Persons and pictures from the histories of France and England from the Norman conquest to the fall of the Stuarts |
Philippa of Dainault:
WIFE OF EDWARD III. OF ENGLAND.
1347. |
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 | Persons and pictures from the histories of France and England |  |
Philippa of Dainault:
WIFE OF EDWARD III. OF ENGLAND.
1347.
The great defect of history, so far as regards the general
reader, is its habit of systematizing and generalizing, its method
of dealing with principles to the almost entire exclusion of
persons, of narrating events, effects, and causes in the mass,
with little, if any, allusion to individual character or action;
of leaping from war to war, from revolution to revolution,
without condescending, for one instant, to customs or costumes,
to physical or social anecdotes, unless in the form of a lumping
supplemental summary at the end of a chapter, or of an epoch
so dry, so bald, and so mixed up with questions of political
economy, and other abstruse and unpopular topics, that they
are skipped as tedious and irrelevant episodes. It is to their
adopting the very reverse of this plan; to their introducing us
personally to the halls, the tournaments, the courts, the camps,
the oratories, and the prisons of individual characters of history;
to their letting us hear the very words that they did
speak, or might have spoken; letting us be present at their
banquets and beside their biers, that the school of historical
dramas introduced by Shakspeare, and of historical romances
having their origin in Scott; and yet more than these the
chroniclers, owe their deathless charm; and it is to this that
Macaulay owes the success of his brilliant and picturesque,
though partial and irresponsible history of England.
The consequence of this is, that men and women of the present
day, in general, depend for their events and facts of history
on the sparse and disjointed memories of the crude and bald
abridgments; of the, themselves, crude and bald generalizations,
passing for history, which they picked up as children,
abhorring, not unnaturally, that abhorrent task, while their
active and actual ideas of historical events as acted realities,
and of historical personages as real men and women, walking
and standing, eating and drinking, waking and sleeping, wearing
clothes and speaking their own thoughts, they owe one and
all to the historical plays of Shakspeare, the historical romances
of Scott and his followers. In some sort, it is well that this
should be so. It would be well altogether, were the readers
able to discriminate between that which is true and that which
is only truth-like in the dramatical or romantical fiction; were
they, in short, to limit their belief to the costume, the language,
and the social scenery only of the fiction, without giving to the
events of the narrative, or the actions of the personages, a credence
which they were not intended to deserve.
For, we say it distinctly, that no reader of English History,
of Hume or Lingard, or even Mackintosh himself, ignorant of
the chroniclers, can form half so correct an idea of the usages,
the language, the dress, and the demeanor, the daily lives and
the daily doings of the English Kings, Barons, and Commons,
from the days of King John in the early feudal ages, to those of
the immediate predecessors of Elizabeth; when constitutional
government, though irregular as yet and ill-defined, had taken
a firm foothold in the land; and yet, he who should accept as
the characters and actions of men, forgetful that he wrote
according to the bias of his inclinations and his interest, and
reviewed history so as to gratify his patrons of the house of
Tudor, would err lamentably in his conclusions as to the great
and fundamental facts of history.
In like manner, the reader of Ivanhoe, of the Talisman, and
of the Betrothed, will gain more insight into the social life, the
domestic occupations, the military costume, the state of arts and
arms, the civil, religious, and literary condition of the people of
England, of all classes, in the times of the crusades—the reader
of Kenilworth will learn more of the state of England at large,
from the court to the cottage, during the heyday of Elizabeth,—
and the reader of the Fair Maid of Perth, and that noble novel,
Quentin Durward, of the real life of Scotland and of France, at
their respective periods, than the students of all the modern
histories of England, France, and Scotland, which still pass as
standards, and which boast high names of authors, published
from the reign of Anne, inclusively, to those of the elder
Georges. At the same time, however, while he may aseribe
perfect truth to the general coloring, and to all the details of
Scott's gorgeous historical pictures, he must not give implicit
credit to his individual portraitures; he must not, we would
say, accept events built into tales, having a true historical foundation,
in order to connect and ornament the superstructure, as
being themselves truths of history.
