One fact is at the outset to be remarked upon; it at the first blush appears singular, but it admits of easy explanation. In the first nineteen years of his reign, from 1423 to 1442, Charles VII. very frequently convoked the states-general, at one time of Northern France, or Langue d’oil, at another of Southern France, or Langue d’oc. Twenty-four such assemblies took place during this period at Bourges, at Selles in Berry, at Le Puy in Velay, at Mean-sur-Yevre, at Chinon, at Sully-sur-Loire, at Tours, at Orleans, at Nevers, at Carcassonne, and at different spots in Languedoc. It was the time of the great war between France on the one side and England and Burgundy allied on the other, the time of intrigues incessantly recurring at court, and the time likewise of carelessness and indolence on the part of Charles VII., more devoted to his pleasures than regardful of his government. He had incessant need of states-general to supply him with money and men, and support him through the difficulties of his position. But when, dating from the peace of Arras (September 21, 1435), Charles VII., having become reconciled with the Duke of Burgundy, was deliverer from civil war, and was at grips with none but England alone already half beaten by the divine inspiration, the triumph, and the martyrdom of Joan of Arc, his posture and his behavior underwent a rare transformation. Without ceasing to be coldly selfish and scandalously licentious king he became practical, hard-working, statesman-like king, jealous and disposed to govern by himself, but at the same time watchful and skilful in availing himself of the able advisers who, whether it were by a happy accident or by his own choice, were grouped around him. “He had his days and hours for dealing with all sorts of men, one hour with the clergy, another with the nobles, another with foreigners, another with mechanical folks, armorers, and gunners; and in respect of all these persons he had a full remembrance of their cases and their appointed day. On Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday he worked with the chancellor, and got through all claims connected with justice. On Wednesday he first of all gave audience to the marshals, captains, and men of war. On the same day he held a council of finance, independently of another council which was also held on the same subject every Friday.” It was by such assiduous toil that Charles VII., in concert with his advisers, was able to take in hand and accomplish, in the military, financial, and judicial system of the realm, those bold and at the same time prudent reforms which wrested the country from the state of disorder, pillage, and general insecurity to which it had been a prey, and commenced the era of that great monarchical administration, which, in spite of many troubles and vicissitudes, was destined to be, during more than three centuries, the government of France. The constable De Richemont and marshal De la Fayette were, in respect of military matters, Charles VII.‘s principal advisers; and it was by their counsel and with their co-operation that he substituted for feudal service and for the bands of wandering mercenaries (routiers), mustered and maintained by hap-hazard, a permanent army, regularly levied, provided for, paid, and commanded, and charged with the duty of keeping order at home, and at the same time subserving abroad the interests and policy of the state. In connection with, and as a natural consequence of this military system, Charles VII., on his own sole authority, established certain permanent imposts with the object of making up any deficiency in the royal treasury, whilst waiting for a vote of such taxes extraordinary as might be demanded of the states-general. Jacques Coeur, the two brothers Bureau, Martin Gouge, Michel Lailler, William Cousinot, and many other councillors, of burgher origin, labored zealously to establish this administrative system, so prompt and freed from all independent discussion. Weary of wars, irregularities, and sufferings, France, in the fifteenth century, asked for nothing but peace and security; and so soon as the kingship showed that it had an intention and was in a condition to provide her with them, the nation took little or no trouble about political guarantees which as yet it knew neither how to establish nor how to exercise; its right to them was not disputed in principle, they were merely permitted to fall into desuetude; and Charles VII., who during the first half of his reign had twenty-four times assembled the states-general to ask them for taxes and soldiers, was able in the second to raise personally both soldiers and taxes without drawing forth any complaint hardly, save from his contemporary historian, the Bishop of Lisieux, Thomas Basin, who said, “Into such misery and servitude is fallen the realm of France, heretofore so noble and free, that all the inhabitants are openly declared by the generals of finance and their clerks taxable at the will of the king, without anybody’s daring to murmur or even ask for mercy.” There is at every juncture, and in all ages of the world, a certain amount, though varying very much, of good order, justice, and security, without which men cannot get on; and when they lack it, either through the fault of those who govern them or through their own fault, they seek after it with the blind eyes of passion, and are ready to accept it, no matter what power may procure it for them, or what price it may cost them. Charles VII. was a prince neither to be respected nor to be loved, and during many years his reign had not been a prosperous one; but “he re-quickened justice, which had been a long while dead,” says a chronicler devoted to the Duke of Burgundy; “he put an end to the tyrannies and exactions of the men-at-arms, and out of an infinity of murderers and robbers he formed men of resolution and honest life; he made regular paths in murderous woods and forests, all roads safe, all towns peaceful, all nationalities of his kingdom tranquil; he chastised the evil and honored the good, and he was sparing of human blood.”
