that the power of speech had returned to him, and she showed therefore as great joy as she could. And when she knew that he had taken the Cross, as he himself told her, she showed as great grief as if she had seen him dead."

Blanche's grief was not without cause, for nothing short of the death of this well-beloved son could have caused her the pain that she must endure if he went on the crusade. Not only her age, but the knowledge that he would wish her to stay behind and guard the kingdom for him, precluded all thought of her accompanying him. It meant separation from him on whom she had all her life lavished an affection little short of idolatry. How bitterly must she have regretted encouraging that fervent piety that now led to a sacrifice, in the name of his religion, of all that the king, the son, the husband ought to hold most dear. At a time when, under the persistent efforts of his grandfather, his father, and his mother, the power of the crown had just begun to be firmly established, Louis must reverse all this policy, or rather must make use of it not to the profit of his kingdom but to that of fanatical religious ideals. Blanche was too good a politician not to understand this, and too sensible not to deplore it. Louis's duty lay in France; he had everything to lose, nothing to gain, in a crusade; though Blanche knew too well the relentless doggedness with which he would cling to what he conceived to be his duty to God, nevertheless she pleaded with him to give up the idea of going on the crusade.

The pleading of his mother and of his wife could not turn Saint Louis from his design, nor was the advice of his councillors more effective. For three years, however, other matters occupied his attention, though the preparations for his holy war were not forgotten. When these preparations began to be undertaken with more vigor a fresh attempt was made to dissuade him. The Bishop of Paris one day said to him: "Do you remember, sire, that when you received the cross, when you made suddenly and without reflection so momentous a vow, you were weak and troubled in spirit, which took from your words the weight of truth and responsibility? Now is come the time to seek release from this obligation. Our lord, the Pope, who knows the needs of your kingdom, would gladly give you a dispensation from your vow." And then he pointed out the peculiar danger of undertaking such an enterprise in the existing disturbed state of Europe. Blanche was present, watching with anxious countenance the effect of this subtle appeal. "My son, my son!" she said, "remember how sweet it is to God to see a son obedient to his mother; and never did mother give her child better counsel than I give you. You have no need to trouble yourself about the Holy Land; if you will but stay in your own land, which will prosper in your presence, we shall be able to send thither more men and more money than if your country were suffering and weakened by your absence." Louis listened silently, thought earnestly a moment, and then replied: "You say that I was not myself when I took the cross. Very well, since you so wish, I lay it aside; I give it back to you." With his own hand he took the sacred symbol from his shoulder and surrendered it to the bishop. Then, while those present had hardly recovered from their delight and astonishment, he spoke again: "Friends, now surely I am not lacking in sense, I am not weak or troubled in spirit; I demand my cross again; He Who knows all things knows that no food shall pass my lips until the cross is placed once more on my shoulder."

There was no turning aside a man of such character; the preparations for the crusade went on, and Saint Louis raised the Oriflamme at Saint-Denis on June 12, 1248. We shall not tell of the crusade or of Louis's characteristic conscientiousness in seeing, before he left, that reparation was made for every act of injustice done in his kingdom, for which purpose he sent out a commission charged with holding an inquest in all parts of France. The inevitable day of separation came, the day to which Blanche looked forward as the last upon which she would see her son. She accompanied him for the first three or four days of his journey, which lay through southern France to Aigues-Mortes, and at Corbeil she received the regency, with power to act in the government through what agents she pleased and in what way she pleased. The guardianship of his children, too, Louis left to Blanche. At Cluni came the scene of final separation; the grief of Blanche can be imagined, and words would fail to help us to a realization of its intense sincerity. Her premonition was well founded; she was not to live to see Louis again.

Once more was Blanche de Castille regent of France, a heavy burden for one who had lived a life of no easy indulgence and who was now sixty years of age. Instead of peace and rest in her declining years--perchance she had hoped to retire to her own convent of Maubuisson--she must undertake the cares of government. Truly, Saint Louis was sacrificing his mother for an ambition, albeit not a vain or selfish ambition, and whatever service he may have rendered God by killing some hundreds of Mohammedans in Egypt, there is no question about the service Blanche was rendering to him and France.

