THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS.
For those who possess historic tastes, slender purses, and an exemption from Alpine mania, few holidays are more pleasant than a lounge along the Loire. There is always something refreshing in the companionship of a fine river, and whatever one may think of its summer sands Loire through the spring and the autumn is a very fine river indeed. There is, besides, the pleasantest variety of scenery as one wanders along from the sombre granite of Brittany to the volcanic cinder-heaps of Auvergne. There is the picturesque contrast between the vast dull corn-flats to the north of the great river and the vines and acacias to the south. There is the same contrast in an ethnological point of view, for one is traversing the watershed that parts two different races, and enough of difference still remains in dialect and manner to sever the Acquitanian from the Frank. And historically every day brings one across some castle or abbey or town that has been hitherto a mere name in the pages of Lingard or Sismondi, but which one actual glimpse changes into a living fact. There are few tracts of country indeed where the historical interest ranges equally over so long a space of time. The river which was the "revolutionary torrent" of Carrier had been the highway for the Northmen into the heart of Carolingian France. Saumur blends the tenth century and the sixteenth together in the names of Gelduin and Du Plessis; Chinon brings into contact the age of the Plantagenets and the age of Joan of Arc. From the mysterious dolmen and the legendary well to the stone that marks the fusillade of the heroes of La Vendée there is a continuous chain of historic event in these central provinces. Every land has its pet periods of history, and the brilliant chapters of M. Michelet are hardly needed to tell us how thoroughly France identifies the splendour and infamy of the Renascence with the Loire. Blois, Amboise, Chenonceaux, embody still in the magnificence of their ruin the very spirit of Catherine de Medicis, of Francis, of Diana of Poitiers. To Englishmen the relics of an earlier period have naturally a greater charm. Nothing clears one's ideas about the character of the Angevin rule, the rule of Henry II. or Richard or John, so thoroughly as a stroll through Anjou.
There the Angevin Counts are as vivid, as real, as the Angevin Kings are on English soil unreal and dim. Hardly a building in his realm preserves the memory of Henry II.; Richard is a mere visitor to English shores; Beaulieu alone and the graven tomb at Worcester enable us to realize John. But along the Loire these Angevin rulers meet us in river-bank and castle and bridge and town. Their names are familiar words still through the length and breadth of the land. At Angers men show you the vast hospital of Henry II., while the suburb around it is the creation of his son. And not only do the men come vividly before us, but they come before us in another and a fresher light. To us they are strangers and foreigners, stern administrators, exactors of treasure, tyrants to whose tyranny, sometimes just and sometimes unjust, England was destined to owe her freedom. But for Anjou the period of their rule was the period of a peace and fame and splendour that never came back save in the shadowy resurrection under King René. Her soil is covered with monuments of their munificence, of their genuine care for the land of their race. Nine-tenths of her great churches, in the stern grandeur of their vaulting, their massive pillars, their capitals breaking into the exquisite foliage of the close of the century, witness to the pious liberality of sovereigns who in England were the oppressors of the Church, and who when doomed to endow a religious house in their realm did it by turning its inhabitants out of an already existing one and giving it simply a new name. As one walks along the famous Levee, the gigantic embankment along the Loire by which Henry saved the valley from inundation, or as one looks at his hospitals at Angers or Le Mans, it is hard not to feel a sympathy and admiration for the man from whom one shrinks coldly under the Martyrdom at Canterbury. There is a French side to the character of these Kings which, though English historians have disregarded it, is worth regarding if only because it really gave the tone to their whole life and rule. But it is a side which can only be understood when we study these Angevins in Anjou.
