the other. When the ushers saw the queen-mother coming into the chamber of the king her son, they knocked upon the door with their staves, and the king came running into his chamber, so that his mother might find him there; and so, in turn, did the ushers of Queen Marguerite’s chamber when Queen Blanche came thither, so that she might find Queen Marguerite there. One day the king was with the queen his wife, and she was in great peril of death, for that she had suffered from a child of which she had been delivered. Queen Blanche came in, and took her son by the hand, and said to him, ‘Come you away; you are doing no good here.’ When Queen Marguerite saw that the queen-mother was taking the king away, she cried, ‘Alas! neither dead nor alive will you let me see my lord; and thereupon she swooned, and it was thought that she was dead. The king, who thought she was dying, came back, and with great pains she was brought round.”
Louis gave to his wife consolation and to his mother support. Amongst the noblest souls and in the happiest lives there are wounds which cannot be healed and sorrows which must be borne in silence.
When Louis reached his majority, his entrance upon personal exercise of the kingly power produced no change in the conduct of public affairs. There was no vain seeking after innovation on purpose to mark the accession of a new master, and no reaction in the deeds and words of the sovereign or in the choice and treatment of his advisers; the kingship of the son was a continuance of the mother’s government. Louis persisted in struggling for the preponderance of the crown against the great vassals; succeeded in taming Peter Mauclerc, the turbulent Count of Brittany; wrung from Theobald IV., Count of Champagne, the rights of suzerainty in the countships of Chartres, Blois, and Sancerre, and the viscountship of Chateaudun, and purchased the fertile countship of Macon from its possessor. It was almost always by pacific procedure, by negotiations ably conducted, and conventions faithfully executed, that he accomplished these increments of the kingly domain; and when he made war on any of the great vassals, he engaged therein only on their provocation, to maintain the rights or honor of his crown, and he used victory with as much moderation as he had shown before entering upon the struggle. In 1241, he was at Poitiers, where his brother Alphonso, the new Count of Poitou, was to receive, in his presence, the homage of the neighboring lords whose suzerain he was. A confidential letter arrived, addressed not to Louis himself, but to Queen Blanche, whom many faithful subjects continued to regard as the real regent of the kingdom, and who probably continued also to have her own private agents. An inhabitant of Rochelle, at any rate, wrote to inform the queen-mother that a great plot was being hatched amongst certain powerful lords, of La Marche, Saintonge, Angoumois, and perhaps others, to decline doing homage to the new Count of Poitou, and thus to enter into rebellion against the king himself. The news was true, and was given with circumstantial detail. Hugh de Lusignan, Count of La Marche, and the most considerable amongst the vassals of the Count of Poitiers, was, if not the prime mover, at any rate the principal performer in the plot. His wife, Joan (Isabel) of Angouleme, widow of the late King of England, John Lackland, and mother of the reigning king, Henry III., was indignant at the notion of becoming a vassal of a prince himself a vassal of the King of France, and so seeing herself—herself but lately a queen, and now a king’s widow and a king’s mother—degraded, in France, to a rank below that of the Countess of Poitiers. When her husband, the Count of La Marche, went and rejoined her at Angouleme, he found her giving way alternately to anger and tears, tears and anger. “Saw you not,” said she, “at Poitiers, where I waited three days to please your king and his queen, how that when I appeared before them, in their chamber, the king was seated on one side of the bed, and the queen, with the Countess of Chartres, and her sister, the abbess, on the other side: They did not call me nor bid me sit with them, and that purposely, in order to make me vile in the eyes of so many folk. And neither at my coming in nor at my going out did they rise just a little from their scats, rendering me vile, as you did see yourself. I cannot speak of it, for grief and shame. And it will be my death, far more even than the less of our land which they have unworthily wrested from us; unless, by God’s grace, they do repent them, and I see them in their turn reduced to desolation, and losing somewhat of their own lands. As for me, either I will lose all I have for that end or I will perish in the attempt.” Queen Blanche’s correspondent added, “The Count of La Marche, whose kindness you know, seeing the countess in tears, said to her, ‘Madam, give your commands: I will do all I can; be assured of that.’ ‘Else,’ said she, ‘you shall not come near my person, and I will never see you more.’ Then the count declared, with many curses, that he would do what his wife desired.”