To aid Blanche in her government, and also to collect an additional force for the crusade, Louis had left in France his brother, Alphonse de Poitiers, who was of real assistance to his mother. The other sons, however, Robert d'Artois and Charles d'Anjou, had sailed with the crusaders for Egypt. Blanche's first anxiety came from Henry III., who chose this opportunity to make warlike preparations, after he had refused to renew the truce with France, and who had been besieging Saint Louis with preposterous demands for the restoration of his lost provinces. But Henry contented himself with preparations, being perhaps held in check by fear of the Church, which threatened an interdict on all England if he ventured to attack France while the king was away fighting in her behalf. Relieved of this anxiety, Blanche was free to concentrate her efforts in procuring assistance for Saint Louis. But the worldly-minded Pope Innocent IV. was so busily engaged in his contest with the Emperor Frederick II. that he had little but prayers and blessings to bestow upon the crusading king; while Frederick was either unable or unwilling to contribute more than a mere pittance. At the close of the summer of 1249, Alphonse de Poitiers embarked on his voyage to lead to his brother the considerable army he had been able to collect. This was a new separation for Blanche, and one that involved her, almost at once, in the conduct of new and rather complex political problems.

Scarcely a month after the departure of Alphonse de Poitiers, his father-in-law, Count Raymond of Toulouse, died, leaving as his only heir his daughter's husband. Blanche immediately took steps to secure to her son the succession, even before she was requested to do so by a message from him. Under the terms of the treaty of 1229, she took possession of the estates of the count, and appointed commissioners to receive the homage of the vassals on behalf of Alphonse.

Meanwhile, good news had come from Louis, who had landed in Egypt and had taken Damietta. Frequent letters passed between the queen and her son; but letters were slow in reaching their destination, and the queen was still rejoicing over the good news when Saint Louis and his army were in desperate plight. At last came the letter telling of the disastrous battle of Mansourah,--a victory in name, but as costly in its consequences as a defeat,--February 8, 1250, and of the death of the impetuous Robert d'Artois. His army was reduced by disease and incessant skirmishes with the infidels and Saint Louis himself fell sick. There was no Blanche de Castille, no tender mother, no wife there to nurse him back to health.

We have mentioned the wife of Saint Louis, and it may be as well to complete here her part in this story. She had accompanied her husband on the crusade, but had been left behind in Damietta with a strong garrison when Louis marched on to Mansourah. When the king was captured by the infidels, Marguerite lay ill in Damietta, hourly expecting the birth of her child. When the first messengers came with the news of the captivity of her husband she refused to believe them, and, it is said, had the unfortunates hanged as the bearers of false news; but there was soon no doubt that disaster had overtaken the Christian arms. Marguerite was half crazed with pain and fear; even in her sleep she fancied that the room was full of Saracens bent on killing her, and she would cry out pitifully, "Help! help!" She made an old knight, over eighty years of age, keep guard at the foot of her bed. Before the birth of her child she called this old man to her, sending everyone else from the room, and threw herself on her knees before him, begging him to grant her one boon she would ask. "Sir knight," she said, "I enjoin you, by the faith you have sworn to me, that, if the Saracens should take this town you will cut off my head before they can capture me." And the good knight, with a sternness characteristic of the age, replied that he would surely do as she bid him, for he had already resolved to kill her rather than see her become a Saracen captive.

A son was born to the queen; in memory of the misery of these days she named him Jean Tristan. On the very day of the child's birth she learned that the Genoese and Pisan sailors, and some of the garrison, were preparing to abandon Damietta. It was a serious danger; for, the fleet once gone, what chance of rescue, or even of return to France, was there for the king and his army? In the midst of her pain Marguerite acted with a promptitude and decision far greater than one could have hoped for from the rather colorless, yielding woman who had so long submitted to the domination of her mother-in-law. She sent for the ringleaders, and besought them for God's sake not to imperil the safety of the king and the whole army: "Have pity, at least, upon this poor woman, lying here in pain, and wait but till she can get up again." Then, learning that they had just cause of complaint in that they could not get food, she took the responsibility of purchasing what provisions could be had and of feeding the sailors at the king's expense. Her prompt action saved the fleet for Louis. Even as it was, Damietta had to be evacuated, as one of the conditions of his being released, and Queen Marguerite was compelled to sail for Acre before she had entirely regained her health.

