The Story of Rouen

by Theodore Andrea Cook

LITERALLY not one stone remains in Rouen to which I can point you as a witness of the tragedy in which the names of Fredegond and Brunhilda will always live. Yet the part of their tragedy which was played in Rouen must be told, if you are clearly to fashion for yourself that web of many faded colours which is to be the background for the first figures recognisable as flesh and blood, the northern pirates. It is a story which points as clearly to the downfall of Merovingian society and the coming of a new race, as ever any tale of Rome's decline and fall pointed to the coming of the barbarians.

After the death of King Hlothair, the last man of the blood of the great Hlodowig, or Clovis, whose Frankish warriors had driven the Romans out of Gaul, and who himself became the "eldest son of the Church," his kingdom had been divided among his four sons, of whom the eldest died in possession of the lands of Bordeaux; and left his treasure to be taken by the next brother, Gunthram, and his lands to be divided among all three of the surviving heirs. Mutual suspicion defeated its own ends, and the ridiculous principles on which the division was made were the mainspring of nearly all the quarrelling that followed. Sigebert, the youngest brother, reigned over Austrasia, which stretched eastward from the north of Gaul through Germany towards the Slavs and Saxons. Gunthram had the central land of Orléans and Burgundy. Hilperik reigned north and westward of the Loire in Neustria. But each of the three owned towns and lands in various parts of France without regard to the broad lines of division which have just been indicated. Of them all Hilperik, the King of Neustria, was the most uxorious and effeminate. By his wife, Audowere, he had had three sons, Hlodowig, Theodobert and Merowig, who was held at the font of Rouen Cathedral by the Bishop Pretextatus. Among the royal waiting women was a young and very beautiful Frank called Fredegond, on whom the King had already cast a too-favourable eye; and the opportunity of his absence on an expedition to the North was seized by the girl in a way which showed at once the unscrupulous and subtle treachery which was the keynote of her character. The Queen was brought to bed of her fourth child, a daughter, while the King was still from home. By Fredegond's suggestion, the infant was held at the font by Audowere herself and christened Hildeswinda. Hlodowig at once took advantage of the trap into which the innocent and unsuspecting mother had fallen. As soon as he returned he sent away Audowere and her baby to a monastery at Le Mans, on the pretext that it was illegal for the godmother of his own daughter to be his wife. He then made Fredegond his queen.

The conduct of the younger brother Sigebert was at once more dignified and more politically secure. At Metz in 566 he married Brunhilda, the younger daughter of Athanagild, King of the Goths, whose capital was at Toledo, a woman whose courage, beauty, and resource, have remained a byword in history and song. The splendour and success of this alliance roused Hilperik's jealousy, and he lost no time in sending an embassy to Spain asking the hand of Galeswintha, the elder sister of his brother's wife. After much negotiation, the girl left the palace of Toledo on her long march to the north. Her own presentiment of coming evil was strengthened by the tears of her reluctant mother, who could with difficulty be persuaded to leave the procession that escorted the princess across the Pyrenees. By way of Narbonne, Carcassonne, Poitiers, and Tours, Galeswintha moved slowly across France towards her husband, with all her Goths and Franks behind her, and a train of baggage waggons groaning beneath the treasures of her dowry. She made her entry into Rouen on a towering car, set with plates of glittering silver, and all the Neustrian warriors stood in a great circle round her with drawn swords, crying aloud the oath of their allegiance. Before them all, the King swore constancy and faith to her, and on the morning following he publicly made present to her of the five southern cities that were his wedding gift.

Fredegond had disappeared. In the general proscription of immorality that had followed the embassy to Spain, she was swept away like the rest, and she knew when to yield. Like the viper in the grass she lay hidden, gathering up her venom for a more deadly blow. So harmless did she seem that she was soon allowed to return to her former humble post as one of the waiting women of the palace. It was not long before she struck. The sensual and shallow nature of the King had soon wearied of his new bride, whose chief charm was not, it would appear, her beauty. A moment came when weariness became disgust. The sight of Fredegond recalled his former passion, and the proud princess of the Goths soon had the mortification of seeing the affections of her husband transferred to her waiting woman. But this was not enough. A few days afterwards Queen Galeswintha was found strangled in her bed, in 568. Hilperik was not long in adding the dignity of queen to the position of wife which he had already given to the triumphant Fredegond.

The sad young figure of this Spanish princess, brought up against her will from sunnier courts into the midst of Merovingian brutality in the dark palaces of Neustria, is one that affected many minds with compassion for her fate. The story of the crystal lamp that hung above her tomb in Rouen, which fell upon the marble pavement, yet was neither broken nor extinguished, was but a poetical expression of the universal pity.[2] In the heart of her sister Brunhilda pity flamed rapidly into revenge. Sigebert was enlisted on the side of justice, and Gunthram quickly followed him, with the object of making peace between his brothers. The King of Neustria was condemned to forfeit certain cities as punishment for the murder of his queen.

