King René d'Anjou and His Seven Queens. Staley Edgcumbe
“Tarasque,”—dwelt in a hollow cave by the Rhone shore, and fed on human flesh. News of the devastation wrought by the monster reached the ears of Lazarus and his sisters at Marseilles, and St. Martha took upon herself to subdue the beast. With nothing in her hand but a piece of the true Cross of Christ and her silken girdle of many ells in length, she sought out the deadly dragon in his lair. Casting around his loathsome body her light cincture, she enabled her companions to slay him. The girdle of St. Martha became the mascot of all the Tarasconnais, and everybody wore a goodly belt or bodice à la Marthe. Such a girdle, in cloth of gold and tasselled, was offered to the young bride by the loyal townsfolk.
The state entry of the Sovereigns into Angers—the major capital of the King-Duke’s dominions—was just such another pageant as that which greeted Queen Isabeau of Bavaria in Paris in the summer of 1385. From ancient days Angers had been a place of note—the Andegavi of Gallo-Roman times, a municipium and a castrum combined. In the Carlovingian era the Counts—then Dukes—of the Angevines—founders of the great Capet family—and their vigorous consorts nursed stalwart sons, who were the superiors of their neighbour rulers in Frankland. From Geoffrey Plantagenet, titular King of Jerusalem, sprang our English Kings. Louis IX.—St. Louis of blessed memory—bestowed the duchy of Anjou upon his brother John with the title of King of the Two Sicilies; hence came the sovereign titles of Louis II. and Yolande.
The Castle of Angers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was one of the most imposing in France. Flanked by eighteen great donjon towers, shaped like dice-boxes, it had the aspect of a prison rather than of a palace. The royal apartments were between two great bastions, Le Tour du Moulin and Le Tour du Diable. The drawbridge spanned the deep, wide moat to the esplanade called Le Pont du Monde; beneath were dark dungeons and odious oubliettes. To honour their King and Queen, the castle household hung great swaying lengths of scarlet “noble cloth,”—newly purchased from the Florentine merchants of the “Calimala,”—to cover up the black slate-stone courses of the masonry of Le Diable, whilst they concealed the rough masonry of Le Moulin by strips of gorgeous yellow canvas of Cholet d’Anjou. These were the heraldic colours of Aragon. All the gloomy slate-fronted houses of the city—“Black Angers” it was called—were decorated similarly, and gay Flemish carpets and showy skins of beasts were flaunted from the windows. The citizens kept holiday with bunches of greenery and early spring flowers in their hands to cast at their new liege Lady.
Queen Yolande waved her gloved hand—a novelty in demure Angers—in friendly response to the plaudits of the throngs, and refused no kiss of bearded mouth or cherry lips thereon as she rode on happily by the side of her royal spouse. At St. Maurice—the noble cathedral, with its new and glorious coloured windows—the royal cortège halted whilst Te Deum was sung, and the bridal pair were sprinkled with holy water and censed. Another “Station” was made where the ascent to the castle began, for there pious loyal folk had prepared the mystery-spectacles of the “Resurrection of Christ” with “His Appearance to His Virgin Mother.” The Saviour’s features, by a typical but strange conceit, were those of the King-Duke, St. Mary’s those of the royal bride!
The banquetings and junketings were scenes of deep amazement to the new Queen. In Aragon and Barcelona people ate and drank delicately—their menus were à la Grecque—but in cold and phlegmatic Anjou great hunks of beef and great mugs of sack—quite à la Romain—were de rigueur. An old kitchen reporter of Angers records the daily fare at the castle: “One whole ox, two calves, three sheep, three pigs, twelve fowls.” The only artistic confection was “hippocras, seasoned with cloves and cinnamon.” Pepper, ginger, rosemary, mint, and thyme, were served as “delicacies.” Another harsh note on the fitness of things which struck the royal bride as extraordinary was the loud laughter indulged in by the gentlemen of the Court and their coarse jests; le rire français had nothing of the mellowed merriment of the “Gaya Ciencia.”
