Chapter IX: “the Convalescence of France” (1)

Confused as was the long period of the last years of Charles
VII, it may nevertheless be thus summarily defined--the
convalescence of France. France recovered and England fell
ill.--MICHELET.[b]

The sorceress, the she-devil, was burned; the charm was doubtless broken, the spell removed; there was nothing now to prevent the English from conquering the kingdom of France. Nevertheless, before they should recover the power in fact they deemed it right to have the power in law on their side--to legitimise the young Henry VI by having him crowned. The coronation to which Charles VII had been led by an agent of the devil being, by that means itself, null and void, they wished to have for their little prince a coronation perfectly orthodox and irreprehensible.

[Sidenote: [1431-1432 A.D.]]

The ceremony took place the 17th of December, 1431; not at Rheims, which the English no longer held, but at Paris. An English prelate, Beaufort, the cardinal-bishop of Winchester, officiated, to the great discontent of the bishop of Paris; for assistants there were English lords, not a single French prince. There was no liberation of prisoners, no reduction of taxes, no largesse to the people. “A bourgeois marrying off his daughter,” says the Bourgeois de Paris,[i] “would have done better.”[c] The child king was found to have little intelligence or grace, and the day after Christmas he was taken from Paris to Rouen, and thence to England.[d]

Paris was far from prosperous under foreign domination. Public officials were ill paid. The university was no longer recruited, except from the English and Burgundian provinces. It lost its pupils; it lost still more when, a month after his arrival, Bedford established schools of civil and canon law at Caen, in the midst of the English provinces. Charles responded by creating, in his turn, a university at Poitiers, and by according new privileges to the schools of Angers.[e]

It was now that period when the feeble bond that still united the duke of Burgundy to the English began to give way. His sister, Bedford’s wife, died in November, 1432. The duke of Burgundy had never had much reason to like the English, nor had he more to fear them. Their war in France was becoming ridiculous.[b]

The marshal De Boussac, as the result of a conspiracy, was almost able to seize Rouen. His advance guard was already in the castle when his bands began to quarrel over the division of the booty, and the English drove them off. Dunois was more successful at Chartres; he had an understanding with a preacher of renown. The latter announced that he would preach every day in a certain church; the entire English garrison assisted devoutly at the sermon while the French took the town. The English, from whom so important a place had been taken, were not even able to capture a hamlet. A certain French captain, John Foucauld by name, was stationed at Lagny and greatly harassed the neighbourhood of Paris. The duke of Bedford and the earl of Warwick went to besiege the place. They soon made a breach in the wall, but when they saw the besieged bravely awaiting them, they returned to Paris, where they arrived on Easter eve, “apparently to confess,” says the Bourgeois de Paris,[i] maliciously, in his journal. Meanwhile several soldiers of fortune in the service of the king of France had seized St. Valéry, Gerberoy, St. Denis, and other places (1432).[c]

The Parisians, delighted at this retreat of Bedford from Lagny, made themselves no less merry on the subject of his second marriage. At fifty years of age he wedded a girl of seventeen, “sprightly, fair, and gracious,” a daughter of the count of Saint-Pol, one of the duke of Burgundy’s vassals, and that abruptly and furtively without saying a word to his brother-in-law. The duke would not have consented to the match. The Saint-Pols, raised by him for the purpose of guarding his frontier, were beginning to play that double game which was to be their ruin; they were giving the English a footing in the dominions of the duke of Burgundy.

Beaufort saw more clearly that if the alliance with Burgundy were broken off, the war would change its aspect; that it would become far more costly, and that the church would infallibly have to bear the expense. A beginning had been made with the church of France, from which it was sought to wrest all the pious donations it had received for sixty years. In this state of anxiety, he exerted himself strongly for peace, and had it arranged that a conference should take place between Bedford and Philip the Good. He succeeded in making the two dukes advance towards each other as far as St. Omer. But this was all; once in the town, neither of them would take the first step. Though Bedford ought to have seen clearly that France was lost for the English if he did not bring back the duke of Burgundy to their party, he remained peremptory on the point of etiquette; as the king’s representative, he awaited the visit of the king’s vassal, who never moved. The rupture was definitive.

France, on the contrary, was gradually becoming reunited, a result brought about chiefly by the efforts of the house of Anjou. The old queen, Yolande of Anjou, the king’s mother-in-law, brought him back the Bretons; and in concert with the constable Richemont, the duke of Brittany’s brother, she dismissed the favourite, La Trémouille.[48]

It was more difficult to allure the duke of Burgundy, who was supporting the pretender Vaudemont, in Lorraine, against René of Anjou, Yolande’s son.[49] That prince, who has remained in the memory of the Angevins and Provençals by the name of “the good king René,” possessed all the amiable qualities of old chivalric France; and with them, too, its imprudence and levity. He suffered himself to be beaten and taken prisoner at Bulgnéville, by the Burgundians (July, 1431). The duke of Burgundy restored him to liberty, under security.[b]

