Jacques Coeur, temporarily established at Montpellier, became a great and a celebrated merchant. In 1433 Charles VII. put into his hands the direction of the mint at Paris, and began to take his advice as to the administration of the crown’s finances. In 1440 he was appointed moneyman to the king, ennobled together with his wife and children, commissioned soon afterwards to draw up new regulations for the manufacture of cloth at Bourges, and invested on his own private account with numerous commercial privileges. He had already at this period, it was said, three hundred manufacturing hands in his employment, and he was working at the same time silver, lead, and copper mines situated in the environs of Tarare and Lyons. Between 1442 and 1446 he had one of his nephews sent as ambassador to Egypt, and obtained for the French consuls in the Levant the same advantages as were enjoyed by those of the most favored nations. Not only his favor in the eyes of the king, but his administrative and even his political appointments, went on constantly increasing. Between 1444 and 1446 the king several times named him one of his commissioners to the estates of Languedoc and for the installation of the new parliament of Toulouse. In 1446 he formed one of an embassy sent to Italy to try and acquire for France the possession of Genoa, which was harassed by civil dissensions. In 1447 he received from Charles VII. a still more important commission, to bring about an arrangement between the two popes elected, one under the name of Felix V., and the other under that of Nicholas V.; and he was successful. His immense wealth greatly contributed to his influence. M. Pierre Clement [Jacques Coeur et Charles WE, ou la France au quinzieme siecle; t. ii., pp. 1-46] has given a list of thirty-two estates and lordships which Jacques Coeur had bought either in Berry or in the neighboring provinces. He possessed, besides, four mansions and two hostels at Lyons; mansions at Beaucaire, at Beziers, at St. Pourcain, at Marseilles, and at Montpellier; and he had built, for his own residence, at Bourges, the celebrated hostel which still exists as an admirable model of Gothic and national art in the fifteenth century, attempting combination with the art of Italian renaissance.
M. Clement, in his table of Jacques Coeur’s wealth does not count either the mines which he worked at various spots in France, nor the vast capital, unknown, which he turned to profit in his commercial enterprises; but, on the other hand, he names, with certain et ceteras, forty-two court-personages, or king’s officers, indebted to Jacques Coeur for large or small sums he had lent them. We will quote but two instances of Jacques Coeur’s financial connection, not with courtiers, however, but with the royal family and the king himself. Margaret of Scotland, wife of the dauphin, who became Louis XI., wrote with her own hand, on the 20th of July, 1445, “We, Margaret, dauphiness of Viennois, do acknowledge to have received from Master Stephen Petit, secretary of my lord the king, and receiver-general of his finances for Languedoc and Guienne, two thousand livres of Tours, to us given by my said lord, and to us advanced by the hands of Jacques Coeur, his moneyman, we being but lately in Lorraine, for to get silken stuff and sables to make robes for our person.” In 1449, when Charles VII. determined to drive the English from Normandy, his treasury was exhausted, and he had recourse to Jacques Coeur. “Sir,” said the trader to the king, “what I have is yours,” and lent him two hundred thousand crowns; “the effect of which was,” says Jacques Duclercq, “that during, this conquest, all the men-at-arms of the King of France, and all those who were in his service, were paid their wages month by month.”
An original document, dated 1450, which exists in the “cabinet des titres” of the National Library, bears upon it a receipt for sixty thousand livres from Jacques Coeur to the king’s receiver-general in Normandy, “in restitution of the like sum lent by me in ready money to the said lord in the month of August last past, on occasion of the surrendering to his authority of the towns and castle of Cherbourg, at that time held by the English, the ancient enemies of this realm.” It was probably a partial repayment of the two hundred thousand crowns lent by Jacques Coeur to the king at this juncture, according to all the contemporary chroniclers.