To the English traveller Angers is in point of historic interest without a rival among the towns of France. Rouen indeed is the cradle of our Norman dynasty as Angers of our Plantagenet dynasty; but the Rouen of the Dukes has almost vanished while Angers remains the Angers of the Counts. The physiognomy of the place—if we may venture to use the term—has been singularly preserved. Few towns have it is true suffered more from the destructive frenzy of the Revolution; gay boulevards have replaced "the flinty ribs of this contemptuous city," the walls which play their part in Shakspere's 'King John'; the noblest of its abbeys has been swept away to make room for a Prefecture; four churches were demolished at a blow to be replaced by the dreariest of squares; the tombs of its later dukes have disappeared from the Cathedral. In spite however of new faubourgs, new bridges, and new squares, Angers still retains the impress of the middle ages; its steep and narrow streets, its dark tortuous alleys, the fantastic woodwork of its houses, the sombre grimness of the slate-rock out of which the city is built, defy even the gay audacity of Imperialist prefects to modernize them. One climbs up from the busy quay along the Mayenne into a city which is still the city of the Counts. From Geoffry Greygown to John Lackland there is hardly one who has not left his name stamped on church or cloister or bridge or hospital. The stern tower of St. Aubin recalls in its founder Geoffry himself; the nave of St. Maurice, the choir of St. Martin's, the walls of Roncevray, the bridge over Mayenne, proclaim the restless activity of Fulc Nerra; Geoffry Martel rests beneath the ruins of St. Nicholas on its height across the river; beyond the walls to the south is the site of the burial place of Fulc Rechin; one can tread the very palace halls to which Geoffry Plantagenet led home his English bride; the suburb of Roncevray, studded with buildings of an exquisite beauty, is almost the creation of Henry Fitz-Empress and his sons.
But, apart from its historical interest, Angers is a mine of treasure to the archæologist or the artist. In the beauty and character of its site it strongly resembles Le Mans. The river Mayenne comes down from the north, from its junction with the Sarthe, edged on either side by low ranges of coteaux which approaching it nearly on the west leave room along its eastern bank for vast level flats of marshy meadow land, cut through by white roads and long poplar-rows—meadows which in reality represent the old river-bed in some remote geological age before it had shrunk to its present channel. Below Angers the valley widens, and as the Mayenne coils away to Ponts de Ce it throws out on either side broad flats, rich in grass and golden flowers, and scored with rhines as straight and choked with water-weeds as the rhines of Somersetshire. It is across these lower meadows, from the base of the abbey walls of St. Nicholas, that one gets the finest view of Angers, the colossal mass of its castle, the two delicate towers of the Cathedral rising sharp against the sky, the stern belfry of St. Aubin. Angers stands in fact on a huge block of slate-rock, thrown forward from one of the higher plateaux which edge the marshy meadows, and closing up to the river in what was once a cliff as abrupt as that of Le Mans. Pleasant boulevards curve away in a huge semicircle from the river, and between these boulevards and the Mayenne lies the dark old town pierced by steep lanes and break-neck alleys. On the highest point of the block and approached by the steepest lane of all stands the Cathedral of St. Maurice, the tall slender towers of its western front and the fantastic row of statues which fill the arcade between them contrasting picturesquely enough with the bare grandeur of its interior, where the broad, low vaulting reminds us that we are on the architectural border of northern and southern Europe. St. Maurice is in the strictest sense the mother church of the town. M. Michelet has with singular lucklessness selected Angers as the type of a feudal city; with the one exception of the Castle of St. Louis it is absolutely without a trace of the feudal impress. Up to the Revolution it remained the most ecclesiastical of French towns. Christianity found the small Roman borough covering little more than the space on the height above the river afterwards occupied by the Cathedral precincts, planted its church in the midst of it, buttressed it to north and south with the great Merovingian Abbeys of St. Aubin and St. Serge, and linked them together by a chain of inferior foundations that entirely covered its eastern side. From the river on the south to the river on the north Angers lay ringed in by a belt of priories and churches and abbeys. Of the greatest of these, that of St. Aubin, only one huge tower remains, but fragments of it are still to be seen embedded in the buildings of the Prefecture—above all a Romanesque arcade, fretted with tangled imagery and apocalyptic figures of the richest work of the eleventh century. The Abbey of St. Serge still stands to the north of Angers; its vast gardens and fishponds turned into the public gardens of the town, its church spacious and beautiful with a noble choir that may perhaps recall the munificence of Geoffry Martel. Of the rivals of these two great houses two only remain. Portions of the Carolingian Church of St. Martin, built by the wife of Emperor Louis le Debonnaire, are now in use as a tobacco warehouse; the pretty ruin of Toussaint, not at all unlike our own Tintern, stands well cared for in the gardens of the Museum.