Philip the Good might well have congratulated himself on a victory which clipped the wings of the royalists in Lorraine, but he made no use of it, and now showed himself disposed for pacific measures. In September, 1431, at the very moment that the royalist captains were preparing to invade Charolais and Burgundy, he signed at Chinon a two years’ truce with Charles VII for his frontiers of Réthelois, Picardy, Burgundy, and Charolais.[e] The English had no good reason for their complaints of Philip’s loyalty in this; if he had concluded a separate truce for his own states, he did not treat for peace on their behalf or without them. The English ambassadors were called to take part in all negotiations; but it was very evident, at the conferences of Auxerre (July, 1432) and those held in the village of Simport (now Seineport) in March, 1433, that while peace was now almost an easy matter between Charles VII and Philip on account of the great concessions to which the king resigned himself, it was next to impossible between Charles VII and Henry VI.[f]

The princes were becoming friends, and there was nothing to hinder the people from doing likewise, if they had the will. Paris, governed by Cauchon and other bishops, tried to get rid of them and expel the English. Normandy, even, that little French England, at last grew weary of a war of which it was made to bear the whole burden. A vast rising took place, in 1434, among the rural population of Lower Normandy; the leader was a peasant named Quatrepieds; but there were knights also engaged in the affair, which was not a mere Jacquerie. The English could not fail soon to lose the province.

THE TREATY OF ARRAS (1435 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1435 A.D.]]

They seemed themselves to look on their prospects as desperate. Bedford abandoned Paris. The poor town, smitten by turns with famine and pestilence, was too hideous an abode. The duke of Burgundy, nevertheless, ventured to visit it with his wife and son, on his way to the great assembly at Arras, where the terms of a treaty of peace were to be arranged. The Parisians welcomed him, and implored his aid, as though he had been an angel from God. The assembly in question was one of all Christendom, including ambassadors from the council, the pope, the emperor, the sovereigns of Castile, Aragon, Navarre, Naples, Milan, Sicily, Cyprus, Poland, and Denmark. All the French princes, and all those of the Low Countries, attended in person or by deputy; so did the University of Paris, and a number of good towns. All these personages being assembled, England herself arrived, in the person of the cardinal-bishop of Winchester. The conferences opened August 5th, 1435, in the chapel of St. Waast.

The first question to be considered was the possibility of an accommodation between Charles VII and Henry VI. But how was it to be effected? Each of them claimed the crown. Charles VII offered Aquitaine, and even Normandy, which was still in the hands of the English. The latter required that each party should retain what it then had, with the exception of mutual exchanges for the purpose of rendering the possessions of each more compact.

Nothing could be made of the English, and they were allowed to depart from Arras. Everyone turned towards the duke of Burgundy, beseeching him to have pity on the realm and on Christendom, which suffered so much from these long wars. But he could not make up his mind; his conscience and his knightly honour were engaged, he said; he had given his signature; besides, was he not bound to take vengeance for his father’s murder? The pope’s legates told him he might make light of such scruples, for they had power to release him from his oaths. But this did not yet satisfy him. Ecclesiastical law not seeming sufficient, recourse was had to civil law, and a fine case was drawn up, in which, to leave the minds of the jurisconsults the more free, the parties were designated by the names of Darius and Ahasuerus. The English and the French doctors gave such opinions as might have been expected of them respectively; but those of Bologna, whom the legates brought forward, declared, in conformity with the French lawyers, that Charles VI had no power to conclude the Treaty of Troyes.

[Sidenote: [1435-1436 A.D.]]

The duke of Burgundy allowed the suppliants to argue and implore. But, in reality, the desired change had already taken place in him; he was weary of the English. The Flemings, who had so often forced their counts to remain united with England, were becoming hostile to that nation; they suffered from the forays of the garrison of Calais, and were maltreated when they went to that great wool market. England was then becoming a rival and enemy of Flanders; had she been friendly to that country, her friendship would henceforth have availed little. The duke of Burgundy had gained the barrier of the Somme, through the English alliance, and rounded and completed his Burgundy; but their alliance could no longer guarantee him the possession of his new acquisitions. Divided as they were, it was with difficulty they could defend themselves. Bedford alone could maintain some sort of balance between Winchester and Gloucester; but he died, at Rouen in September, 1435, and his decease was a further alleviation to the conscience of the duke of Burgundy. Thenceforth the treaties concluded with Bedford, as regent of France, appeared to him less sacred; such was the strictly literal mode of viewing things in the Middle Ages; he deemed himself bound during the lifetime of him to whom he had given his signature.

The duke of Burgundy’s two brothers-in-law, the duke de Bourbon and the constable De Richemont, contributed not a little to fix his wavering purposes. They plied him so hard that he vouchsafed at last to yield to their entreaties and grant mercy. The Treaty of Arras cannot be characterised by any other phrase. The king asked pardon of the duke for the murder of John the Fearless, and the duke did not pay him homage; thereby he became himself king, as it were. He retained for himself and his heirs all he had acquired: on the one side Péronne and all the fortresses on the Somme, on the other Auxerre and Mâcon.

The explanations and reparations for the death of Duke John were very humiliating. The king was to say, or have it said, that at that time he was very young, had as yet little knowledge, and had not been sufficiently advised to see duly into the matter, but that at present he was about to use all diligence in searching out the guilty parties. He was to found a chapel in the church at Montereau, and a convent for twelve Carthusians; and to erect, moreover, on the bridge where the act had been perpetrated, a stone cross, which was to be kept in repair at the king’s expense. The ceremony of forgiveness took place in the church of St. Waast. The dean of Paris, Jean Tudert, threw himself at the feet of Duke Philip, and cried him mercy, on the king’s part, for the murder of John the Fearless. The duke appeared moved, raised and embraced him, and told him there should never be war between King Charles and himself. The duke de Bourbon and the constable then swore a peace, as did the French and Burgundian ambassadors and lords.

