The Strangled Queen (9 page)

Tempers were rising; the discussion had become a paying off of old scores.

"ln any case, Monseigneur," replied Marigny, "it would
make
more sense not to
put
the cart before the horse. We may consider, all the princesses on earth for the King. I can well, understand his impatience. But we have first to get him unmarrie
d from his present wife... The
Count of Artois appears not to have brought
back the answers you expected from Chateau-Gaillard,
he con
tinued , in order to show that he was well informed. "The first requirement for an annulment is
a
Pope
."

"The Pope; you have been promising us, for the last six months, Marigny, has not yet materialised out of this phantom conclave. Yo
ur envoys have so successfully
bullied and defenestrated the cardinals at Car
pentras
that raising
their soutanes, they
have fl
ed
across country and can no longer be found. - You have little reason
to think it a stroke of genius! Had you shown greater moderation, and that respec
t due to the ministers
of God, which is so alien to you, we would not be in our present difficulty.

Up till now I have succeeded in
preventing the election of a Pope who would be
the c
reature of the King of Naples,
because King Philip particularly wished
that there should be one useful
to
France."

Men who love power are not only dominated, as is generally supposed, by an appetite for wealth and honours. Above all, they are
influenced, by an objective taste for
the
creation of events, for
controlling their
occurrence for acting upon the
world with
effectiveness, and for being always in the right. Wealth and
honours are no more than the signs and tools of their influence.

Marigny, and Valois were both men of this particular, stamp and, in Council, the successful man from the middle classes had nearly always won the day over the Prince of the Blood. Only Philip the Fair had succeeded in keeping; these two adversaries at arm's length, using the political understanding of the, one and the military ability of the other to the best advantage.

Louis X was completely submerged by the storm; the argument was going much too
rapidly
for him, and
he was unable to forget certain
painful memories of the previous night.

Monseigneur of Evreux intervened in an endeavour to quiet their tempers, and brought forward a formula which might conciliate the two positions.

"If, in exchange for a marriage with the Princess Clemence, we
obtained from
the King of Naples an agreement that the Pope should be French," he proposed, "and elected
with
all speed ..."

"Certainly, Monseigneur," said Marigny more calmly, "such an agreement would have certain benefits; but I very much doubt whether we can get it."

"Nevertheless, let us send an embassy to Naples if that be the King's wish."

"Most assuredly, Monseigneur."

"Bouville, what do you advise?" said The Hutin suddenly, in order to give an appearance of continuing the discussion in hand.

Fat Bouville
started. He had made an excellent Chamberlain, overseeing the expenditure and managing the household with precision, but his mind was not capable of any great flights. Philip the Fair hardly ever spoke to him in Council except to order him to open, the windows.

"Sire," he said, "you are seeking a wife from a noble family; they maintain all the old traditions of chivalry. We sho
uld be honoured to serve such a Queen
.
"

He stopped, interrupted by a glance from Marigny which seemed' to say, "You are betraying me, Bouville!

Hugues de
Bouville, a Norman like Marigny, was five years the elder. It was in his household, as an equ
erry, that Marigny had begun
his career. The equerry had not been slow to surpass his lord, but had always faithfully dragged his old master after him in his extraordinary rise.

Fat Bouville lowered his head. He was so devoted a servant of the crown and so dazzled by royal majesty that, when the King spoke to
him, he could not but approve.
That The Hutin was an idiot was not apparent to him; he was The King and Bouville was prepared to lavish upon him all the zeal that he had shown towards Philip the Fair.

This servility re
ceived its immediate recompense for t
he
Hutin decided, to everyone's surprise, that Bouville should be sent to Naples.

Moreover, there was no opposition. The Count of Valois, believing that he could arrange everything by letter, thought that a mediocre but tractable man was exactly the ambassador he required. While Marigny thought, "All right, send him then. He has as much cunning as a child
of three. You'll see what the
results will be."

So, blushing, the good servant found himself charged with an important
mission he had never expected.

"Don't forget, Bouville, that I must have a Pope," said the young King.

"Sire, I shall have no other idea in my mind."

