The reason was plain. The prelates and seigneurs, being exempt of taxation in virtue of the privileges of the nobility of the one and the alleged sanctity of the other, and sharing, thanks to the prodigalities of the kings, in the taxes levied on the bourgeoisie, granted with gladsome hearts all the levies for money that the crown ever requested.
Thus stood things at the beginning of the reign of John II. Though the position of the people continued to be grievous, yet marked progress had been made.
CHAPTER II.
ETIENNE MARCEL.
The hopeless minority in which the bourgeoisie found itself in the States General rendered its participation in government a fiction. It remained for a great man and the proper juncture in order to turn the fiction into a reality. The juncture set in during the year 1355, when King John II found his treasury empty through his ruinous prodigalities, and Gaul in flames through the pretensions of the King of England to the ownership of the country and his efforts to reconquer it, while in the south Charles the Wicked, King of Navarre, whom John II. had given his daughter in marriage, was arms in hand, capturing several provinces to which he laid claim as part of his wife's dower. The man of the occasion arose in Etienne Marcel.
With the country torn up by war and his treasury bankrupt, John II convoked the States General. He needed stout levies of men and stouter levies of money. The Archbishop of Rouen, then the royal chancellor, haughtily presented the King's demands. But the imperious chancellor had counted without Etienne Marcel, one of the greatest men who ever added luster to the name of Gaul. The great commoner, deputed to the States General by the city of Paris and indignant at seeing the nobility and clergy disregard the just protests of the deputies of the bourgeoisie, thundered against the odious practice, and, sustained by the menacing attitude of the Parisians, he uttered the memorable declaration that the alliance of the nobility and the clergy was no longer to be of controlling force upon the deputies of the bourgeoisie, and that if, contrary to the vote of the bourgeoisie, the seigneurs and prelates granted levies of men and moneys to the King without any guarantee as to the proper employment of such forces and funds for the public welfare, the towns would have to refuse obedience to such decrees and furnish neither men nor moneys to the crown.
These energetic and wise words, never heard before, imposed upon the States General. In the name of the deputies of the bourgeoisie, Marcel submits to the crown the conditions under which the third estate would consent to grant the men and subsidies asked for; and the crown accepts, knowing the people of Paris stood ready to sustain their spokesman. Unfortunately, and the experience was to be more than once made by Marcel, he soon realized the hollowness of royal promises. The moneys granted by the national assembly are insanely dissipated by the King and his courtiers. The levies of men, instead of being employed against the English, whose invasion spread over wider areas of the national territory, are turned to the private wars of the King against some of the seigneurs, and intended either to protect or enlarge his own domains. The audacity of the English redoubles; they break the truce and threaten the very heart of the land; and King John then hastily summons his faithful and well-beloved nobility to join him in the defence of the nation.
The reception given to the royal herald by the valiant jousters, warm from the passage of arms at the tourney of Nointel, has been narrated. Nevertheless, with good or ill will, the majority of the gallants, all of whom were made to fear for their own estates by the foreign invasion, dragged their vassals after them, and joined John II near Poitiers. At the first charge of the English archers the brilliant gathering of knights turn their horses' heads, ply their spurs, cowardly take to flight, and leave the poor people that they had compelled to follow them at the mercy of the invader who falls upon them and ruthlessly puts them to the sword. King John himself remains a prisoner on the field, while his son Charles, Duke of Normandy, a stripling barely twenty years of age, escapes with his brothers the disgraceful defeat of his father only by riding full tilt to Paris, where, in his capacity of Regent, he convokes the States General for the purpose of obtaining fresh sums to ransom the seigneurs who remained in the hands of the enemy.
Without Etienne Marcel, the draper, Gaul would have been lost; but the ascendancy of his genius and patriotism dominated the assembly. In answer to the chancellor, who conveyed the demands of the Regent, Marcel declared that before attending to the ransom of the King and knights, the nation's safety demanded attention. The nation's safety demanded urgent and radical reforms. He recited them. And, losing sight of nothing, but developing superhuman activity, he caused Paris to be protected with new fortifications in order to render the town safe from the English who had advanced as far as St. Cloud. He armed the people; organized the street police; made provisions for food by large importations of grains; calmed and reassured the alarmed spirits; by his example imparted a similar temper to the other towns; and, faithful in the midst of all other cares to the plan of reform that he had pursued and ripened during the long years of his obscure and industrious life, he caused the appointment of a committee of twenty-four bourgeois deputies charged with the drafting of the reforms that were to be demanded from the Regent. The deputies of the nobility and the clergy withdrew disdainfully from the national assembly, shocked at the audacity of the bourgeois legislators. These, however, masters of the situation and laboring under the high inspiration of Etienne Marcel, drew up a plan of reforms that in itself meant an immense revolution. It was the republican government of the ancient communes of Gaul, now extended beyond the confines of the town and made to cover the entire nation; it was the substitution of the power of deputies elected by the whole country for the absolute power of the crown. The King becomes merely the chief agent of the States General, and he has no power without their sovereign consent to dispose of a single man, or a single florin. These reforms, the fruit of many vigils on the part of Etienne Marcel, were accepted and solemnly sworn to by Charles, Duke of Normandy, in the capacity of Regent for his father, then a prisoner in the English camp, and they were promulgated in the principal towns of Gaul with the sound of trumpets, under the title of "Royal Ordinance of the 17th day of January, 1357." The ordinance was as follows:
The States General shall henceforth meet whenever they may think fit and without requiring the consent of the King, to deliberate upon the government of the kingdom, and the vote of the nobility and clergy shall have no binding power over the deputies of the communes.
The members of the States General shall be under the protection of the king, the Duke of Normandy and their successors. And, furthermore, members of the States General shall be free to travel throughout the kingdom with an armed escort that shall be charged with causing them to be respected.