[Sidenote: [1436-1438 A.D.]]

But the reconciliation would not have been complete if the duke of Burgundy had not concluded a definitive arrangement with the brother-in-law of Charles VII, René of Anjou. René, not having been able to adhere to the terms of the first treaty, had preferred returning to prison. Philip the Good released him and gave him back part of his ransom money, in consideration of the marriage of his niece, Mary de Bourbon, with René’s son. Thus were the houses of Burgundy, Bourbon, and Anjou united with each other and with the king. That of Brittany still vacillated; the duke did not declare himself; he found great profit in the war; it was said that thirty thousand Normans had taken refuge in Brittany. But whether the duke was English or French, his brother Richemont was constable of France: the Bretons followed him cheerfully; the Breton bands were the main force of Charles VII, and were called the _bons corps_.

THE FRENCH RETURN TO PARIS (1436-1437 A.D.)

This self-reconciliation of France drove the English distracted; their wrath blinded them, and they plunged as it were wilfully into their ill fortune. The duke of Burgundy wished to keep some terms with them, and offered them his mediation; but they rejected it, and plundered and killed the Flemish merchants in London. Flanders becoming incensed in its turn, the duke seized the opportunity to lead the communes to the siege of Calais.[b] For this he collected a large army in 1436, the Flemings, especially the Ghenters, answering his call to the number of forty thousand, and promising not merely to second his enterprise, but to accomplish it themselves. They found the task, however, so much beyond their power, that they grew disheartened, accused the Burgundians of betraying them, and marched off leaving the duke to extricate himself with his other forces as best he could.[g]

The Burgundian party turned round like the duke; those of Paris, of the _halles_ even, the Burgundian quarter _par excellence_, called in the king’s forces and his constable, and installed them in the town. The English, who had still fifteen hundred men-at-arms there, and at first made a show of resisting, shut themselves pitiably in the Bastille, and then, apprehensive of famine, obtained leave to embark and descend the river to Rouen. The people, who had been harshly governed by three bishops on behalf of the English, pursued them with hootings, and shouted, “Fox! fox!” after the bishop of Thérouanne, the chancellor of the English. The Parisians were loath to let them off so cheaply, for they calculated that the ransom of so many rich nobles would bring in at least 200,000 livres; but it would have been necessary to besiege the Bastille, and the constable himself was at his shifts, money failing him. The king had only 1,000 livres to give him for the purpose of retaking Paris (1436).[b]

At length, in November, 1437, Charles made his solemn entrance into his capital, from which he had been an exile nearly twenty years. The constable rode on the monarch’s right hand, the count de Vendôme on his left, and the royal cavalcade was met at the Porte St. Denis by “the seven virtues and the seven mortal sins, well clad, mounted upon various beasts.” Charles had previously reunited the parliament of Poitiers to that of Paris, and the new judges and councillors returned to take their seats, and thus restore Paris to the rank of judicial capital of the _languedoïl_.[g]

THE PRAGMATIC SANCTION (1438 A.D.)

In that vast and multitudinous wretchedness, amid so many ruins, two things were still standing--the nobility and the church. The nobility had served the king against the English, gratuitously served a beggared king; it had consumed much of its own wealth, at the same time that it devoured the people’s substance, and it looked for compensation. The church, on its part, represented itself as very poor and afflicted; but there was this notable difference, that its poverty consisted in the suspension of its revenues--in general the capital remained. The king, indebted to the nobility, could discharge his obligations only at the church’s expense, either by forcing it to pay for him, which seemed difficult and dangerous, or rather by gently and indirectly, for the sake ostensibly of the ecclesiastical liberties, re-establishing the elections in which the lords had the paramount influence, and thus enabling them to dispose of benefices. These were often bestowed by the pope on the partisans of England; Charles VII had no inducement to respect his claims. He adopted in his _pragmatique_ of Bourges (July 7th, 1438) the decrees of the council of Bâle, which re-established elections, and recognised the rights of the noble patrons of churches to present to benefices. These patrons, descendants of the pious founders or protectors, regarded the churches as portions severed from their fiefs, and desired nothing better than to protect them still, that is to say, to put their own men into them, by causing them to be elected by the monks or canons.

What delighted France in its then extreme poverty was that the _pragmatique_ would stop the outgoing of money from the kingdom. The absence of gold was acutely felt. Under Charles VII it was really necessary as an instrument of war and a means of rapid action. The bankers were turning their speculations in that direction; previously occupied with the exchange of Rome and the transmission of the ecclesiastic tithes, they were about to draw on the English that bill of exchange which was paid with Normandy.

One thing, however, was to be feared, namely, that a church so completely closed against papal influence might become not national but purely seigniorial. It was not the king or the state that would inherit what the pope lost, but the lords and the nobles. At a period when organisation was still so feeble, it was not very practicable to act with effect from a distance; now at every election the lord was on the spot to present or recommend, and the chapters obsequiously elected his nominee; the king was very far away. It was a question whether the nobility were worthy of being intrusted with the chief active part in the affairs of the church--whether the lords on whom really devolved the choice of pastors and the responsibility for the salvation of souls were themselves the pure souls whom the Holy Spirit would enlighten in so delicate a matter.

THE ATROCIOUS CRIMES OF THE BARONS

[Sidenote: [1435-1440 A.D.]]