Louis X was impatient for his departure. He wished his messenger alrea
dy upon the road:, He suddenly
seemed to gain authority."

"On your way back you will pass through Avignon," he went on. "You will do your best to hasten the conclave. And since the cardinals, so it appears, are to b
e bought, you will get Messire
de Marigny to furnish you with sufficient gold."

"Where shall I find the gold, Sire?" asked the latter.

"Good God, in the Treasury of course!

"The Treasury is empty, Sire, that is to say there is enough in it only to cover the necessary expenses between now and the Feast of Saint Nicholas, no more."

"What do you mean, the Treasury is empty," cried Valois. "Why haven't you told us this before?"

"I wished to begin with it, Monseigneur, but you prevented me."

"And why, in your opinion, is it empty?"

"Because, Monseigneur, the revenue from taxes does not easily accrue from a starving people. Because the barons, as you will be the first to realise," said Marigny, his voice rising insolently, "refuse to pay the dues which they had agreed. Because the loan from the Lombard companies has been exhausted by the war in Flanders, the war you so strongly recommended ..."

"And which you wished to terminate upon your own authority," cried Valois, "before our knights could find an opportunity of glory and our finances of profit. If the kingdom has drawn no advantage from
the peculiar treaties you went there to conclude, I
imagine that that does not hold good for you, Marigny, because it is not your
habit
to overlook you
r own advantage in any business
you
undertake. I
know this to my own detriment.
"

He was alluding in this last phrase to an exchange of lands which
had taken place between them
in 1310, when Valois, had asked Marigny to
yield
him his lordship of, Champrond against that of Gaillefontaine, and had ever afterwa
rds considered himself cheated.

"Nevertheless," said Louis X, "Bouville must set out as soon as possible.
"

Marigny, without appearing to pay the slightest attention to the King's last words, cried, "Sire, I would wish Monseigneur of Valois to elaborate what he has just said upon the. subj
ect of the treaties of Lille or
alternatively, to retract his words."

A terrifying silence fell over the, Council. Would the Count of Valois dare, repeat straight out the appalling accusations he had just brought against his brother's Coadjutor.

Monseigneur of Valois did so dare.

"I tell you to your face, Messire, as everyone says behind your back, that the Fl
emish bought you to effect the
retreat of our army, and that you embezzled money which should have been paid over to the Treasury."

Marigny rose to his feet. Indignation had paled his blotchy skin, and he now adopted the pose of his statue in the Mercer's Hall.

"Sire," he said, "I have listened today to more than a man of honour should hear
in the whole
course of his life. I possess what I do only from the benefits that the King, your father, lavished upon me for the services I rendered as his lieutenant for sixteen years. I have now been accused in your presence of embezzlement, of commerce with the enemies of the kingdom; nor has; any voice been raised in my defence, not even yours, Sire. I demand that a commission be appointed to look into the accounts for which I am responsible to you and to you alone."

Anger is contagious. Louis X suddenly grew irritated with the attit
ude Marigny had displayed since
the opening of the Council, the manner with which he had thwarted his proposals, treated him like a small boy, and made him feel all too clearly how inferior he was to his father.

"Very well, Messire, the commission will be appointed," he replied, "since you demand it yourself.
"

By these words he separated himself
from the only minister capable
of commanding in his stead and of directing the policy of his reign. Mediocrities can tolerate being surrounded only by flatterers who conceal their mediocrity. France was to pay through long years for this momentary resentment.

Marigny picked up his file, filled it with his documents, and went to the door. This action increased The Hutin's irritation.

"From now on," he added, "you will have no further concern with our Treasury'."

"I shall take the greatest care not to, Sire," said Marigny, leaving the room.

And his
feet could be heard fading down
the length of the corridor.

Valois was triumphant, surprised almost at the speed with which his enemy's fall had, been brought about.

"You are wrong, Brother," said the Count of Evreux; "you cannot browbeat a man of that sort."'

"I had good reason," `replied
Valois; "and you will soon be
grateful to me for it. Marigny is a blot upon the face, of the kingdom. He had to be squashed as soon as possible."

