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By Root 1344 0

is uncertain. Out of respect for his father-in-law, Coucy took no overt action at this time, but immediately on his return he accepted a diplomatic mission to the Count of Flanders in the interests of France against England. By now Coucy was a member of the Royal Council, clearly relied on by Charles V for his perspicacity and diplomacy. The King’s anxieties had been increased by the mental illness of Queen Jeanne who in 1373 was afflicted “so that she lost her mind and her memory.” After many prayers and pilgrimages by her husband who was devoted to her, she recovered her health and senses and was named, in the event of the King’s death, guardian of the Dauphin. She was to be assisted by a Regency Council of fifty composed of prelates, ministers of crown and Parlement, and ten of the “most notable and sufficient” bourgeois of Paris. Twelve of the Council were to be in constant service of the Queen. As a member of the Council, Coucy received an annual wage of 1,000 francs in addition to payments of 500 francs a month on his annual pension of 6,000 francs. At about this time his daughter Marie, heiress of his domain, joined the household of the Queen who took charge of her education along with that of the Dauphin and his brothers and sisters. In April 1377 the records show a payment to Coucy of 2,000 francs, to be deducted from his pension, for furnishing his several castles with crossbows against the event of renewed war.

Still trying to avert that last calamity, Charles again delegated Coucy as diplomat to re-open negotiations with England, this time without benefit of the royal Dukes, to spare their expensive presence. Over the next six months, from January to June 1377, the parleys met variously at Boulogne, Calais, and halfway between at Montreuil on the coast. As the only lay noble in a group of ministers, Coucy had as his chief colleague Bureau de la Rivière, the Chamberlain, along with two ecclesiastical ministers, the Bishops of Laon and Bayeux, and various members of the Council.

The English envoys, representing adherents of both Lancaster and the late Prince, were men with whom Coucy was very likely acquainted, from his recent visit to England if not before. Varying from one meeting to another, they included the guardian of the heir to the throne, Sir Guichard d’Angle, a gallant and admired Gascon, long a campaigner with the Black Prince; the Lollard knight Sir Richard Stury, whom Lancaster had reinstated in office; Lord Thomas Percy, a veteran of the French wars and brother of Sir Henry Percy; the Earl of Salisbury; and lastly a trusted servant of the court connected with Lancaster’s entourage, Geoffrey Chaucer.

Recently appointed to the well-paid and important post of Comptroller of the Wool Customs for the port of London, Chaucer was a successful civil servant whose other life as a poet had bloomed in an astonishing break with precedent: in 1369 he had written a long poem of courtly love, The Book of the Duchess, not in French appropriate to its subject and audience, but in unliterary and still unstable English. Though he was well acquainted with French, from which he had translated the Roman de la Rose, something in the ambience of his time prompted Chaucer to work in the same language as his gaunt and penniless contemporary, the street cleric Langland, who called himself “Long Will.”

In different circumstances from Langland, Chaucer enjoyed a grant from the King of a daily pitcher of wine and was married to Katherine Swynford’s sister Philippa, a relationship that had brought them both into the ducal household. The Book of the Duchess was a graceful elegy for Gaunt’s first wife, Blanche, a well-beloved lady who had died at the age of 27 after bearing seven children. Though its choice of language was considered peculiar, its author lost no favor for that. In 1373 he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Italy to negotiate a commercial treaty with the Doge of Genoa and to conduct “secret business” in Florence. It was the year of Boccaccio’s lectures in Florence on Dante. Chaucer returned steeped in new material,