A Distant Mirror (82 page)

The central problem of financing government was recognized in a series of ordinances dealing with financial and judicial reforms. Cancellation of the University’s tax-exemption was one measure attempted by Rivière and Mercier with no good result, for it earned them the powerful enmity of the University to add to that of the Dukes.

At the same time in England, a more lethal drama of King against uncles and other opponents was taking place. The central figure was Philippa de Coucy’s husband, Robert de Vere, ninth Earl of Oxford, King Richard’s closest adviser and friend. Brought to court as a boy by virtue of his marriage to Philippa, Oxford gained a dominant influence over Richard, who was five years his junior and fatherless. He “managed the King as he pleased,” and “if he had said black was white, Richard would not have contradicted him.… By him everything was done and without him nothing done.”

The King at 21, slender, yellow-haired, pale-faced, with a skin that flushed easily, was “abrupt and stammering in his speech,” over-splendid in dress, averse to war, ill-tempered with his domestics, arrogant and capricious. His Plantagenet pride, combined with Oxford’s influence, shaped an erratic and willful sovereign who levied extortionate taxes to pay for his luxuries. Before his downfall, which finished off the Plantagenets, he invented the handkerchief, recorded in his household rolls as “little pieces [of cloth] made for giving to the lord King for carrying in his hand to wipe and clean his nose.”

Government by favorite leans toward the arbitrary exercise of power, which in any case was Richard’s natural tendency. He had made Oxford a Knight of the Garter and, at 21, a member of the Privy Council, and showered on him a stream of endowments—lands, castles, wardships, lordships, revenues—and a hereditary sheriffdom belonging to Buckingham’s wife’s family. This was unwise, but if autocrats always acted wisely they would not furnish history with moral lessons. The ruthless Buckingham, now Duke of Gloucester, did not need extra provocation to hate his nephew, whom he despised for his reluctance to pursue the war. Attracting the enemies of Oxford, Gloucester became
the focus of the oppositionist party bent on curbing the power of the King’s favorite.

The struggle reached a peak when Richard, on the occasion of a rebellion in Ireland, created for Oxford the unprecedented title of Marquis of Dublin and subsequently Duke of Ireland with precedence over all the earls. He was given regal powers to crush the rebellion, but instead of going to Ireland, which would at least have given the nobles the satisfaction of removing him from the scene, Oxford was smitten by love for a Bohemian lady-in-waiting of Richard’s Queen. Such was his passion that he determined to divorce Philippa in order to marry the Bohemian lady, thus infuriating Philippa’s royal uncles, the Dukes of Lancaster, Gloucester, and York. Despite the insult to the royal family, Richard was too hypnotized by Oxford to do other than “improperly and sinfully consent” to, and even assist in, his own cousin’s repudiation. Oxford submitted to Rome an appeal for divorce based on “false testimony,” Richard entreated Pope Urban for favorable consideration, and the Pope felt no compunction in complying since Philippa was of Clementist lineage.

Oxford’s treatment of his wife was said by Froissart to be “the principal thing that took away his honor.” Even his mother joined in the general condemnation and showed it by taking Philippa to live with her. Probably it was the fact of Philippa’s royal blood and Oxford’s personal unpopularity rather than moral indignation that excited all the disapproval. Although marriage was a sacrament, divorce was frequent and, given the right strings to pull, easily obtained. In
Piers Plowman
all lawyers are said to “make and unmake matrimony for money,” and preachers complained that a man might get rid of his wife by giving the judge a fur cloak. In theory, divorce did not exist, yet marriage litigation filled the courts of the Middle Ages. Regardless of theory, divorce was a fact of life, a permanent element in the great disharmony between medieval theory and practice.

A formal appeal against Oxford and four other councillors of the King’s party was presented in November 1387 by a group of lords known by virtue of their action as the Lords Appellant. When they appointed a Commission of Government headed by Gloucester with powers as Regent, Richard and Oxford gathered an army to assert the King’s sovereignty by force of arms. The conflict came to a head in the so-called Battle of Radcot Bridge: facing superior forces, Oxford escaped by leaping into the river on horseback, after discarding part of his armor, and galloping away on the far side into the dusk. He took ship for Flanders, where he had taken the precaution to deposit large sums with Lombard bankers at Bruges.

