Maurice Druon - The Poisoned Crown

The processes of decay were therefore to continue during a third of a century, but it must be admitted that a great part of the destruction was completed during the first six months.

Institutions were not sufficiently stable to be able to function without the personal intervention of the sovereign.

The feeble, nervous, and incompetent Louis X, overwhelmed from the very first day by the magnitude of his task, resigned the cares of power to his uncle, Charles of Valois, who was, it appears, a good soldier though a detestable politician, who spent his whole life searching for a throne and had now, at last, found an outlet for his turbulent blundering.

The middle-class ministers, who had been the backbone of the preceding reign, had been imprisoned, and the skeleton of the most remarkable of them all, Enguerrand de Marigny, once Rector-General of the Kingdom, was bleaching on the forks of the gibbet of Montfaucon.

Reaction was triumphant; the Barons’ Leagues were sowing disorder in the provinces and subverting the royal authority. The great Lords, Charles of Valois at their head, minted their own currency which they circulated throughout the country to their own personal profit. The Administration, no longer held in check, became corrupt, and the Treasury was empty.

A disastrous harvest, followed by an exceptionally hard winter, caused famine. The death-rate was rising.

During this time Louis X had been mainly preoccupied with repairing his domestic honour and endeavouring to efface, if it were possible, the scandal of the Tower of Nesle.

For lack of a Pope, whom the Conclave seemed unable to elect, and who was required for the purpose of pronouncing an annulment, the young King of France, so that he might remarry, had had his wife, Marguerite of Burgundy, strangled in the prison of Château-Gaillard.

Thus he became free to marry the beautiful Neapolitan Princess who had been found for him, and with whom he was making preparations to share the felicities of a long reign. fn1

STANDING AT ONE OF the windows in the huge Castelnuovo, which had a view over the port and bay of Naples, the old Queen Mother, Marie of Hungary, watched a ship weighing anchor. Making sure that no one could see her, she wiped a tear from the corner of a lashless eyelid with a roughened finger.

‘Now I can die,’ she murmured.

She had lived a full life. Daughter of a king, wife of a king, mother and grandmother of kings, she had settled one branch of her descendants upon the throne of central Italy, and obtained for the other, by war and intrigue, the Kingdom of Hungary, which she looked upon as her personal heritage. Her younger sons were princes or sovereign dukes. Two of her daughters were queens, one of Majorca, the other of Aragon. Her fecundity had been a means to power for the Anjou-Sicily family, a cadet branch of the Capet tree, which was now beginning to spread across all Europe, threatening to become as great as its trunk.

If Marie of Hungary had already lost six of her children she had at least the consolation of knowing that they had died as piously as she had brought them up; indeed, one of them, who had renounced his dynastic rights to enter the Church, was shortly to be canonized. As if the Kingdoms of this world were too narrow for this expanding family, the old Queen had dispatched her progeny to the Kingdom of Heaven. She was the mother of a Saint. 1 fn2

At over seventy she had but one duty left to fulfil and that was to assure the future of one of her granddaughters, Clémence, the orphan. This had now been achieved.

Because Clémence was the daughter of her eldest son, Charles Martel, for whom she had so persistently laid claim to the throne of Hungary, because the child had been orphaned at two years of age, because she herself had assumed entire responsibility for her education, and because finally this task was the last of her life, Marie of Hungary had held the girl in particular affection, in so far as a capacity for affection existed in that old heart, subordinated as it was to force, duty, and power.

The great ship, which was weighing anchor in the harbour upon this brilliantly sunny day of the first of June 1315, represented to the eyes of the Queen Mother of Naples both the triumph of her policy and the melancholy of things achieved.

For her dearly loved Clémence, a princess of twenty-two without territorial inheritance, rich only in her reputation for beauty and virtue, she had recently obtained the most important of alliances, the most imposing of marriages. Clémence was leaving to become Queen of France. Thus she, who was the most deprived by fate of all the princesses of Anjou, who had waited the longest for a match, was now to receive the finest of kingdoms and to reign as suzerain over all her relations. It clearly illustrated the teaching of the Gospel.