him odious in Dagobert’s eyes, that he might even be slain, but the love of justice and the fear of God, which he had diligently embraced, freed him from all evils.” However, it seems that he, together with other Austrasian nobles, was kept in a sort of honorable captivity in Neustria during the rest of the days of Dagobert (from 630 to 638), and that not till the latter date did he return to Austrasia. Evidently there was already an uneasy feeling on the part of the Frankish ruler dwelling at Paris that these great Austrasian potentates would one day give him or his descendants a sharp struggle for the crown.
For one year after his return Pippin swayed the affairs of the Austrasian palace, acting always in concert with Cunibert, Bishop of Cologne, who had succeeded to the same position of spiritual prime minister which had formerly been held by St. Arnulf. Together they presided over the division of the treasures of the late king, assigning one-third to his widow, Nantildis; one-third to his son, Clovis II., who succeeded him in Neustria, and one-third (which with jealous care was at once conveyed to Metz) to his other son, Sigibert III., who ruled in Austrasia. In 640 Pippin died, greatly regretted, we are told, by all the men of Austrasia, whose hearts he had won by his goodness and love of justice. Possibly during his enforced absence from the realm the Austrasian nobles had learned that the strong hand under which they had chafed was, after all, needed for the welfare of the State.
Some years apparently before the death of Pippin the alliance between the two great Austrasian chiefs had been cemented by a marriage between Adelgisel, son of St. Arnulf, and a daughter of Pippin, who was probably named Becga. From this marriage sprang the second Pippin, the great-grandfather of Charlemagne.
Adelgisel himself was mayor of the palace for a few years before the return of his father-in-law, but he seems to have been a somewhat insignificant person, and is overshadowed in history by the sanctity of his father and the success of his son.
A much more important figure is his brother-in-law, Grimwald, son of Pippin of Landen, who three years after his father’s death succeeded by a deed of blood perpetrated by one of his adherents, in obtaining the coveted mayoralty. For thirteen years, or thereabouts, he acted as major domus to the weak but devout Sigibert III., the first of the absolutely fainéant kings. Then, in 656, on the death of Sigibert, Grimwald deemed that the time had come for ending the farce of Merovingian royalty, shaved off the long locks of Dagobert, his dead master’s son, sent him, under the escort of the Bishop of Poitiers, to a monastery in Ireland, and proclaimed his own son, to whom he had given the Merovingian name of Childebert, King of the Eastern Franks. He was, however, a century too soon. The glamour which hung round the descendants of the great Clovis had as yet not utterly vanished, neither had the Pippins and the Arnulfs yet done such great deeds as to give them any title to claim the Frankish throne. “The Franks,” says the chronicler, “being very indignant hereat, prepared snares for Grimwald, and, taking him prisoner, carried him for condemnation to Clovis II., King of the Franks. In the city of Paris he was confined in a dungeon and bound with torturing chains; and at length, as he was worthy of death for what he had done to his lord, death finished him with mighty torments.”
This premature clutch at royalty seems to have damaged for a long time the fortunes of the Austrasian house. In fact, we hear no more of the descendants of Pippin in the male line; it is through the Arnulfings, the posterity of Grimwald’s sister, that the fortunes of the family will one day revive.
The thirty-two years that follow (656–688) are perhaps the dreariest in all Frankish history. The kings, as has been said, were little better than idiots; Austrasia was probably a prey to anarchy and dissension; the strong and warlike races on the eastern frontier which had been harnessed to the car of the Frankish monarchy were rapidly breaking their bonds. The Wends, beyond the Elbe, under a Frankish commercial traveller named Samo (who had made himself their king, and who had twelve wives and thirty-seven children), had inflicted a crushing defeat on Dagobert. Dagobert’s son, Sigibert, had been defeated by Radulfus, Duke of the Thuringians, with such a fearful slaughter of the Franks as moved the youthful king to tears. The Alamanni were growing restless, the Dukes of the Bavarians were making themselves practically independent. The situation of the Frankish realm in these later years of the seventh century was becoming like the situation of the Mogul Empire when Clive landed in India—an old monarchy founded on force, and long held together by fear, but now fast falling into decomposition and ruin through the utter loss of power in its heart.
It will be hardly necessary to waste another word on the nominal occupants of the Frankish throne. Here, from the pages of the slightly later years Liber Historiæ Francorum, is a picture of the reign of Clovis II., son of Dagobert, who reigned over Neustria and Burgundy from 638 to 656.
“At that time Chlodoveus (Clovis), at the instigation of the devil, broke off an arm of the blessed martyr Dionysius. At that time the kingdom of the Franks fell under many pestilential disasters. But Clovis himself was given up to every kind of filthy conversation, a fornicator and a deceiver of womankind, happy in his gluttony and drunkenness. As to his death history records nothing worth repeating, for many writers speak in condemnatory language concerning his end, but not knowing exactly how his wickedness was terminated, they talk in an uncertain way, one saying one thing and another another.”
For the next quarter of a century after the death of Clovis II. the canvas is fully filled by the great figure of Ebroin, who was during many years mayor of the palace for Neustria and Burgundy, and during a short time for Austrasia also. Thus the same results, which in the next generation were secured by the ancestor of Charlemagne, seemed for a time to have been obtained by the Neustrian Ebroin. Originally raised to the dignity of mayor of the palace by something like a vote of the Frankish nobles, he used his power, when he felt himself settled in his seat, in a spirit of strenuous hostility to the aristocracy, both spiritual and temporal. That it was absolutely necessary in the interest of the kingdom that some stand should be made against the increasing pretensions of the counts and bishops there can be little doubt, but how far Ebroin acted in the interests of king and kingdom, and how far in those of his own avarice and ambition, it is now hopeless to determine. He was evidently a hard and unscrupulous man, but we have always to remember in reading the vituperative adjectives which are attached to his name that his story is written by ecclesiastics, and that he showed himself their constant opponent. Especially was he brought into collision with the astute and able Leodegarius, Bishop of Autun, who in the year 670, successfully using the name of the puppet king of Austrasia, overthrew Ebroin and his puppet, and sent the fallen major domus with tonsured head into retirement at Luxeuil. For three years Bishop Leodegarius ruled as practically, if not nominally, major domus of Burgundy; then he too fell into disgrace, became involved in an ignoble squabble with another canonized bishop, Patricius of Clermont, fled from the court, was taken captive and sent to rejoin his former rival in the monastery of Luxeuil. The assassination of Childeric, the Austrasian king (a crime which Leodegarius was afterwards accused of having prompted), led to a turn in the wheel of fortune. Leodegarius and Ebroin escaped from the monastery and succeeded in getting hold of the person of the last surviving son of Clovis II. In his name Ebroin again ruled as major domus in Neustria and Burgundy (674) but the alliance between him and his late fellow-prisoner was of short duration. Leodegarius was seized and blinded, and four years afterwards put to death. This Bishop of Autun was evidently a mere politician, like his far more famous successor, Talleyrand. He had less than Talleyrand’s luck, and it may perhaps be admitted that, if he were not really privy to the assassination of Childeric, his punishment was somewhat harder than that usually meted out even in those days to politicians who had failed. But it is not without a slight feeling of surprise that we find this turbulent bishop transformed into a saint and martyr, and discover that Leodegarius, Bishop of Autun, is none other than the St. Leger whose name, among all those of mediæval saints, is perhaps the most often heard from the lips of Englishmen.17
Restored to power, Ebroin kept his major-domat in Neustria and Burgundy for seven years (674–681). The same monastic biographer who pours upon his memory the names “devil,” “viper,” “cruel lion,” and “son of damnation,” confesses at the close of his career that “he had
