Loches in the Touraine, some twenty-five miles from Tours, will go down in history as one of the most famous, or more exactly, infamous castles in mediæval France. It was long a favored royal palace, a popular residence with the Plantagenet and other kings, but degenerated at length under Louis XI into a cruel and hideous gaol. It stands to-day in elevated isolation dominating a flat, verdant country, just as the well-known Mont St. Michel rises above the sands on the Normandy coast. The most prominent object is the colossal white donjon, or central keep, esteemed the finest of its kind in France, said to have been erected by Fulk Nerra, the celebrated “Black Count,” Count of Anjou in the eleventh century. It is surrounded by a congeries of massive buildings of later date. Just below it are the round towers of the Martelet, dating from Louis XI, who placed within them the terrible dungeons he invariably kept filled. At the other end of the long lofty plateau is another tower, that of Agnes Sorel, the personage whose influence over Charles VII, although wrongly acquired, was always exercised for good, and whose earnest patriotism inspired him to strenuous attempts to recover France from its English invaders. Historians have conceded to her a place far above the many kings’ mistresses who have reigned upon the left hand of the monarchs of France. Agnes was known as the lady of “Beauté-sur-Marne,” “a beauty in character as well as in aspect,” and is said to have been poisoned at Junièges. She was buried at Loches with the inscription, still legible, “A sweet and simple dove whiter than swans, redder than the flame.” The face, still distinguishable, preserves the “loveliness of flowers in spring.” After the death of Charles VII, the priests of Saint-Ours desired to expel this tomb. But Louis XI was now on the throne. He had not hesitated to insult Agnes Sorel while living, upbraiding her openly and even, one day at court, striking her in the face with his glove, but he would only grant their request on condition that they surrender the many rich gifts bestowed upon them at her hands.
It is, however, in its character as a royal gaol and horrible prison house that Loches concerns us. Louis XI, saturnine and vindictive, found it exactly suited to his purpose for the infliction of those barbarous and inhuman penalties upon those who had offended him, that must ever disgrace his name. The great donjon, already mentioned, built by Fulk Nerra, the “Black Count,” had already been used by him as a prison and the rooms occupied by the Scottish Guard are still to be seen. The new tower at the northwest angle of the fortress was the work of Louis and on the ground floor level is the torture chamber, with an iron bar recalling its ancient usage. Below are four stories, one beneath the other. These dungeons, entered by a subterranean door give access to the vaulted semi-dark interior. Above this gloomy portal is scratched the jesting welcome, “Entrez Messieurs—ches le Roi nostre maistre,”—“Come in, the King is at home.” At this gateway the King stood frequently with his chosen companions, his barber and the common hangman, to gloat over the sufferings of his prisoners. In a cell on the second story from the bottom, the iron cage was established, so fiendishly contrived for the unending pain of its occupant. Comines, the “Father of modern historians,” gives in his memoirs a full account of this detestable place of durance.
Comines fell into disgrace with Anne of Beaujeu by fomenting rebellion against her administration as Regent. He fled and took refuge with the Duke de Bourbon, whom he persuaded to go to the King, the infant Charles VIII, to complain of Anne’s misgovernment. Comines was dismissed by the Duke de Bourbon and took service with the Duke d’Orleans. Their intrigues were secretly favored by the King himself, who, as he grew older, became impatient of the wise but imperious control of Anne of Beaujeu. In concert with some other nobles, Comines plotted to carry off the young King and place him under the guardianship of the Duke d’Orleans. Although Charles was a party to the design he punished them when it failed. Comines was arrested at Amboise and taken to Loches, where he was confined for eight months. Then by decree of the Paris parliament his property was confiscated and he was brought to Paris to be imprisoned in the Conciergerie. There he remained for twenty months, and in March, 1489, was condemned to banishment to one of his estates for ten years and to give bail for his good behavior to the amount of 10,000 golden crowns. He was forgiven long before the end of his term and regained his seat and influence in the King’s Council of State.
“The King,” says Comines, “had ordered several cruel prisons to be made; some were cages of iron and some of wood, but all were covered with iron plates both within and without, with terrible locks, about eight feet wide and seven feet high; the first contriver of them was the Bishop of Verdun (Guillaume d’Haraucourt) who was immediately put into the first of them, where he continued fourteen years. Many bitter curses he has had since his invention, and some from me as I lay in one of them eight months together during the minority of our present King. He (Louis XI) also ordered heavy and terrible fetters to be made in Germany and particularly a certain ring for the feet which was extremely hard to be opened and fitted like an iron collar, with a thick weighty chain and a great globe of iron at the end of it, most unreasonably heavy, which engine was called the King’s Nets. However, I have seen many eminent men, deserving persons in these prisons with these nets about their legs, who afterwards came out with great joy and honor and received great rewards from the king.”