In his fief the baron of the twelfth century, haughty and stern as he might be, had yet a rule of conduct which, though unwritten, seemed but the more inviolable. This rule was “usage,” custom. In his most violent proceedings he saw himself accosted by his men, who said respectfully to him: “Messire, it is not the ‘usage’ of the good people here.” The fear of God and respect for usage, those two bridles of the feudal times, were broken in the fifteenth century. The lord was no longer a resident on his estate, and knew neither his people nor their customs. If he returns, it is with soldiers to raise money abruptly; he falls on the country occasionally like storm and hail, everyone hides at his approach, and the whole district is seized with a panic.

This lord, though bearing his father’s seigniorial name, was not the more a lord for all that; he was commonly a rough captain, a barbarian, scarcely a Christian. Often he was a leader of _houspilleurs_, _tondeurs_, or _écorcheurs_, like the bastard de Bourbon, the bastard of Vaurus, a Chabannes, or a La Hire. _Écorcheurs_ (flayers) was their right name: ruining the ruined, taking away the shirt from him who had been left with nothing but a shirt to cover him; and if nothing remained but the skin, then stripping off the skin.

It would be a mistake to suppose that it was only the captains of the _écorcheurs_, the bastards, the lords without lordship, that were so ferocious. The grandees and the princes had acquired a strange appetite for blood in these hideous wars. What shall we say when we see John of Ligny, of the house of Luxemburg, exercising his nephew, the count of Saint-Pol, a boy of fifteen, in massacring fugitives?

They treated their relations just as they did their enemies; in fact, as regarded safety, the enemy was better off than the relation. It would seem as though there were no fathers, no brothers in those days. The count d’Harcourt keeps his father a prisoner all his life; the countess de Foix poisons her sister, the sire de Giac his wife; the duke of Brittany starves his brother to death, and that publicly--the horror-stricken passer-by heard his piteous voice imploring a morsel of bread for charity. One evening, on the 10th of January, Count Adolphus of Gelderland drags his old father out of bed, marches him five leagues on foot through the snow without hose, and throws him into a subterraneous dungeon (1440). The son, indeed, might have said in his own behalf that parricide was matter of usage in the family. But we find it likewise in most of the great houses of the time, in all those of the Low Countries, in those of Bar, Verdun, Armagnac, etc.

_Gilles de Retz_

[Sidenote: [1426-1440 A.D.]]

People were well inured to these things, but one such that came to light stupefied all men with wonder and horror. The duke of Brittany being at Nantes, the bishop, who was his cousin and his chancellor, was emboldened by his presence to proceed against a great lord of the neighbourhood, regarded with singular awe, a Retz of the house of Laval, which was itself a branch of the Montforts, of the lineage of the dukes of Brittany. Such was the terror inspired by that name that it had silenced every tongue for fourteen years.

The accusation was a strange one. An old woman called La Meffraie used to travel about the country and the heaths, and make up to the children who kept cattle or begged. Caressing and cajoling them, but all the while keeping her face half covered with a piece of black gauze, she used to entice them to the château of the sire de Retz, and they were never seen again. This Gilles de Retz was a very great lord, rich both in patrimony and by his marriage into the house of Thouars, besides which he had inherited the wealth of his maternal grandfather, John de Craon, lord of La Suze, Chantocé, and Ingrande.

There was found in the tower of Chantocé a tunful of calcined children’s bones, the remains, it was calculated, of some forty victims. Similar discoveries were made in the château de la Suze, and in every other place where he had made his abode. Murder accompanied him wherever he went. The number of children slaughtered by this beast of extermination is estimated at 140. How slaughtered, and why? In the answer to this question lay something more horrible than death itself. They were offerings to the devil. He invoked the fiends Barron, Orient, Beelzebub, Satan, and Belial, praying them to grant him “gold, knowledge, and power.”[50]

He was condemned to the flames and placed at the stake, but not burned. Out of deference for his powerful family and the nobility in general, he was strangled before the flames reached him. The body was not reduced to ashes. “Damsels of high condition,” says Jean Chartier,[h] went to the meadows of Nantes, where the execution had taken place, raised the body with their noble hands, and, with the aid of some nuns, gave it very honourable burial in the Carmelite church (1440).

Barbarism had returned, only without what was good in it, simplicity and faith. Feudalism had come back, but without its traits of devotedness and fidelity, and its chivalry. These ghosts of buried feudalism appeared like damned souls bringing unknown crimes to earth from their infernal abode. It mattered not that the English withdrew; France still continued the work of self-extermination. The provinces of the north were becoming a desert; the waste heaths were spreading. In the centre, Beauce was becoming overrun with briers and thickets; two armies sought and could hardly find each other there. The towns in which the whole population of the rural districts sought refuge, absorbed that miserable multitude, and yet remained not the less desolate. A vast number of houses were empty, says the Bourgeois de Paris,[i] and many a door was closed to open no more. The poor took from those houses whatever they could for firing. Paris was burning Paris. We may judge of the other towns from this one, the most populous of all, the town in which the government had held its seat, and where resided those great corporations, the university and the parliament. Famine and wretchedness had made it a focus of disgusting contagious maladies, the nature of which was not very accurately discriminated, but which were called at random the plague. Charles VII had a glimpse of that hideous thing which was still called Paris, was struck with horror, and hurried away. The English did not try to return thither. The two parties withdrew as if by a common understanding. The wolves alone were voluntary visitors, entering at evening in search of carrion; for as they no longer found food in the fields, they were rabid with hunger, and attacked men. The contemporary historian, who no doubt exaggerates, alleges that in September, 1438, they devoured fourteen persons between Montmartre and the Porte St. Antoine.

