Philip, quamvis illiteratus, as Nangis described him, was not fond of the learned or the talented. In the first years of his reign he made a confident of Pierre de la Brosse, who had been a chamberlain of his father's. Philip advanced him to high dignities, and endowed him with rich fiefs; his brother, too, he made a bishop. De La Brosse was unfortunate enough to make an enemy of Queen Maria of Brabant, a quarrel that proved fatal to him. The circumstances are too characteristic of the times not to be related.

Louis, eldest son of King Philip by his first wife, Isabel of Aragon, having died rather suddenly, his death was attributed to poison. Peter de la Brosse did not shrink from insinuating that the queen was guilty of this act, and that she was capable of inflicting the same fate upon all the king's children by Isabel. The son of St. Louis, disturbed by such a rumour, did not recur to any of his good father's modes of investigating crime. He resolved to consult a soothsayer. Two or three persons were mentioned to him as possessing the gift of what in our day has been called clairvoyance. A kind of beguine or begging nun, of Nivelle in Flanders, was fixed on as having most reputation. And Philip sent the Abbot of St. Denis to question her. Whatever the abbot heard in reply, he considered it too serious to repeat. He therefore declined speaking, on the plea that what he had heard was under the secret of the confessional. The king, piqued and angered, sent other messengers, who at once told that they came from the King of France. The beguine accordingly gave the best possible character of the queen. Singular to say, we learn all this from the Chronicle of St. Denis, a history of the time written in that orthodox and enlightened monastery. The verdict of the beguine satisfied Philip, and abated much of his trust and friendship for De la Brosse. Some time was allowed to elapse, when the grandees, who were bent on

CHAP.

VII.

CHAP.

VIL

the ruin of La Brosse, discovered, or pretended to discover, a treasonable correspondence of his. He was accordingly handed over to their justice, the first instance of an extraordinary royal commission, and hanged. Both the Pope and the populace seemed to think him the victim of unrighteous vengeance. Philip afterwards confined his intimacy to the court, and its baronial circle.

The king encouraged tournaments, which, being forbidden by the Pope, would have fallen under the prohibition of Louis. He entertained the project of the single combat with Charles of Anjou, and Peter of Aragon. He presided at the tournament in which the young Count of Clermont, the founder of the house of Bourbon, received such severe blows on the head as to shake his reason. He was not present, however, at that more famous tournament, in which Edward of England, at the head of 1000 knights, held a pass at Chalons against the count of that town and his Burgundians.

The combat between the knights was fierce and serious, the Count of Chalons flinging himself on Edward's neck to drag him to the ground. Edward spurred his horse forward, and gave the count a heavy fall. He tried to renew the attack, but was so severely handled, as to be compelled to cry mercy. The English knights having the advantage, the Burgundian followers of the worsted party attacked the English of the same class in the suite of Edward, and a skirmish ensued, in which the Burgundians were sorely maltreated and a great many slain. National quarrels, indeed, became frequent. The English and the Picard students in the University of Paris came to ferocious strife in the year 1281, and the English, according to Nangis, drove the Picards out of Paris. A few years later this animosity spread to the rulers of the two nations, and led to serious political results.

CHAP. VIII.

PHILIP THE FAIR.

1285-1314.

HISTORY has recorded but the acts, and preserved but the public documents, of the reign of the Fourth Philip. Striking as most of these acts were, and far more so to his cotemporaries than to us, no person undertook to comment or explain them. The reader is left to grope after the motives and exercise conjectures as to the causes which influenced the monarch's conduct. Royalty, which had been gradually rising from the century previous, began to inspire awe more than love. The nobles, from having been its equals, sunk into mere courtiers; and knights, who like Joinville, had lived on equal terms with the good St. Louis, no longer approached Philip le Bel, or held converse and intimacy with the sovereign. The clergy began to sink in the social and political scale. In the earlier centuries the world was theirs, to mould or to impel, to endow with orthodoxy or annihilate if it refused. And monks, of course, chronicle the events of an age of which the spirit is monkery. But as the thirteenth century, in which ecclesiastical men and influence were predominant, drew to a close, they gave way to other men and other influences; and these were not communicative. His legists had the ear of Philip the Fair, and dictated the resolves and the edicts of his council; but they saw the necessity of

CHAP.

VIII.

VIII.

CHAP. being humble, of concealing their predominance, and working in the dark. They have left us no effusions, no records, save judicial ones, no simple and sincere confessions. Nangis, who spoke at large of St. Louis and Philip the Hardy, becomes circumspect in the following reign. And the meagre chroniclers of the convent of St. Denis distort to monastic advantage the few facts they record.

According to the Catalonian chronicler, Muntaner, Philip was far from being a zealous approver of the crusade into Aragon. He is said to have blamed the ferocity of the legate, resisted that holy man's special claim to massacre women and children; and he displayed jealousy and dislike of his brother the Count of Valois, alluding to whose Aragonese crown, he called him il ré di Capello. According to Muntaner, Philip the Hardy towards the close of the campaign came to partake these opinions of his eldest son. It was difficult, however, to suppress or terminate a war raging over so many kingdoms. The two eldest sons of Pedro, Alphonso and James, succeeded that monarch, the first in Aragon, the second in Sicily. Roger de Loria, the admiral of both, prosecuted the war against France and Naples, destroying the French ports in the Mediterranean. Charles the Second of Naples, son of Charles of Anjou, was still a prisoner; but Robert of Artois commanded for him, and acted as guardian to the son of Charles the Second, a youth whom Villani calls Charles Martel. Numbers still flocked to his standard; with such aid his Angevins had captured Agosta on the coast of Sicily, and menaced to reinvade the island, when Roger de Loria, in June, 1286, came to challenge their fleet in the Bay of Naples. The French knights, Guy of Montfort, young Philip of Flanders, and the Count de Brienne insisted on accepting the challenge. A fierce naval battle ensued, in which the French and Angevins were defeated, and their chiefs captured.

In

Edward of England had endeavoured during the previous years to bring about a peace. He had failed through the inveteracy of Pope Honorius; but that pontiff was no more. Roger de Loria's victory deprived the Angevins of all hope of conquering Sicily; and Edward's exhortation was at last listened to. 1287 he succeeded in concluding a truce between the King of Aragon and the Angevins, by which the latter were to pay 30,000 marks, and give up the three sons of Charles the Second into captivity, on condition of Charles himself being released. This accord or truce was concluded for the purpose of being converted into a definitive peace. But no But no sooner was Charles free than the Pope released him from his oaths; and receiving fresh supplies from France, he renewed the war; whilst Philip the Fair, ignoring the truce altogether, prepared to attack Aragon in concert with the King of Castille. But the French and Spaniards had really no cause of quarrel, and did not seriously menace each other. The parliament of Aragon, therefore, took the matter into their own hands, and negotiated with the Pope and with Philip, promising to allow the Sicilians and Neapolitans to fight their own battle, provided the brother of the King of France would abandon the assumption of the title of the King of Aragon. Charles the Second of Naples was equally anxious for peace, and when the Sicilians came to besiege Gaeta, the circumstance led not to fresh encounters, but a two years' truce. The death of Alphonso of Aragon, and the consequent transfer of King Jayme from Sicily to Aragon, again broke the arrangements already made. But all parties were weary; France, Naples, the Prince of Anjou, the King and people of Aragon, and even the Pope. The Sicilians alone were determined not to yield; and when Jayme abandoned them, and when even Roger de Loria and Procida turned against them, they still persisted, chose Frederic,