VIII. up the revelation of crime even in the monarch's family. CHAP. Of the king's three sons the eldest, Louis, called Hutin, who wore the crown of Navarre, had espoused Margaret of Burgundy; the second, Philip, Count of Poictiers, and the third, Count de la Marche, had married Jeanne and Blanche, princesses of Franche Comté. All these were accused of being false to their marriage vows; and two Norman brothers, Philip and Gaultier D'Aulnay, were accused of being the paramours of Margaret and of Blanche. Put to the torture, the youths confessed to having been the lovers of the princesses for the preceding three years. They were accordingly executed, with the most refined cruelty, on one of the public squares of Paris. They were skinned alive and mutilated, and several others suffered for having been privy to the crime. Margaret, queen of Louis of Navarre, was immured in the castle of Andelys on the Seine, where she was afterwards strangled, when her husband wished to re-marry. Blanche, after long imprisonment, took the veil. Jeanne, who was the heiress of Franche Comté, was more leniently dealt with. Her husband, Philip, afterwards Philip the Long, desired to keep her heritage; and, either for this reason or from her innocence, she was acquitted of the crime laid to her charge. Margaret of Burgundy, wife of Louis, was the heroine of the tradition which told that a princess once inhabited the Tour de Nesle, on the south side of the Seine. Thither she was in the habit of enticing such youths as pleased her, and then precipitating them into the Seine until a student named Buridan had the wit to suspect, and the good fortune to escape, the fate reserved for him. The grand master of the Templars had perished at the stake in March. Clement the Fifth expired in the following month. It was said of his mistress Melissende, Countess of Talleyrand Perigord, that she cost CHAP. the Pontiff more treasure than was expended during the pontificate for the rescuing of the Holy Land. The uncontrolled authority which Philip had arrogated to himself over the lives and property of so many of his subjects-an authority which he had so criminally and so fearfully abused-did not either supply his necessities or ensure his tranquillity. An outbreak of the Flemings, who redemanded French Flanders, or Lille, Bethune, and Douai from the king, on their payment of 200,000 livres, compelled him to raise an army. And this obliged him to levy fresh taxes, especially a duty on all sales and transfers, which occasioned almost a general insurrection throughout France. A confederation, in which nobles and commons joined, was formed first in the capital, and afterwards in Picardy and Champagne. And though the obnoxious tax seems to have been confined to the north, the league against taxation soon extended to the south, of which the people were greatly irritated, and frequently complained of the adulteration of the coin. Philip was therefore obliged to abandon the exaction of the duty on sales and transfers, which resolve necessitated another humiliation, that of a compromise with the Flemings, who had besieged Lille. In order to come to a satisfactory arrangement about the coin, the king assembled deputies from forty-three towns, no doubt the most considerable of the kingdom. Their recommendation was to bring the gold coin back to the weight and fineness which it possessed in the reign of St. Louis. Philip consented to this, but an illness, which was incomprehensible to his physicians, gradually undermined his strength; and Philip the Fair expired towards the close of November, 1314, at Fontainebleau. It is impossible to avoid considering in contrast the characters of St. Louis and of Philip the Fair,-monarchs whose reigns succeeded each other with an interval of but a few years, children of the same century, the same VIII. family, the same civilisation, the same system, the policy CHAP. of the one being but the result of that which the other originated; their personal genius, and the mode of pursuing and accomplishing their aims, not the aim itself, making the difference. It was St. Louis who converted the feudal monarchy into an absolute one, and created a functionary class, altogether dependent upon the crown, to supersede the territorial noblesse in political, in administrative and judicial authority. Philip, inheriting this absolute power, wielded it with a fuller consciousness of right, and without a feudal scruple or a feudal virtue. For the honour of the knight and the gentleman, St. Louis substituted an exclusively religious principle and motive. But religion had been so prostituted and perverted to the avarice, the greed, the ambition and immeasurable pretensions of the Popes, that it was no longer recognisable as Christianity. Every moral principle had been destroyed, every idea of natural justice obliterated, and every feeling of humanity itself sacrificed