VI.

CHAP. occupied, not Tunis, but the ruins of Carthage, about a league distant, in the midst of which was a castle of no great strength. Here the good king rested, awaiting, as it was supposed, the King of Sicily. But in truth, he could scarcely support the weight of his armour at midsummer, on the coast of Africa. The great heat, and the number of dead, which too little trouble had been taken to remove, with bad water and insufficient food, soon occasioned pestilence in the army. Numbers of the crusading chiefs died; amongst others, the king's son, John Tristam, Count of Nevers, who, born in the first crusade, thus fell a victim to the second. The day of his son's death was the first of St. Louis's illness. He was seized with dysentery and fever, and after a fortnight's suffering, the good king expired on the 25th of August, 1270.

Joinville and several chroniclers have preserved his dying injunctions to his son and successor, Philip. They chiefly related to his observance of religious duties, to his practising confession and protecting the Church. But he also warned Philip to avoid heavy imposts, and to attend particularly to the conduct of his baillis and prevots, and make every amendment possible in his manner of dispensing justice. The king was but fifty-six when he died.

Louis, the eldest son of St. Louis, having died in 1260, Philip, his second son, succeeded to the throne. Peter and John died without issue; but Robert, the youngest son of Louis, receiving the county of Clermont from his father, acquired that of Bourbon by marriage, and was the founder of the family which afterwards wore the crown of France down to our times. Robert received such severe blows on the head during a tournament that he lost his reason.

Louis the Ninth has been portrayed by several hands; by his friend and fellow soldier, Joinville, by his con fessor, and by the contemporary chroniclers of France and England, William of Nangis and Matthew Paris,

Nangis, a dry, discreet, uninteresting recorder of events, Matthew Paris, a garrulous, frank, and argumentative recorder of the thoughts as well as the facts of the age. Louis appears under the least agreeable aspect in the limning of his confessor. His observance of the rules of monastic piety, his submitting to the discipline of the cord, his estimation of very dubious relics as of more value than provinces, and finally his cruelty in burning heretics and branding blasphemers, make us behold the inquisitor and the Dominican rather than the monarch. But there was evidently no medium possible at that time for a sincere man between full submission to the religion of the day as taught and the almost total rejection of it, as was the case of Frederic the Second and the Albigenses. Amidst the narrowness of education which prevailed, to question was to doubt, and to doubt was to disbelieve. So that in theology such men as St. Louis thought it best to accord implicit faith to the Church.

Had a person of intellect dared to open his eyes to the errors of religious teaching, as he did to the errors of law and government, even in the hands of priests, his common sense would have led him to similar conclusions, and would have made him a reformer of dogma and of discipline, as well as of law. But Louis kept his judgment fettered in the one, whilst he left it free on the other. With a friend and companion like Thomas Aquinas, he preserved the strict path of orthodoxy. It was on legal questions that he indulged in the free exercise of his judgment, and he did this with the more zeal and delight, because his reforms put an end to the reign of violence and war. Judicial proceedings were evidently his favourite pastime, as is evinced by the anecdote of Joinville, of the good monarch summoning suitors to have their causes tried under one of the oaks of the forest of Vincennes. His determination to bring Enguerrand de Coucy to justice is one of the noblest

CHAP.

VI.

CHAP.
VI.

pope

traits of his or of any monarch's reign. And his stern
and upright resistance to the pretensions of either
or prelates, when they were contrary to justice, display
Louis not only as a saint, but, as he said himself, some-
thing better, a prudhomme, a wise and just man.

CHAP. VII.

PHILIP THE HARDY.

1270-1285.

ALTHOUGH St. Louis, inspired by the sentiments of true
piety, philanthropy and disinterestedness, and by a
magnanimous preference of justice to either ambition or
aggrandizement, stood the foremost of his age in France,
he was far from fully representing the country's spirit.
He had, with righteous and humane purpose, sought to
mitigate the rude authority of the feudal lords, and had
raised from the dust a profession, that of the legists,
better fitted to lead the middle class in resisting them,
than even the wealthy townsmen had been. These first
law officers and ministers were upright men, worthy of
the monarch who selected and advanced them. But those
whom subsequent kings elevated from the condition of
clerks to be knights of their council and their judgment-
seat, introduced mean principles of policy and habits
of chicane, which disgraced their own profession and
the master they served. The influence of these men
became soon manifest, first in the reign of the son, and
still more in that of the grandson, of St. Louis. Such
ministers succeeded in enriching and even in aggran-
dizing the crown, but it was at the expense of character,
and consequently to the diminution of that reverence
which the kingly office should command.
This pro-
duced a feudal reaction against the learned and middle

CHAP.
VII.

CHAP.

VII.

classes altogether, and led in the ensuing century to the ascendancy of a new, exclusive, and arrogant aristocracy, more tyrannical and oppressive as well as more socially intolerant than that which the arm of Philip Augustus and the edicts of St. Louis had humbled.

Whilst the laws of justice and equality, which animated St. Louis became thus misrepresented, the disinterested piety of that monarch was contrasted in his own family with the selfish fanaticism of his brother, whose fervour for religion was mingled with a passion for adventure, for vengeance, for blood and for greed, the very reverse of Christian feeling. There is no character more often reproduced in history, than that of the able, iron, ambitious fanatic, the expression of whose faith and piety is so earnest, that to question its sincerity is difficult, although the craft with which it is accompanied would induce serious doubts. Singular enough, the crusades did not give birth to many such men. Northern energy became invariably subdued in Palestine, and even in Constantinople melted down to a lax, self-indulgent, and reckless character, incapable of extending an empire or preserving a dominion. It was in a domestic, though religious war that such a personage as Simon de Montfort was formed, where the ruthlessness of the crusader was joined to the unrelaxed energy of the Anglo-Norman knight. Charles of Anjou was another De Montfort, as ambitious, as rapacious, as cruel, fanatic in the cause of religion and of the Pope, provided the religion was of his own conception, and the Pope a fanatic as himself. Charles was a brave soldier and an able general. He would have been a persecutor and slaughterer of heretics, no doubt, had any survived. St. Louis himself did not shrink from that sacred duty, or entertain doubts of its sanctity and justice. But Charles found something akin to heresy in the attachment of any people or class to liberty: St. Louis himself and his legists entertained