to the countess his wife, ‘Noble countess, give thou joyously this glittering sword to the count thy spouse: he who taketh it from thee as count will bring it back to thee as king.’ ” “In this very campaign, Bouchard, by his death,” says Suger, “restored peace to the kingdom, and took away himself and his war to the bottomless pit of hell.” Hugh du Puiset had frequently broken his oaths of peace and recommenced his devastations and revolts; and Louis resumed his course of hunting him down, “destroyed the castle of Puiset, threw down the walls, dug up the wells, and razed it completely to the ground, as a place devoted to the curse of Heaven.” Thomas de Marle, Lord of Couci, had been committing cruel ravages upon the town and church of Laon, lands and inhabitants; when “Louis, summoned by their complaints, repaired to Laon, and there, on the advice of the bishops and grandees, and especially of Raoul, the illustrious Count of Vermandois, the most powerful, after the king, of the lords in this part of the country, he determined to go and attack the castle of Couci, and so went back to his own camp. The people whom he had sent to explore the spot reported that the approach to the castle was very difficult, and in truth impossible. Many urged the king to change his purpose in the matter; but he cried, ‘Nay, what we resolved on at Laon stands: I would not hold back therefrom, though it were to save my life. The king’s majesty would be vilified, if I were to fly before this scoundrel.’ Forthwith, in spite of his corpulence, and with admirable ardor, he pushed on with his troops through ravines and roads encumbered with forests. … Thomas, made prisoner and mortally wounded, was brought to King Louis, and by his order removed to Laon, to the almost universal satisfaction of his own folk and ours. Next day, his lands were sold for the benefit of the public treasury, his ponds were broken up, and King Louis, sparing the country because he had the lord of it at his disposal, took the road back to Laon, and afterwards returned in triumph to Paris.”
Sometimes, when the people, and their habitual protectors, the bishops, invoked his aid, Louis would carry his arms beyond his own dominions, by sole right of justice and kingship. “It is known,” says Suger, “that kings have long hands.” In 1121, the Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand made a complaint to the king against William VI., Count of Auvergne, who had taken possession of the town, and even of the episcopal church, and was exercising therein “unbridled tyranny.” The king, who never lost a moment when there was a question of helping the Church, took up with pleasure and solemnity what was, under these circumstances, the cause of God; and having been unable, either by word of mouth or by letters sealed with the seal of the king’s majesty, to bring back the tyrant to his duty, he assembled his troops, and led into revolted Auvergne a numerous army of Frenchmen. He had now become exceeding fat, and could scarce support the heavy mass of his body. Any one else, however humble, would have had neither the will nor the power to ride a-horseback; but he, against the advice of all his friends, listened only to the voice of courage, braved the fiery suns of June and August, which were the dread of the youngest knights, and made a scoff of those who could not bear the heat, although many a time, during the passage of narrow and difficult swampy places, he was constrained to get himself held on by those about him. After an obstinate struggle, and at the intervention of William VII., Duke of Aquitaine, the Count of Auvergne’s suzerain, “Louis fixed a special day for regulating and deciding, in parliament, at Orleans, and in the duke’s presence, between the bishop and the count, the points to which the Auvergnats had hitherto refused to subscribe. Then triumphantly leading back his army, he returned victoriously to France.” He had asserted his power, and increased his ascendency, without any pretension to territorial aggrandizement.
