Philip Augustus; or, The Brothers in Arms

by G. P. R. James

"Good knight and noble! if ever one lived," said the herald, bowing his head to De Coucy.

"Go then to the false traitor John," continued the king, "defy him in our name! tell him that we will have blood for blood; and that the death of all the thousands which shall fall in his unrighteous quarrel we cast upon his head. Tell him, that we will never sheathe the sword, so long as he possesses one foot of ground in France; and that when we have even driven him across his bulwark of the sea, we will overleap that too, and the avenging blade shall plague him at his very hearth.--Yet hold!" cried Philip, pausing in the midst of the passion into which he had worked himself, and reining in his wrath, to guide it in the course of his greater purposes; as a skilful charioteer bends the angry and impetuous fire of his horses, to whirl him on with more energetic celerity to the goal within his view. "Yet hold!--------" and Philip carried his hand to his brow, catching, as by inspiration, the outline of that bright stroke of policy which, more than any other act of his whole reign, secured to the monarchs of France the absolute supremacy of their rule--the judgment of John of Anjou, the greatest feudatory of the crown, by the united peers of France.

If he made the war against John a personal one between himself and the king of England, he might be supported by his barons, and come off victorious in the struggle, it was true; but if he summoned John, as Duke of Normandy, to receive judgment from his sovereign court in a case of felony, it established his jurisdiction over his higher vassals, on a precedent such as none would ever dare in after years to resist. It did more; for, if John were condemned by his peers, of which Philip entertained not a moment's doubt, the barons of France would be bound to support their own award; and the tie between them and him would become, not the unstable one of voluntary service, rendered and refused as caprice might dictate, but a strictly feudal duty with which all would be interested to comply.

Philip saw, at a glance, the immense increase of stability which he might give to his power by this great exercise of his rights; and, clear-sighted himself, he hardly doubted that his barons would see it also, and perhaps oppose his will. Certain, however, that by the feudal system his right to summon John, and judge him in his court, was clear and undeniable, he resolved to carry it through, at all events; but determined, first, to propose it to his nobles as a concession that he himself made to their privileges.

What is long and tedious, as the slow eye or slower pen travels over the paper, is but the work of a moment to the mind; and Philip had, in the pause of one brief instant, caught every consideration that affected the idea before him, and determined upon his line of conduct.

"Hold!" said he to the herald--"hold! My lords," he continued, turning to the nobles, by whom he was surrounded, "in my first wrath against this base murderer, I had forgot that, though I have the indisputable right of warring upon him as a monarch, yet I cannot justly punish him as a felon, strictly speaking, without your judgment previously pronounced upon him. I would not willingly trespass upon the privileges of any of my noble vassals; and therefore, lords--you Dukes of Burgundy and Champagne, and whatever other peers of France are present, I resign the judgment of this John of Anjou into your hands. I will summon him to appear before my court of peers, at the end of twenty days, to answer the charges brought against him. The peers of France shall judge him according to their honour and his demerits; and I will stand by in arms, to see that judgment executed." The peers of France could hardly have refused to assist at the trial to which Philip called them, even had they been so willed; but, far behind the monarch in intellect, and indignant at the baseness of John of Anjou, they now eagerly expressed their approval of the king's determination; and again plighted themselves to support him in his war against the English sovereign, whether that war was maintained as a consequence of the judgment they should give, or as a continuation of that which had already commenced.

The herald, then, was instantly despatched to Rouen, for the purpose of displaying the articles of accusation against John at the court of Normandy, and of summoning him to appear on the twentieth day at Paris, to answer the charges to be there substantiated. At the same time, the legate of the holy see, very well convinced that, in the present case, the thunders of the church would fall harmless at the feet of Philip, though launched with ever so angry a hand, took leave of the monarch with a discontented air; and as he left the hall, the monarch's lip curled, and his eye lightened, with a foretaste of that triumph which he anticipated over the proud priest who had so darkly troubled the current of his domestic happiness.

"Beau Sire De Coucy," said the king, turning to the young knight with a bland smile, as he recalled his thoughts from the contemplation of the future, "notwithstanding the sad news you have brought us, you are most welcome to the court of France. Nor will we fail to repay your sufferings, as far as our poor means will go. In the mean while, we beg of you to make our palace your home till such time as, with sounding trumpets and lances in rest, we shall march to punish the assassin of Arthur Plantagenet. Then shall you lead, to aid in the revenge I know you thirst to take, all the fair host raised on the lands of the Count de Tankerville, full a thousand archers and two hundred knights. At supper, noble lords," continued the king, "I trust that all here will grace my board with their presence. Ere then, I have a bitter task to perform--to break to a fond mother the death of her noble boy, and to soothe the sorrows of a helpless widow."

CHAPTER IX.

One unchanging cloud of perpetual sorrow lowered over the days of the unhappy Agnes de Meranie. The hope that the council which had been called to decide upon the king's divorce might pronounce a judgment favourable to her wishes, dwindled gradually away, till its flickering, uncertain light was almost more painful than the darkness of despair. The long delays of the church of Rome, the tedious minutiae of all its ceremonious forms, the cavillings upon words, the endless technicalities, however sweet and enduring was her disposition, wore her mind and her frame, and she faded away like a rose at the end of summer, dropping leaf by leaf towards decay.