VII, before the death of his father, had contracted marriage with Eleanor of Guyenne, heiress of Poitou and of the duchy of Aquitaine. He obtained the most splendid dower that ever fell to the lot of a French king. It consisted of nothing less than half of the south of France. Eleanor was a passionate, frivolous girl; Louis, a pale, feeble prince, a prey to petty religious scruples. He took the cross and started on the disastrous and disgraceful crusade of 1147. He took Eleanor with him. She made no secret of her contempt for her husband. “He is a monk, and not a man.” She became over-intimate with her uncle, Raymond of Antioch, the handsomest man of his time. She was accused also of carrying on an intrigue with a Saracen. On her return to Europe she insisted on being divorced from Louis, and she cast herself into the arms of Henry Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, Duke of Normandy, and heir to the crown of England. Thus she detached all these provinces from France and annexed them to the realm of England. Indeed, Henry, by the marriage of one of his sons to the heiress of Brittany, found himself master of nearly the whole of Western France. The House of Anjou had sprung into domination on Gaulish soil equal to that of the French king and his other vassals put together, and controlling the mouths of the three great rivers. Add to all this the possession of the English kingdom. The long protracted and desolating wars that ensued on French soil was a struggle between the kings as to whether France should be annexed to England, or Aquitaine to France.
“By the peace between Henry III and Louis IX,” says Mr. Freeman, “Aquitaine became a land held by the King of England as a vassal of the French crown. From that time it became one main object of the French kings to change this feudal superiority over this great duchy into an actual possession. The Hundred Years’ War began through the attempt of Philip of Valois (1337) on the Aquitanian dominions of Edward III. Then the King of England found it politic to assume the title of King of France. But the real nature of the controversy was shown by the first great settlement. At the Peace of Bretigny (1360) Edward gave up all claim to the crown of France, in exchange for the independent sovereignty of his old fiefs and of some of his recent conquests. Aquitaine and Gascony, including Poitou … were made over to the King of England without the reservation of any homage or superiority of any kind. These lands became a territory as foreign to the French kingdom as the territory of her German and Spanish neighbours. But in a few years the treaty was broken on the French side, and the actual possessions of England beyond the sea were cut down to Calais and Guines, with some small part of Aquitaine adjoining the cities of Bordeaux and Bayonne. Then the tide turned at the invasion of Henry V. Aquitaine and Normandy were won back; Paris saw the crowning of an English king, and only the central part of the country obeyed the heir of the Parisian kingdom. But the final result of the war was the driving out of the English from all Aquitaine and France except the single district of Calais.
“The French conquest of Aquitaine (1451–3), the result of the Hundred Years’ War, was in form the conquest of a land which had ceased to stand in any relation to the French crown.”
Thus Aquitaine, including Gascony, had belonged to the crown of England from 1152 to 1453, just three hundred and one years.
But, although nominally pertaining to England, it contained stubborn and recalcitrant elements, notably the counts of Foix, who were viscounts of Béarn.
Towards the close of the eleventh century the viscounty of Béarn had enjoyed sovereign rights, admitting allegiance to none. Later, when Louis XI went in pilgrimage to Notre Dame de Sarrance, he lowered the sword of France on entering Béarn, as being no longer in his own kingdom. This little territory during the Middle Ages was perhaps the best governed corner of the earth, the freest and happiest in France, and perhaps in all Europe. The fors of Béarn were the liberties to which the viscount was required to swear adhesion before he was recognized as sovereign. The earliest of these fors is that of Oloron (1080), renewed in 1290, and it is one of the earliest monuments extant of the Romance tongue. By these constitutions the inhabitants of the viscounty governed themselves.
An instance or two of the independent spirit of the Béarnais may be given.
Marie, daughter of Peter, Viscount of Béarn, upon the death of her brother, in 1134, became heiress. She had been reared at the Court of Aragon, and had married William de Moncada, a Catalonian noble. She had the weakness to do homage to the king for Béarn. The people rose in revolt, deposed her, and elected as their viscount a knight of Bigorre, well spoken of for his virtues. He, however, disregarded the fors, and attempted to rule as a feudal lord, whereupon within a year he was assassinated. Then a knight of Auvergne was chosen, and held the viscounty for two years. But he also disregarded the constitution and was put to death. Then his estates of Béarn sent a deputation to Marie de Moncada, to inform her that it had come to their ears that she had given birth to twin boys, and the people authorized their commissioners to select one of the twins to be their viscount. The deputation were shown the cradle in which the infants lay; one slept with his hands open, the other held his fists clenched. “We will have the open-handed lad,” said the Béarnais, and he became Viscount Gaston VI. On his death in 1170 his brother, the close-fisted William Raymond, claimed the inheritance, but the Béarnais refused to acknowledge his claim as one of right, protesting that the viscountship was elective. They compelled him to submit to their will, and accepted him only when he had granted still greater liberties than they had hitherto enjoyed, and this not till five years after the death of his brother.
William Raymond died in 1223, leaving a son, William, to succeed him, but he was killed in battle against the Moors in 1229, and William’s son Gaston succeeded under the regency of his mother Garsende. She is described as having been so stout that only a large wagon could contain her, and then she overlapped the sides. Gaston VII, son of this plump lady, left an only child, a daughter Margaret, the heiress of Béarn, which she carried with her when married to Roger Bernard, Count of Foix. Thus it came about that Foix and Béarn were united in one hand.
I. PEDIGREE OF THE VISCOUNTS OF BÉARN, COUNTS OF FOIX
II. PEDIGREE OF LEONORA, HEIRESS OF NAVARRE
Roger Bernard and Margaret had a grandson, Gaston IX of Béarn. At the age of eighteen he was married to Eleanor of Cominges, a lady considerably older than himself. Some one without tact remarked to the Countess on the disparity of their ages. “Disparity of ages!” exclaimed she, “Why, I would have waited for him till he was born.”
The young husband fell fighting against the Moors in 1343. By his elderly wife he left a son, Gaston Phœbus, of whom more when we come to Orthez.
Gaston Phœbus was succeeded by a cousin, Matthew de Castelbon, who died in 1398, without issue, and he was followed by his sister Isabella, married to Archibald, Captal de Buch, a just and worthy ruler. They had a son, John of Béarn, who succeeded his mother in 1426. He captured the antipope, Benedict XIII, and threw him into a dungeon in one of his castles, where he died of ill-treatment, and then John denied Christian burial to his body. This so delighted Pope Martin, the rival of Benedict, that he conferred on John the title of “Avenger of the Faith.” Jean was succeeded by his son Gaston, who placed his sword at the disposal of Charles VI. At Bordeaux with his aid the English underwent a signal defeat. He was married to Eleanor of Navarre, through whom the claim to the title of King of Navarre came to her descendants. How that was, and the crimes that brought it about, must now be told.
Charles the Noble, King of Navarre, died in 1425. Having lost his only son, he bequeathed crown and kingdom to his daughter Blanche, married to Juan of Aragon, brother of Alphonso, King of Aragon and the Two Sicilies, and by reversion after her death to their son Charles, Prince of Viana. Juan of Aragon acted as viceroy to his brother whilst Alphonso was in Italy. On the death of Charles the Noble Juan and Blanche assumed the titles of King and Queen of Navarre. Blanche died in 1441, and by her will bequeathed the kingdom, in accordance with her father’s desire, to her son Charles of Viana. But Juan had no thought