And he was as good as his word. That same year, 1241, at the end of the autumn, “the new Count of Poitiers, who was holding his court for the first time, did not fail to bid to his feasts all the nobility of his appanage, and, amongst the very first, the Count and Countess of La Marche. They repaired to Poitiers; but, four days before Christmas, when the court of Count Alphonso had received all its guests, the Count of La Marche, mounted on his war-horse, with his wife on the crupper behind him, and escorted by his men-at-arms also mounted, cross-bow in hand and in readiness for battle, was seen advancing to the prince’s presence. Every one was on the tiptoe of expectation as to what would come next. Then the Count of La Marche addressed himself in a loud voice to the Count of Poitiers, saying, ‘I might have thought, in a moment of forgetfulness and weakness, to render thee homage; but now I swear to thee, with a resolute heart, that I will never be thy liegeman; thou dost unjustly dub thyself my lord; thou didst shamefully filch this countship from my step-son, Earl Richard, whilst he was faithfully fighting for God in the Holy Land, and was delivering our captives by his discretion and his compassion.’ After this insolent declaration, the Count of La Marche violently thrust aside, by means of his men-at-arms, all those who barred his passage; hasted, by way of parting insult, to fire the lodging appointed for him by Count Alphonso, and, followed by his people, left Poitiers at a gallop.” (Histoire de Saint Louis, by M. Felix Faure, t. i. p. 347.)
This meant war; and it burst out at the commencement of the following spring. It found Louis equally well prepared for it and determined to carry it through. But in him prudence and justice were as little to seek as resolution; he respected public opinion, and he wished to have the approval of those whom he called upon to commit themselves for him and with him. He summoned the crown’s vassals to a parliament; and, “What think you,” he asked them, “should be done to a vassal who would fain hold land without owning a lord, and who goeth against the fealty and homage due from him and his predecessors?” The answer was, that the lord ought in that case to take back the fief as his own property. “As my name is Louis,” said the king, “the Comet of La Marche doth claim to hold land in such wise, land which hath been a fief of France since the days of the valiant King Clovis, who won all Aquitaine from King Alaric, a pagan without faith or creed, and all the country to the Pyrenean mount.” And the barons promised the king their energetic co-operation.
The war was pushed on zealously by both sides. Henry III., King of England, sent to Louis messengers charged to declare to him that his reason for breaking the truce concluded between them was, that he regarded it as his duty towards his step-father, the Count of La Marche, to defend him by arms. Louis answered that, for his own part, he had scrupulously observed the truce, and had no idea of breaking it; but he considered that he had a perfect right to punish a rebellious vassal. In this young King of France, this docile son of an able mother, none knew what a hero there was, until he revealed himself on a sudden. Near two towns of Saintonge, Taillebourg and Saintes, at a bridge which covered the approaches of one and in front of the walls of the other, Louis, on the 21st and 22d of July, delivered two battles, in which the brilliancy of his personal valor and the affectionate enthusiasm he excited in his troops secured victory and the surrender of the two places. “At sight of the numerous banners, above which rose the oriflamme, close to Taillebourg, and of such a multitude of tents, one pressing against another and forming as it were a large and populous city, the King of England turned sharply to the Count of La Marche, saying, ‘My father, is this what you did promise me? Is yonder the numerous chivalry that you did engage to raise for me, when you said that all I should have to do would be to get money together?’ ‘That did I never say,’ answered the count. ‘Yea, verily,’ rejoined Richard, Earl of Cornwall, brother of Henry III.: ‘for yonder I have amongst my