to the aim of making the Papacy dictatorial over the acts and even over the very thoughts of men. It was impossible that the Inquisition should have drowned the south of France in blood, and made it over to the north and to Rome, without producing a ministry, a monarch, a policy, and a judicature in its own image. St. Louis, indeed, repelled and adjourned that necessity. There was enough in him of the knight and the layman to repudiate the morality and the policy that sacerdotalism had created. But although he kept almost all his own acts and his government free from such degradation, he still unconsciously contributed to the formation of a monarchy which rivalled the Papacy in authority and pretensions, and which imitated and adopted its thraldom over the intellect and its contempt of all men's rights. Philip the Fair was the result. It is a subject of congratulation and of boast with some French writers, that the authority of the nobles and the CHAP. VIII. influence of the clergy were counterbalanced and nullified by the new class of the ignobly born and legally learned, whom the progress of the age had raised to influence and power. But in what were Pierre Flotte and Nogaret better than the canonists and inquisitors of Rome? They were equally the priests of absolutism, the instruments of murder, the unscrupulous perverters of morality and justice. The king, to be sure, was their Pope, and the prerogative which they claimed and created for him was but a counterpart of that which the fabrication of decretals had built up for the Pontiff. But what was this, except, at the critical moment when sacerdotal authority in the person of the Pope was declining, to build up another more formidable and more tyrannical, less shackled by scruples or by a sense of decorum, better fitted to gather compactness and strength in its system of tyranny from its own hereditary right, and from that hereditary fixity of caste, which it created around it, and, moreover, far more powerfully armed to put down resistance, and grind all the ranks of social life into the one mass of despicable servility? Philip the Fair carried this absolute power almost at once to its highest pitch. None of the noblesse dared to lift up their heads; and the commonalty, when they chanced to be froward, were, as in the towns of South Languedoc, punished with the sanguinary cruelty of the time. The order of the Templars cost him no more than lawyers' labour to destroy. The Pope himself, -that power which had displaced so many monarchs, and swept dynasties from off of the earth,-was made the humble and subservient tool of the King of France. But Philip's lawyers had no skill beyond their profession. They were without political science or statesmanlike views. It was out of their power, and beyond their sagacity, to organise a financial or a military system. The desire of the monarch was to liberate his crown from being dependent for military force upon VIII. feudal institutions or upon the noblesse. He could only CHAP. do this by large levies of money; but he shrunk from the only mode in which this was feasible,-the summoning of the several orders, and demanding their assent to increased taxation. The state of England, the humiliation of Edward the Second, and the straits to which even Edward the Third was brought, deterred rather than tempted the French monarch to have recourse to such a policy. The consequence was, that the king had no military force at his disposal, and no permanent resources equal to supply it. The tyranny of the French crown was thus without solid substance or basis, and in this it also resembled the Pope's, being an affair of opinion and a jurisdiction of awe. When it was examined closely, it ceased to command respect. The despotism commenced by Philip Augustus, advanced by St. Louis, and completed under Philip the Fair, was by many centuries premature. These monarchs sought not merely to curb and regulate the feudal power of the aristocracy, but to destroy and dispense with it altogether, and to substitute great functionaries after the Byzantine system. The attempt failed utterly, and the consequence was that the country sunk into a kind of transitional state, its feudal organisation weakened and destroyed, whilst no other could be framed to replace it. And thus in war it became powerless, and in administration lapsed into anarchy. Its princes were mere spoliators, and its courts of justice were but shambles. The communes, far from gaining rights, were left at the mercy of the king's lieutenants during a vigorous reign, or that of the renascent aristocracy under a weaker one. In this boasted reign of legists and equality, the lower grades of society, instead of being aided to rise to a level, or to a nearer level, with those above them, were in fact stopped in their progress. The sales of fiefs or noble land to roturiers or wealthy men of the middle |