"Well, Uncle," asked The Hutin, reverting to his one anxiety, "when will you send the
embassy. to

Madame
Clemence? "

As soon as Valois had promised that Bouville would set
out within the week, he closed
the meeting. He wanted to stretch his legs.

2. Marigny: Remains Rector-General

As he went home, preceded as usual by three sergeant mace-bearers, and followed by two secretaries and an equerry, Monseigneur de Marigny did not as yet comprehend what had occurred, how destiny had turned so abruptly against him. He was blinded by anger. "That
impudent rascal accuses me of
having taken bribes over the treatie
s," he said to himself. "He's a
fine one to talk! And as for this little King, who has, got the brains of a fl
ea and the surliness of a wasp,
who, says not one single word in
my defence, but instead takes
the Treasury out of my control! "

He rode on, unaware of the streets and the people he passed, unobservant of the hostile faces of those forced to make way for him. He was not loved. He had governed men from so high a position and for so long that he had lost the knack of looking at them.

Having reached his house in the Rue des Fosses-Saint-Germa
in, he leapt
from his h
orse without awaiting the help
of his equerry, walked quickly across the courtyard, threw his cloak over the arm of the first servant
he met and, still holding his
file
of documents,
mounted the stairs leading to the first floor.

His house wa
s less like a private residence
than, a government office: heavy furniture,, huge chandeliers, thick carpets, lav
ish hangings, nothing but solid
furnishings designed to last. An army of servants were at his beck and call.

Enguerrand de Ma
rigny
opened the door of the room in which he knew he would find his wife. She was playing by the hearth with a miniature Italian dog, a dog with a grey clipped coat, resembling a tiny horse. Her sister, Dame de Chanteloup, a talkative widow, sat beside her.

From her husband's appearance, Madame de Marigny knew at once that something was wrong.

"Enguerrand, my dear, what has happened?" she asked.
J
eanne de Saint-Martin, goddaughter of the late Queen Jeanne,
wife of Philip the Fair, lived in a state of perpetual admiration for the man she had married, and her devotion to him was the centre of her life.

"What has happened," replied Marigny, "is that, now the master is no longer there to hold them in check, the hounds have attacked me."

"Is there anything
I can do?"

He replied that he could well
look after himself so harshly
that Madame de Marigny's eyes filled with tears. Enguerrand was immediately remorseful. He took her by the shoulders, kissed her forehead at the edge of her ash-blonde hair and said, "I know very well, Jeanne, that I have no one to love me but
you!'

`Then
he went to his study, and threw his documents on a
chest.

His hands were trembling, and he very nearly dropped a candelabra. he wanted to move. H
e swore, and-then walked up and
down between the window
and the fire, giving his anger
a chance to simmer down.

"You have taken the Treasury from me, but you have forgotte
n the rest. Just wait a little;
you won't break me as easily as that." He rang a handbell.

"Send me four guards at once," he said to the servant who answered.

The men came running from the guardroom, holding their belilied staves in their hands. Marigny gave them their orders.

"You, go and find me Messire Alain de Pareilles, who should be at the Louvre. You, find my brother, the Archbishop, at the Episcopal Palace. You, Messires Guillaume Dubois and Raoul de Presles, and
you, Messire le Loquetier. Find
them wherever they may be. I shall await them here."

The messengers departed and Enguerrand opened the door of the room in which his secretaries worked. "I want to dictate,
"
he said.

A clerk
came to him, carrying his tablet and his pens.

"Sire," began, Marigny, standing with his back to the fire, "in the con
dition in which I am, now that
God has called to Himself the greatest
King France has ever known ..
"

He was writing
to Edward II, King of England,
and son-in
-
law of Philip the Fair by his marriage to Isabella. Since 1308, the date of the union he had taken a hand in bringing about, Marigny had had numerous opportunities of rendering Edward political and private services. The marriage was not going well, and Is
abella complained
of her husband's abnormalities. The situation in Guyenne was still serious. . . Marigny, together with his enemy, Charles of Valois, had been selected to represent the King of France at the coronation at Westminster. In 1313 the English King, on a visit to France, had thanked the Coadjutor with a life
-
pension of a thousand pounds a year.