These terrible miseries are expressed, very feebly indeed, in the _Complaint of the poor Commonalty and the poor Labourers_. It is a medley of lamentations and threats; the starving wretches warn the church, the king, the burghers and merchants, and, above all, the lords, that “the fire is very near their hôtels.” They call the king to their aid. But what could Charles VII do--that king of Bourges, that weak and mean-looking personage,[51] how could they expect him to impose respect and obedience on so many audacious men? With what forces was he to put down the _écorcheurs_ of the rural districts, and the terrible petty kings of châteaux? They were his own captains;[52] it was with them and through them he was waging war against the English.

CHARLES BEGINS THE WORK OF REFORM (1439 A.D.)

On the 2nd of November, 1439, Charles VII ordained in the states of Orleans, and at their request: that henceforth the king alone shall nominate the captains; that the lords, as well as the royal captains, shall be responsible for the acts of their men; and that both alike must answer before the king’s functionaries, that is to say, that henceforth war shall be subjected to the control of justice. The barons shall no longer take anything beyond their seigniorial rights, under pretext of war. War becomes the king’s affair, and he undertakes, in consideration of 1,200,000 livres a year granted him by the states, to maintain fifteen hundred lances with six men to each. By and by we shall see him back this cavalry with a newly created infantry of the communes. Contraveners shall obtain no grace; should the king pardon, his servants should take no heed thereof. The ordinance subjoined a more direct and more efficacious threat: the spoils of the contraveners shall belong to whoever shall take them. This was a tremendous clause; it armed the peasant, and sounded, as it were, the tocsin in the village.

What partially explains the boldness of the measure is that the self-styled royal captains, the pillagers and _écorcheurs_, had recently damaged their own strength. They had attempted an expedition to Bâle with the hopes of extorting ransom-money from the council, but instead of this they were themselves very roughly handled on their march by the peasants of Alsace; and then, seeing the Swiss ready to receive them, they returned with their tails between their legs. The king, who had taken Montereau, valiantly leading the assault in person (1437), took Meaux with his artillery (1439); then feeling himself in strength, he listened to the complaints made against the soldiery, and lent a gracious ear to the lamentations of his good subjects. Acts of justice were done with rapid despatch; the constable De Richemont, willingly exchanging his functions for those of provost-martial, hanged and drowned all along his route. His brother, the duke of Brittany, did not delay to strike that great blow, the sentencing and burning of Marshal de Retz. This first instance of justice done upon a lord was effected only in God’s name, and with the aid of the church; but it was, nevertheless, a warning to the nobility that their impunity was at an end.[b]

The most important effect of the memorable meeting of the states-general of 1439 was to render further meetings of that body unnecessary. In effect, the king was given the exclusive right to raise troops and to levy taxes. This virtually amounted to the creation of a permanent army, and, by implications, to the imposition of a perpetual tax. So at least the king interpreted it. From then on the king, having no need of the authorisation of the estates for the imposition of taxes, took good pains to dispense with its services. In point of fact it assembled but once more during the remaining period of his reign.[p]

Who were the intrepid advisers that urged the king upon this course of proceeding? Who were the servants that could have prompted him to these reforms, and procured for him the name given by contemporaries: Charles “the well served”?

Along with the princes in the council of Charles VII, the count of Maine, the cadet of Brittany, and the bastard of Orleans, there were also petty nobles, the brave Saintrailles, and those wise and politic men, the Brézés, nobles, but men who were nothing without the king. We find in it two burghers, Jacques Cœur, the money-changer, and the master of the artillery, Jean Bureau, both very humble _roturier_ names. Bureau was a man of the robe, a master of the accounts. He threw down his pen, and by this remarkable transformation exemplified the truth that an able mind can apply itself to anything. Henry IV reformed the finances through a man of the sword; Charles VII waged war through a financier. Bureau was the first who made an able and scientific use of artillery.

War needs money, and Jacques Cœur contrived to supply it. Whence came he? We are sorry to know so little of his early career. All we know is that in 1432 we find him engaged in commerce in Beirut in Syria; sometime afterwards we see him at Bourges in the capacity of money-changer to the king. This great trader had always one foot in the East, and one in France. Here, he made his son archbishop of Bourges; yonder, he married his nieces or other female relations to the masters of his galleys. On the one hand he was continuing his Egyptian traffic; on the other he was speculating on the maintenance of armies and the conquest of Normandy.

Such were the able and humbly-born councillors of Charles VII. If it be asked who brought them about him, and what was the influence that made him yield to their advice, it will be found, if we are not mistaken, that it was a woman, his mother-in-law, Yolande of Anjou. We see her in possession of power from the beginning of this reign; it was she who caused the Maid to be received with favour; and it was with her on one occasion that the duke of Alençon arranged the preparations for a campaign. This influence, balanced by that of the favourite, seems to have been without a rival from the moment the old queen had given her son-in-law a mistress whom he loved for twenty years (1431-1450). This was Agnes Sorel.

AGNES SOREL; THE _PRAGUERIE_ (1440 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1440 A.D.]]