But, interesting as these relics are, it is not ecclesiastical Angers that the English traveller instinctively looks for; it is the Angers of the Counts, the birthplace of the Plantagenets. It is only in their own capital indeed that we fully understand our Angevin Kings, that we fully realize that they were Angevins. To an English schoolboy Henry II. is little more than the murderer of Beket and the friend of Fair Rosamund. Even an English student finds it hard after all the labours of Professor Stubbs to lay hold of either Henry or his sons. In spite of their versatile ability and of the mark which they have left on our judicature, our municipal liberty, our political constitution, the first three Plantagenets are to most of us little more than dim shapes of strange manner and speech, hurrying to their island realm to extort money, to enforce good government, and then hurrying back to Anjou. But there is hardly a boy in the streets of Angers to whom the name of Henry Fitz-Empress is strange, who could not point to the ruins of his bridge or the halls of his Hospice, or tell of the great "Levee" by which the most beneficent of Angevin Counts saved the farmers' fields from the floods of the Loire. Strangers in England, the three first Plantagenets are at home in the sunny fields along the Mayenne. The history of Anjou, the character of the Counts, their forefathers, are the keys to the subtle policy, to the strangely-mingled temper of Henry and his sons. The countless robber-holds of the Angevin noblesse must have done much towards the steady resolve with which they bridled feudalism in their island realm. The crowd of ecclesiastical foundations that ringed in their Angevin capital hardly failed to embitter, if not to suggest, their jealousy of the Church.
Of the monuments of the Counts which illustrate our own history, the noblest, in spite of its name, is the Bishop's Palace to the north of the Cathedral. The residence of the Bishop was undoubtedly at first the residence of the Counts, and the tradition which places its transfer as far back as the days of Ingelger can hardly be traced to any earlier source than the local annalist of the seventeenth century. It is at least probable that the occupation of the Palace by the Bishop did not take place till after the erection of the Castle on the site of the original Evêché in the time of St. Louis; and this is confirmed by the fact that the well-known description of Angers by Ralph de Diceto places the Comitial Palace of the twelfth century in the north-east quarter of the town—on the exact site, that is, of the present episcopal residence. But if this identification be correct, there is no building in the town which can compare with it in historical interest for Englishmen. The chapel beneath, originally perhaps simply the substructure of the building, dates from the close of the eleventh century; the fine hall above, with its grand row of windows looking out upon the court, from the earlier half of the twelfth. It was to the building as it actually stands therefore that Geoffry Plantagenet must have brought home his English bride, Maud the Empress, the daughter of our Henry I., along the narrow streets hung with gorgeous tapestries and filled with long trains of priests and burghers. To Angers that day represented the triumphant close of a hundred years' struggle with Normandy; to England it gave the line of its Plantagenet Kings.