But the blood of Galeswintha still cried out for vengeance from the ground, and the horrible series of murders that filled the century began with Hilperik's unwarranted aggressions on the territory of his brother Sigebert. Long months passed in pillage, in ineffectual attempts at reconciliation, in perpetual reprisals. At last Brunhilda rose and insisted that her husband should make an end with the murderer of her sister. So Sigebert and his army moved forward to a combined attack and chased Hilperik to the walls of Paris. Thither, when Fredegond and her husband had fled to Rouen and then to Tournai, Brunhilda came southwards to meet the conqueror who soon marched north again to be crowned at Vitry, leaving his wife behind to guard the capital in triumph. Now came Fredegond's opportunity. For when Hilperik was besieged by Sigebert in the city of Tournai and sore pressed, Fredegond saw her enemy delivered into her hand. "La femme," say the chronicles of St. Denis (III. 3 and 4) "pensa de la besogne là où le sens de son seigneur faillait, qui selon la coutume de femme, moult plus est de grand engieng à malfaire que n'est homme." By some diabolical trick of fascination she persuaded a pair of assassins to penetrate into Sigebert's camp, armed with a "scramasax" she had herself provided. They murdered him as he sat at table, and were instantly cut to pieces by the courtiers.[3] Fredegond always managed to get inconvenient witnesses out of the way. Hilperik at once took advantage of the confusion to march on Paris, and the horror of Brunhilda may be imagined as she realised that the murderer of her husband and of her sister was approaching the city in which the widow and her three orphans were defenceless. Her son (afterwards the second Hildebert), was then but five years old, and by the help of Gundobald she was able to contrive his escape, lowering him in a basket through an opening in the city walls.

Then began another act in this dark drama, which ended very differently to the expectations of Fredegond. For with his father had come young Merowig to Paris, and whether from fascinations that had some deep ulterior design, or whether as is more probable from the natural attraction felt by the young warrior for a lovely princess in distress, Merowig fell hopelessly in love with the fair Brunhilda, who was but twenty-eight and could have been very little older than her second husband. He saw, however, the danger of prematurely confessing his passion, and quietly went off on a foraging expedition to Berri and Touraine at the bidding of his father. But, no doubt, he was aware before starting of Hilperik's intention to send Brunhilda to Rouen; for it was not long before he marched northwards (after a visit to his mother Audowere in her prison at Le Mans),[4] and came to Rouen himself. The meeting cannot have been a surprise to the daughter of the Spanish Goths, and whatever may have been her intentions, she proved so willing to console herself that a very short time elapsed before she was the wife of Merowig. Strangely enough the Bishop of Rouen at the time was the same Pretextatus who had been Merowig's godfather at his baptism. "Proprium mihi," he says (in the history of Gregory of Tours) "esse videbatur, quod filio meo Merovecho erat, quem de lavacro regeneratione excepi." This kindly and somewhat weak prelate, whose natural sympathies seem invariably to have proved too strong for his political prudence, was prevailed upon to perform the ceremony of marrying to Merowig the widow of his father's murdered brother. But it was not merely canonical law, or even certain sentimental precepts, that were offended by a union that was later on to cost its celebrant his life. The suspicions of Hilperik were instantly aroused. Brunhilda's young son had already been accepted as their King by the Austrasian warriors at Metz. Now Brunhilda herself had taken what was evidently the second step in a deep-laid plot to reassert her own superiority and ruin Neustria. It can have scarcely needed the hatred of Fredegond, both for her natural rival and for the son of Audowere, to urge Hilperik to speedy action. He hastened to Rouen with such swiftness that the newly-married pair were entirely taken by surprise in the first few months of their new happiness. They fled for sanctuary to the little wooden church of St. Martin, whose timbers rested on the very ramparts of the town. No entreaties nor cajoleries at first availed to make them leave their refuge. At last, they agreed to come out if the King would swear not to separate them. His oath was a crafty one as it is given by Gregory of Tours: "Si, inquit, voluntas Dei fuerit, ipse has separare non conaretur," and, of course, the "will of God" happened to be the wish of Hilperik, and they were safely separated as soon as possible. For after two or three days of feasting and apparent reconciliation he hurried off with the unwilling bridegroom in his train, and left Brunhilda under a strict guard at Rouen.

The very first incident that followed this unhappy marriage was the siege of Soissons by the men of Neustria, and in this coincidence the King saw further confirmation of the plots of Brunhilda in which she had so nearly secured the assistance of Merowig against Fredegond and his father. He at once ordered his miserable son, whose intellect was incapable of ambitious schemes, and whose only fault had been an unconsidered passion, to be stripped of his arms, and to have the long hair cut from his head that was a mark of royal blood. The later adventures of the wretched Merowig, an exile and an outlaw, hunted through his father's kingdom, are too intricate to follow. After a long imprisonment in the sanctuary of Tours Cathedral, he escaped only to be murdered by the emissaries of the implacable Fredegond in a farmhouse north of Arras. Meanwhile his wife, Brunhilda, had long ago been set free to go from Rouen to Austrasia. She was safer across the border, while the follies of another Merowig might make her dangerous. Her flight, at this unexpected opportunity of freedom, was so rapid that she left the greater part of her baggage and treasure with the Bishop of Rouen, who was once more unwise enough to compromise himself in order to be of service to his godchild's wife. For Pretextatus not only supplied Merowig with money in his various efforts to escape, but was so careless in his demands upon the friendship of the surrounding nobles, and in scattering bribes to gain them over, that his treasonable practices soon came to the ears of Hilperik. That avaricious and perpetually needy ruler was not long in securing the remainder of the treasure of which tidings had so opportunely reached him, and he then immediately summoned Pretextatus to answer before a solemn ecclesiastical council in Paris, as to his relations with Brunhilda, and his disposition of the money she had left with him. The celebrated trial that followed, of which Gregory of Tours was at once the historian and the noblest figure, was ended by the brutal interference of Fredegond, who could not be patient with the law's delays, and forced the Bishop of Rouen to fly for refuge to the island of Jersey where he lived in exile for some years, until the time arrived for Fredegond's full vengeance to be consummated.