Once released and safe at Acre, Saint Louis was urged to return at once to France, whither the dreadful news of his disaster had already gone to distress Blanche de Castille; but he had left a large part of his followers prisoners in the hands of the infidels, and under such circumstances it was useless to urge this truly noble monarch to consider his own wishes, or his own interests. He called a counsel of his barons, and announced to them: "I have come to the conclusion that, if I stay, my kingdom is in no danger of going to destruction, for Madame the Queen has many men to defend it with." He had good reason to rely upon _Madame la reine_, who had kept his heritage for him when he could not have kept it for himself. Sending back to France his brothers, Alphonse de Poitiers and Charles d'Anjou, Saint Louis lingered on in Syria.

Blanche continued to rule France and to make every effort to succor her son in his perilous position. The death of Frederick II., in December, 1250, gave a momentary hope of obtaining assistance from the empire or from the Pope. But this hope was soon dashed, for Innocent IV. was bent on continuing his quarrel with Frederick's successor, Conrad. Blanche, moreover, was seriously ill in the early part of 1251 so ill that the Pope wrote to discourage her from attempting to journey to Lyons to see him. "Your life," he wrote, "is the safeguard of so many people that you should use every endeavor and take every care to preserve or to recover the health which means so much to all." With all the benedictions and affectionate solicitude contained in this letter, the Pope was not disposed to give material assistance to Saint Louis. On the contrary, he ordered the preaching of a crusade, even in Brabant and Flanders, against the Christian emperor who was his political rival, and promised greater rewards to those who would engage in it than to those who were fighting the infidels. Blanche called a council of her vassals, who broke forth in violent wrath against the selfish and un-Christian conduct of the head of the Church. No doubt Blanche shared their resentment, and it is even reported that she ordered the confiscation of the goods of those who ventured to engage in the Pope's crusade against the emperor, saying: "Let those who are fighting for the Pope be maintained by the Pope, and go to return no more."

While the affairs of the Church were in this state a new and dangerous movement of the common people, a movement half religious in nature, came to disturb France. A strange man, of wonderful eloquence, and exercising a powerful influence upon the peasantry, made his appearance in northern France. In a few weeks he had gathered veritable armies of the peasants, the _pastoureaux_, as they were called, who marched about the country after their mysterious leader, known only by the name of "the Master of Hungary," proclaiming that they would go to the aid of their good king. At first they committed no damage, but, growing bolder and becoming contaminated by a certain mixture of the more dangerous elements of the population, they began to manifest a peculiar unfriendliness toward priests, and soon passed to actual acts of violence. The Master of Hungary arrogated to himself powers almost miraculous, and the people believed in him. At Amiens, the first large town entered by the Pastoureaux, people sought out this man and knelt before him as if he had been a holy personage. But the priests circulated all sorts of stories about him: he was a magician in league with the devil; he was an apostate Christian, an infidel, nay, an emissary of the sultan of Egypt, charged with delivering into the hands of the Saracens a host of Christian prisoners. But, impostor or no impostor, the people had faith in him, and it was in vain for the priests to repeat or to concoct tales of his being an infidel: the very people of the most Christian nation in Europe were sullenly murmuring against Christ Himself. When the begging friars asked for alms the people snarled a refusal at them and, calling the first poor person in sight, gave alms, saying: "Take that; in the name of Mohammed, who is greater than Christ."

The Master of Hungary and his satellites, preaching against the clergy and inciting to acts of violence, performing all the functions of priests and even claiming to perform miracles, advanced with their hordes of ignorant or vicious followers to Paris. What attitude would Blanche take? She had always had a heart to feel for the woes of the common people, and she well knew that the priests were not by any means always the friends of the poor, for she was not so blinded by religiosity as to think that the clerical habit alone could make a mere man something more than a man. At this particular time, too, she had reason to feel vexed with the clergy; was it not the Church itself that was most niggardly of funds to carry on the war in defence of the holy places? She was far too sensible a woman to look for any material help from this rabble which vowed to go to the rescue of the good king; but she was not disposed to interfere with them until she had definite proof of their wrongdoing. One can but suspect that she did not credit all that the priests reported to her of them; she herself had known and in some ways liked Raymond of Toulouse, whom the priests made out an arch fiend.