Agnes la Sorelle or Surelle--she assumed for arms a gold _sureau_ (elder tree)--was the daughter of a gownsman, Jean Soreau, but she was noble by the mother’s side. She was born in honest Touraine. The _naïveté_ of Agnes was early transplanted into a land of craft and policy, Lorraine. She was brought up with Isabella of Lorraine, with whom René of Anjou espoused that duchy. Isabella, the wife of a prisoner, waited on the king to beseech his aid, bringing her children with her and also her good friend from childhood, the demoiselle Agnes. The king’s mother-in-law, Yolande of Anjou, who stood also in the same relation to Isabella, was, like her, a woman of masculine mind; and they both agreed to attach Charles VII forever to the interests of the house of Anjou-Lorraine. The gentle creature was given him for his mistress, to the great satisfaction of the queen, who wished at any cost to remove La Trémouille and the other favourites.

Everyone knows the little story how Agnes said one day to the king that, when very young, she had been informed by an astrologer that she was to be loved by one of the most valiant kings in the world: she had thought that this was Charles, but she now saw clearly it was the king of England, who took so many fine towns from him in defiance of his beard; therefore to the king of England she would go. Stung by these words, the king burst into tears, “and quitting his hunting and his gardens, he took the bit in his teeth,” and to such purpose, that he drove the English out of the kingdom.

The pretty verses by Francis I[53] prove that this tradition was of earlier date than Brantôme.[l] Be this as it may, we have an equivalent testimony in favour of Agnes from a hostile pen, that of the nearly contemporary Burgundian chronicler, Olivier de la Marche.[m] “Certest Agnes was one of the most beautiful women I ever saw, and did in her quality much good to the realm.” And again: “She took pleasure in bringing under the king’s notice young soldiers and gentle companions, by whom the king was afterwards well served.”

Charles VII thought wisdom charming when preached by such lips; old Yolande in all probability spoke through Agnes, and no doubt she had the principal part in all that was done. More politic than scrupulous, she had welcomed with equal readiness the two girls that came to her so _à propos_ from Lorraine, Joan of Arc and Agnes, the saint and the mistress, who both in their several ways were of service to the king and the realm.

This council of women, _parvenus_, and _roturiers_, it must be confessed, did not command much reverence, or greatly tend to set off to advantage the unroyal figure of Charles VII. To sit as judge of the realm on the throne of St. Louis, and be like him the guardian of God’s Peace, he ought apparently to have surrounded himself with people of a different sort. The league of the three ladies, the dowager queen, the queen, and the mistress, was not edifying in anybody’s eyes. What was Richemont? An executioner. Jacques Cœur? A trader in Saracen lands. A Jean Bureau, a limb of the law, “an inkhorn,” had made himself a captain, was riding all over the kingdom with his cannon, and not a fortress could stand before him; was not that a shame for the men of the sword? The foxes had become lions. Thenceforth the knights were to account to the knights at law--the most noble lords and the high justiciars were to tremble before the underlings of justice!

So much was this the tone of feeling prevalent among the nobles, not excepting those who were most immediately in contact with Charles VII, that even Dunois quitted the council after the famous ordinance. “The cool and tempered lord,” as Chartier[h] calls him, repented of having served his king too well. This bastard of Orleans had begun his fortunes by defending the town of Orleans, his brother’s appanage, in which service he had very adroitly employed the heroic simplicity of the Maid. After having grown great through the king, he wished to grow great against the king. The misfortune was that his brother the duke was still in England; but the ancient enemy of the house of Orleans, the duke of Burgundy (converted no doubt by Dunois), was labouring to get that future chief of the malcontents out of the hands of the English.

The duke of Alençon threw himself headlong into the affair; the Bourbons and the Vendômes lent their hands to it. The ex-favourite, La Trémouille, whom Richemont had removed, readily engaged in it. The most eager of all were the leaders of the _écorcheurs_, the bastard de Bourbon, Chabannes, and Le Sanglier (“the wild boar”). In truth, the matter was one that most nearly concerned them; the lords had their honours and jurisdictional prerogatives to contend for; but as for them, they had their necks to save; the gallows stared them in the face.

Nothing was now wanting but a leader. As the duke of Orleans could not be had, the malcontents took the dauphin, a mere child in point of age, but it was thought that a name would be sufficient. The supposed child, who was already Louis XI, had made his first efforts in arms, as he made his last, against the very party of the lords that chose him for their chief. At fourteen years of age he had been commissioned to pacify the marches of Brittany and Poitou. His first capture had been that of one of Marshal de Retz’s lieutenants; such a commencement did not promise the grandees a very trusty friend. Friend or not, he accepted their offers. This dauphin of France resembled Charles VII in no respect, but took rather after his grandmother, who was sprung from the houses of Bar and Aragon.

The king was keeping his Easter at Poitiers, and was at dinner, when word was brought him that St. Maixent had been seized by the duke of Alençon and the sire de la Roche; whereupon Richemont said to him in Breton fashion, “Remember King Richard II, who shut himself up in a fortress and got taken.” The king thought the hint a good one, mounted his horse, and galloped with four hundred lances to St. Maixent. The burghers had been fighting four-and-twenty hours for their king, when he came to their relief. De la Roche’s men were decapitated or drowned, according to Richemont’s custom, but Alençon’s were let go. The small fortresses of Poitou did not hold out; Richemont carried them one by one. Dunois then began to reflect, and he calculated too that the first who should leave the rest would be allowed good terms. He came, was well received, and congratulated himself on the course he had adopted, when he saw the king stronger than he had supposed, with 4,800 cavaliers, and 2,000 archers at his back, without having been obliged to weaken the garrisons in the marches of Normandy.