Now Marigny needed King Edward's help and was
writing to ask him to intervene
in his favou
r. He managed to convey in his
letter the benefits that would accrue to him provided the policy of France should not change direction. Those who had worked together
for the peace of empires should
remain united.

The clerk hastened to dry the parchment and present it for signature.

"Am I to send it by the couriers,
Monseigneur:
" he asked.

"No. This will be taken to its destination by my son. Send one of your underlings for him, if he is not in the house."

The secretary went out, and Marigny unclasped the collar of his robe; he felt his neck swelling at the thought of action.

"How sad
for the, kingdom," he said to himself. "What a state
they will bring it to, if they a
re not opposed. Have I done so
much only to see all my e
fforts brought to nothing?"

Like all men who have exercised power for a long time, he had come to identify himself with the country, and to consider every attack made upon hi
m personally as a direct attack
upon the interests of the State.

As things were, he was not far wrong; but he was nevertheless prepared to act against the interests of the kingdom as s
oon as its direction was taken
out of his own hands.

It
was in this state of mind that
he received his brother Jean de Marigny. The Archbishop, his thin body clothed in a clinging violet gown, had a studied manner which the Coadjutor disliked. He wanted to say to his younger brother, "You c
an give yourself airs with your
canons if you like, but don't do it with me who
has seen you slobbering your soup and blowing your nose in your fingers."

In a very few words lie summed up what had happened at the Council he had just left, and without hesitation gave him his orders in the same unanswerable tone of voice he used to his secretaries.

"I don't want a Pope just yet, because as long as there is no Pope I have the King in my power. There must be no managed conclave prepared to obey Bouville's orders. There must be no peace for the cardinals at Avignon. Let them fight and argue; you arrange it, Jean, till I give you further orders."

Jean de Marigny, who had begun by sharing his brother's anger, looked gloomy when the conclave was mentioned. He thought for a moment, contemplating his handsome bishop's ring.

"Well, what are you thinking about?" Enguerrand asked.

"Brother," said the Archbishop, "I find your plans somewhat against the grain. In sowing further discord in the conclave than there is already, I run the risk of alienating the friendship of a certain candidate who, very well placed at this moment to win election to the Papacy, would give me, as soon as elected, a cardinal's hat."

Enguerrand burst out, "Your hat! This is a fine time to speak of it! If you ever do get a hat, my, poor Jean, it is I who will give it you, as I gave you your mit
re. But if you propose
joining my enemies against me, you will soon be going, not only Without a hat, but without shoes, a mere miserable monk, exiled to some monastery. You seem to have forgotten rather too quickly what you owe me, for instance, that unfortunate situation concerning the embezzlement of the Templars' possessions, from which I rescued you two months ago. And, by the way, have you succeeded in laying your hands upon that unfortunate receipt you gave the banker Tolomei, by means of which the Lombards made me climb down when I
wanted to raise their taxes?"

"Of course, Brother," replied the Archbishop untruthfully.

But he immediately hauled down his flag.

"What must I do?" he asked.

"You must send messengers whom you can trust beyond
question, I mean people who are in your power f
or one reason or another and are
so placed as to be afraid of my displeasure. They must spread two contradictory rumours; on the one hand, pretending to the French that the new King proposes to allow the Holy See to return to Rome; on the other, telling the Italians that he intends imprisoning the next Pope in
the neighbourhood of Paris. Let them
sow all the discord of which clerics are capable among themselves.' Our good Bouville will lose himself in a vacuum. Bertrand de Got shook the cardinals a little too much; but we shall try a differen
t tactic upon them: the fear of
what does not exist. They, don't care for each other now, I want them to hate each other, and blame each other for their mutual faults. Let me know how things go week by week, if I cannot be informed of the situation day by day. Does our young Louis X want a Pope? He shall have one, when the time comes, but certainly not, just any Pope through whom we might lose at a single blow all that King Philip and I have taken so long to extract from two previous Pontiffs. If you can, arrange matters so that your envoys do not know each other."

Thereupon he dismissed his brother so as to see his, son who was waiting, outside the door. Louis de Marigny, as so often happens in families, resembled the Archbishop more than he did his father. He was slender, much too concerne
d with his personal appearance,
and rather too elaborately dressed.

