THE ROYAL URIAH HEEP

Otago Witness, Issue 3853, 17 January 1928, Page 9

THE ROYAL URIAH HEEP

By

Sidney Dark.

“ The expression of this man's countenance was partly attractive and partly forbidding. His strong features, sunk cheeks, and hollow eyes had, nevertheless, an expression of shrewdness and humour congenial to the character of the young adventurer. But then, those same sunken eyes, from under the shroud ofthick black eyebrows, had something in them that was at once commanding and sinister. Perhaps this effect was increased by the low fur cap, much depressed on the forehead, and adding to the shade from under which those eyes peeped out; but it? is certain that the young stranger had some difficulty to reconcile his looks with the meanness of his appearance in other respects. His cap, in particular, in which all men of any quality displayed either a brooch of gold or of silver, was ornamented -with a paltry image of the Virgin, in lead, such as the poorer sort of pilgrims bring from Loretto.”

This is Walter Scott's description of Louis XI of France when Quentin Durward met him near Peronne. Louis- was born in 1423. He was the son of Joan of Arc’s Dauphin, the milksop prince, whom that masterful peasant saint made a king much against his will. Louis w-as six when his father was crowned at Rheims, and in “ Saint Joan ” Shaw makes Charles describe his son as a “selfish little beast.” When he was 13 he was married to Margaret of Scotland. Already his character was well defined. Already he was pious—superstitious, if you will —and already he had learned to prefer the substantial virtues of the bourgeois to the more showy qualities of knight and baron.

When he was 22 his wife died, and the smouldering hostility between father and son broke out into open enmity. In 1447 Louis left the royal court for his independent government of the Dauphine, an ancient province of France that lay between Provence and Savoy. Father and son never met again. Louis governed his province as he afterwards governed France. He made friends with the trading classes, and patronised the Jewish bankers. He clipped the claws of the nobles, and he contrived to get three or four times more revenue from the province than had ever been collected before. ~~

But his foreign alliances, made with the evident intention of establishing an independent kingdom, led him into trouble. Charles marched south with an army in 1456. The Dauphine was formally incorporated into the French kingdom, and Louis fled for safety to Flanders, where he lived, until the death of hi' father, under the protection of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, a prince who, in his love of pomp and love of letters, anticipated the Renaissance, and was in every way a contrast to the keeneyed, cunning Frenchman, ugly, shabby, and mean, to whom a stab in the hack always appeared the wisest form of warfare.

Louis was crowned at Rheims in 1461, and it was Philip who put the crown on his head. He reigned for 22 years, following persistently, undaunted by failure, uninflated by success, the purpose he had set himself, long before he had succeeded his father, to . unify France and to break the power of the feudal nobility. His most intimate friend was his barber, Oliver le Dain. His wisest counsellor was his famous biographer, Philippe de Commines. He fought when he had to fight, but he. generally preferred to buy off his enemies, to bribe one to betray the others, to play on greed, and to exploit fear. Edward IV was the King of England with whom he had to deal, and Edward was quite as able and far more admirable. He thoroughly understood the character and policy of his brother of France, and at one time , and another did particularly well out of him. Humiliation meant nothing to Louis. Caught in a trap by Charles of Burgundy, the son of Philip the Bold, he was compelled to march with the Burgundian army against his own allies at Liege, and he went, not only with patience, but -with a pretence of pleasure. Afterwards,, however, he made his advisers pay for the blunder that led him into a false position, one of them, the Bishop of Verdun, being kept in a cage for 11 years. He waited, he bribed, and he plotted, and by 1477 some of his enemies were broken, others were dead, and Louis was king of a united France. His policy was at least justified by success. Louis XI was the royal Uriah Heep. He was very humble, but his humility was very dangerous. There is no doubt that he was sincere in his contempt of pomp and circumstance. There is no reason to doubt that he honestly preferred the society of his barber to the company of princes; but though his ambition was undoubtedly patriotic, and his services to France of almost incalculable value, Louis himself was mean and cruel and bad. Love was a sentiment he did not understand. He did not even love himself.

His policy of conquest by bribery was as costly to France as the more picturesque method of conquest by force of arms. It is true that in order to raise the immense revenue necessary for his purpose he encouraged trade and remained the constant friend of the trading classes. He established the silk trade in

Lyons, and Marseilles owes to him its beginning as a port. But while he was benevolent to the middle classes he ground the faces of the poor. For the first time the craftsman found himself shut out from the guilds of his craft, and the countryman" starved that the royal taxes might be paid. During the reign of Louis the taxation of the French people was increased by over 150 per cent. And Louis cared nothing for law and justice. The king made the laws, and the king s creatures administered them.

The really bad man has always been something of a portent in this world of ours, where kindliness flourishes in the most unlikely places. It may be that many’ men, at the bottom of their hearts, yearn after thorough-paced wickedness’ But to be completely wicked in deed as well as in thought presupposes considerable courage, for the wicked are never likely to be popular, and the way of the transgressor is generally hard.. Only a comparatively few of the bogey-men of history have been really bad,* and, nowadays, it is an historical pastime Mr Shane Leslie is the last writer to play at it—to whitewash the characters of traditional villains. -The task is easy, since no man is so black as liis enemies have painted him. Now and again, however, the real bad man appears, the man absolutely ruthless in the methods he uses for his own ends, absolutely regardless of the lives or the happiness of his fellows.

Louis of France was such a man. It may be urged that the end he sought was not base, but no end, however noble, could justify the meanness of the means that Louis chose. And his cruelty was not mere policy, as it has sometimes been. He actually derived a jaundiced pleasure from watching a ’bishop in a cage.

As Louis had no self-love, so he had no satisfaction. There have been bad men who have thoroughly enjoyed their wickedness, but Louis was not one of them. His piety was no mere hypocrisy. He built shrines, he went on pilgrimage, he • spent hours in prayer, he gave costly gifts to the Church." And all this in the intervals of calculated Heepism. His religion did not save him from one mean rascality, but it proved that he had not arrived at the ultimate damnation of sinning without appreciating the sin. Louis at least knew that he was a bad man, and had a proper apprehension of the fate that awaits bad men. So he invoked the saints, and aji the end of his life lived in seclusion y ith an army of astrologers prophesying smooth things. But he must have been too wise really to believe them. For the splendid sinner there must be something of admiration, if not of sneaking envy. For the mean sinner who sins and trembles there can be nothing but contempt. Like Mr Chesterton’s Higgins, Louis was “ a poor old sinner ” who sinned without delight. But, unlike Higgins, he had the faith though he certainly did not have the fun. If he is to have a good time the -bad man must believe neither in God nor in man. Louis believed in God. That was why he did not have the fun.

When Louis died France was saved from the turbulent nobility. Northern Italy was its King’s washpot, and in only one respect had his *policy been foiled. He was not able to cast his shoe oxer Flanders, for that some-time possession of the House of Burgundj’ had passed to the Habsburgs. Dickens, with his poet’s yearning for poetic justice, makes the end of Uriah Heep poor and miserable. But Uriah Heep in real life sometimes dies in Park lane. The mean, as in the case of Louis XI of France’ on occasion inherit the earth. But they’ never enjoy the inheritance.—John 6’ London’s Weekly.