More than one of Dunois’ party thought as he did. Many an _écorcheur_ of the south took the king’s pay, and fought against the _écorcheurs_ of the north. Charles VII drove back the duke de Bourbon upon the Bourbonnais, securing the good will of the towns and châteaux by prohibiting all pillage. He assembled the states of Auvergne, and got them to declare loudly that the rebels were hostile to the king, only because he protected the poorer classes against the plunderers. The princes, abandoned by their followers, and obtaining no support from the duke of Burgundy, came in and made their submission; first Alençon, then the duke de Bourbon and the dauphin. As for La Trémouille and two others, the king would not receive them. The dauphin hesitated about accepting a pardon which was not extended to his friends, and said to the king, “I find then, my liege, that I must go back to them, for I have promised so.” The king replied coldly, “The gates are open for you, Louis, and if they are not wide enough, I will have sixteen or twenty fathoms of the wall pulled down for you.”

This war, so well conducted, was not less wisely terminated. The duke de Bourbon was deprived of his possessions in central France (Corbeil, Vincennes, etc.) and the dauphin was dismissed from court, and assigned an establishment on the frontier, in Dauphiné. Thus he was isolated, and allotted his separate portion; there was no getting rid of him, except by giving him a little royalty, in advance of his hereditary expectations.

This _praguerie_ of France (it was so called after the name of the great Bohemian _praguerie_), although it was so quickly ended, nevertheless produced some disastrous results. The military reform was postponed. The English were emboldened to attack Harfleur, which they took and retained. They released the duke of Orleans at the request of the duke of Burgundy (1440). When the ancient enemy of his house thus exerted himself to take him out of captivity, the king could not decently refuse likewise to guarantee the ransom-money, and aid in the deliverance of the dangerous prisoner. He proceeded straight on his return to the duke of Burgundy, who threw the chain of the Golden Fleece[54] over his neck, and gave him his niece in marriage. Against whom was formed this close union of two enemies, if not against the king? He took the hint.

[Sidenote: [1440-1442 A.D.]]

First of all, he obtained from the states a tenth to be levied on all the clergy of the realm. He recalled Tannegui du Châtel, the mortal enemy of the house of Burgundy. Then concentrating all his forces towards the north, he proceeded along the frontier, doing justice upon the Burgundian, Lorrainian, and other captains, who were desolating the land. Among those who made their submission, there was a man of turbulence, the most audacious of plunderers; audacious both from the strength his birth gave him, and because he was the common agent of the duke de Bourbon and the duke of Burgundy; this was the bastard de Bourbon. He did not get off so cheaply as he had expected. The king handed him over, Bourbon as he was, to the provost, who put him on his trial just like any other robber; and after being well and duly found guilty, he was put in a sack, and thrown into the river.

Another lesson, not less instructive, was given. The young count of Saint-Pol, relying on the protection of the duke of Burgundy, dared to intercept some of the king’s cannon on the march, and carry them off; the king deprived him of two of his best fortresses; Saint-Pol hastened to the king and besought pardon, but he could obtain no favour, except by submitting to the decision of the parliament on the litigated question of the Ligny inheritance.

EFFECTIVE PROGRESS AGAINST ENGLAND (1441-1444 A.D.)

Meanwhile the English, all this time so near Paris, and so strongly established on the lower Seine, had advanced up the river and seized Pontoise. Lord Clifford, who had surprised that important and formidable post, kept possession of it in person. The inveterate obstinacy of the Cliffords acquired but too much notoriety in the wars of the Roses. Besides the English, there were in Pontoise numerous deserters, who knew they had no quarter to expect.

Invincible pertinacity of purpose was displayed on both sides. The duke of York, regent of France, now came to the aid of Clifford, whom he was afterwards to put to death in the civil wars. He brought with him an army from Normandy, revictualled the place, and offered battle (June); Talbot was with him. The king let the English pass, fell back, and returned. Talbot also returned, and again threw provisions into the town (July). The duke of York once more marched his army back, but could not yet bring on an engagement. He was allowed to roam over the ruined Île-de-France as much as he pleased, and waste his strength in those useless evolutions. When they had exhausted and harassed themselves, in four times revictualling Pontoise, Charles VII seriously resumed the siege; Jean Bureau battered the walls with admirable activity; two murderous assaults were made, that lasted five hours; first a church, that served as a redoubt, was carried, and then the place itself (September 16th, 1441). Thus men, who dared not meet the English in the plain, attacked and defeated them by storm.

The recapture of Pontoise was a deliverance for Paris, and for the whole country around; cultivation could thenceforth recommence, the means of subsistence were secured. Yet the Parisians evinced no gratitude to the king; they felt but their present miseries and the burden of the taxes; these were beginning to affect the brotherhoods even, and the churches, which were loud in their complaints. There was no want of willingness on the part of the princes to take advantage of these discontents. The duke of Burgundy, without himself appearing, assembled them in his own home at Nevers (March, 1442). The duke of Orleans, with whom he did as he pleased, since he had delivered him, presided for him over the meeting, which consisted of the dukes de Bourbon and d’Alençon, the counts d’Angoulême, d’Étampes, and de Dunois. The king frankly sent his chancellor to this conclave which was held against him, and notified to them that he would readily hear what they had to say.

