Louis: The French Prince Who Invaded England (6 page)

THE SHAPING OF A PRINCE

T
HE KING OF
France was a man under pressure.

In September 1187 Philip Augustus was twenty-two and he had already been on the throne for seven years. As was the custom of the ruling Capetian family he had been crowned and associated with the throne during his father’s lifetime, but the elderly Louis VII had died within months of the coronation, leaving the fifteen-year-old Philip in sole charge of a small French kingdom sandwiched precariously between the Holy Roman Empire to the east and the Plantagenet domains to the west. These were held by a rapacious Henry II of England and they sprawled all the way from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees; Henry controlled more of France than Philip did.

That Philip had so far survived, managed to hold his own and even made a few gains against his vastly more experienced opposite number was a positive sign for the future of France, but in one crucial aspect of medieval kingship Henry held the upper hand: he had sons. Indeed, some might argue that he had too many sons – four of them survived to adulthood and they fought constantly either against him or with each other – but Henry had done more than enough to ensure the succession of his dynasty, while Philip had lived through seven childless years of marriage.

But now all that was about to change. Philip’s queen was with child and near her time, and France was holding its breath. The older citizens had lived through this before, of course: Philip himself had been a very long-awaited male heir, born to huge celebrations as Philip
Dieudonné
, the God-given, the product of his father’s third and somewhat desperate marriage. Philip had five sisters, the eldest twenty years his senior.

Queen Isabelle’s lying-in was to take place in the royal palace on the Île de la Cité, the island in the middle of the River Seine in Paris. The birthing chamber was an exclusively female space in the late twelfth century; an expectant mother would retire to a darkened room ahead of the birth, and would be shut in along with her female attendants and midwives – literally ‘confined’ – until it was all over. Husbands and fathers, even royal ones, could do nothing but wait outside for news, and Philip was no exception.

Giving birth was a painful and dangerous experience which as many as one woman in eight did not survive, so prayers were said both inside and outside the palace as nobles, citizens and clergy awaited the heir. The queen’s labour began, and in the early evening of 5 September 1187 she gave birth to a boy. She is said to have wept for joy on being informed of the baby’s sex, as well she might. As the news filtered out of the chamber, raced around the palace and spread throughout Paris, bells began to ring. Even the normally sober chronicler Rigord was moved to emotion: the city was filled with such great happiness, he tells us, that for seven days and nights the whole population did not stop singing, dancing and offering praises to God; messengers were sent out to all the provinces to announce the king’s great joy. Once again the crown could pass from father to son in a line unbroken since Hugh Capet’s accession in 987. Philip could accept the congratulations of his nobles and start work on his dynastic plans.

* * *

Possibly the only person in France who was even more pleased and relieved than the king was the queen. Isabelle of Hainaut had been presented to Philip as a bride in the spring of 1180, when she had just turned ten and he was fifteen. As queen consort her primary role was to produce male heirs, but given her age the consummation of the marriage was delayed. Although not for long: in 1184, when she was still only fourteen, the continuing lack of a child was causing concern among the nobility and this was one of the factors behind Philip’s public announcement in the spring of that year that he intended to divorce her. As a consolation he would give her as husband any of his nobles that she cared to name. But Isabelle was not about to be dismissed without making some effort to keep her crown: she retorted that she wanted no other, and walked through the streets barefoot, dressed only in her shift, praying and distributing alms, publicly begging for forgiveness. The sight of the beautiful teenager in such a pitiable state turned opinion in her favour and she was reunited with the king.

But it was to be nearly three more years until she carried a baby to term, years filled with pressure to conceive and with the accompanying worry over her position. So her feelings as she recovered from the rigours of labour, shut in the dark and quiet chamber while the jubilations went on outside, and looked down at the swaddled form in the cradle surely included relief as well as love and pride. As the mother of the future king her status had increased and her position was strengthened.

The new prince was named Louis in honour of his grandfather and other illustrious ancestors. As Isabelle was descended from Charlemagne and Philip from Hugh Capet, Louis could claim descent from both of France’s legendary kings, so his great destiny seemed assured and prophecies began to circulate about his future. The queen’s ancestry manifested itself in another way: Louis was pale and blond like her, small and more slender in appearance than the robust Capetians with their trademark mops of uncontrollable dark hair.

The dangers of infant mortality in the twelfth century were many: a conservative estimate would be that some 15 to 20 per cent of babies died in their first year (many within days of the birth), and that a third of all children did not reach the age of fifteen. Death was no respecter of rank, so from the very beginning the young prince, a fragile thread upon which to hang the future of a dynasty until he had any brothers, was to be guarded from harm as closely as possible. This does not necessarily indicate that Louis was a particularly sickly child; rather that he was valuable, a treasure beyond price.

The first great event in Louis’s life was his baptism. A ceremony essential for all newborns, not just the royal ones, it was generally carried out within weeks or even days of the birth. Christening drove out original sin, made a child a member of the Church, and provided it with godparents who would make promises on its behalf and act as spiritual mentors and advisers. The infants probably did not enjoy the ceremony much: as well as being stripped and anointed with oil they were immersed fully in the water of the font three times. Louis would have had a number of godparents, but we know the name of only one: Stephen de Tournai, a theologian who later became bishop of Tournai.

At this time babies and young children spent the first few years of their lives in a predominantly female environment. As Louis was suckled and weaned and as he learned to walk and talk he would have been surrounded by the women of the royal household: a wet-nurse, other nurses, his mother and her ladies-in-waiting. Royal children were not generally nursed by their mothers – thus enabling queens to return to a fertile condition all the sooner, for the production of more heirs – but Louis’s carefully guarded state meant he was kept in the royal palace, rather than being sent away to form his own household, so it is likely that he saw his mother on a regular basis, and his father as often as convention and royal duties allowed.

