After they had left the King, Louis and Blanche discussed the matter together. It made Blanche uneasy.
‘I like it not that you should be the one to go,’ she told him. ‘Would it not be wiser for your father to lead the forces?’
Louis shook his head. ‘Nay,’ he said. This crown comes to us through you. I am your husband. I shall be the King of England, you the Queen. My father is right when he decrees that I shall be the one to go.’
In the early part of the year 1216 Louis sailed across the Channel and marched on London, in which city he received the homage of those barons who were eager to displace John.
As it was natural that John, with a few who had remained loyal to him – among them those worthy men William Marshal and Hubert de Burgh – should not give way meekly, Louis had to expect resistance and it came. But the more towns he took the more people were ready to accept him. John was antagonising the entire country through his cruel manner of taking what he wanted from the towns through which he passed and showing no respect for the religious houses. Misfortune dogged him. Crossing the Wash his baggage, including his jewels, were lost; and coming to Sleaford he died somewhat mysteriously. Some said he had been poisoned by a monk from Swineshead Abbey, where he had stayed for a few nights, and where he had seen a nun whom he had attempted to ravish. Sickness, lassitude and the ingenuity of the monks had saved the nun, but afterwards John had died through eating fruit which it was suspected was poisoned.
So he died violently as he had lived and the nightmare which he had created passed with him.
When Philip brought the news to Blanche, they rejoiced together.
‘Now matters will run smoothly,’ said the King. ‘Louis will be crowned and we shall settle down to peace.’
‘But what of his sons? I believe there are two of them.’
‘Boys … nothing more.’
Blanche was thoughtful, thinking that if by some chance Philip and Louis both died and her own Philip, aged seven, was suddenly King, would she stand by and let a foreigner take the crown? Indeed she would not. She would have him crowned without delay.
Then she thought of Isabella whom she had met briefly soon after her marriage. Languorous, sensuous and very beautiful she had been then. Was she still? She had married John and had seemed to feel few regrets for Hugh, and when one considered the handsome, upright lord of Lusignan and John, surely any woman would have preferred Hugh?
The fact was that although John was dead, there remained Isabella. Would she stand aside and allow Louis to be crowned in place of her son?
She mentioned this to Philip, who shrugged it aside. ‘Isabella!’ Philip laughed. ‘If the tales one hears about her are true it would seem she would be more concerned with her lovers than her son’s inheritance. You know she was more or less John’s prisoner. He hung her lovers over her bed, so they say, which is characteristic of him. I do not think we need concern ourselves with Isabella.’
‘I have a strange feeling,’ said Blanche, ‘that we shall always have to concern ourselves with Isabella.’
‘Nay,’ replied Philip. ‘God is clearly with us.’ He was sober thinking of the price God had asked for his help. Take Ingeburga back. Well, he deserved the luck of being asked to come to England and John’s dying at precisely the opportune moment. Philip was sure that God had set the comely nun in John’s path and put the idea into the monk’s head to poison him.
But it was Blanche’s deduction which proved correct.
Isabella was concerned with her son. Isabella was a very ambitious woman and she was not going to have her rights thrust aside for a foreigner.
Moreover she had two strong men beside her, William Marshal and Hubert de Burgh.
In a short time after John’s death young Henry was crowned and it became clear that those barons who had invited Louis to come and rule them had only wanted to be rid of John. God had removed him and now they would have their rightful king on the throne and if he was but a boy of nine he had strong loyal men beside him.
It was obvious that Louis was no longer welcome in England. He had a choice. He could remain and fight a bloody war, and such a war fought away from home on foreign soil would be an almost certain failure – or he could go home.
He chose the latter.
So the English adventure was over. There was a young king on the throne and as strong men were there to support him, law and order was restored to England. True, John had lost most of his possessions on the Continent (‘And we must keep it so,’ said Philip) but at the time there was nothing to be done.
And while Louis had been away Blanche had given birth to another child – another boy to delight his grandfather.
He was called Robert.
Three boys in the nursery. That was a number to make a king happy.
While Philip was exulting in the possession of his three grandsons, tragedy struck the nursery. The eldest and the King’s namesake, who had been out hunting in the best of health one day, on the next was too sick to leave his bed.
At first it had seemed some indefinable childish ailment but as two days passed and the child developed a fever there was anxiety for his health and doctors were called from all over the kingdom.
The King sat by his bed with Blanche and Louis, and anxiously they watched together, but the child who had seemed so full of health and high spirits did not rally.
‘What more could I have done?’ Philip demanded. ‘I gave up Agnes, I took back Ingeburga.’ A cold fear came to him. Was God asking him to live with her as her husband? Oh no! That was asking too much. God could not be so cruel. And while he tormented himself he watched his beloved namesake die.
There was deep mourning at court. Young Louis was the important one now. He was a fine upstanding little fellow, a child of whom a King could be proud – but then so had Philip been. Alive and well one week and dead the next! It looked like the hand of an avenging God, for no one could suggest for a moment that the child had been poisoned.
As though in compensation Blanche almost immediately became pregnant and in due course gave birth to another boy. She wanted to call him Alphonso after her father, but this was not a French name. However, Philip was so delighted that there should be another boy in the nursery that he agreed providing the French form of the name – Alphonse – was used. He was delighted, he said, that she showed how deeply she cared for her father that she wished her son to be called after him.
Philip admitted to himself that few kings could be as content with their heirs as he was with his. He thought of his beloved Richard Coeur de Lion – who had had none – and Henry, Richard’s father, who had watched his sons – one by one – turn against him.
Louis would never do that. He could say without reservation that in Louis he had the best of sons. He remembered how, long ago, he had forbidden him to ride into the tourneys and not once had Louis disobeyed him; although the decree had put him into a difficult situation and might secretly have earned him the name of coward in some quarters.