Into his relations with his two powerful neighbors, the King of England, Duke of Normandy, and the Emperor of Germany, Louis the Fat introduced the same watchfulness, the same firmness, and, at need, the same warlike energy, whilst observing the same moderation, and the same policy of holding aloof from all turbulent or indiscreet ambition, adjusting his pretensions to his power, and being more concerned to govern his kingdom efficiently than to add to it by conquest. Twice, in 1109 and in 1118, he had war in Normandy with Henry I., King of England, and he therein was guilty of certain temerities resulting in a reverse, which he hastened to repair during a vigorous prosecution of the campaign; but, when once his honor was satisfied, he showed a ready inclination for the peace which the Pope, Calixtus II., in council at Rome, succeeded in establishing between the two rivals. The war with the Emperor of Germany, Henry V., in 1124, appeared, at the first blush, a more serious matter. The emperor had raised a numerous army of Lorrainers, Allemannians, Bavarians, Suabians, and Saxons, and was threatening the very city of Rheims with instant attack. Louis hastened to put himself in position; he went and took solemnly, at the altar of St. Denis, the banner of that patron of the kingdom, and flew with a mere handful of men to confront the enemy, and parry the first blow, calling on the whole of France to follow him. France summoned the flower of her chivalry; and when the army had assembled from every quarter of the kingdom at Rheims, there was seen, says Suger, “so great a host of knights and men a-foot, that they might have been compared to swarms of grasshoppers covering the face of the earth, not only on the banks of the rivers, but on the mountains and over the plains.” This multitude was formed in three divisions. The third division was composed of Orleanese, Parisians, the people of Etampes, and those of St. Denis; and at their head was the king in person: “With them,” said he, “I shall fight bravely and with good assurance; besides being protected by the saint, my liege lord, I have here of my country-men those who nurtured me with peculiar affection, and who, of a surety, will back me living, or carry me off dead, and save my body.” At news of this mighty host, and the ardor with which they were animated, the Emperor Henry V. advanced no farther, and, before long, “marching, under some pretext, towards other places, he preferred the shame of retreating like a coward to the risk of exposing his empire and himself to certain destruction. After this victory, which was more than as great as a triumph on the field of battle, the French returned, every one, to their homes.”
The three elements which contributed to the formation and character of the kingship in France—the German element, the Roman element, and the Christian element—appear in con-junction in the reign of Louis the Fat. We have still the warrior-chief of a feudal society founded by conquest in him who, in spite of his moderation and discretion, cried many a time, says Suger, “What a pitiable state is this of ours, to never have knowledge and strength both together! In my youth had knowledge, and in my old age had strength been mine, I might have conquered many kingdoms;” and probably from this exclamation of a king in the twelfth century came the familiar proverb, “If youth but knew, and age could do!” “We see the maxims of the Roman empire and reminiscences of Charlemagne in Louis’s habit of considering justice to emanate from the king as fountain head, and of believing in his right to import it everywhere. And what conclusion of a reign could be more Christian-like than his when, exhausted by the long enfeeblement of his wasted body, but disdaining to die ignobly or unpreparedly, he called about him pious men, bishops, abbots, and many priests of holy Church; and then, scorning all false shame, he demanded to make his confession devoutly before them all, and to fortify himself against death by the comfortable sacrament of the body and blood of Christ! Whilst everything is being arranged, the king on a sudden rises, of himself, dresses himself, issues, fully clad, from his chamber, to the wonderment of all, advances to meet the body of our Lord Jesus Christ, and prostrates himself in reverence. Thereupon, in the presence of all, cleric and laic, he lays aside his kingship, deposes himself from the government of the state, confesses the sin of having ordered it ill, hands to his son Louis the king’s ring, and binds him to promise, on oath, to protect the Church of God, the poor, and the orphan, to respect the rights of everybody, and to keep none prisoner in his court, save such a one as should have actually transgressed in the court itself.”
This king, so well prepared for death, in his last days found great cause for rejoicing as a father. William VII., Duke of Aquitaine, had, at his death, intrusted to him the guardianship of his daughter Eleanor, heiress of all his dominions, that is to say, of Poitou, of Saintonge, of Gascony, and of the Basque country, the most beautiful provinces of the south-west of France, from the lower Loire to the Pyrenees. A marriage between Eleanor and Louis the Young, already sharing his father’s throne, was soon concluded; and a brilliant embassy, composed of more than five hundred lords and noble knights, to whom