It is to these delightful creations of the two greatest poetical
creators and constructors, in our opinion, who have ever written
in any language, Shakspeare and Walter Scott, that we owe our
own love of history and historical research. It was the eloquent
eulogium of Froissart, ascribed by the latter to one of his most
questionable heroes, John Graham of Claverhouse, that first
of truth stranger and more exciting than fiction; of prose more
thrilling, more effective, and more picturesque than poetry, the
pages of the ancient chroniclers. It was then and it was thence,
that we learned that it is not history, not the living body, with
its muscles, its sinews, its energy and actions, its doings and sufferings,
its smiles and tears, its lights and shadows, of history
itself as it was, and as it was written by those who saw it, and
lived with, and were a part of it; but the marrowless and arid
skeleton into which the schools have boiled it down, and scraped
it clean, and distorted it, and set it up with wires, that we find
so cold, and base, and arid, so rigid in its lines, so pallid in its
hues, so distasteful to the human imagination, so unsatisfactory
to the human reasoning. It was then that we began to suspect
that the conquerors and prelates, the kings and queens, the
knights and ladies, who are so identical in their stiff-starched
effigies, as we are introduced to them, row after row, by grave
and cold historians, might possibly have been special individualities,
with characters and distinctions, each of their own and
different from those of others, with human hearts, human hopes,
human affections, human fears, and human sorrows; that they
might, nay that they must, have had their histories of intermingled
vice and virtue, of interconnected sin and sorrow;
their histories of the human heart of that olden day, with which
the human heart of this present day must have much with which
it can sympathize; must have much from which it can learn—
no word of which will be found in that great compendium of
national growth and grandeur, crime and conquest, treason and
triumph, debility and downfall, which those, whom the world
calls its historians, have given as the history of the world.
Our object it is now, to endeavor to lay before the eyes of
our readers the portraiture of some whom they never regarded,
of historical pageants, in the new guise of real persons; and first
one, not the lowest or the least estimable, to whom two notices,
and those of the briefest, are given by Hume, and who, though
the wife and mother of two of the greatest and most estimable
heroes of the true chivalric era, and herself, in every respect, a
true heroine, and a true woman, is scarcely known to this day
as a real individual, other than an almost forgotten queen of
England.
Philippa, in after days the wife of Edward III., and mother
of Edward, the Black Prince of England, was the second
daughter of William, Earl of Hainault, and first became
acquainted with her future lord, then Prince of Wales, when
he was compelled to fly in company with his infamous mother,
Isabella, “the wolf of France,” of the poet Gray, and her companion
in evil, Roger of Mortimer, as well as his father's brother,
the Earl of Kent, from the intolerable tyranny and arrogance of
the Le de Spencers, who then, by the influence of the younger
Sir Hugh, over the weak, imbecile, and luxurious Edward II.,
held absolute dominion over England, for protection to the
court of her father.
The royal fugitives had, at first, found refuge in Paris with
King Charles, the brother of Isabella, who was as famous for
her beauty as she was infamous for her crimes, and, above all,
for her connivance in the atrocious butchery of her hapless
husband; but they had not long received asylum there, before
the Le de Spencers, fearing that the queen would be enabled to
make a descent on England by aid of her foreign allies, and so
to rally the malcontent barons to her standard and overthrow
their usurped authority, set all engines at work to bring about
her expulsion from the court of her brother. Cardinals and
prelates were bought with gold, until the Pope was induced to
banish his sister the realm; nor, it is probable, had the same
puissant worker on the minds of men been brought to bear
upon the king himself, for we find it recorded by the Lord
Berners, in his graphic and eloquent translation of Froissart,
that “he was in sagude and will to make his sister to be taken;”
and it is an undoubted fact, that at the warning of her cousin,
the Count Robert of Artois, she set out at the dead of night for
the empire, apprehending the surrender of herself with Roger
Mortimer, the Prince Edward, and the Earl of Kent, into the
hands of Sir Hugh Le de Spencer; and that she there found a
refuge first in Ostrevant, at the house of a poor knight, Sir
Eustace d' Ambreticourt, afterwards one of her son's paladins,
and himself father of one of the first knights of the garter, and
thereafter at Valenciennes, in the house of the Earl William of
Hainault; “who, as well as his countess,” says old Jehan Froissart,
“received her very graciously. Many great feasts were
given on this occasion, as no one knew better than the countess
how to do the honors of her house. This Earl William had, at
that time, four daughters, Margaret, Philippa, Zoar, and Isabella;
the young King Edward,—it must be observed, however, that
he was, at this time, only Prince of Wales, and that a fugitive
prince, with no very direct prospects of obtaining his succession—
paid more court and attention to Philippa than to any of the
others; and the young lady also conversed with him more frequently,
and sought his company oftener than any of her
sisters.”