When the Pastoureaux approached Paris, therefore, she gave orders that they should not be interfered with. Sending for the Master of Hungary, she treated him with respect, asked him questions, and sent him back with some presents. The man lost his head with vainglory at this reception. Returning to his followers he announced that he had so thoroughly enchanted the queen and her people that she would approve of anything they did, and that they might kill priests with impunity. In episcopal robes, the mitre on his head, he preached in the church of St. Eustace. Riots were precipitated by his followers, and the vast army moved on to the south, growing more and more outrageous every day. Blanche saw that it was time to act; she had made a mistake in supposing these people to be harmless, misguided peasants or religious enthusiasts. Orders were given to pursue and exterminate them. Scattered bands were overtaken here and there and dispersed, and the leaders were summarily hanged. But the final catastrophe was to take place at or near Bourges. The Pastoureaux having entered this town, engaged in looting and rapine, and the royal officers, thinking to confine them in the town, shut the gates; but the Pastoureaux broke these down, and poured out of the town, pursued by the enraged citizens. They were overtaken and brought to bay, and a veritable massacre, rather than a battle, ensued, for most of the Pastoureaux were poorly armed. The Master of Hungary was slain and torn in pieces, while his forces were dispersed. In a few weeks the country was quiet again. Only a few of the Pastoureaux really received the cross from those who had proper authority to give it, and went to the aid of Saint Louis.

During these years we find Queen Blanche acting very frequently in a judicial capacity, presiding over the court of Parliament and over the council; she seems to have continued to take an active part in all the affairs of her government. And, strange to say, we do not find the name of any one counsellor exalted above the others, as a greater favorite or as more relied on by the queen; she has her ministers, but so little part do they seem to play that France is really ruled by the queen, not by the ministers. We comment upon this because it is remarkable, especially when we remember that, even with great kings, the names of the ministers are not often utterly obscured.

The most interesting of the queen's activities at this time are those connected with the Church; there are numberless little quarrels in which she had to intervene and hold out for the rights of the crown, but the two examples that follow will suffice to show the sort of thing with which she had to contend. The clergy of France had accorded to Saint Louis a tax of one-tenth on their property, in view' of his crusade. Though this tax had been long due, the Abbey of Cluni, one of the richest and one of the most favored by the royal family, allowed month after month to elapse without making any move to pay. At length, in the early part of 1252, while the abbot was away in England, the royal bailli of Ma'am seized the chateau of Lourdon, belonging to the Abbey of Cluni. There was a tremendous uproar in the clerical camp; the Pope himself wrote to protest against this outrage upon the servants of God, and demanded of Blanche the restitution of the sequestered chateau. At the same time he instructed the Archbishop of Bourges to launch an interdict against all those who continued to hold, to guard, or to inhabit the chateau of Lourdon, with special exception of the queen and her family. Blanche had not, it appears, given the bailli any orders with regard to the collection of the tax, but, since he had acted, she sustained him; there was no persuading her to return the property of the abbey until the abbot had satisfied her just claims. The Pope and the abbot were compelled to accept defeat for the present; but after Blanche was dead a claim was made for indemnity, which we can only hope Saint Louis did not grant.

Another instance in which Blanche intervened is even more to her credit, since it was pure humanity, not the jealous safeguarding of the rights of the crown, that moved her. The inhabitants of the villages of Orly, Chatenay, and some others were serfs of the canons of Notre Dame. Being unable to pay some tax imposed by their masters, the men of the villages--we mean not a few, but _all_ the able-bodied men--were seized and imprisoned in the chapter house. The horrors of the Black Hole of Calcutta have been made familiar to all English readers; there are few who realize that jails as horrible, and jailers as inhuman, were not infrequent in many a period of the world's history. The condition of the prisons of France when the courageous and devoted philanthropist John Howard visited them, at the close of the eighteenth century, was such as to beggar description: how much worse must have been a prison of the thirteenth century! The unfortunate peasants, with insufficient food, water, and air, were so crowded in the prison that several of them died. News of the affair coming to Queen Blanche, she humbly prayed the canons to release their victims, and said that she would investigate the matter. The canons replied that it was none of her affair, that she should not meddle with their serfs, "whom they could take and kill and do such justice on as seemed good to them." To emphasize these rights and to revenge themselves upon the talebearers who had reported to Queen Blanche, they seized the wives and children of their prisoners, and thrust them into the same overcrowded prison. The suffering was, of course, intensified; many of the miserable wretches died. The historian tells us that Blanche "felt great pity for the people, so tormented by those whose duty it was to protect them." We do not need to be told that; but Blanche was not of the milk-and-water kind that would have wasted time in _fainéant_ compassion when there was suffering which her activity could relieve. She summoned a body of knights and citizens, gave them arms, marched straight to the prison, and ordered the doors to be broken down, herself striking the first blow, that all might see that she was not afraid to assume the responsibility for the act. Nor did her beneficent activity cease with the release of the prisoners; for she was determined that there should be no repetition of such tyranny if she could help it. She took the serfs under her special protection and confiscated the goods of the chapter of Notre Dame, which she held until such time as full satisfaction had been rendered. The serfs were enfranchised in consideration of an annual tax. But so far was she from wishing to wrong the canons, or even to interfere with their rights, if they had any, that she ordered the bishops of Paris, Orléans, and Auxerre to hold a special investigation to determine whether or not the people of Orly had owed the tax. With a woman of her character the canons vainly resorted to their favorite threat of excommunication. If they had excommunicated her, she would, in the light of history at least, have been given an absolution more purifying than any they could offer.

