Miniatures of French history

Louis, King of France, the seventh of that name, had no son. Two wives had borne him four daughters. Their alliance confirmed his house, but the Capetian foundation was imperiled. It had established itself by an unshaken chain of circumstance and will, son succeeding father, and crowned in youth before the father’s eyes. It had been a process of power hidden in the mind, a thing gradually more and more conscious for two hundred years, since first Robert the Strong had come, no one knew whence, into the Court, and obtained his government in the west; since Hugh had been crowned. It was now grown to full stature, and knew itself: a thing formed—the kingship of France; and from that seed, now a tree, was to grow the full kingdom and the re-establishment of the Gauls. But now the advance was halted, for Louis, already in middle age, had no son. Four years had passed since his last marriage.

He was a pious man, full of doubt and intuition. He prayed secretly to God, and there is record of his prayer, “I beseech Thee, O God....” For the great times that were to come depended upon its answer. He prayed secretly to God for a son.

When the time of the queen’s delivery drew near, the king summoned Hugh, the bishop, and said to him, “Tell no one till I am dead, but I have dreamed a dream which some survivor should know. I have dreamed that what shall soon be born stood holding a golden cup full of blood, and that the nobles of France came around and drank of it in turn.”

In the night of the 21st of August, the vigil of the Octave of the Assumption in the year 1165 from the Incarnation of the Lord, the child was born in a castle to the south. It was a boy, and they gave him the name of Philip, but for the populace a second name, “Adeodatus,” the gift of God—so necessary was he to the Crown, and so strangely had he come in answer to a prayer. Later he was to be the Augustus, to fight great and glorious battles all his life, to break the Angevin and the German, and to rule all up to the coasts of the sea.

Then for years the king watched over the child, and cherished him as he grew: not so strong in body as he should have been. All turned upon his life.

When the lad was already in his fourteenth year, the king summoned a great council in the spring time and said to the great lords and bishops there assembled, “I will, if it is your will, that my son be crowned at Rheims, and allegiance sworn to him by all while yet his father lives, as is the custom of our House, and this on the Assumption of this very year.” This was the year 1179. For he felt his age coming upon him, though he was but in his sixtieth year. Already had he feared paralysis, and known the symptoms of its coming. His council acclaimed him and his will.

As the Feast of the Assumption drew near, which is also the memory of Roncesvalles, the 15th of August, Louis, the king, came with all his Court to the castle of Compiègne, on the edge of the great woods, there to stay till they should set out on the two days’ march to Rheims, and the young prince, Philip, was with him.

But just in the days before this journey was due, the prince went out one morning with his men to hunt the boar in the forest at the gates of the castle. They gave him a swift horse, perhaps too mettlesome, and he rode out with his men in the morning, with their hounds and their horns, till, in the depths of this high wood, they unleashed, and next found a great boar; and him they pursued, scattering round, by this narrow path and that, through the thick undergrowth, and making round by the right and the left to come up with the hounds at last when they should pull the great boar down. But as his horse went furiously, and got off too far from the rest, the prince heard the horns more faintly, and, when he tried to rally to them, took false turnings, till at last he heard them no more. Then he knew that he was lost. He had not eaten, and the day was done, and he became afraid. Before it was dark he checked his tired mount and stood in doubt, looking all around and seeing nothing in the woods nor hearing any sound of men. Then he prayed to Our Lady and his Lord St. Denis, who is the strong protector of the Kings of France, that he might be saved out of the high wood; and looking round again to his right, he saw in the gloaming a charcoal burner, rough and forbidding, all grimy with his trade, and bearing on his shoulder an axe.

The child was frightened at that figure; but he took it for a sign, and summoning his courage he walked his horse up to the charcoal burner and accosted him very courteously, and told him that he was the Son of France lost in the high wood, and in peril, and weak with long fasting. This story the man believed, and he led the prince by ways he knew all through the miles of forest in the darkness, till, by morning, they had come to the castle of Compiègne, and the prince was delivered safe to his father. But the strain had thrown the boy into a fever, and it seemed he would die. Thus for the second time was the line of France in peril, and King Louis near despair.

In such an agony he bethought him of the saints, and what help he could implore. There was one with whose name all Christendom was alive—St. Thomas, murdered at Canterbury not ten years before by the agents of the Angevin, his rival. The archbishop had been his guest, he had succoured him—through policy and as a lever against the house which was his greatest feudatory, and almost his master; the house of Anjou, against which he had warred in vain. There, in England, its head, Henry, was a great king, his equal. Louis, the king, determined to pray at that shrine. They could not dissuade him. They told him it was perilous to put himself unarmed into his enemy’s hand; they warned him of his failing powers, but his intention stood; and immediately after the Assumption he set out for the sea. His weakness hampered him. He was six days on his journey to the coast. He reached it at Wissant, on the Straits, in the evening of his son’s fourteenth birthday, the 21st of August. On the morrow, the Octave of the Feast, he crossed the Narrows and came into Dover Harbour, an inlet of the hills, and so went ashore, the first King of France to land in this island. Henry, the king, came down to meet him, and they went together up to Canterbury to pray at the shrine. There, in the crypt, at the tomb under the high altar, King Louis prayed for his son’s recovery and for the strength of the Capetian line.

King Louis had upon his finger a certain stone, the most precious and (some said) the greatest in the world; it was called the Royal Jewel, and men knew of it everywhere. All manner of stories were told of it: how it shone in the dark with a smouldering light, how it was worth the ransom of a kingdom, how the saint had claimed it in a vision. But these stories were only tales. The great stone was its own title. This stone King Louis took off as he knelt at the shrine, and offered it to be the saint’s for ever. There they hung it, and later they put a silver angel before it, pointing to it. There the stone shone before the shrine three hundred years and more, displayed whenever the rich cover of the shrine was lifted for the pilgrims, and giving birth to legend upon legend; until, when more than three hundred years had passed, another King of England—another Henry, the Tudor—destroyed that shrine. He, in his turn, took that famous stone and had it set in a ring to wear on his enormous thumb; and after him his daughter Mary had it set in a collar she wore; but what became of it after that, or where it is now, I do not know.

So the king gave the stone, and prayed at the shrine of St. Thomas for his son, who lay between life and death far off in France, the last of such a line.

Louis, the king, also gave to the monastery of Canterbury sixteen hundred gallons of wine a year for ever, to be taken from the product of his own vineyards at Poissy; a poor, thin, northern wine, but he could give no other, for as yet the southern vineyards were not in any domain of the Crown. And having done these things, and given great alms, his pilgrimage was ended, and on the third day, which was the 25th of August, he set forth back again to the sea coast at Dover, and on the morrow, the 26th, he crossed, reaching the French land.

His task was done. In his journey south to his own the blow fell on him. As he reached Paris all his right side was struck, and he was paralysed. The boy, however, his son, was saved.

On the day of All Saints, Prince Philip was crowned at Rheims with great splendour, in the midst of the twelve peers, and so was the full purpose of his father accomplished. But that father, in his illness, could not see the crowning, and in a little while he died, as well and piously as he had lived.