With this brief record ends all we know or can discover of
the courtship of the prince and his fair and virtuous bride, but
that their love must have been of that ardent and impulsive
character, which is known as love at first sight, cannot be
doubted, when we learn that they were only at this time in
prince departed with his mother, and such allies as his good
cause and the spirit of genuine knight-errantry, which was, at
that day, in its prime of real life, mustered to his standard, to
strike a blow for his crown, and for the emancipation of his
country from the abject state of degradation into which it had
fallen.
The uncle of Philippa, Sir John of Hainault, contrary to the
opinion of the earl, his brother, and of his council, who deemed
the enterprise hazardous, on account of the well known jealousy
of the English against foreign interference, resolved to accompany
the princely exiles, and aid in reinstating them in their
birthright, saying, in reply to all the remonstrances which were
made to him, “that he could die but once; that the time was
in the will of God; and that all true knights were bound to aid,
to the utmost extent of their power, all ladies and damsels driven
from their kingdoms, comfortless and forlorn.” When the earl
had heard this, he said to him—“Dear brother, God forbid that
there should be any hindrance to your wish, therefore I give
you leave, in the name of God.” He then kissed him, and
squeezed his hand, in sign of great affection.
How young Philippa parted from her princely lover history
has not thought it worth the while to record, but who can
doubt that, sprung from men whose every thought, every action,
was imbued with the very odor and sanctity of true chivalry,
brought up in the midst of all associations high and noble, held
far aloof from the contamination of any low, base, or ignoble
thought, any lucre-loving mercantile association, she sent him
away cheered with serene and soul-stirring encouragement; that
she bade him do kingly, and, if he might not live a king, die
kingly; that she assured him she would rather be the widowed
leal-love of one brave, royal Edward, dead under his shield
And who can doubt that, when his tall plume faded
from her sight, and the gleam and glitter of his panoply was
lost in the distance among the mists of evening, the tears dimmed
her bright eyes, and darkness fell upon her heart; and
she doubted the truth of the high counsel she had been true
enough and brave enough to give—for, though she was nobly
born, and herself noble, and no recreant to her race, she was a
woman, a true woman, and she loved truly and wisely, and for
once, not too well; for he, the loved one, deserved and returned,
and forgot not ever, but awarded and prized to the last, the
true love of Philippa of Hainault.
For once, contrary to all that Shakspeare did ever hear, did
ever read, in tale or history, their tale of true love did run
smooth.
The expedition was successful, the faction of the Le de Spencers
was put down, and themselves overpowered by a party
scarcely less infamous than that of Isabella and Mortimer—for
Edward III., yet a minor, and taking no share in the government,
fortunately for him elf, took no share of the guilt—suffered
by the hands of the common executioner; and soon afterwards,
the unhappy and imbecile king ended an ignominious and
useless life by a death so ignominious and so horribly atrocious,
that, while history itself shrinks from recording it, it has almost
altered the sentence of utter condemnation of scorn and detestation,
which would otherwise have attached to his memory,
into something of that pity which is still nearer akin to contempt
than to love. Shortly afterwards, however, Edward, who
had attained his eighteenth year, and was already remarkable
for intellect and abilities, which might have been termed precocious,
but that they did not meet the fate of precocity in premature
decay, succeeded in emancipating himself from the
peers, died the deserved but bloody death of a traitor on the
scaffold; and was crowned with a royal diadem, in his palace
of Westminster, on Christmas day, among the rejoicings of his
subjects of all classes, and the happy auguries, all of which, by
a most unusual success for popular-succeeding monarchs, he
fulfilled to the letter, for the benefit of his people, the honor of
his country, and his own eternal glory.
He had not long sat upon the throne of England, his accession
to which was signalized, as was very wont in those days
to be the case, by an invasion of the Scots, which he repelled
in person, before he bethought himself seriously of the sweet
damsel whose heart he had won when but an exiled outlaw
prince, and whom, in the spirit of a true knight and true man,
he was now resolved to marry, “for that he loved her more
dearly, on her own and her father's account, than any other
lady.”