Let it be added, in accordance with contemporary testimony, that at the same time that he established an all but arbitrary rule in military and financial matters, Charles VII. took care that “practical justice, in the case of every individual, was promptly rendered to poor as well as rich, to small as well as great; he forbade all trafficking in the offices of the magistracy, and every time that a place became vacant in a parliament he made no nomination to it, save on the presentations of the court.”
Questions of military, financial, and judicial organization were not the only ones which occupied the government of Charles VII. He attacked also ecclesiastical questions, which were at that period a subject of passionate discussion in Christian Europe amongst the councils of the Church and in the closets of princes. The celebrated ordinance, known by the name of Pragmatic Sanction, which Charles VII. issued at Bourges on the 7th of July, 1438, with the concurrence of a grand national council, laic and ecclesiastical, was directed towards the carrying out, in the internal regulations of the French Church, and in the relations either of the State with the Church in France, or of the Church of France with the papacy, of reforms long since desired or dreaded by the different powers and interests. It would be impossible to touch here upon these difficult and delicate questions without going far beyond the limits imposed upon the writer of this history. All that can be said is, that there was no lack of a religious spirit, or of a liberal spirit, in the Pragmatic Sanction of Charles VII., and that the majority of the measures contained in it were adopted with the approbation of the greater part of the French clergy, as well as of educated laymen in France.
In whatever light it is regarded, the government of Charles VII. in the latter part of his reign brought him not only in France, but throughout Europe, a great deal of fame and power. When he had driven the English out of his kingdom, he was called Charles the Victorious; and when he had introduced into the internal regulations of the state so many important and effective reforms, he was called Charles the Well-served. “The sense he had by nature,” says his historian Chastellain, “had been increased to twice as much again, in his straitened fortunes, by long constraint and perilous dangers, which sharpened his wits perforce.” “He is the king of kings,” was said of him by the Doge of Venice, Francis Foscari, a good judge of policy; “there is no doing without him.”
Nevertheless, at the close, so influential and so tranquil, of his reign, Charles VII. was, in his individual and private life, the most desolate, the most harassed, and the most unhappy man in his kingdom. In 1442 and 1450 he had lost the two women who had been, respectively, the most devoted and most useful, and the most delightful and dearest to him, his mother-in-law, Yolande of Arragon, Queen of Sicily, and his favorite, Agnes Sorel. His avowed intimacy with Agnes, and even, independently of her and after her death, the scandalous licentiousness of his morals, had justly offended his virtuous wife, Mary of Anjou, the only lady of the royal establishment who survived him. She had brought him twelve children, and the eldest, the dauphin Louis, after having from his very youth behaved in a factious, harebrained, turbulent way towards the king his father, had become at one time an open rebel, at another a venomous conspirator and a dangerous enemy. At his birth in 1423, he had been named Louis in remembrance of his ancestor, St. Louis, and in hopes that he would resemble him. In 1440, at seventeen years of age, he allied himself with the great lords, who were displeased with the new military system established by Charles VII., and allowed himself to be drawn by them into the transient rebellion known by the name of Praguery. When the king, having put it down, refused to receive the rebels to favor, the dauphin said to his father, “My lord, I must go back with them, then; for so I promised them.” “Louis,” replied the king, “the gates are open, and if they are not high enough I will have sixteen or twenty fathom of wall knocked down for you, that you may go whither it seems best to you.” Charles VII. had made his son marry Margaret Stuart of Scotland, that charming princess who was so smitten with the language and literature of France that, coming one day upon the poet Alan Chartier asleep upon a bench, she kissed him on the forehead in the presence of her mightily astonished train, for he was very ugly. The dauphin rendered his wife so wretched that she died in 1445, at the age of one and twenty, with these words upon her lips: “O! fie on life! Speak to me no more of it!” In 1449, just when the king his father was taking up arms to drive the English out of Normandy, the dauphin Louis, who was now living entirely in Dauphiny, concluded at Briancon a secret league with the Duke of Savoy “against