If you will pardon further digression, I will say a word about those names Bourbon and Valois which you meet so often in history:—In spite of our notions about womens’ rights, we common folks are reconciled to see the wife take the name of the husband, even when we suspect that it is not he who is master of the house. Royalty has sometimes departed from this wholesome rule:—Robert of Clermont the youngest son of Louis IX., Saint Louis, married the heiress of the house of Bourbon. Instead of calling his wife Madame de Clermont, he called himself Monsieur de Bourbon; and they were the progenitors of the family which came to the throne in the person of Henry IV. Henry’s right to the crown of France, was through his father the riotous Antony, and to the crown of Navarre, through his mother Jane who was not riotous but pious.
Another way in which surnames have been acquired to the blood royal, is by the escheating of male fiefs to the crown by the extinction of male heirs. Thus the estates of Valois fell to the crown, and were bestowed by Philip III. on his second son Charles brother of Philip-the-fair. This Charles was the father of Philip VI. first king of the house of Valois.
Strictly speaking these poor kings had no family names at all—that is none in the sense that Smith and Brown are family names; and when Louis XVI. was arraigned before those cut-throats of the Convention, and called to answer to the name of Louis Capet, he refused, saying that his name was Louis of France. And in the archives of the Convention, is still to be found the inscription of a sum of francs expended to bury the Widow Capet. Widow Capet was Marie Antoinette, Mary of Lorraine, the descendant of Rudolph of Hapsburg, the daughter of a line of emperors, the wife of Louis of Bourbon, the queen of France. Widow Capet![5]
To return to the Captivity. On the death of Clement V. the cardinals made an effort to rescue the pontificate from French domination, and for two years there was no pope; but the French party prevailed, and the bishop of Fréjus was chosen who took the name of John XXII. He immediately confirmed the French ascendancy by appointing six new French cardinals. It was during his reign that began the quarrel between the Holy See and the Visconti a powerful Lombard family from which were descended the later Valois kings, and from which they derived their fatal claim to the Milanese. John XXII. not only excommunicated Matteo Visconti the head of the family, but he added an edict advertising him, his wife and children for sale as slaves. There were no bids, because the Visconti were pugnacious and would not have made good household servants. His son Marco beat the pope’s army at Vavrio on the Adda, and drove him back to France. But he came not bootless home like Bolingbroke. He had plundered Italy from end to end. Though he did not succeed in turning the Visconti into cash, there were found in his coffers after his death, twenty-five millions of florins in gold, in jewels and in plate.
The next pope was Jacques Fournier, Benedict XII. and the next, Pierre Roger, archbishop of Rouen, called Clement VI. The Holy See had now been thirty years without a home of its own. It had resided as tenant at Avignon, and paid rent to the Angevine Kings of Naples, called Angevine from their founder Charles of Anjou brother of Saint Louis. The Angevines were a disreputable set, and Queen Jane the heiress at that period, was not the best of them. Clement VI. bought Avignon of Jane for eighty thousand florins in gold which Voltaire says he never paid. He made it up to her however, by a transaction in his own line, to the understanding of which we must look a little into Jane’s qualities and conduct. She was married four times, and neither time did she make a good wife. Her first husband Andrew of Hungary, she strangled; her second, Louis of Tarento, she poisoned; her third, James of Aragon, perished nobody knows how; her fourth, Otho of Brunswick, prudently kept away from her. At last, her cousin Charles of Durazzo dethroned her, and served her as she had served her first husband—that is choked her, and that was the end of Jane. Before this last culmination, the pope had pardoned her sins. They were as scarlet, and he made them white like snow; and when you reflect that the catalogue embraced the assassination of at least two husbands, you will admit that according to any reasonable tariff, the pontiff did not remain her debtor.
It was during the reign of Clement VI. that the citizens of Rome, sick of misrule, revolted and created Nicholas Rienzi tribune of the people, and thus conjured up a ghost of the ancient republic. At Rome you are still shown the house of Rienzi.
Like the rest, Clement played with his thunderbolts. He excommunicated Waldemar king of Denmark for having made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land without his permission, which shows how hazardous it was in those days, to be pious on mere impulse and without due license from the Church.
Next came Innocent VI. and then Urban V. who was a Marseilles abbot. Urban undertook to be a great pope, but the Captivity was no time for great popes. Urban’s spiritual artillery seemed to have the same disagreeable property of recoil as that of our old friend Boniface VIII.
Petrarch then lived, and though he was a citizen of Avignon, he prayed night and morning for the rebuilding of the Roman pontificate. Listening to him, Urban went to Italy to recover if possible the patrimony of Saint Peter, or, if you insist, that of the Countess Matilda. He was confronted by that chronic enemy of the papacy, the Visconti. At that time the head of that house was one Bernabo who was if anything a little less bland in his way than his predecessors. After many high words, Urban lost his temper and let fly at Bernabo a major excommunication cursing him in eating and drinking and sleeping and in all the functions of life, and redoubling the anathema upon him wherever he might fetch up in the life to come. Bernabo seized the legate who brought the bull, and made him eat it—parchment, ribbon, leaden seal and all. What sauce was allowed him with this strange victual, and how he felt after supper, have not been handed down to us. Not content with that, the impious ruffian sent Urban word that it was he, Bernabo, who was pope in Italy, and emperor to boot; and that the Almighty himself dared do nothing there without his consent.
On Urban’s return to Avignon, a fresh humiliation awaited him. Peter-the-cruel king of Castile had an illegitimate brother, Henry of Trastamara who undertook to dethrone him. Henry obtained the aid of the famous French knight, Bertrand du Guesclin, and also of a band of mercenary soldiers called Free Companions who were not always distinguishable from free-booters. In their march toward Spain, they encamped one night on the bank of the Rhone opposite Avignon, and sent to the Holy Father praying that he would pardon their sins, bless their enterprise and give them some money. Urban granted them absolution and benediction; but he told them he had no money for them, and bid them be gone. They demanded forty thousand crowns in gold as the price of their departure. Urban launched at them a thunder-bolt as pregnant with disaster as the one he had discharged at Bernabo. Du Guesclin himself then sought an interview with his Holiness, and told him that he had no control over those marauders except on the field of battle, and that they were threatening to sack the papal palace. Urban, thoroughly frightened, recalled his curses and renewed his benedictions; but as his conscience would not allow him to take money out of the sacred treasury to give to such miscreants, he laid a tax on the citizens of Avignon, and they had to pay the sum demanded.