He sent, therefore, a sumptuous embassy to demand her hand
of her father, the Earl of Hainault; and having obtained a dispensation
from the Pope, which was necessary on account of
their near relationship, their mothers being cousins-german,
married her by procuration at Valenciennes; after which she
was escorted to London by her uncle, Sir John of Hainault,
and crowned amongst great rejoicings of the people, and
“great crowds of the nobility, and feastings and tournaments,
and sumptuous entertainments every day, which lasted three
weeks.”
Immediately on her being thus elevated to the throne of a
foreign country, she had the rare wisdom—most rare, indeed,
among crowned heads in the female line—to adjudge herself
entirely and wholly to the country of which she had become
one, to devote herself to studying the interests and gaining the
England by becoming herself an Englishwoman, as she was
already an English queen. Consequently, although but a little
while before her accession and coronation there had been sharp
feuds and even actual hostility between the English archers—a
force peculiarly national, English, and even Saxon in their
origin, and as such embodying the prejudices and expressing
the feelings of the people—and the Hainaulters, with her own
honored uncle at their head, we hear of no bickerings or
jealousies, much less of any partialities on the Queen's part
toward her own kin or countrymen—that block on which so
many queens have stumbled to their own disastrous downfall
—that we can find that “but few of our countrymen,” as
Froissart writes, who was himself a Hainaulter born, and an
especially grateful servant of Philippa—“remained with the
young queen; among whom was a youth called Wastelet de
Mauny, to attend on and carve for her, who performed afterward
so many gallant deeds of arms, in such various different
places, that they are not to be counted.”
To be the wife of such a champion, and such a king as
Edward, the mother and instructor of such a son as the Black
Prince—the only two men of actual existence, with the exception
of Bayard, le sans pen et sans reproach, and the good and
gallant Philip Sidney, who have ever realized the beau-ideal of
knight-errantry, and the blended greatness and prowess of true
chivalry, were glory enough for any one woman; but she added
to this to be the judicious and constant, as well as consistent
rewarder of true merit, whether in art or in arms; to be the
defender of her husband's crown and of her adopted country;
to show that, like her great successor, the lionlike Elizabeth,
though she were “but a weak woman, she had a man's heart
in her bosom, and that man's a king of England”—for she,
victorious sword in the heart of France, feared not to mount
the war-horse and gird the steel upon her thigh, and to address
her troops, on the eve of battle, with words of fire, that lighted
up an equal daring in the heart of the meanest groom and of
the proudest earl that fought at Neville's cross, on English soil
against a Scottish foeman, and caused the capture of a Scottish
king, not many days before the monarch of the French yielded
himself, conquered in chivalry and courtesy alike, to the victorious
prowess of her son.
We are no admirers, not we, of military glory, as attached
to women. We believe that the mission of women, as the
slang of the present day runs, is a mission to the home and
the hearth, to the fireside and the cradle, to the nursery and
the sick bed—that it is a mission to civilize, and humanize, and
soften, not to teach or to preach or to conquer—that it is a
mission to cheer the toils, comfort the homes, sympathize with
the griefs, and by affectionate and gentle firmness to maintain
the courage of man against the shocks of this world, and the
apprehensions of the next. We believe, in a word, that the
God of nature, as nature itself indicates, intended them to be
the mothers and the wives of men, to love and to be loved, to
lean on the superior hardihood of man, and to soften and adorn
his hardness as the honeysuckle embellishes the oak, to which
it clings for shelter and support. We believe that the rights
of women are to be held highest and holiest of human things,
above all pollution, aloof from all insult, free from all harm, to
be loved, cherished, honored, worshipped next below God—but
neither to be orators nor statesmen, heads of firms nor chiefs of
battalions, champions of aristocracy nor propagandists of liberty.
We have no sympathy with your gallant dragoonesses of modern
Hungary or modern Poland, no respect for your Miss-Captain
Sarah that—we believe that if women choose voluntarily to
take to the work of men, and make themselves men, they have
no right to complain when they share the fate of men. Let
them follow squadrons, if they will, cheer their wounded, sustain
their dying husbands; so shall they earn that deathless
renown, as true heroines, which clings to the Baroness de
Reidesell, and the Lady Harriet Acland, of Saratoga and Stillwater—but
let them not presume to lead squadrons and unsex
themselves, descending into soldiers, else shall they merit their
true name of termagants and viragoes, and “taking to the
sword shall die by the sword,” whether on the field or on the
scaffold, by us at least unpitied and despised, not honored.
