The estates met on the 5th of February. It was not without surprise that they found themselves less numerous than they had hitherto been. The deputies from the duchy of Burgundy, from the countships of Flanders and Alencon, and several nobles and burghers from other provinces, did not repair to the session. The kingdom was falling into anarchy; bands of plunderers roved hither and thither, threatening persons and ravaging lands; the magistrates either could not or would not exercise their authority; disquietude and disgust were gaining possession of many honest folks. Marcel and his partisans, having fallen into somewhat of disrepute and neglect, keenly felt how necessary, and also saw how easy, it was for them to become completely masters. They began by drawing up a series of propositions, which they had distributed and spread abroad far and wide in the provinces. On the 3d of March, they held a public meeting, at which the dauphin and his two brothers were present. A numerous throng filled the hall. The Bishop of Laon, Robert Lecoeq, the spokesman of the party, made a long and vehement statement of all the public grievances, and declared that twenty-two of the king’s officers should be deprived forever of all offices, that all the officers of the kingdom should be provisionally suspended, and that reformers, chosen by the estates, and commissioned by the dauphin himself, should go all over France, to hold inquiries as to these officers, and, according to their deserts, either reinstate them in their offices or condemn them. At the same time, the estates bound themselves to raise thirty thousand men-at-arms, whom they themselves would pay and keep; and as the produce of the impost voted for this purpose was very uncertain, they demanded their adjournment to the fortnight of Easter, and two sessions certain, for which they should be free to fix the time, before the 15th of February in the following year. This was simply to decree the permanence of their power. To all these demands the dauphin offered no resistance. In the month of March following, a grand ordinance, drawn up in sixty-one articles, enumerated all the grievances which had been complained of, and prescribed the redress for them. A second ordinance, regulating all that appertained to the suspension of the royal officers, was likewise, as it appears, drawn up at the same time, but has not come down to us. At last a grand commission was appointed, composed of thirty-six members, twelve elected by each of the three orders. “These thirty-six persons,” says Froissart, “were bound to often meet together at Paris, for to order the affairs of the kingdom, and all kinds of matters were to be disposed of by these three estates, and all prelates, all lords, and all commonalties of the cities and good towns were bound to be obedient to what these three estates should order.” Having their power thus secured in their absence, the estates adjourned to the 25th of April.
The rumor of these events reached Bordeaux, where, since the defeat at Poitiers, King John had been living as the guest of the Prince of Wales, rather than as a prisoner of the English. Amidst the galas and pleasures to which he abandoned himself, he was indignant to learn that at Paris the royal authority was ignored, and he sent three of his comrades in captivity to notify to the Parisians that he rejected all the claims of the estates, that he would not have payment made of the subsidy voted by them, and that he forbade their meeting on the 25th of April following. This strange manifesto on the part of imprisoned royalty excited in Paris such irritation amongst the people, that the dauphin hastily sent out of the city the king’s three envoys, whose lives might have been threatened, and declared to the thirty-six commissioners of the estates that the subsidy should be raised, and that the general assembly should be perfectly free to meet at the time it had appointed.
And it did meet towards the end of April, but in far fewer numbers than had been the case hitherto, and with more and more division from day to day. Nearly all the nobles and ecclesiastics were withdrawing from it; and amongst the burgesses themselves many of the more moderate spirits were becoming alarmed at the violent proceedings of the commission of the thirty-six delegates, who, under the direction of Stephen Marcel, were becoming a small oligarchy, little by little usurping the place of the great national assembly. A cry was raised in the provinces “against the injustice of those chief governors who were no more than ten or a dozen;” and there was a refusal to pay the subsidy voted. These symptoms and the disorganization which was coming to a head throughout the whole kingdom made the dauphin think that the moment had arrived for him to seize the reins again. About the middle of August, 1357, he sent for Marcel and three sheriffs, accustomed to direct matters at Paris, and let them know “that he intended thence-forward to govern by himself, without curators.” He at the same time restored to office some of the lately dismissed royal officers. The thirty-six commissioners made a show of submission; and their most faithful ecclesiastical ally, Robert Lecocq, Bishop of Laon, returned to his diocese. The dauphin left Paris and went a trip into some of the provinces, halting at the principal towns, such as Rouen and Chartres, and everywhere, with intelligent but timid discretion, making his presence and his will felt, not very successfully, however, as regarded the re-establishment of some kind of order on his route in the name of the kingship.