Enormous and unexpected wealth excites envy and suspicion at the same time that it confers influence; and the envious before long become enemies. Sullen murmurs against Jacques Coeur were raised in the king’s own circle; and the way in which he had begun to make his fortune—the coinage of questionable money—furnished some specious ground for them. There is too general an inclination amongst potentates of the earth to give an easy ear to reasons, good or bad, for dispensing with the gratitude and respect otherwise due to those who serve them. Charles VII., after having long been the patron and debtor of Jacques Coeur, all at once, in 1451, shared the suspicions aroused against him. To accusations of grave abuses and malversations in money matters was added one of even more importance. Agnes Sorel had died eighteen months previously (February 9, 1450); and on her death-bed she had appointed Jacques Coeur one of the three executors of her will. In July, 1451, Jacques was at Taillebourg, in Guyenne, whence he wrote to his wife that “he was in as good case and was as well with the king as ever he had been, whatever anybody might say.” Indeed, on the 22d of July Charles VII. granted him a “sum of seven hundred and seventy-two livres of Tours to help him to keep up his condition and to be more honorably equipped for his service;” and, nevertheless, on the 31st of July, on the information of two persons of the court, who accused Jacques Coeur of having poisoned Agnes Sorel, Charles ordered his arrest and the seizure of his goods, on which he immediately levied a hundred thousand crowns for the purposes of the war. Commissioners extraordinary, taken from amongst the king’s grand council, were charged to try him; and Charles VII. declared, it is said, that “if the said moneyman were not found liable to the charge of having poisoned or caused to be poisoned Agnes Sorel, he threw up and forgave all the other cases against him.” The accusation of poisoning was soon acknowledged to be false, and the two informers were condemned as calumniators; but the trial was, nevertheless, proceeded with. Jacques Coeur was accused “of having sold arms to the infidels, of having coined light crowns, of having pressed on board of his vessels, at Montpellier, several individuals, of whom one had thrown himself into the sea from desperation, and lastly of having appropriated to himself presents made to the king, in several towns of Languedoc, and of having practised in that country frequent exaction, to the prejudice of the king as well as of his subjects.” After twenty-two months of imprisonment, Jacques Coeur, on the 29th of May, 1453, was convicted, in the king’s name, on divers charges, of which several entailed a capital penalty; but “whereas Pope Nicholas V. had issued a rescript and made request in favor of Jacques Coeur, and regard also being had to services received from him,” Charles VII. spared his life, “on condition that he should pay to the king a hundred thousand crowns by way of restitution, three hundred thousand by way of fine, and should be kept in prison until the whole claim was satisfied;” and the decree ended as follows: “We have declared and do declare all the goods of the said Jacques Coeur confiscated to us, and we have banished and do banish this Jacques Coeur forever from this realm, reserving thereanent our own good pleasure.”
After having spent nearly three years more in prison, transported from dungeon to dungeon, Jacques Coeur, thanks to the faithful and zealous affection of a few friends, managed to escape from Beaucaire, to embark at Nice and to reach Rome, where Pope Nicholas V. welcomed him with tokens of lively interest. Nicholas died shortly afterwards, just when he was preparing an expedition against the Turks. His successor, Calixtus III., carried out his design, and equipped a fleet of sixteen galleys. This fleet required a commander of energy, resolution, and celebrity. Jacques Coeur had lived and fought with Dunois, Xaintrailles, La Hire, and the most valiant French captains; he was known and popular in Italy and the Levant; and the pope appointed him captain-general of the expedition. Charles VII.‘s moneyman, ruined, convicted, and banished from France, sailed away at the head of the pope’s squadron and of some Catalan pirates to carry help against the Turks to Rhodes, Chios, Lesbos, Lemnos, and the whole Grecian archipelago. On arriving at Chios, in November, 1456, he fell ill there, and perceiving his end approaching, he wrote to his king “to commend to him his children, and to beg that, considering the great wealth and honors he had in his time enjoyed in the king’s service, it might be the king’s good pleasure to give something to his children, in order that they, even those of them who were secular, might be able to live honestly, without coming to want.” He died at Chits on the 25th of November, 1456, and, according to the historian John d’Auton, who had probably lived in the society of Jacques Coeur’s children, “he remained interred in the church of the Cordeliers in that island, at the centre of the choir.”
We have felt bound to represent with some detail the active and energetic life, prosperous for a long while and afterwards so grievous and hazardous up to its very last day, of this great French merchant at the close of the middle ages, who was the first to extend afar in Europe, Africa, and Asia the commercial relations of France, and, after the example of the great Italian merchants, to make an attempt to combine politics with commerce, and to promote at one and the same time the material interests of his country and the influence of his government. There can be no doubt but that Jacques Coeur was unscrupulous and frequently visionary as a man of business; but, at the same time, he was inventive, able, and bold, and, whilst pushing his own fortunes to the utmost, he contributed a great deal to develop, in the ways of peace, the commercial, industrial, diplomatic, and artistic enterprise of France. In his relations towards his king, Jacques Coeur was to Charles VII. a servant often over-adventurous, slippery, and compromising, but often also useful, full of resource, efficient, and devoted in the hour of difficulty. Charles VII. was to Jacques Coeur a selfish and ungrateful patron, who contemptuously deserted the man whose brains he had sucked, and ruined him pitilessly after having himself contributed to enrich him unscrupulously.
We have now reached the end of events under this long reign; all that remains is to run over the substantial results of Charles VII.‘s government, and the melancholy imbroglios of his latter years with his son, the turbulent, tricky, and wickedly able born-conspirator, who was to succeed him under the name of Louis XI.