For the common people the great queen had always a tender heart. It was a rough and cruel age, especially for those in bondage. "And since this Queen," says an anonymous chronicler, "had great pity for such as were serfs, she ordered, in several places, that they be set free in consideration of the payment of some other dues. This she did partly because of the pity she felt for the girls in this condition, because people would not marry them, and many of them went to ruin thereby."

The last days of Blanche de Castille were drawing to a close amid sad and fruitless longing to see her son. Her health was failing; one after another of those dear to her fell ill or passed away; the dearest of all lingered in the Holy Land, leading a forlorn hope and deaf to the entreaties of his mother that he would return. She was at Melun when, in November, 1252, she became so ill that she hastened to return to Paris. She put her affairs in order and left instructions that those whom she had unwittingly wronged should be indemnified out of her private fortune. All worldly thoughts were now put aside, and she summoned the Bishop of Paris, took the Holy Communion, and was admitted, by the prelate's decree, into the Cistercian order, becoming a nun of her Abbey of Maubuisson. Clothed in the simple garments of the sisterhood, the noble queen passed, not many days later, from the scene of her useful labors, murmuring in her last moments the words of the prayer for those in extremis: _Subvenite, saticti Dei_.

It was on November 26th or 27th, in her sixty-fourth year, that Blanche died. Over her nun's habit they placed her royal robes, and on her head the crown; thus clothed, and placed upon a bier ornamented with gold, she was borne by her sons and the great nobles through the streets of Paris to the Abbey of Saint-Denis. The next day, after a mass for the dead, the body was carried in procession to Maubuisson, where another service was held. Here, in the choir of the chapel, the body of the queen was buried, and a tomb, bearing her effigy in nun's habit, was erected. The other convent founded by her wished to have the honor of guarding her heart, which, in March of the following year, was taken to Notre Dame du Lys by the abbess, Countess Alix de Macon.

Let us pause awhile by the tomb before we attempt to review the character of Blanche de Castille; and meanwhile we may see how the news of her death was received by Saint Louis. He was at Jaffa when, after a long delay, the intelligence reached him. At the very first ominous words of the papal legate who had come to break the tidings to him Saint Louis gave way to uncontrollable emotion. Consolation was unavailing; even the clergy seemed to realize that it would have been but an impertinent aggravation; and for two days no one ventured to speak to him. Then, rousing himself from the depths of his grief, he sent for that best and sturdiest of his friends, the fearless, honest, blunt Sire de Joinville, Seneschal of Champagne, who leaves us an account of what followed. When Joinville came into the presence, the king rose, and, stretching out his arms to him, cried in simple grief: "Ah! Seneschal! I have lost my mother!" Joinville replied: "Sire, I do not marvel at it, for she had to die; but I do marvel that you, a wise man, should mourn so deeply; you know that in the words of Wisdom it is said that, whatever grief a man have at his heart, none of it should be seen in his countenance; for he who does so (_i. e._, shows his grief) rejoices the heart of his enemies and brings sorrow to his friends." As all consolation would have been inadequate to the magnitude of the loss, we do not know that anyone could have spoken better than Joinville. The Seneschal continues: "Madame Marie de Vertus, a very good and pious woman, came to tell me that Queen Marguerite, who had rejoined the king a little before, was in great grief, and prayed me to go to her and comfort her. When I arrived I saw that she was weeping, and I said to her that he spoke truth who maintained that one ought not to believe women; for she who is dead was the person in the world whom you most hated, and yet you display such grief for her. And she told me that it was not for the Queen that she wept, but for the suffering and the grief of the King, and for her little daughter, now left in the care of men."

