Blanche as Regent, and the narrative of Louis's minority
There was no real threat or challenge to the status of young Louis as king. He had been designated by his father in his will, and the Capetian line had descended from father to son since 987. But when power was personal, minority government was always contested government. Magnates like Theobald of Champagne and Peter Mauclerc, who had been chafing under the heavy fists of Philip Augustus and Louis VIII, would certainly take advantage of the minority to push claims to additional land and power as far as they could, and protect themselves against what they saw as royal encroachment on their lordships. Others who were fundamentally loyal to the Capetians would still see a minority as an opportunity to bolster their positions. Peter Mauclerc was already exploiting Henry III's desires to regain the Angevin lands as a lever of personal power: he would not let slip the opportunity offered by a minority. All this could be expected.
Blanche's status as guardian and custodian of king and kingdom was another matter. There were no established norms for regency, whether in the case of a minority or when the king was out of the country in Crusade. The only previous Capetian to have succeeded as a minor was Philip I in 1060. The realm was ruled during his minority by his uncle by marriage, Count Baldwin of Flanders, probably with some assistance from Philip's mother, Anna of Kiev. Arrangements for Crusading regencies had varied. Philip Augustus had left the country in the guardianship of his mother, Adela of Champagne, her brother, the archbishop of Reims, and six prominent Paris merchants, who supervised the financial accounts. During the Second Crusade, the regents, "elected" under the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux, were an unlikely, and not very successful, triumvirate: Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, the archbishop of Reims and Louis VII's cousin Ralph of Vermandois. No powers were vested in Louis VII's mother, Queen Adela of Maurienne. The great principalities had a stronger tradition of leaving power in the hands of an absent prince's wife or a minor prince's mother. Recent notable examples were the successive countesses of Champagne, Mary of France and Blanche of Navarre. But leaving the kingdom in the hands of the queen alone was novel. (At least in France, though there was the recent example of Margaret of Navarre in Sicily). At the very least, one might have expected her to hold power jointly with a prominent churchman. The archbishop of Reims was the traditional choice- but William of Joinville had died shortly before Louis, on the return from the Albigensian Crusade.
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There certainly were challenges to the regency from the French baronage. Political songs of the day accused Blanche of sending money to Spain, and accused both Blanche and Walter Cornut of preferring the men of Spain to the barons of France. They accused Blanche of keeping young Louis unmarried so that she could remain in power, and accused her of being the mistress of, variously, Theobald of Champagne and Cardinal Romanus Frangipani. Like most regents, Blanche would have to make concessions and obtain by diplomacy what a king would have obtained by command.
But it is a dramatization and an oversimplification. Many French magnates remained loyal. Those who proved particularly fractious had already been so under Louis VIII. The most consistent plotter of all, Peter Mauclerc, count of Brittany, continued his conspiracies long after St Louis had reached his majority; and Theobald of Champagne's major revolt occurred under Louis's personal kingship. Private war remained endemic in France, though Louis tried to outlaw it, to the disgust of his barons, in 1258. Blanche faced a continual need to control marriage alliances that might lead to dangerous power blocs â but that had been true in the previous two reigns, and continued to be an issue after Louis attained his majority. Much of the worst trouble was not aimed at toppling Blancheâs status as guardian of the realm; it was a series of attacks against Theobald of Champagne. The succession to Champagne had long been an issue, as had the border zone berween Champagne and Burgundy. Blanche and Louis intervened, for the king (or his regent) should ensure peace within his realm, and they did so with reasonable success. The exact chronology of the troubles is difficult to establish, but it seems that, after a difficult few months, stability had been restored by March 1227. In summer 1229 came the major attack on Champagne by members of the Burgundian aristocracy together with various related allies â though the fact that their relations included Peter of Brittany gave it a dangerous edge, for Peter was also plotting an invasion from England with Henry III. By summer 1230 it was clear that had failed, and although Peter of Brittany made war in western Normandy and the western Loire in most subsequent campaigning seasons until 1236, he was increasingly isolated. After 1230 he was an irritant rather than a threat to the Capetian kingship.
Hawiz, dugez Breizh. Daughter of Alan III and Berthe de Blois.
Berta, dugez Breizh. Daughter of Konan III and Maude FitzRoy. Mother of Konstanza Breizh, beskontez Rocâhan and Enoguen Breizh, abbesse de St. Sulpice.
Konstanza, beskontez Rocâhan. Daughter of Berta and Alan Penteur, 1st Earl of Richmond.
