Philip the Long had no children and was succeeded by his brother, Charles the Fair. Charles was twice married after his repudiation of Blanche, but he left only a daughter, born at the Louvre after his death, and the crown therefore went to his first cousin, Philip of Valois.
CHAPTER VIII
PARIS OF THE EARLY VALOIS
PHILIP OF VALOIS ruled as Philip VI (1328-1350), thus founding the royal house of Valois. Philip was not allowed to take his throne peacefully, however. There were other claimants, the most formidable being Edward III of England, who demanded the succession through his mother, Isabelle, daughter of Philip the Fair and sister of the late king. Edward’s aspirations brought to pass the Hundred Years’ War whose weary length saw France overrun by foreign enemies and by French brigands, tortured by famine and plague, and her king (John the Good) a prisoner in England. With everything topsy-turvy it becomes hardly a matter of surprise to learn that a French queen mother sold her son’s birthright, that an English prince was crowned king of France in Notre Dame, that the citizens of Paris welcomed the English to help defend them against their own countrymen, and that a maid led men to battle.
As often happens with men of extraordinary force Philip the Fair did not bequeath any legacy of energy to his sons. Philip of Valois, son of Philip the Fair’s brother, had no notable inheritance of character, but he was made of livelier stuff than his cousins. Although three reigns had passed since his uncle’s death it was only a period of fourteen years, and the royal power was then at the greatest point of concentration it had yet reached. A man of but ordinary vigor and judgment, one would suppose, would have been able to entrench himself strongly. Yet the promise of Philip’s early years of victory over the Flemish was unfulfilled by his serious defeats at the hands of the English.
He jumped into the arena promptly enough. At his coronation at Rheims on Trinity Sunday, 1328, the Count of Flanders, whose duty it was to bear the great sword, did not answer the herald’s summons, although he was there in plain view. When Philip asked for an explanation his vassal answered that he had been called by his title, and, because of the disobedience of his people, his title was now but empty sound. Philip was fired with instant sympathy. “Fair Cousin,” he said, “we will swear to you by the holy oil which hath this day trickled over our brow that we will not enter Paris again before seeing you reinstated in peaceable possession of the countship of Flanders.”
He found that he had entered upon no easy task, for the Flemish burghers were both brave and obstinate. However, he won a brilliant victory at Cassel, where, according to Froissart, of sixteen thousand Flemish “all were left there dead and slain in three heaps one upon another.” So annoyed was Philip by the trouble he had been put to to save his word unbroken that he gave the Count of Flanders some rather threatening advice when he left to make his deferred entrance into Paris.
“Count,” he said, “I have worked for you at my own and my barons’ expense; I give you back your land, recovered and in peace; so take care that justice be kept up in it, and that I have not, through your fault, to return; for, if I do, it will be to my own profit, and to your hurt.”
The count, however, could not keep out of embroilment with his people. Because England supplied the wool which the Flemish looms wove it was important to the manufacturers of Flanders that peace should be preserved between the two countries. Heedless of this necessity, the Count of Flanders, in 1336, eight years after the battle of Cassel, ordered the imprisonment of all the English in Flanders. King Edward retaliated in kind and clapped into jail all the Flemish merchants in England. The people of both countries were well aware that Philip of France was the instigator of all this turmoil.
A year after Philip’s accession, Edward, as lord of Aquitaine, had gone to France and paid his feudal duty to him. The two monarchs were supposed to be friends. Friendship is hard to preserve, however, when ambitions clash and when interested people are alert to foment trouble. In 1337 war was declared, and its dragging course for the next decade was prophetic of the whole miserable century.
After nine years of desultory fighting the French suffered at Crécy the worst defeat the country ever had known. For the first time in history gunpowder was used in war and the innovation made apparent at once the futility of the nobles’ fortresses against the new ammunition.