The proudest monuments of the sovereigns who sprang from this match, our Henry the Second and his sons, lie not in Angers itself but in the suburb across the river. The suburb seems to have originated in the chapel of Roncevray, the Roman-like masonry of whose exterior may date back as far as Fulc Nerra in the tenth century. But its real importance dates from Henry Fitz-Empress. It is characteristic of the temper and policy of the first of our Plantagenet Kings that in Anjou, as in England, no religious house claimed him as its founder. Here indeed the Papal sentence on his part in the murder of Archbishop Thomas compelled him to resort to the ridiculous trick of turning the canons out of Waltham to enable him to refound it as a priory of his own without cost to the royal exchequer. But in his Continental dominions he did not even stoop to the pretence of such a foundation. No abbey figured among the costly buildings with which he adorned his birthplace Le Mans. It was as if in direct opposition to the purely monastic feeling that he devoted his wealth to the erection of the Hospitals at Angers and Le Mans. It is a relief, as we have said—a relief which one can only get here—to see the softer side of Henry's nature represented in works of mercy and industrial utility. The bridge of Angers, like the bridges of Tours and Saumur, dates back to the first of the Count-Kings. Henry seems to have been the Pontifex Maximus of his day, while his care for the means of industrial communication points to that silent growth of the new mercantile class which the rule of the Angevins did so much to foster. But a memorial of him, hardly less universal, is the Lazar-house or hospital. One of the few poetic legends that break the stern story of the Angevins is the tale of Count Fulc the Good, how, journeying along Loire-side towards Tours, he saw just as the towers of St. Martin's rose before him in the distance a leper full of sores, who put by his offer of alms and desired to be borne to the sacred city. Amid the jibes of his courtiers the good count lifted him in his arms and carried him along bank and bridge. As they entered the town the leper vanished from their sight, and men told how Fulc had borne an angel unawares. Little of his ancestor's tenderness or poetry lingered in the practical utilitarian mind of Henry Fitz-Empress; but the simple Hospice in the fields by Le Mans or the grand Hospital of St. John in the suburb of Angers displayed an enlightened care for the physical condition of his people which is all the more striking that in him and his sons it had probably little connection with the usual motives of religious charity which made such works popular in the middle ages, but, like the rest of their administrative system, was a pure anticipation of modern feeling. There are few buildings more complete or more beautiful in their completeness than the Hospital of St. John; the vast hall with its double row of slender pillars, the exquisite chapel, trembling in the pure grace of its details on the very verge of Romanesque, the engaged shafts of the graceful cloister. The erection of these buildings probably went on through the whole reigns of our three Angevin sovereigns, but the sterner and simpler hall called the Lazar-house beside with its three aisles and noble sweep of wide arches is clearly of the date of Henry alone. It was occupied when I visited it some years ago as a brewery, but never was brewer more courteous, more genuinely archæological, than its occupant. Throughout these central provinces indeed, as throughout Normandy, the enlightened efforts of the Government have awakened a respect for and pride in their national monuments which extends even to the poorest of the population. Few buildings of a really high class are now left to ruin and desecration as they were twenty years ago; unfortunately their rescue from the destruction of time is too often followed by the more destructive attack of the restorer. And in almost every town of any provincial importance one may obtain what in England it is simply ridiculous to ask for, a really intelligent history of the place itself and a fair description of the objects of interest which it contains.
The broken ruins of the Pont de Treilles, the one low tower above the river Mayenne which remains of the walls around the suburb of Roncevray, show the price which Henry and his sons set on these costly buildings. They have a special interest in Angevin history, for they were the last legacy of the Counts to their capital. Across the river, at the south-west corner of the town itself, stands the huge fortress that commemorates the close of their rule, the castle begun by the French conqueror, Philip Augustus, and completed by his descendant St. Louis. From the wide flats below Angers, where Mayenne rolls lazily on to the Loire, one looks up awed at the colossal mass which seems to dwarf even the minster beside it, at its dark curtains, its fosse trenched deep in the rock, its huge bastions chequered with iron-like bands of slate and unrelieved by art of sculptor or architect. It is as if the conquerors of the Angevins had been driven to express in this huge monument the very temper of the men from whom they reft Anjou, their grand, repulsive isolation, their dark pitiless power.
It is a relief to turn from this castle to that southern fortress which the Counts made their home. A glance at the flat tame expanse of Anjou northward of the Loire explains at once why its sovereigns made their favourite sojourn in the fairer districts south of the river. There are few drives more enjoyable than a drive along the Vienne to the royal retreat of Chinon. The country is rich and noble, deep in grass and maize and corn, with meadows set in low broad hedgerows, and bare scratchy vineyards along the slopes. The road is lined with acacias, Tennyson's "milk-white bloom" hanging from their tender feathery boughs, and here beneath the hot sun of the South the acacia is no mere garden shrub but one of the finest and most graceful of trees. Everywhere along the broad sunlit river of Vienne nature is rich and lavish, and nowhere richer or more lavish than where, towering high on the scarped face of its own grey cliff above the street of brown little houses edged narrowly in between river and rock, stands the favourite home of our Angevin Kings.