[Sidenote: [1442-1443 A.D.]]

Their demand and alleged grievances very plainly showed what were their secret views. The princes, therefore, in their love for the public welfare, and for the good people of France, set forth before the king the necessity of making peace. They called for the repression of the brigands.

The king’s reply, which was sedulously made public, was overwhelming, and the more so as its tone was calm and moderate. He answers specially, respecting the taxes, that the aids had been consented to by the lords on whose property they had been levied; that as to the tallages, the king had “notified” them to the three estates, although in matters so urgent, when the enemy was in occupation of one portion of the kingdom, and was destroying the rest, he had a good right to levy tallages of his royal authority. “It is not necessary to that end,” he says, “to assemble the estates; it is but a burden for the poor people who have to pay the charges of those who attend. Many notable persons have requested that these convocations should cease.”

The king, leaving the malcontents to waste time in their meeting at Nevers, was then performing a grand and useful journey all through his kingdom, from Picardy to Gascony, everywhere establishing peace, especially in the marches, in Poitou, Saintonge, and the Limousin. Strengthened in the north by the recovery of Pontoise, he went to make head against the English in the south. The count d’Albret, being hard pressed by them, had promised to surrender if the king did not come on the 23rd of June to “keep his day,” and await them on the _lande_ of Tartas. They liked the condition, not believing that he could arrive in time, much less that he would offer them battle. On the appointed day they saw the king of France and his army on the _lande_ (June 21st, 1442). All these Gascons, who had imagined themselves far beyond the king’s reach in a world of their own, were beginning to feel that he was everywhere. They came and did homage, performed feudal service, and the king rendered justice to them.

He did this conspicuously in an important case the following year (March, 1443). The estates of Comminges supplicated Charles VII on behalf of the aged countess de Foix who had been imprisoned by her husband. He frightened the count de Foix, liberated the old countess, divided the usufruct of Comminges between the husband and wife, and adjudged the property to himself. This startling act of justice struck great awe into all those lords who had hitherto been so independent.

This was not all. In order to remain always among them as judge, the king gave them a royal parliament, which was to reside in Toulouse. This judicial royalty of the south was altogether free of the parliament of Paris; it judged in accordance with the law of the country, the written law, and was not dependent on anyone, but was self-elected. Until such time as this great body could establish order and justice in Languedoc, Charles VII authorised the poor to take justice into their own hands, and hunt down the brigands and vagrant soldiers.

He could not remain long absent from the north. Dieppe, which had been recovered by a fortunate and bold stroke, was in danger of being lost again. A great fleet and an army were every moment expected from England; it was urgently necessary to anticipate their arrival. The dauphin got permission to undertake this service along with Dunois; many Picard and Norman gentlemen also volunteered. The Bastille was taken. The duke of Somerset, the English commander, returned to Rouen to rest from his toils and take up his winter quarters.

[Sidenote: [1443-1444 A.D.]]

That winter, whilst Somerset was enjoying his victorious repose, the dauphin Louis was rapidly traversing the whole kingdom, to ruin and destroy the best friend of the English. The count d’Armagnac, dissatisfied by the way in which Comminges had been disposed of without giving him a share, had attempted to seize the whole country. He reckoned on the English, and particularly on the duke of Gloucester, who in fact wanted to marry Henry VI to a daughter of the count. The dauphin set out in winter, made his way over snows and swollen rivers, and found the game in its lair, everything that bore the name of Armagnac shut up in one place. Gloucester and the war party, though they had encouraged Armagnac, were unable to defend him. They had enough to do to defend themselves in England against the bishops, and the partisans of peace, Winchester and Suffolk, who had gained the upper hand.[b] Painful as it was to their pride they were obliged at conferences held at Arras, in 1444, to beg for a truce and the hand of a French princess, Margaret of Anjou, for their young king Henry VI, placing also a new enemy at their gates through the marriage of the dauphin Louis with Margaret of Scotland, daughter of James I.

EXPEDITION TO SWITZERLAND AND LORRAINE

Charles VII only granted that truce in order the better to complete the work of reform begun in 1439.[c] But there was a third people very embarrassing during the truce, the war-folk namely. What could be done was to induce them to go and rob elsewhere, to quit ruined France for thriving Germany, and make a pilgrimage to the council of Bâle, to the rich and saintly towns of the Rhine, and the fat ecclesiastical principalities.

[Sidenote: [1444-1445 A.D.]]

Just then the king received two applications for aid, the one from the emperor Frederick III against the Swiss, the other from René, duke of Lorraine, against the cities of the empire. The king was equally favourable to both proposals, and generously promised aid for and against the Germans.[b]

Switzerland had founded and consolidated its independence of Austria and the empire in three battles--Morgarten, Sempach, and Näfels--in which a handful of peasants had heroically vanquished great feudal armies. The French nobility was always ready for positive warfare, but that of Germany showed itself more circumspect and the Austrian provinces were reduced to setting, by means of wretched intrigue, the Swiss cantons one against the other, and then if possible to intervene. This time Frederick III reckoned to make the Armagnacs of Charles VII intervene for him.

_The Battle of Sankt Jakob (1444 A.D.)_