When Louis was two and a half years old there was further good news for the realm: the queen was pregnant again. It was to be hoped that she would bear another son in order to secure the dynasty. In March of 1190 she went into what may have been a premature labour … and unexpectedly delivered not one son, but two. Twins, although by no means unheard of, were more of a rarity in the twelfth century than they are now; most cases would have been diagnosed only at birth, with the appearance of a second baby coming as a surprise to all concerned. Unfortunately, as twins were generally smaller than singleton babies and were liable to be born earlier, the lack of adequate medical care meant that very few of them survived, even if they were born without complication. We do not know the details of what went on in the royal birthing chamber that day in 1190, or how many hours Isabelle suffered and laboured, praying for deliverance, but we do know that the nineteen-year-old queen died, and that both babies followed her to the grave shortly afterwards. France had no more heirs and Louis was left motherless.

* * *

Louis was surrounded by servants and nurses, and had not been brought up entirely by the queen; but losing a mother, as common an experience as it may have been during the twelfth century, would have a traumatic effect on any two-year-old. This loss was compounded only months later when his father left Paris to go on crusade to the Holy Land, not to return for nearly two years. Louis was left in the care of his grandmother Adela, the queen mother, and her brother William the archbishop of Reims. Philip, no doubt aware of the dangers of battle and disease he would face, drew up his testament: if he were to die, the regents and the citizens of Paris were to guard his treasury and keep it safe for his son until he was of age to govern the realm, with the help and by the grace of God.

After travelling to Sicily in September and spending the winter months there, Philip arrived in the Holy Land in April 1191 and was shortly joined by Richard the Lionheart, now king of England after the death of Henry II in 1189. Together – or in competition with each other, depending on how you look at it – they laid siege to the city of Acre, the major port in the Holy Land and therefore of pivotal importance to the crusade. Richard had been delayed on his way by illness, and now Philip succumbed to the same disease, which was to change both his life and Louis’s. Called
arnoldia
by contemporaries, it was an early form of sweating sickness, causing fever, chills and the loss of hair and nails; it also seems to have caused nervous disorders. Philip’s body swelled, his lips became sore, the unruly hair for which he was famed fell out in clumps and his skin began to peel off in strips; he was afflicted by a paranoia which was to be lifelong. But as he lay sweating on his camp bed in the heat of the Holy Land, perhaps fearing for his life, he can have had little idea that his young son was also hovering near death in Paris. For Louis, approaching his fourth birthday, had developed a life-threatening bout of dysentery, a common cause of infant mortality.

As the little boy lay suffering, with no parent to comfort him, the monks of St Denis did the only thing they could: they prayed for his life and brought out their sacred relics, a nail from the True Cross, a spine from the holy crown of thorns, and the arm bone of St Simeon. Rigord tells us that they formed a procession and set off through the streets ‘carrying with them the nail and the Lord’s crown of thorns and the arm of Saint Simeon, with clergy and people pouring out tearful prayers’. The relics of saints were considered to have healing powers, so, followed by a crowd of weeping barefoot citizens, the monks took them to the palace. Once inside, the bishop of Paris approached Louis: ‘The boy’s stomach was touched all over by the nail and the crown of thorns. The arm was placed on it in the form of a cross, and he was liberated that very day from imminent danger.’ Such was the grace of God in sparing the young prince’s life, says Rigord, that ‘on the same day clear air and weather was restored to all lands. For the Lord had long rained on the earth because of the sins of men.’ It was also, apparently, the very same day that Philip was healed of his illness in the Holy Land, although this claim should be taken as symbolic rather than factual.

News of Louis’s illness reached Acre, where it is possible that Richard deliberately told Philip that his son was dead in the hope of distressing him further. Once the city had fallen, there was still much to do in the Holy Land if Jerusalem was to be recaptured, but after the health of both France’s king and its heir had been threatened (or, alternatively, using this as a convenient excuse) Philip decided that his own kingdom must come first. If he and Louis had both died it was anyone’s guess as to who would take the throne, with the most likely scenario being a civil war between Philip’s cousins and the husbands and sons of his sisters as they each sought the crown; this would not only damage the realm but also leave it vulnerable to attack from Richard and others. Philip had not worked so hard for so long to risk France descending into anarchy after his death. And so he set off home, much to the annoyance of Richard, who remained in the Holy Land, although he was destined never to reach Jerusalem. After a long journey across land and sea which must have taxed his health even further, Philip eventually reached Paris on a freezing 27 December 1191, to prostrate himself before the altar at St Denis and give fervent thanks to God for his safe return.

And what of the father–son reunion? It must have been very confusing for the four-year-old prince as he welcomed the returning king. Louis had not seen Philip since he was a toddler, and even if some shadowy memories remained, the man before him – sick, bald, prematurely aged – can have borne little resemblance to the father he remembered.

* * *

Louis continued to grow up in the palace; Philip resumed his duties, one of which was to ensure the succession by producing more heirs. Shortly before Louis’s sixth birthday the prince received the news that he was to gain a new stepmother: Ingeborg, the eighteen-year-old sister of King Cnut VI of Denmark, reputed to be one of the most beautiful and the most pious women in Europe. The wedding took place on 14 August 1193, bride and groom having no common language and having met each other for the first time earlier that same day. And then, for reasons which have been inexplicable to generations of historians ever since, never mind to a small boy caught up in events, Philip repudiated Ingeborg the day after the wedding and sent her away to a convent. Louis was not to have a new mother after all. Many years of dispute were to follow, setting Philip variously against the king of Denmark, the pope, the clergy and people of France, and even his own loyal chroniclers, with Rigord describing the clergy who agreed to sanction the divorce as ‘mute as dogs who did not know how to bark’. But Philip would never agree to live with Ingeborg as husband and wife again.