It is only in one or two points amidst the great mass of stately buildings which is known as the castle of Chinon that their hand can be traced now. The base of the Tour du Moulay, where tradition says the Grand Master of the Templars was imprisoned by Philippe le Bel, is a fine vault of twelfth-century date, which may have been the work of Henry II., and can hardly be later than his sons. But something of its original character as a luxurious retreat lingers still in the purpose to which the ground within the walls has been devoted; it serves as a garden for the townsfolk of Chinon, and is full of pleasant shadowy walks and flowers, and gay with children's games and laughter. And whatever else may have changed, the same rich landscape lies around that Henry must have looked on when he rode here to die, as we look on it now from the deep recessed windows of the later hall where Joan of Arc stood before the disguised Dauphin. Beneath is the broad bright Vienne coming down in great gleaming curves from Isle-Bouchard, and the pretty spire of St. Maurice, Henry's own handiwork perhaps, soaring lightly out of the tangled little town at our feet. Beyond, broken with copse and hedgerow and cleft by the white road to Loudun, rise the slopes of Pavilly leading the eye round, as it may have led the dying eye of the king, to the dim blue reaches of the west where Fontevraud awaited him.
No scene harmonizes more thoroughly than Fontevraud with the thoughts which its name suggests. A shallow valley which strikes away southward through a break in the long cliff-wall along the Loire narrows as it advances into a sterner gorge, rough with forest greenery. The grey escarpments of rock that jut from the sides of this gorge are pierced here and there with the peculiar cellars and cave-dwellings of the country, and a few rude huts which dot their base gather as the road mounts steeply through this wilder scenery into a little lane of cottages that forms the village of Fontevraud. But it is almost suddenly that the great abbey church round which the village grew up stands out in one colossal mass from the western hill-slope; and in its very solitude and the rock-like grandeur of its vast nave, its noble apse, its low central tower, there is something that marks it as a fit resting-place for kings. Nor does its present use as a prison-chapel jar much on those who have grown familiar with the temper of the early Plantagenets. At the moment of my visit the choir of convicts were practising the music of a mass in the eastern portion of the church, which with the transepts has now been set apart for divine service, and the wild grandeur of the music, unrelieved by any treble, seemed to express in a way that nothing else could the spirit of the Angevins. "From the devil we come, and to the devil we go," said Richard. In spite of the luckless restoration to which their effigies have been submitted—and no sight makes us long more ardently that the "Let it alone" of Lord Melbourne had wandered from politics into archæology—it is still easy to read in the faces of the two King-Counts the secret of their policy and their fall. That of Henry II. is clearly a portrait. Nothing could be less ideal than the narrow brow, the large prosaic eyes, the coarse full cheeks, the sensual dogged jaw, that combine somehow into a face far higher than its separate details, and which is marked by a certain sense of power and command. No countenance could be in stronger contrast with his son's, and yet in both there is the same look of repulsive isolation from men. Richard's is a face of cultivation and refinement, but there is a strange severity in the small delicate mouth and in the compact brow of the lion-hearted king which realizes the verdict of his day. To an historical student one glance at these faces as they lie here beneath the vault raised by their ancestor, the fifth Count Fulc, tells more than pages of chronicles; but Fontevraud is far from being of interest to historians alone. In its architectural detail, in its Romanesque work, and in its strangely beautiful cinque-cento revival of the Romanesque, in its cloister and Glastonbury kitchen, it is a grand study for the artist or the archæologist; but these are merits which it shares with other French minsters. To an English visitor it will ever find its chief attraction in the Tombs of the Kings.