To all rules, however, there are exceptions—and the exception
to this rule is this, that when by accident of position, of
rank, or of circumstance, the woman is elevated or compelled
into such eminence or deadly necessity of trust, as compels her
to do actual battle in defence of those committed to her charge,
she is not only absolved of the charge of unsexing herself, of
the suspicion of unwomanly ambition for notoriety and loud
report, of yet more unwomanly love for masculine attire, masculine
display, perhaps masculine thirst for blood and glory,
but is entitled to the highest praise for daring, at the call of a
higher moral duty, to “overstep the modesty of nature,” and
forgetful of the gentleness of woman to put on the fiery courage
and the stern endurance of man, for daring, in a word, “to do
her duty in that sphere of life to which it has pleased God to
call her.”
Such was the position of Philippa, when her brave husband
and her brave son afar off in foreign lands, doing battle for
their country, herself appointed the vicegerent of the crown
and regent of the realm, with a foreign enemy polluting English
free wind of England, she buckled the lion casque over her
matron pillet, and drew the sword, and breathed the breath of
liberty into the hearts of all who heard her thrilling words on
that wild plain of Cumberland, and filled the meanest of her
followers with that heaven-reaching valor which makes triumph
certain.
Such was the position of Elizabeth, when she rode her war-horse,
in full caparison, along the mustered train-bands and
militia of her realm, weak-seeming bulwark for the liberties
and the religion of her land, against the unconquered veterans
of the low country, the far famed Spanish infantry, the freight
of the invincible Armada, and swore that she would fight, and
if she could not live, then die, a king of England.
Such was the position of Maria Theresa, when she drew her
sabre, on the guarded mount, all as she harangued her tumultuous
legions of noble cavalry, before the unhallowed partition
of her realm, and her words of flame were answered by the
unanimous cry, while every sword leaped from its scabbard,
through that mighty host, moriamur, moriamur, pro rege nostro,
Maria Theresa.”
Such is the position of the backwoodsman's wife; Kentucky
and Tennessee, the dark and bloody ground, can tell of many
a one who, when alone at dead of night, or with her terrified
and helpless little ones only around, startled from sleep by the
appalling sounds of the war-whoop, far pealing through the
arches of the forest, has snatched the weapons of her absent
husband, and done victorious battle for her hearth and her
home against the fierce and wily savage.
And cold must be his heart, and weak his glow of manly
spirit, who does not in the same degree admire, and venerate,
and almost canonize such true examples of pure, legitimate, and
rejects as base and spurious, that false, fierce, unfeminine
spirit, which, assuming the garb of heroism to cover ambition
and love of notoriety, leaps to arms, backs chargers, and literally
slays men in hand to hand encounter, only to cringe and
quail—while the gulled, gaping mob, shrieks horror at the sight
—when taken in the soldier's self-elected trade, they are compelled
to abide by the soldier's doom.
But such was not the character, such not the action of the
gentle and brave Philippa. Compelled by her rank and state
to defend her husband's crown, and son's hereditary kingdom,
she came forward for one little moment, she showed herself for
one passing glance able to perform her duties, even if these
duties were the duties of a man, and the next, when victorious
over her foes, and the saviour of her country and her crown,
retired into the gentle and unassuming routine of her sweet
and humble life, and is next found—as we find recorded in
history—as crossing over the British channel, “to throw herself
at the feet of the indignant king, and beg with tears the
lives of the six rebellious burgesses of Calais, doomed to a base
death on the gallows, by the wrath of the unrelenting victor.”