Konstanza, dugez Breizh. Daughter of Konan IV and Margaret of Huntingdon. Mother of Eleonora Breizh, the Fair Maid of Bretagne and Alis a Dhouars, dugez Breizh.
Eleonora, Countess of Richmond. Daughter of Konstanza and Geoffrey of England.
Alis, dugez Breizh. Daughter of Konstanza and Guy de Thouars. Mother of Yolanda Breizh, kontez Penteur.
Yolanda, kontez Penteur. Daughter of Alis and Pierre Mauclerc de Dreux. Mother of Alais de Lusignan, Countess of Gloucester; Marie de Lusignan, Countess of Derby; Isabelle de Lusignan, dame de Belleville; and Yolande de Lusignan, dame de Preaux.
Alis, comtesse de Blois. Daughter of Yann Iañ and Zuria Nafarroakoa. Mother of Jehanne de Chùtillon, comtesse de Blois.
Dame Alix would be for us merely a name on a few timestained charters, the nebulous progenitrix of a noble line of Breton dukes, had she not married a man who while he may well have been a fond husband and devoted father, was certainly an ambitious and arrogant baron. But some fortunate mixture of affection, piety, and pride moved Peter to enshrine his family where he, his wife, and his two elder children would shine forth in varied colors from the lancet windows of the south transept of the cathedral of Chartres to rejoice the eyes of countless generations. In the lower part of the central lancet glow Peter's arms-alternate squares of blue and gold which designated the house of Dreux quartered with ermines which were Peter's personal insignia. The two lancets to the right of the center are occupied by Peter and John, those to the left by Alix and Yolande. Peter, kneeling in prayer in an armorial surcoat, looks far from comfortable and prepared for instant flight from his pious environment. As the feelings of a Christian martyr must have been very similar to those of Peter in prayer, it would be useless to probe the mind of the artist for his model. Peter looks unhappy-but so do the saints above him. Alix, John, and Yolande with their attending saints seem far more content.
-Sidney Painter, The Scourge of the Clergy: Peter of Dreux, Duke of Brittany
The present count of Champagne, Thibaut IV, is a poet. Guarded through his minority by his capable mother, Blanche of Navarre, Thibaut grew up to marry, one after the other, a Hapsburg, a Beaujeu, and a Bourbon princess, by whom he had eight children. To these children he added four more, products of his numerous love affairs. But the enduring passion of his life was a chaste one, owing to the inaccessibility of its object, the queen of France. This lady, Blanche of Castile, wife and widow of Louis VIII and mother of Louis IX (St.-Louis), was a dozen years Thibautâs senior. Nevertheless Thibautâs penchant for Blanche was such that he was suspected of poisoning her husband when the king died suddenly. The injustice of the accusation provoked Thibaut to join a couple of baronial troublemakers, Hugo of La Marche and Peter of Brittany, in a sort of antiroyal civil war. When on sober second thought Thibaut changed his mind, Hugo and Peter turned their spite against him and invaded Champagne, setting haystacks and hovels ablaze. Stopped by the walls of Troyes, they were forced to turn around and go home when a relieving force arrived, sent by Queen Blanche.
Partly as a result of the war, Thibaut was constrained to sell three of his citiesâBlois, Chartres and Sancerreâto the king of France. At the last moment he felt a reluctance to hand over Blois, cradle of his dynasty, and carried stubbornness to the point of courting a royal invasion. But forty-six-year-old Blanche of Castile dissuaded thirty-three-year-old Thibaut in an interview of which the dialogue was recorded, or at least reported, by a chronicler:
Blanche: Pardieu, Count Thibaut, you ought to have remembered the kindness shown you by the king my son, who came to your aid, to save your land from the barons of France when they would have set fire to it all and laid it in ashes.
Thibaut (overcome by the queenâs beauty and virtue): By my faith, madame, my heart and my body and all my land is at your command, and there is nothing which to please you I would not readily do; and against you or yours, please God, I will never go.
Thibautâs fancy for Blanche needed sublimation. Sage counselors recommended a study of canzonets for the viol, as a result of which Thibaut soon began turning out âthe most beautiful canzonets anyone had ever heardâ (a judgment in which a later day concurs). The verses of Thibaut the Songwriter were sung by trouvĂšres and jongleurs throughout Europe. A favorite:
Pierre de Dreux was present at the 1216 French invasion of England. Shakespeare was wrapping the play up at this point, but that wouldâve made for a very entertaining pvp scene between Philip Bastard (unhinged) and Pierre Mauclerc (also unhinged).