In the month of February, the king left Tours and Amboise for the Bourbonnois and Auvergne. He there performed a nine-days devotion at the church of our Lady at Puy, and afterwards went into the Lyonnois and Dauphiny. During his stay at Puy, he received intelligence that the Swiss had met the duke of Burgundy and his army as they were on their march to enter Swisserland, and had defeated him with the loss of sixteen or eighteen thousand men, and taken all his artillery.
It was thus told:—When the duke of Burgundy had won the town of Granson, he marched his army along the lake of Neufchâtel, toward Fribourg, and found means to gain two castles at the entrance of Swisserland. The Swiss though informed of this as well as of the capture of Granson, kept advancing to meet him, and, on the Friday preceding the first Sunday in Lent, surrounded these castles so effectually that none could come out. They posted two ambuscades in a small wood hard by, and near to the main body of the Burgundians. On the morrow very early, the duke began his march with the artillery; but he had no sooner passed the ambuscades than the Swiss, who did not amount to more than six thousand infantry armed with culverins, began to fire with such success on the enemy that the duke's van, panicstruck, took to flight with very great loss[62]. The Swiss charged the main body, which fled also; and the duke himself escaped with great difficulty, attended by only four persons: he never stopped, but often looked behind him, until he came to Joigné, which was eight country leagues from the place of his defeat, and equal to sixteen leagues of pretty France, which may God preserve and guard! The duke lost the greater part of his best captains,—and there was great slaughter among the Burgundians. After this disgraceful flight, and after the Swiss had taken all his artillery, plate, and baggage[63], they won the two castles, and hanged all the Burgundians within them. They also regained the town of Granson, and took down from the gibbets the Swiss and Germans, to the number of five hundred and twelve, whom the duke had caused to be hanged, and buried them. At the same time, they seized on an equal number of Burgundians then in Granson, and tied them up with the same ropes, and at the same places where the Germans and Swiss had been hanged.
The king, during the month of March had sent the lord of Beaujeu to besiege the duke of Nemours, in the town of Carlat in Auvergne, with a considerable force and a large train of artillery. The duke surrendered himself into the hands of the lord of Beaujeu, who conducted him to the king then in Dauphiny,—whence he was, by the king's orders, carried prisoner to the castle of Vienne. During the siege of Carlat, the duchess of Nemours, daughter to Charles d'Anjou duke of Maine, was brought to bed in the castle,—but whether from vexation at the situation of her husband's affairs, or from illness in childbirth, she died: it was a pity, for she was a good and honourable lady. The duke was afterwards removed from the castle of Vienne to Pierre-en-cise, near Lyon.
In the month of April, the count de Campo Basso[64], a Lombard or Milanese, who had the command of two hundred lombard lances at the siege of Nuys, and had also been with the duke at the defeat at Granson, left the duke of Burgundy, and went to Brittany, claiming relationship with that duke, under pretence of going on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint James in Gallicia. The duke of Brittany received him well, and made him handsome presents in money. Campo Basso published abroad, that the duke of Burgundy was cruel and inhuman,—that all his enterprises would prove abortive,—and that he was only losing time, people, and money by his foolish obstinacy.
FOOTNOTES:
[59] Bourget,—within a league of Paris.
[60] Count de Roussy,—Anthony of Luxembourg, son to the constable.
[61] It was a codicil he now added to a will he had just before made at Peronne. See the particulars of both, and his trial, in the third volume of Comines,—Preuves.
[62] Comines says, that he lost but seven men at arms. Louis de Châlons, lord of Château Guyon, was the only man of note killed.
[63] The spoils of the duke greatly enriched the poor Swiss, and would have been of more advantage had they known the value of the prize. They sold his silver plates and dishes for pewter. The largest diamond then in the world, having an immense pearl fastened to it, was picked up by a Swiss, replaced in its case, and thrown under a cart, and sold afterward to a priest for a florin, who again resold it for three francs. This diamond was, for some time, the first in the crown of France: it is now the second, and known under the name of Sanci, from having been last in the possession of Nicholas de Harlai, lord of Sanci, celebrated in the reigns of Henry III, Henry IV. Sanci bought it of don Antonio, prior of Crato, who died at Paris, and his pretensions to the crown of Portugal with him. Varillas in his Hist. of Henry III. makes a fine but false story of this diamond.—Comines.