We care not that this anecdote has no foundation in history
—as it has very clearly been proved to have none, from actual
and direct testimony, as well as from the internal evidence of
the legend—for, though it is totally inconsistent with the character
of Edward III., who, on no single occasion, is known to
have acted otherwise than generously, mercifully, and knightly
to all men, whether of high or low degree, and who in that
very siege of Calais had shown proof of mercy, very unusual
even in the comparatively humane warfare of modern times, in
permitting the unwarlike inhabitants of the city to withdraw
themselves from the hardships and sufferings of a beleaguered
that no contemporaneous writer could have invented such an
anecdote had it been very much at variance with the spirit of
the times, or at all inconsistent with the known character of the
princess whom he desired to laud, that she should “with tears
have said, `Ah, gentle sir, since I have crossed the sea with
great danger to see you, I have never asked you one favor; now,
I most humbly ask as a gift, for the sake of the Son of the blessed
Mary, and for your love to me, that you will be merciful to
these six men;' ” or, that “the king should have looked at her
for some time in silence, and then said, `Ah, lady, that you had
been anywhere else than here; you have entreated in such a
manner that I cannot refuse you; I therefore give them to you,
do as you please with them.' ” The anecdote is known, proved,
and by all historians admitted to be untrue; it is therefore unworthy
of a place in history, except as a foot note, illustrative
of the spirit of the times, and the character by her own contemporaries
ascribed and believed to belong to Philippa of Hainault—to
her honor it was composed, and in her honor it ought in
some sort to hold good, since it is clearly what she was capable
of doing, might well have done, would probably have done had
it been in her way so to do, and was actually believed to have
done by her servant and historiographer.
From this time forth we hear little of her, a proof that her
life flowed evenly and serenely towards its close; it is the tortured
and the turbulent waters that are the most loudly bruited—
those which are most placid, which most brilliantly reflect the
hues of heaven, are the peaceful and the silent. She lived to
see her husband, who never varied from his love for her, or was
seduced from allegiance to her beauty by younger or more brilliant
charms, the greatest king in Christendom; she lived to
see her son, the Black Prince, the most famous champion, the
native land, and the wonder of the world, as he lives in his
great renown to this day, for all the real attributes of the best
and brightest of earthly things—true Christian chivalry; a gentleman,
a soldier, a noble, a man, a Christian, and a knight par
excellence, for ever.
Happy as she had been in her life, she was no less happy in
her death, for she survived nothing—neither friends nor fame,
neither happiness nor love. She died as she had lived, the
honored of her children, the beloved of her husband, the adored
of her adopted country, the regretted of all—the best woman,
the best queen of her own day—almost the best of any.
Hear what fell out when this lovely woman passed away, for
the passage which relates to it is one of the gems of Froissart,
in the quaint, old, simple, Saxon English, of his best, if first
translator, Johan Bourchier, Lord Berners.
“There fell in Englande a heavy case and a common, howbeit
it was right pyteouse for the kinge, his children, and all
his realm. For the good queene of Englande, that so many good
deeds had done in her tyme, and so many knights succored,
and ladyes and damosels comforted, and had so largely departed
of her goods to her people, and naturally loved always the nation
of Heynaulte, the country where she was born. She fell sick
in the castle of Wyndsore, the which sickness continued on her
so long that there was no remedy but dethe. And the good
ladye, when she knew and perceived that there was with her no
remedy but dethe, she deigned to speke with the king, her husbande.
And when he was before her, she put out of her bed
her right hand, and took the king by his right hand, who was
right sorrowful in his heart. Then she said, `Sir, we have in
peace, joy, and great prosperity, used all our time together. Sir,
now, I pray you, at our departing, that ye will grant me three
desire what ye will; I will grant it.' `Sir,' said she, `I require
of you, first of all that all, manner of people, and as I shall have
dealt with in merchandise, in this side of the sea or beyond it,
that it may please you to pay every thing that I owe them or
any other. And secondly, sir, all such ordnance and promises
as I have made to the churches, as well of this country as beyond
the sea, whereas I have had any devotion, that it may
please you to accomplish and fulfil the same. Thirdly, sir, I
require you that it may please you to take none other sepulture,
whensoever it shall please God to take you out of this transitory
life, but beside me in Westminster.' The kinge, all weeping,
said, `Madame, I grant you your desire.' Then the good ladye
and queene made on her the sign of the cross, and commended
the king, her husband, to God, and her youngest son, Thomas
who was then beside her. And anone, after, she yielded up the
spirit, the which I believe surely the holy angels received with
great joy up to heaven, for in all her life she did neither in
thought nor deed thing whereby to lose (hurt) her soul, as far
as any creature could know. Thus the good queene of England
died, in the year of our Lord MCCCLXIX. in the vigil of our
lady, in the myddle of August. Rest to her soul.”
| Persons and pictures from the histories of France and England | |