A month later, in February 1388, the lords in a session known as the Merciless Parliament brought charges of treason against Oxford and the Chancellor, Michael de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, who had also escaped. They were charged with conspiring to control the King, exclude his proper councillors, murder the Duke of Gloucester, impoverish the crown by grants to themselves and their relatives, override Parliament, and return Calais to the French King in exchange for aid against their domestic opponents. The Parliament sentenced Oxford and Suffolk in absentia to be hanged as traitors. Three others who had not escaped—the Chief Justice, the Mayor of London, and Richard’s former tutor, Sir Simon Burley—were executed. Richard remained, humiliated and robbed of the friend he was never to see again. To abase a King and leave him on the throne has its dangers. Richard was to have his revenge.

Against Coucy’s fierce opposition, Oxford was invited to France in 1388 on the grounds that it would be advantageous to obtain information from him about the quarrels in England. It may be, too, that Oxford had indeed made overtures about Calais. Although Coucy “hated him with all his heart,” he was forced to acquiesce. Oxford came, was received at court and well entertained, but Coucy did not rest until, with the support of Clisson, Rivière, and Mercier, he prevailed upon the King to expel the dishonorer of his daughter from France. A residence was found for Oxford in Brabant, where, in 1392, he was killed in a boar hunt at the age of thirty. King Richard had his body brought back for reburial in England, and in an ornate if lonely ceremony, gazed mournfully upon the embalmed face and placed a ring on the dead finger of the great troublemaker. Meanwhile, the divorce having been annulled, Philippa remained the legal Countess of Oxford.

A royal grant made to Coucy at this time testified to the scars left by plague and war over the last decades. In November 1388 he was appointed
Grand Bouteiller (Grand Butler) of France, the equivalent of chief seneschal or domestic steward to the crown. At the same time he was granted the privilege of holding two annual fairs of three days each, with the sale of all merchandise exempted from taxes. The language of the grant states that the town of Coucy had three times suffered “the fires of mischief, which occurred in the said town because of lack of laborers who died during the great mortality. And also owing to preceding wars, the inhabitants and community of the said town, castle and lands of Coucy were so impoverished, diminished and
reduced in people, houses, manors, rents, revenues and all other goods and chattels, that the said town was in danger of becoming deserted and uninhabitable, and the vines, fields and other husbandries going to waste.”

The intent of the grant, which followed a survey of the barony at the time of the King’s visit to Coucy the year before, was clearly designed, in the royal interest as much as in Coucy’s, to restore the health of a crucial domain. The barony is described by the grant as the “key and frontier” of the kingdom with borders reaching to Flanders and the Empire, and the castle as “one of the most notable and beautiful of the realm.” By the “deserting and uninhabiting of the said town and castle, if that should happen, many great perils, damages and irreparable inconveniences could issue.” The fact that the grant followed immediately upon the transfer of power to the group dominated by the Marmosets, Clisson, and Coucy himself, was certainly no coincidence.

From this time on, Coucy served as first Lay President of the Chambre des Comptes, a post associated with the office of Bouteiller, which originally had charge of the royal revenues and accounts. While he does not seem to have collected wages for the office, he continued to receive an annual pension from the crown. His domain, greatly enlarged by his many acquisitions, and now comprising 150 towns and villages, was apparently extensive enough to surmount the declining fortunes of lesser landowners.

Picardy, his native region, so often in the path of invasion, was “beaten and chastised,” wrote Mézières, himself a Picard, “and today no longer flourishes.” From places reduced to misery, the last peasants fled to other regions so that “at present,” according to a
complaint of 1388, “laborers cannot be found to work or cultivate the land.” The marks of a century of woe—lowered population, dwindling commerce, deserted villages, ruined abbeys—were everywhere in France, and cause enough for the climate of pessimism. Certain communes in Normandy were reduced to two or three hearths; in the diocese of Bayeux several towns had been abandoned since 1370, likewise several parishes of Brittany. The commerce of Châlons on the Marne was reduced from 30,000 pieces of cloth a year to 800. In the region of Paris, according to an ordinance of 1388, “many notable and ancient highways, bridges, lanes, and roads” had been left to decay—gutted by streams, overgrown by hedges, brambles, and trees, and some, having become impassable, abandoned altogether. The same examples could be multiplied for the south.