Another occupant beside d’Haraucourt, of this intolerable den, so limited in size that “no person of average proportions could stand up comfortably or be at full length within,” was Cardinal la Balue,—for some years after 1469. These two great ecclesiastics had been guilty of treasonable correspondence with the Duke of Burgundy, then at war with Louis XI. The treachery was the more base in La Balue, who owed everything to Louis, who had raised him from a tailor’s son to the highest dignities in the Church and endowed him with immense wealth. Louis had a strong bias towards low-born men and “made his servants, heralds and his barbers, ministers of state.” Louis would have sent this traitor to the scaffold, but ever bigoted and superstitious, he was afraid of the Pope, Paul II, who had protested against the arrest of a prelate and a prince of the Church. He kept d’Haraucourt, the Bishop of Verdun, in prison for many years, for the most part at the Bastile while Cardinal La Balue was moved to and fro: he began at Loches whence, with intervals at Onzain, Montpaysan, and Plessis-lez-Tours, he was brought periodically to the Bastile in order that his tormentor might gloat personally over his sufferings. This was the servant of whom Louis once thought so well that he wrote of him as “a good sort of devil of a bishop just now, but there is no saying what he may grow into by and by.” He endured the horrors of imprisonment until within three years of the death of the King, who, after a long illness and a paralytic seizure, yielded at last to the solicitations of the then Pope, Sixtus IV, to release him.
The “Bishops’ Prison” is still shown at Loches, a different receptacle from the cages and dungeons occupied by Cardinal La Balue and the Bishop of Verdun. These other bishops did their own decorations akin to Sforza’s, but their rude presentment was of an altar and cross roughly depicted on the wall of their cell. Some confusion exists as to their identity, but they are said to have been De Pompadour, Bishop of Peregneux, and De Chaumont, Bishop of Montauban, and their offense was complicity in the conspiracy for which Comines suffered. If this were so it must have been after the reign of Louis XI.
Among the many victims condemned by Louis XI to the tender mercies of Loches, was the Duc d’Alençon, who had already been sentenced to death in the previous reign for trafficking with the English, but whose life had been spared by Charles VII, to be again forfeited to Louis XI, for conspiracy with the Duke of Burgundy. His sentence was commuted to imprisonment in Loches.
A few more words about Loches. Descending more than a hundred steps we reach the dungeon occupied by Ludovico Sforza, called “Il Moro,” Duke of Milan, who had long been in conflict with France. The epithet applied to him was derived from the mulberry tree, which from the seasons of its flowers and its fruit was taken as an emblem of “prudence.” The name was wrongly supposed to be due to his dark Moorish complexion. After many successes the fortune of war went against Sforza and he was beaten by Trionlzio, commanding the French army, who cast him into the prison of Novara. Il Moro was carried into France, his destination being the underground dungeon at Loches.
Much pathos surrounds the memory of this illustrious prisoner, who for nine years languished in a cell so dark that light entered it only through a slit in fourteen feet of rock. The only spot ever touched by daylight is still indicated by a small square scratched on the stone floor. Ludovico Sforza strove to pass the weary hours by decorating his room with rough attempts at fresco. The red stars rendered in patterns upon the wall may still be seen, and among them, twice repeated, a prodigious helmet giving a glimpse through the casque of the stern, hard looking face inside. A portrait of Il Moro is extant at the Certosa, near Pavia, and has been described as that of a man “with the fat face and fine chin of the elderly Napoleon, the beak-like nose of Wellington, a small, querulous, neat-lipped mouth and immense eyebrows stretched like the talons of an eagle across the low forehead.”
Ludovico Sforza left his imprint on the walls of this redoubtable gaol and we may read his daily repinings in the mournful inscriptions he recorded among the rough red decorations. One runs: “My motto is to arm myself with patience, to bear the troubles laid upon me.” He who would have faced death eagerly in open fight declares here that he was “assailed by it and could not die.” He found “no pity; gaiety was banished entirely from his heart.” At length, after struggling bravely for nearly nine years he was removed from the lower dungeons to an upper floor and was permitted to exercise occasionally in the open air till death came, with its irresistible order of release. The picture of his first passage through Paris to his living tomb has been admirably drawn:—“An old French street surging with an eager mob, through which there jostles a long line of guards and archers; in their midst a tall man dressed in black camlet, seated on a mule. In his hands he holds his biretta and lifts up unshaded his pale, courageous face, showing in all his bearing a great contempt for death. It is Ludovico, Duke of Milan, riding to his cage at Loches.” It is not to the credit of Louis XII and his second wife, Anne of Brittany, widow of his predecessor Charles VIII, that they often occupied Loches as a royal residence during the incarceration of Ludovico Sforza, and made high festival upstairs while their wretched prisoner languished below.