There is no quality more to be admired in one who attempts to write a life of some great man or woman than fearless frankness; the passages we have given are characteristic of the _Vie de Saint Louis_, by the Sire de Joinville, whose straightforward bluntness of speech is an amusing but also a valuable quality. We shall keep Joinville in mind while concluding, in brief, the story of Saint Louis's return and of the subsequent career of Marguerite.

More than a year of misery and futile battling intervened between the time when the news of his mother's death reached Louis and the time when he set sail for France. There was no hope of succor from Europe: there was no Queen Blanche to husband the resources of France that her son might continue his fight for the faith. On April 25, 1254, Saint Louis, accompanied by Marguerite, their little son Jean Tristan, and the remnant of the crusaders, embarked at Acre. The sea was rough, and when they were off the coast of Cyprus the vessel bearing the royal family ran on a sand bank. The nurses rushed frantically to arouse the queen, and asked her what they should do with the children. Marguerite, thinking all would be lost in the violence of the storm, said: "Neither waken them nor move them; let them go to God in their sleep." Saint Louis, urged to transfer himself and his family into another vessel, refused to do so, resolving to take the risk with those who had to remain and might be forced to land in Cyprus: "If I leave this vessel, there are on it five hundred men, each one of whom loves his life as much as I love mine, and who may have to stay in this island, and they may never return to their own country. That is why I had rather place in the hands of God my person, my wife, and my children, than cause such great suffering to the many people in this ship."

Joinville narrates another accident during this voyage, one which will recall the instructions for extinguishing one's candle given in a previous chapter. It seems that one of the queen's ladies, having undressed her, carelessly threw over the little iron lantern in which the candle was burning an end of the cloth she had used to wrap up the queen's head. The cloth caught fire, and in its turn set fire to the bedding, which was all ablaze when the queen awoke. Jumping out of bed _toute nue_, she seized the blazing stuff and threw it overboard, and put out the little fire which had started in the wood of the bed. The cry of fire arose, however, and Joinville tells us that he went to keep the sailors quiet, and later asked Marguerite to go to the king, who had been disturbed and excited by the noise.

We hear little more of Marguerite after this crusade. In spite of his affection and respect for her, and in spite of his gratitude for her conduct during his first crusade, Saint Louis did not think his wife capable of playing the rôle of Blanche de Castille, to which some say she unwisely aspired. When he was preparing for his second crusade, in 1270, he not only did not leave her the regency, although she was to remain in France, but he took unusual care to regulate her expenditures and to hedge about her prerogatives. He forbade her to receive any presents for herself or her children, to meddle with the administration of justice, or to choose any person for her service without the consent of the council of regents. That his precautions were not altogether without excuse, we see when we learn that Marguerite was already thinking about securing her position, in case of her husband's death, by making her son Philippe promise under oath that he would remain in tutelage until he was thirty years of age; that he would take no councillor without her approval; that he would inform her of all designs hostile to her influence; that he would make no treaty with his uncle, Charles d'Anjou; and that he would keep these engagements secret. The young Philippe had himself absolved from his oath by the Pope. The ambition of Marguerite, however, died with the husband whom she had loved and whom all Europe mourned. The good King Louis is a figure so heroic in some of its aspects that one must pause and take thought before venturing on any criticism: his motives cannot be impugned, and it were an ungrateful task to find fault with his deeds in any particular.

Marguerite lived on long after her husband in the convent she had founded in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel, which she gave to the nuns in perpetuity, reserving only a life interest for her daughter, Blanche. It was here that she was living when she had the joy of hearing proclaimed the canonization of Louis IX., the saintly King of France. This was just before her death in 1295.