Marcel and his partisans took advantage of his absence to shore up their tottering supremacy. They felt how important it was for them to have a fresh meeting of the estates, whose presence alone could restore strength to their commissioners; but the dauphin only could legally summon them. They, therefore, eagerly pressed him to return in person to Paris, giving him a promise that, if he agreed to convoke there the deputies from twenty or thirty towns, they would supply him with the money of which he was in need, and would say no more about the dismissal of royal officers, or about setting at liberty the king of Navarre. The dauphin, being still young and trustful, though he was already discreet and reserved, fell into the snare. He returned to Paris, and summoned thither, for the 7th of November following, the deputies from seventy towns, a sufficient number to give their meeting a specious resemblance to the states-general. One circumstance ought to have caused him some glimmering of suspicion. At the same time that the dauphin was sending to the deputies his letters of convocation, Marcel himself also sent to them, as if he possessed the right, either in his own name or in that of the thirty-six delegate-commissioners, of calling them together. But a still more serious matter came to open the dauphin’s eyes to the danger he had fallen into. During the night between the 8th and 9th of November, 1357, immediately after the re-opening of the states, Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, was carried off by a surprise from the castle of Arleux in Cambresis, where he had been confined; and his liberators removed him first of all to Amiens and then to Paris itself, where the popular party gave him a triumphant reception. Marcel and his sheriffs had decided upon and prepared, at a private council, this dramatic incident, so contrary to the promises they had but lately made to the dauphin. Charles the Bad used his deliverance like a skilful workman; the very day after his arrival in Paris he mounted a platform set against the walls of St. Germain’s abbey, and there, in the presence of more than ten thousand persons, burgesses and populace, he delivered a long speech, “seasoned with much venom,” says a chronicler of the time. After having denounced the wrongs which he had been made to endure, he said, for eighteen months past, he declared that the would live and die in defence of the kingdom of France, giving it to be understood that “if he were minded to claim the crown, he would soon show by the laws of right and wrong that he was nearer to it than the King of England was.” He was insinuating, eloquent, and an adept in the art of making truth subserve the cause of falsehood. The people were moved by his speech. The dauphin was obliged not only to put up with the release and the triumph of his most dangerous enemy, but to make an outward show of reconciliation with him, and to undertake not only to give him back the castles confiscated after his arrest, but “to act towards him as a good brother towards his brother.” These were the exact words made use of in the dauphin’s name, “and without having asked his pleasure about it,” by Robert Lecocq, Bishop of Laon, who himself also had returned from his diocese to Paris at the time of the recall of the estates.