The schism had caused physical as well as spiritual damage, as when a Benedictine abbey, already twice burned by the companies, was cut
off from the revenue of its estates in Flanders and spent so much money on lawyers in various disputes that the Pope was obliged to reduce its tax from 200 livres to 40 for a period of 25 years. Other abbeys, robbed by the companies or depopulated by the plague, fell into indiscipline and disorder, and in some cases into disuse, their lands reverting to waste. Decreased revenue and rising costs impoverished many landowners, causing them to exact new fees and invent new kinds of taxes to impose on their tenants. When this hastened flight from the land, the nobles tried to prevent it by confiscating goods and by other penalties that increased the peasants’ hostility.

Gathered together, the facts of decay convey too solid an impression. In real life every age is a checkerboard of light and dark. At the turn of the century the renowned Spanish knight Don Pero Niño, on a visit to France, left a picture of noble life as enchanted and bucolic in reality as it was often represented to be in tapestries and Books of Hours. The castle of Serifontaine, which he visited, was situated on the banks of a river in Normandy and furnished as richly “as if it had been in the city of Paris.” Around it were orchards and gracious gardens, and a walled fishpond from which each day, by opening the conduits, enough fish could be taken to serve 300 people. The elderly and ailing but complaisant host, Reynaud de Trie, Vienne’s successor as Admiral of France, possessed forty or fifty hounds, twenty horses of all kinds for his personal use, forests full of game great and small, falcons for hunting by the river, and for a wife, “the most beautiful lady then in France.” She appears to have been remarkably privileged.

This lady “had her own noble dwelling apart from that of the Admiral,” though connected by a drawbridge, and was attended by ten noble and richly dressed damsels who had no duties but to entertain themselves and their lady, for she had many serving maids as well. In the morning she and her damsels went to a grove, each with her Book of Hours and rosary, and said their prayers seated apart from each other and not conversing until they had finished. Returning to the castle, picking violets and other flowers as they went, they heard low mass in the chapel, after which they ate roasted larks and chicken from a silver plate accompanied by wine. Then, on finely saddled horses, together with knights and squires they rode in the country, where they made chaplets of flowers and sang “lays, virelays, roundelays, complaints, ballads and songs of all kinds which the French compose,” harmonizing in voices “diverse and well-attuned.”

At the elaborate main meal of the day in the castle hall, each gentleman sat beside a lady, and “any man who with due measure and courtesy could speak of arms and love was sure … that he would be
heard and answered as his desire would have it.” Minstrels played during the meal and for dancing by the knights and ladies afterward, which lasted for an hour and ended with a kiss. Spices and wine were served followed by a siesta, after which the company rose for heron-hunting with falcons by the river. There “you would have seen great sport, dogs swimming, drums beating, lures waving, and ladies and gentlemen enjoying delight beyond description.” Dismounting in a meadow, they were served cold partridges and fruits and, while they ate and drank, made chaplets of greenery and returned to the castle singing.

At nightfall they had supper, played bowls or danced by torchlight “far into the night,” or sometimes the Dame, perhaps bored by the cycle of pleasure, “went to seek distraction afoot in the country.” After more fruits and wine, the company went to bed. In the decline of Rome, too, there must have been pockets of wealth and delight and serene days where trouble never penetrated.

Paris was another matter. Deschamps describes a raucous evening’s entertainment, at an unspecified date, which began with dinner at Berry’s residence, the Hôtel de Nesle, and moved on to a dice game in a tavern. The guests were Coucy and the three Dukes—Berry, Burgundy, and Bourbon—as well as “several good Lombards,” and knights and squires, whose drinking and gaming in low-class surroundings inspired the poet to a lengthy if torpid tract against gambling.

Unhappily, Coucy figures also in a more spirited lament on the subject of baldness, in which Deschamps pleads for the return of head-coverings at court to spare the feelings of the bald, among whom he names himself and twelve great lords, including the Sire de Coucy. That baldness should be the only specific detail of his physical appearance to reach posterity is a sad trick of history, even if he was in good company. The Count de St. Pol, the Sire de Hangest, Guillaume de Bordes, bearer of the Oriflamme at Bourbourg, and other great knights and distinguished servitors of the late King were among the “skinheads.” Less fortunate were the
cheveux reboursés—
that is, those with little hair who carried combs and mirrors to keep their few strands combed over the bald spot. What is puzzling is that uncovered heads, a sign of shame, could have at any time become a fad—unless they were adopted as a kind of anti-chic by the dandies of the time in their craving, complained of by the preacher John Bromyard, “to devise some new piece of foppery to make men gaze at them in wonderment anew.”