King René d'Anjou and His Seven Queens. Staley Edgcumbe
YOLANDA D’ARRAGONA—“A GOOD MOTHER AND A GREAT QUEEN.”
I.
The Queen was in labour, and shivering groups of robust citizens and sturdy peasants were gathered in front of the royal castle of Zaragoza, eagerly awaiting the signal of a happy deliverance. The fervent wish of King Juan for a male heir was shared by his subjects, for his brother Martino, next in succession, was in delicate health; moreover, he had only one son, and he was a cripple. The succession to the throne was a source of anxiety to all good Aragonese. To be sure, there was a baby Princess already in the royal nursery, but whether her mother had been a lawful wedded wife, or no more than a barragana of the Sovereign, few knew outside the charmed circle of the Court. In the opinion of the men and women of the triple kingdom generally, this mattered little, for natural children were looked upon as strengthening the family; hijos de ganancia they were called. The Salic Law, however, barred the female heirs of the royal house, so little Juanita was of no importance.
YOLANDA D’ARRAGONA
(KING RENÉ’S MOTHER)
From Coloured Glass Window, Le Mans Cathedral
To face page 30
Within the courtyard, about the royal apartments, and all through the precincts of the Presence, minstrels and poets thronged, as well as Ministers and officials; Queen Yolanda was the Queen of Troubadours, and the courtiers she loved best to have about her were merry maids and men—graduates of the “Gaya Ciencia.” The livelong night they had danced and postured, they had piped and sung. Each poet of the hilarious company had in turn taken up his recitative, printed by staccato notes, to be repeated in chorus and in step, until the fandangoes and boleros of the South were turned into the boisterous whirling jotas of Aragon. The first dawn of day brought into play lutes and harps, restrung, retuned cellos and hurdy-gurdies, and vihuelas de peñola, guitars with metal wires and struck with strong herons’ plumes, and so awoke the phlegmatic guardians of the castle. Sweet and harmonious Provençal voices blended with soft notes of melodious singers from Languedoc to the running accompaniment of the weird Basque music of the mountaineers.
The Queen, upon her massive curtained bed of state, heard the refrains and felt the vibration of the lilting measures, and smiled pleasantly as she laid awake expectantly. At length the great tenor bell up in the chapel turret gave out the hour of six. The last note seemed to hang, and many a devout listener bent a reverent knee and bared his head, whilst the women-folk uttered fervent Aves. One single stroke of the metal clapper was followed, alas! immediately by another. “Two for a Princess!” resounded from lusty throats, but there was a tone of disappointment in the cry. The glaring morning sun, however, made no mistake, impartial in his love of sex. Dancing upon the phosphorescent ripples of the rolling Mediterranean, he shot golden beams within the royal chamber, and crimson flushed the cheeks of the royal mother and her child. It was the red-hot sun of Spain, and the day was red, too—the feast of San Marco, April 25, 1380.
Christened within eight hours of birth—the custom in Aragon—and “Yolanda” named, the little Princess’s advent was speeded right away to distant Barrois, her mother’s home, by the Queen’s Chamberlain, trusty Cavalier Hugues de Pulligny. He had been summoned at once to the accouchement couch, and given to hold and identify the babe. With him he took the Queen’s mothering scarf—the token of a happy birth—and hied post-haste to lay it and his news at the feet of the anxious Duke and Duchess at Bar-le-Duc. His reward was a patent of nobility and 500 good golden livres.
Yolanda, Queen-consort of Juan I., King of the triple kingdom of Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia—Violante de Bar—was the elder of the two daughters of Robert I., Duke of Bar, and his wife, Marie of France, daughter of King John II., “the Good.” Their Court was one of the chief resorts of the Troubadours and Jongleurs, who looked to the Duke’s famous mother, Princess Iolande of Flanders, as their queen and patroness. Bar, or Barrois, first gained royal honours when the Emperor Otto III., in 958, created his son and successor, Frederic, Count of Bar and Prince of the Holy Roman Empire. The succession was handed down for hundreds of years, and in 1321 Count Henry IV. married the Flemish Princess. Her jewels and her trousseau were the talk of half a century. Her gaiety, her erudition, and her skill in handicraft, were remarkable; her Court the most splendid in Europe.
Bar was, so to speak, the golden hub of the great humming wheel of Franco-Flemish arts and crafts. Bordered by Luxembourg, Lorraine, Champagne, and Burgundy, the fountain-heads of rich and generous vintages, she took toll of all, and the Barroisiens were the healthiest, wealthiest, and the merriest folk in the French borderland.
The influence of the bewitching and accomplished Princess-Countess Iolande was paramount, and she was ever adding to her fame by making royal progresses throughout her husband’s domains. Wherever she went, music and the fine arts, and every artistic cult and useful craft, prospered amazingly. Borne in a great swaying chariot, drawn by four strong white Flemish horses, the magnificence of her cortège led on one occasion, if not on more, nearly to her undoing. Travelling in the summer-time of the year 1361 to Clermont en Argonne, one of the ducal castles, she was, when not very far away from storied Laon, beset by an armed company of outlaws, who, however, treated her with charming courtesy. They caused the Princess and her ladies to descend from their equipage and step it with them as vis-à-vis under the greenwood tree. Then, not very gallantly, to be sure, they stripped their fair partners of their ornaments and despoiled the princely treasure, causing the Princess to sign a pardon for their onslaught. The adventure, however, did not end here, for Iolande was a match for any man, and on the spot she enrolled her highwaymen as recruits for Count Henry’s army!
The almost fairy Princess-Countess survived her consort many years, and lived to see the county of Bar raised to a dukedom, and to dance upon her knee a little namesake granddaughter, Violante de Bar. Nothing gave her greater pleasure than the floral games of the troubadours, and one of these fêtes galants was enacted in 1363 at the Ducal Castle of Val de Cassel, where Duchess Marie had just brought into the world this very baby girl. The poets chose their laureate—one Eustache Deschamps-Morel, and Princess Iolande crowned him with bays. The ballade he composed for those auspicious revels is still extant—Du Métier Profitable—wherein he maintains that only two careers are open to happy mortals.
“Ces deux ont partout l’avantage,
L’un en junglant, l’autre à corner.”
The sights and sounds, then, which first greeted the pretty child were merry and tuneful. She was reared on troubadour fare, on troubadour lore. Violante had three brothers, Édouard, Jehan, and Louis, and a younger sister Bonne, married to Nicholas, Comte de Ligny, but alas! buried with her first-born before the high-altar of St. Étienne at Bar-le-Duc.
When Violante was in her seventeenth year, there came a royal traveller, disguised as a troubadour of Languedoc, to the Court of Love at Bar-le-Duc. His quest was for a bride. He was of ancient lineage; his forbears came from Ria, in a southern upland valley of the Eastern Pyrenees, and had ruled the land ’twixt barren mountain and wild seacoast for no end of years—Juan I., King of Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia. He had just buried Mahaud d’Armagnac, the young mother of his little daughter Juanita, and there was a gaping wound in his amorous heart which yearned for healing. The royal Benedict looked for a Venus with a dash of Diana and a measure of Minerva, and chroniclers say he had drawn blank the Courts of Spain and Southern France. Moreover, they tell a pretty tale of him which must now again be told.
After wanderings manifold, the royal knight-errant found himself within the pageant-ground of Bar-le-Duc and at a “Court of Love.” There he broke shield and lance at