The consequences of this position were not slow to exhibit themselves. Whilst the King of Navarre was re-entering Paris and the dauphin submitting to the necessity of a reconciliation with him, several of the deputies who had but lately returned to the states-general, and amongst others nearly all those from Champagne and Burgundy, were going away again, being unwilling either to witness the triumphal re-entry of Charles the Bad or to share the responsibility for such acts as they foresaw. Before long the struggle, or rather the war, between the King of Navarre and the dauphin broke out again; several of the nobles in possession of the castles which were to have been restored to Charles the Bad, and especially those of Breteuil, Pacy-sur-Eure, and Pont-Audemer, flatly refused to give them back to him; and the dauphin was suspected, probably not without reason, of having encouraged them in their resistance. Without the walls of Paris it was really war that was going on between the two princes. Philip of Navarre, brother of Charles the Bad, went marching with bands of pillagers over Normandy and Anjou, and within a few leagues of Paris, declaring that he had not taken, and did not intend to take, any part in his brother’s pacific arrangements, and carrying fire and sword all through the country. The peasantry from the ravaged districts were overflowing Paris. Stephen Marcel had no mind to reject the support which many of them brought him; but they had to be fed, and the treasury was empty. The wreck of the states-general, meeting on the 2d of January, 1358, themselves had recourse to the expedient which they had so often and so violently reproached the king and the dauphin with employing: they notably depreciated the coinage, allotting a fifth of the profit to the dauphin, and retaining the other four fifths for the defence of the kingdom. What Marcel and his party called the defence of the kingdom was the works of fortification round Paris, begun in October, 1356, against the English, after the defeat of Poitiers, and resumed in 1358 against the dauphin’s party in the neighboring provinces, as well as against the robbers that were laying them waste. Amidst all this military and popular excitement the dauphin kept to the Louvre, having about him two thousand men-at-arms, whom he had taken into his pay, he said, solely “on account of the prospect of a war with the Navarrese.” Before he went and plunged into a civil war outside the gates of Paris, he resolved to make an effort to win back the Parisians themselves to his cause. He sent a crier through the city to bid the people assemble in the market-place, and thither he repaired on horseback, on the 11th of January, with five or six of his most trusty servants. The astonished mob thronged about him, and he addressed them in vigorous language. He meant, he said, to live and die amongst the people of Paris; if he was collecting his men-at-arms, it was not for the purpose of plundering and oppressing Paris, but that he might march against their common enemies; and if he had not done so sooner, it was because “the folks who had taken the government gave him neither money nor arms; but they would some day be called to strict account for it.” The dauphin was small, thin, delicate, and of insignificant appearance; but at this juncture he displayed unexpected boldness and eloquence; the people were deeply moved; and Marcel and his friends felt that a heavy blow had just been dealt them.
They hastened to respond with a blow of another sort. It was everywhere whispered abroad that if Paris was suffering so much from civil war and the irregularities and calamities which were the concomitants of it, the fault lay with the dauphin’s surroundings, and that his noble advisers deterred him from measures which would save the people from their miseries.
“Provost Marcel and the burgesses of Paris took counsel together and decided that it would be a good thing if some of those attendants on the regent were to be taken away from the midst of this world. They all put on caps, red on one side and blue on the other, which they wore as a sign of their confederation in defence of the common weal. This done, they reassembled in large numbers on the 22d of February, 1358, with the provost at their head, and marched to the palace where the duke was lodged.” This crowd encountered on its, way, in the street called Juiverie (Jewry), the advocate-general Regnault d’Aci, one of the twenty-two royal officers denounced by the estates in the preceding year; and he was massacred in a pastry-cook’s shop. Marcel, continuing his road, arrived at the palace, and ascended, followed by a band of armed men, to the apartments of the dauphin, “whom he requested very sharply,” says Froissart, “to restrain so many companies from roving about on all sides, damaging and plundering the country. The duke replied that he would do so willingly if he had the wherewithal to do it, but that it was for him who received the dues belonging to the kingdom to discharge that duty. I know not why or how,” adds Froissart, “but words were multiplied on the part of all, and became very high.” “My lord duke,” suddenly said the provost, “do not alarm yourself; but we have somewhat to do here;” and turning towards his fellows in the caps, he said, “Dearly beloved, do that for the which ye are come.” Immediately the Lord de Conflans, Marshal of Champagne, and Robert de Clermont, Marshal of Normandy, noble and valiant gentlemen, and both at the time unarmed, were massacred so close to the dauphin and his couch, that his robe was covered with their blood. The dauphin shuddered; and the rest of his officers fled. “Take no heed, lord duke,” said Marcel; “you have nought to fear.” He handed to the dauphin his own red and blue cap, and himself put on the dauphin’s, which was of black stuff with golden fringe. The corpses of the two marshals were dragged into the court-yard of the palace, where they remained until evening without any one’s daring to remove them; and Marcel with his fellows repaired to the mansion-house, and harangued from an open window the mob collected on the Place de Greve. “What has been done is for the good and the profit of the kingdom,” said he; “the dead were false and wicked traitors.” “We do own it, and will maintain it!” cried the people who were about him.