There are figures in history which have become woefully distorted in the disfiguring mists of centuries, and others which have been not less wronged by prejudice, partisanship, or conscious or unconscious misrepresentation. These--at least some of these--have been in part indemnified and set right before the world: Louis XI. in France, and his contemporary Richard III. in England; Cleopatra, Catherine de Medici, Mary of England, all these and a host of others, we are told now and then, have been misunderstood by the world; nay, in this century of universal charity, this century which is undertaking the task of righting all the wrongs accumulated from the past, one can find apologists for the enemy of mankind himself. The moral of this homily is--it may be apparent to some of my readers--that if you are either very good or very bad you get much talked about in history: there will be some to defend you no matter how bad you are, and some to denounce you no matter how good you are. But if you simply do your duty, without fear and without advertisement, little will be said of you; history, at least in traditions still partly ruling, does not dignify with the epithet "great" the steady day-laborers who go about their task and complete it in silence. This, I would imply, is partly the reason why Blanche de Castille has never been heralded as great, and why her work in the upbuilding of the French monarchy is taken as a matter of course, and not praised like, for example, the more brilliant exploits of the "Grande Monarque" who was to do so much to undermine the power of that monarchy.

The fame of the mother is eclipsed by the peculiar glory of the son; but would it not be fair to ask how much of the excellence of Louis the man, how much of the glory of Louis the king, was due to Blanche de Castille? It cannot be questioned that she found France in a condition most perilous, threatened with the loss of all that two reigns had won for the royal power. A glance at the history of her career will show that she not only averted this danger, but that the crown was stronger when she began to relinquish her authority than it had been under Louis VIII. She reduced her rebellious vassals to submission; she more than held her own against England; she ended the war against Raymond of Toulouse, and reserved for France the control, immediate or ultimate, of the greater part of his dominions; and these things she accomplished, not merely by force, but by wise and patient policy. Louis IX. owed his crown to Blanche's care as regent; it is not improbable that he owed her as much during the years when he himself was on the throne and she but a counsellor. History is silent on many points in this connection, but it might be noted that it was through disregard of her earnest advice that he entered on the crusade which resulted so disastrously. She knew that, even if it had been successful from the point of view of the Church, it could but be dangerous, perhaps even ruinous, for France. This is one case in which we know Saint Louis rejected his mother's guidance, and what came of it is matter of history; might there not be many another act of his, more successful in its issue, for which the credit should go to Blanche?

As a queen, Blanche de Castille was more than capable; it is only the absence of great battles, great social, religious, and economic movements, during her ascendency, that hinders our calling her, without reservation, a great queen. When we look at Blanche the woman, we are confronted with a like difficulty. Shall we say she was a saint? Her son, the son whom she bore, whom she reared with unexampled care, whom she watched over all her life, has been called a saint, and there is no one to say him nay. Shall we say that the mother of a saint is, _ex officio_, or even by courtesy, also a saint? We cannot claim sanctity for Queen Blanche: there was in her a touch of the temper of her grand-mother, Eleanor of Guienne of wicked memory, or mayhap a trace of the Plantagenet. It is interesting to note that the best qualities of the vigorous Henry II. tempered the woman's nature of this daughter of Spain and gave her the stamina, the unconquerable spirit, which alone could save her. This Plantagenet temper is under excellent control in Queen Blanche; so excellent, indeed, that under some circumstances she seems cold. She is not cold, she is cool, a very different thing; no danger, no excitement, no sudden gust of resentment at an insult, can make her lose her head and act rashly. She is a thorough politician, making her feelings, her emotions, subservient to her will, and even, as we have hinted, playing the lover for the sake of controlling an amorous and uncertain vassal. Danger nerves her to action, and she acts with promptitude and firmness. At the defects in her character we have already hinted in part; the fundamental one, when we consider Blanche the woman, was her love of power. Ambitious she was; and yet, when we say this, we must not forget that she sought power not for herself, but for her son. How quietly she relinquishes her authority, and how ready she is, even when that authority is at its height, to tell Thibaud de Champagne that he owes his preservation to "the great goodness of my son, the King, who came to your aid"! But it was her jealousy of Marguerite de Provence that was the great blemish on Blanche's character. It was a meanness unworthy of a nature so generous and so faithful; we can attempt no defence, we can only express regret. Her personality exerted a powerful influence over those with whom she came in contact, and from all the best men of her time she received due meed of praise. Compare her with other women of her day, and there is none who can be placed beside Blanche _la bonne reine_, or Blanche _la bonne mère_.