small respect for popular freedom. Divine right was the foundation with them of politics and of law; and Charles of Anjou was not a prince likely to object to such a theory. The rights therefore of cities or of nations were as nothing in his eyes, compared with his own claim to crush or to rule them, either by victory or by papal donation.

Such a prince attracted to his projects and his standards all the adventurous and unprovided of the noblesse. They could build no hopes upon St. Louis, who merely led warriors at their own expense to perish in the sands of Africa. Charles was a conqueror, a winner of kingdoms, and a dispenser of dignities and land. A monarch of less firmness and renown than Louis would have been eclipsed by Charles. But when Louis died, his son Philip, though monarch of France, declined into the second rank of French estimation, whilst Charles of Anjou concentrated the hopes, attracted the admiration, and represented the interests of the new monarchy.

St. Louis had scarcely closed his eyes in death on the shores of Tunis amid the ruins of Carthage, when Charles of Anjou arrived, and took the command of the army. Illness still weighed upon Philip the Third called the Hardy; how he earned this appellation remains unexplained. Charles immediately led the crusaders against the Egyptians, and tried to cut off the enemy from Tunis. This occasioned two or three severe engagements, which were without results, and proved to both belligerents the uselessness of continuing the war. They proceeded to negotiate. Charles of Anjou peremptorily demanded money, as an indemnity for the expenses of the expedition, which would have been the last condition. put forward or insisted on by his brother. The Tunisians agreed to pay 110 ounces of gold, the French to evacuate Africa. As the chiefs divided the As the chiefs divided the money, the rest of the army were discontented; so was Edward of England, who arrived with his followers soon after.

CHAP.

VII.

CHAP.
VII.

The treaty was however concluded, and the crusaders
set sail, on their return to Sicily, in November. A fierce
tempest assailed them during the voyage, sunk eighteen
of their vessels, and drowned four thousand of the army.
Edward, considering the storm to be a sign of Divine
displeasure, determined to proceed from Sicily to Acre.
King Philip journeyed to Palermo, where his brother-in-
law died of the fatigue of the crusade.
His queen,

Isabel of Aragon, soon after received a hurt whilst
crossing a stream on horseback, and expired also.
Philip, with a procession of dead bodies, reached the
papal residence of Viterbo, where Henry, son of Richard
of Cornwall, then in his suite, was set upon and killed,
whilst at his devotions, by the two sons of Philip de
Montfort, Earl of Leicester. These youths, driven to
poverty and exile, (for the estates of De Montfort in
England had been confiscated and given to Prince
Edmund, the founder of the future house of Lancaster,)
obeyed the dictates of vengeance and despair, and thus
only hastened the destruction of a family so celebrated
in its energetic abettal, for good or for bad, of the
prominent ideas of the times. Soon after Philip arrived
at St. Denis with the remains of his father and his
wife. The monks of the abbey refused at first to admit
him, there chancing to be in his suite two bishops in
their robes. Their entrance into the abbey church
would have been derogatory to its independent rights,
and the prelates had to disrobe ere the living and the
dead king could be admitted within the monastery.

Having performed the usual obsequies, Philip the Third repaired to Rheims to be crowned. The Dukes of Burgundy and Flanders attended the ceremony. But the sword of state, which on the coronation of Philip Augustus had been carried by the Count of Flanders, was now borne by the Count of Artois. This province was part of the Flemish succession: Flanders became, henceforth, more and more alienated from the French

crown and independent of it, making its own treaties with England and with other powers. Thus whilst the kings of France by no great efforts were extending their dominions over every southern race to the Mediterranean, and even over both Alps and Pyrenees, they met in the Teutonic population and princes, but a hundred leagues north of their capital, a resistance and a barrier which has never been overcome.

Shortly after died Alphonso Count of Poitou, and of Toulouse by right of his wife Jeanne; the countess survived her husband but a short time, leaving no issue to the house of Toulouse, and in consequence of Queen Blanche's treaty with the last Raymond, the whole of Languedoc lapsed to the French crown. Some of the southerns looked to the King of Aragon, in hopes that he would claim his ancestral suzerainty north of the Pyrenees. But the alliance between the royal families of France and Aragon of course precluded it. Philip sent his seneschals to Toulouse, where their mission and authority were at once recognised.