Alas! the rejoicings and the feastings of the Angevines and their guests were suddenly arrested, and the enthusiastic shouts of welcome were drowned by harsh hammerings of armourers and raucous military commands. The King-Duke was summoned to take his position among the captains of France, in battle order, in face of the foreign foe, and the Queen-Duchess, young and inexperienced as she was, assumed the government of Angers and the care of the citizens. All France was ravaged by the English, and State after State fell before their onslaught. Yolande addressed herself to the strengthening of the defences of the castle and the city. Imitating the tact and prudence of Silvestro and Giovanni de’ Medici at Florence, she ordered the levying of a poll-tax, rated upon the variations of land-tenure and the varying incomes of the craftsmen: a tenth of all rateable property—shrewdly spread over three years, with a credit for immediate needs—was cordially yielded by the Angevines.
Probably this impost was made upon the advice of worthy councillors, but, all the same, the manner in which the young châtelaine Lieutenant-General in person superintended its operation was an eloquent testimony to her force of character and her true patriotism. She disposed of many personal belongings, and submitted to many acts of self-denial, an example quickly followed by great and small. She sent also to Zaragoza for master-armourers to refurbish old and temper new weapons of various sorts. Some of these craftsmen she ordered to give instruction to native workers; so very shortly her armoury was efficient, not alone for home defence, but for the rearming of the King’s forces in the field.
Not content with these warlike preparations, Queen Yolande gave time and money for the distraction and amusement of her people in their time of stress. Castle fêtes, town sports, and church mystery plays, were bravely carried through. The Queen herself was everywhere—now mounted for the chase, now tending sick folks, now at public prayers. Born daughter of a grand race, and full of dignity, she had inherited her mother’s happy disposition. She charmed everyone in town and country, and endeared herself to her loving subjects by many a homely trait.
A pretty tale has been preserved about her whilst King Louis was standing shoulder to shoulder with Charles VI. and his other peers of France. One afternoon—according to her wont when not hindered by affairs of State or claims of charity—she sallied forth to the royal park of L’Vien, her dogs in leash. Let loose, they put up a rabbit, which made directly for their royal mistress, and sought refuge in the skirt of her green velvet hunting-kirtle. Reaching down her hand, she fondled the little trembling creature, when, to her immense surprise, she discovered upon its neck a faded ribbon, with a medallion bearing an image of the Virgin. The incident occurred in a woody dell within the ruins of a half-buried hermit’s cell. Yolande did not for a moment hesitate in her interpretation of the incident. She noted the date—February 2, the Feast of the Purification—and she set to work to restore the holy house in honour of St. Mary. Upon the portal, by her command, was sculptured the charming episode, with the legend: “Nôtre Dame de Sousterre, l’amie et la protectrice des âmes en danger.”[A]
[A] “Our Lady of the Deep Cell, the friend and protectress of souls in danger.”
The same year, 1401, found Louis d’Anjou and Yolande upon their way to Paris, where she, as Queen of Jerusalem, Naples, Sicily, and Aragon, made her state entry at the Court of Charles VI. and Isabeau. Doubtless the young Queen was struck with Isabeau’s extraordinary freedom of manner. Her own training, both at Zaragoza and Barcelona, in the rigid conventions of a semi-Moorish Court, had taught her restraint and aloofness. The dress of the French Queen astonished her, for in Aragon and Catalonia physical charms were enhanced by semi-concealment, whereas Isabeau exposed her painted arms, shoulders, and her breast, right down to her cincture; whilst her low waist at the back was pinched by a cotte hardie, so that the bust was enlarged to the degree of distortion: une taille de guêpe—“wasp-like” indeed! The etiquette of the Court of her father, as well as that of Anjou, kept men out of the bedchambers of the fair, but Isabeau, décolletée and en déshabillée, was the centre of a crowd of flatterers and fawners at her daily se lever. The dressing-room