Son of a personage before whom the whole kingdom bowed down godson moreover of Louis The Hutin he did not know what it was to have to struggle to satisfy his wants. He was shallow and liked to affect that appearance of nobility which is more commonly assumed in the second generation than the tenth; and if he greatly admired his father, to whom he owed everything and who dominated him from such a height, he stilled blamed him for a certain coarseness of manner. The young man had but one quality, or rather but one vocation: he loved, horses, and knew how to manage them as if chivalry had been in his blood for two centuries.

"Go and get ready, Louis," said Enguerrand. "You
are leaving at once for London
to deliver a letter."

The young man's face expressed annoyance.

"Cannot my departure he put off till tomorrow, Father, or couldn't a courier go instead? I am due to hunt to
morrow in the Bois de Boulogne,
only a small occasion of course because of Court mourning, but ..."

"Hunting! It's about time you be
gan thinking, of something else but hunting," cried
Marigny. "Can I never ask my famil
y, who owe me everything, to do
the least thing without their looking sulky? You may as well know that I am being hunted at this moment! And if you do
n't help me, I shall he skinned
alive and you too. If a courier would have done, I could have thought of it myself! I am sending you to the King of England, and I have things to say to him
which I cannot put in writing.
Does that sufficiently flatter your vanity to persuade you to give up a day's hunting? "

"Forgive me, Father,"
said Louis de Marigny. "I did n
ot understand."

Marigny took up the case which enclosed the letter.

"You know King Edward from having seen him a year or, so ago in Paris. You will say the following to him in person: 'Monseigneur of Valois wishes to have complete authority for himself. I fear, if he succeeds in acquiring it, that he will alter the agreements the two kingdoms have c
ome to over Guyenne. Moreover,
Valois wishes to remarry the new King to a princess of Anjou-Hungary, which will align his alliances towards the south rather than the north.' That is all. Let the King of England ponder these two matters! I will keep in touch with him concerning any developments there may be."

Marigny gazed at his son for a moment. "Our royal Edward," he thought, "has a great appreciation of masculine beauty. Perhaps he will not be altogether insensible
to our messenger's appearance.
'

"Take with you only two equerries and such servants as are essential. Don't have too showy a train so long as you are in France. And you may draw two hundred, no, one hundred pounds from my treasurer; that will suffice.

There was a double knock at the door.

"Messire Alain de Pareilles has arrived," said a guard.

"Show him in. Goodbye, Louis; a good journey to you."

Enguerrand de Marigny embraced his son, a thing he did but rarely. Then he tu
rned towards Alain de Pareilles
who was coming in, took him by the arm and, leading him to a seat by the hearth, said, "Warm yourself, Pareilles,: the cold is appalling."

The
Captain-General of the Archers had, iron-grey hair, features heavily lined by time and war,; and he had seen so much fighting, so many, alarms and excursions, so much torture and execution that he could no longer be surprised by anything. The hanged of Montfaucon were to him an accustomed spectacle. In the last year alone he had led the Grand Master of the Templars to the pyre, the Aunay brothers to the wheel, and the royal Princesses, to prison. But he was also in charge of the Corps of Archers and Sergeants-at-Arms in all the fortresses, and was thus responsible for preserving order throughout the kingdom. Marigny, who never addressed any member of his family in the familiar second person, used it to this, old friend, the faultless, unyielding instrument of his power.

"Alain, I've got two missions for you and they must be carried out without delay," said Marigny.
"You will go yourself
to Chateau-Gaillard and give the fool in command of it a good shaking up. By the way, what is his name?"

"Bersumee, Robert Bersumee," replied Pareilles.

"You will tell Bersumee that he must continue to conform
the instructions I gave him in the past with the consent of King Philip. I know that the Count of Artois, has been there. This is directly contrary to orders. If he were to be sent there, he or another, it should go through me. Only the King may go there; and there's not much risk of that. There must be no visits to Madame Marguerite, not a letter, nothing at all! You can tell the fool that I'll have his ears cut off if he doesn't obey me."