We hear little more of Marguerite after this crusade. In spite of his affection and respect for her, and in spite of his gratitude for her conduct during his first crusade, Saint Louis did not think his wife capable of playing the rôle of Blanche de Castille, to which some say she unwisely aspired. When he was preparing for his second crusade, in 1270, he not only did not leave her the regency, although she was to remain in France, but he took unusual care to regulate her expenditures and to hedge about her prerogatives. He forbade her to receive any presents for herself or her children, to meddle with the administration of justice, or to choose any person for her service without the consent of the council of regents. That his precautions were not altogether without excuse, we see when we learn that Marguerite was already thinking about securing her position, in case of her husband's death, by making her son Philippe promise under oath that he would remain in tutelage until he was thirty years of age; that he would take no councillor without her approval; that he would inform her of all designs hostile to her influence; that he would make no treaty with his uncle, Charles d'Anjou; and that he would keep these engagements secret. The young Philippe had himself absolved from his oath by the Pope. The ambition of Marguerite, however, died with the husband whom she had loved and whom all Europe mourned. The good King Louis is a figure so heroic in some of its aspects that one must pause and take thought before venturing on any criticism: his motives cannot be impugned, and it were an ungrateful task to find fault with his deeds in any particular.
Marguerite lived on long after her husband in the convent she had founded in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel, which she gave to the nuns in perpetuity, reserving only a life interest for her daughter, Blanche. It was here that she was living when she had the joy of hearing proclaimed the canonization of Louis IX., the saintly King of France. This was just before her death in 1295.
There are figures in history which have become woefully distorted in the disfiguring mists of centuries, and others which have been not less wronged by prejudice, partisanship, or conscious or unconscious misrepresentation. These--at least some of these--have been in part indemnified and set right before the world: Louis XI. in France, and his contemporary Richard III. in England; Cleopatra, Catherine de Medici, Mary of England, all these and a host of others, we are told now and then, have been misunderstood by the world; nay, in this century of universal charity, this century which is undertaking the task of righting all the wrongs accumulated from the past, one can find apologists for the enemy of mankind himself. The moral of this homily is--it may be apparent to some of my readers--that if you are either very good or very bad you get much talked about in history: there will be some to defend you no matter how bad you are, and some to denounce you no matter how good you are. But if you simply do your duty, without fear and without advertisement, little will be said of you; history, at least in traditions still partly ruling, does not dignify with the epithet "great" the steady day-laborers who go about their task and complete it in silence. This, I would imply, is partly the reason why Blanche de Castille has never been heralded as great, and why her work in the upbuilding of the French monarchy is taken as a matter of course, and not praised like, for example, the more brilliant exploits of the "Grande Monarque" who was to do so much to undermine the power of that monarchy.
The fame of the mother is eclipsed by the peculiar glory of the son; but would it not be fair to ask how much of the excellence of Louis the man, how much of the glory of Louis the king, was due to Blanche de Castille? It cannot be questioned that she found France in a condition most perilous, threatened with the loss of all that two reigns had won for the royal power. A glance at the history of her career will show that she not only averted this danger, but that the crown was stronger when she began to relinquish her authority than it had been under Louis VIII. She reduced her rebellious vassals to submission; she more than held her own against England; she ended the war against Raymond of Toulouse, and reserved for France the control, immediate or ultimate, of the greater part of his dominions; and these things she accomplished, not merely by force, but by wise and patient policy. Louis IX. owed his crown to Blanche's care as regent; it is not improbable that he owed her as much during the years when he himself was on the throne and she but a counsellor. History is silent on many points in this connection, but it might be noted that it was through disregard of her earnest advice that he entered on the crusade which resulted so disastrously. She knew that, even if it had been successful from the point of view of the Church, it could but be dangerous, perhaps even ruinous, for France. This is one case in which we know Saint Louis rejected his mother's guidance, and what came of it is matter of history; might there not be many another act of his, more successful in its issue, for which the credit should go to Blanche?
As a queen, Blanche de Castille was more than capable; it is only the absence of great battles, great social, religious, and economic movements, during her ascendency, that hinders our calling her, without reservation, a great queen. When we look at Blanche the woman, we are confronted with a like difficulty. Shall we say she was a saint? Her son, the son whom she bore, whom she reared with unexampled care, whom she watched over all her life, has been called a saint, and there is no one to say him nay. Shall we say that the mother of a saint is, ex officio, or even by courtesy, also a saint? We cannot claim sanctity for Queen Blanche: there was in her a touch of the temper of her grand-mother, Eleanor of Guienne of wicked memory, or mayhap a trace of the Plantagenet. It is interesting to note that the best qualities of the vigorous Henry II. tempered the woman's nature of this daughter of Spain and gave her the stamina, the unconquerable spirit, which alone could save her. This Plantagenet temper is under excellent control in Queen Blanche; so excellent, indeed, that under some circumstances she seems cold. She is not cold, she is cool, a very different thing; no danger, no excitement, no sudden gust of resentment at an insult, can make her lose her head and act rashly. She is a thorough politician, making her feelings, her emotions, subservient to her will, and even, as we have hinted, playing the lover for the sake of controlling an amorous and uncertain vassal. Danger nerves her to action, and she acts with promptitude and firmness. At the defects in her character we have already hinted in part; the fundamental one, when we consider Blanche the woman, was her love of power. Ambitious she was; and yet, when we say this, we must not forget that she sought power not for herself, but for her son. How quietly she relinquishes her authority, and how ready she is, even when that authority is at its height, to tell Thibaud de Champagne that he owes his preservation to "the great goodness of my son, the King, who came to your aid"! But it was her jealousy of Marguerite de Provence that was the great blemish on Blanche's character. It was a meanness unworthy of a nature so generous and so faithful; we can attempt no defence, we can only express regret. Her personality exerted a powerful influence over those with whom she came in contact, and from all the best men of her time she received due meed of praise. Compare her with other women of her day, and there is none who can be placed beside Blanche la bonne reine, or Blanche la bonne mère.
CHAPTER VII
THE ROMANCES OF CHIVALRY AND LOVE
BESIDE such a figure as that of Blanche de Castille, the women of whom we might next speak would seem pale ghosts, mere masks and shadows; and, even then, not always pleasing ones. There are, in fact, no immediate successors of Blanche and her daughter-in-law in the history of France; there is an interregnum, so to speak, of good, great, even of notorious women; in this inter-regnum, therefore, let us see how chivalry and literature were treating woman, what was the ideal, and what was the real woman in the artistic world at this time.
Between the tenth and the sixteenth centuries Europe saw the birth, the growth, the culmination, the decay, and finally the displacement of those ideals and those customs which we associate with the word "chivalry." The subject of chivalry, interesting in itself, is also one of peculiar interest for us, since chivalry affected in no small degree the condition of women; but with its primal origin we shall not attempt to deal: we shall dig up no roots, but only do our best to describe the glorious tree itself and the soil in which it flourished. We shall find that chivalry, like all other earthly things, has its leprous spots, which one must keep out of sight if one would pour forth genuine and unchecked enthusiasm; yet the good and the bad alike must be understood if we would have a just conception of the whole.