Henry the Third of England at the same time wrote to claim the restoration of Agen and the land of Xaintonge, which he said reverted to him on the death of Alphonso and Jeanne. Philip replied in the following year, by the counter-demand, that the homage of the Count of Limoges should be paid to him and not to the king of England. Moreover Philip put forward a claim to Guienne, in consequence of homage not being paid for

it.

This ceremony Henry, on account of his age and infirmities, was unable to come to perform. But the French lawyers left no stone unturned, no chicane unemployed, to keep the English king out of the provinces, which St. Louis had stipulated to restore, and at the same time to grasp or lay preparations for grasping whatever still remained to the English monarch on the continent of France. In 1272 Henry the Third expired. His successor, Edward the First, was then at Acre. Philip,

CHAP.

VIL

VII.

CHAP. about to march an army to the south of France, showed manifest signs of a desire to appropriate Edward's possessions, summoning his vassals and raking up every kind of claim. Pope Gregory, lately elected, a just man and a friend of Edward's, thought it necessary to interfere; and he published a bull for the purpose of checking French rapacity, and placing Edward's possessions under the protection of the Holy See, whilst the young monarch was absent in the Holy Land. When Edward did return, he performed homage in Paris to Philip for the lands which he ought to have held of the French king, such were his words,-but which he expressly complained were still withheld from him. In 1275 we again find Edward demanding Agen, as especially assigned to the support of his mother; whilst Philip's parliament received appeals from the Gascon clergy against the seneschals of Edward. In this unsettled state did the relations of the two kings on the continent continue. In 1272 Philip visited his new dominions in Languedoc: in order to appear there with authority and state, he took advantage of a petty quarrel between the lords of Armagnac and Casaubon, to summon his feudatories of the Duchy of France, as well as Poitou, to meet him at Tours, in order to their accompanying him in his expedition southwards. The feudal muster proved very scanty the barons of Normandy and Champagne would not march to the Pyrenees at their own expense; and notwithstanding all the traditions and principles of centralisation which St. Louis and his officers had left, Philip found it impossible to dominate or govern the South exclusively from the North. Hence, no doubt, Toulouse was formed into a new centre; a parliament was established there, as it had been found necessary to leave also that which before existed at Rouen. Seneschals and bailiffs had to render an account of their administration to it, rather than to Paris. And thus the centralised and absolute monarchy of France was

n

not more than in its infancy, when it was found necessary, nay, imperative, to decentralise, in order to preserve the allegiance and accomplish the wise administration of distant provinces. As long as the military power of the empire was feudal, consisting of chiefs and their retainers bound to but forty days' service, such decentralisation was indeed inevitable. Nor, in the difficulty of communications at that time, was it possible for functionaries or magistrates at Carcassonne or Aix to journey or refer to Paris. The spirit of the south was not sufficiently extinguished.

Still Philip maintained his feudal and military superiority. The Lord of Casaubon being too small a foe to crush, he resolved to strike a more puissant noble of his partisans, the Count de Foix, who maintained a kind of divided allegiance between France and Aragon. Philip marched to Foix, and invested its castle. The count himself commanded within; but showing that want of confidence, common to the southern lords in their resistance to the North, he surrendered. Philip consigned him to the prison of Carcassonne. The King of Aragon interceded rather than interfered for him; but Philip would not pardon or restore him till he gave up all his castles north of the Pyrenees.

Whilst Philip was thus reducing the feudal chiefs of the Pyrenees, Edward of England resolved to imitate him. He had much reason of complaint against Gaston, Count of Bearn, who had shown a wish to shake off the suzerainty of Guienne. Edward marched against him, besieged his castles, and Gaston endeavoured to escape from his danger by appealing to the French king and parliament. Edward is said at the time to have refrained from pursuing his advantage. But somewhat later Gaston of Bearn appears in England as a prisoner, confined in Winchester Castle, from which he was at length released. Edward gave every sign of a wish to remain at peace with France. There was a dispute about the

CHAP.

VII.