the ministers of the King of France, his enemies.” In 1456, in order to escape from the perils brought upon him by the plots which he, in the heart of Dauphiny, was incessantly hatching against his father, Louis fled from Grenoble and went to take refuge in Brussels with the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, who willingly received him, at the same time excusing himself to Charles VII. “on the ground of the respect he owed to the son of his suzerain,” and putting at the disposal of Louis, “his guest,” a pension of thirty-six thousand livres. “He has received the fox at his court,” said Charles: “he will soon see what will become of his chickens.” But the pleasantries of the king did not chase away the sorrows of the father. “Mine enemies have full trust in me,” said Charles, “but my son will have none. If he had but once spoken with me, he would have known full well that he ought to have neither doubts nor fears. On my royal word, if he will but come to me, when he has opened his heart and learned my intentions, he may go away again whithersoever it seems good to him.” Charles, in his old age and his sorrow, forgot how distrustful and how fearful he himself had been. “It is ever your pleasure,” wrote one of his councillors to him in a burst of frankness, “to be shut up in castles, wretched places, and all sorts of little closets, without showing yourself and listening to the complaints of your poor people.” Charles VII. had shown scarcely more confidence to his son than to his people. Louis yielded neither to words, nor to sorrows of which proofs were reaching him nearly every day. He remained impassive at the Duke of Burgundy’s, where he seemed to be waiting with scandalous indifference for the news of his father’s death. Charles sank into a state of profound melancholy and general distrust. He had his doctor, Adam Fumee, put in prison; persuaded himself that his son had wished, and was still wishing, to poison him; and refused to take any kind of nourishment. No representation, no solicitation, could win him from his depression and obstinacy. It was in vain that Charles, Duke of Berry, his favorite child, offered to first taste the food set before him. It was in vain that his servants “represented to him with tears,” says Bossuet, “what madness it was to cause his own death for fear of dying; when at last he would have made an effort to eat, it was too late, and he must die.” On the 2nd of July, 1461, he asked what day it was, and was told that it was St. Magdalen’s day. “Ah!” said he, “I do laud my God, and thank Him for that it hath pleased Him that the most sinful man in the world should die on the sinful woman’s day! Dampmartin,” said he to the count of that name, who was leaning over his bed, “I do beseech you that after my death you will serve so far as you can the little lord, my son Charles.” He called his confessor, received the sacraments, gave orders that he should be buried at St. Denis beside the king his father, and expired. No more than his son Louis, though for different reasons, was his wife, Queen Mary of Anjou, at his side. She was living at Chinon, whither she had removed a long while before by order of the king her husband. Thus, deserted by them of his own household, and disgusted with his own life, died that king of whom a contemporary chronicler, whilst recommending his soul to God, re-marked, “When he was alive, he was a right wise and valiant lord, and he left his kingdom united, and in good case as to justice and tranquillity.”
CHAPTER XXV.——LOUIS XI. (1461-1483.)
Louis XI. was thirty-eight years old, and had been living for five years in voluntary exile at the castle of Genappe, in Hainault, beyond the dominions of the king his father, and within those of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, when, on the 23d of July, 1461, the day after Charles VII.‘s death, he learned that he was King of France. He started at once to return to his own country, and take possession of his kingdom. He arrived at Rheims on the 14th of August, was solemnly crowned there on the 18th, in presence of the two courts of France and Burgundy, and on the 30th made his entry into Paris, within which he had not set foot for six and twenty years. In 1482, twenty-one years afterwards, he, sick and almost dying in his turn at his castle of Plessis-les-Tours, went, nevertheless, to Amboise, where his son the dauphin, who was about to become Charles VIII., and whom he had not seen for several years, was living. “I do expressly enjoin upon you,” said the father to the son, “as my last counsel and my last instructions, not to change a single one of the chief officers of the crown. When my father. King Charles VII., went to God, and I myself came to the throne, I disappointed [i.e., deprived of their appointments] all the good and notable knights of the kingdom who had aided and served my said father in conquering Normandy and Guienne, in driving the English out of the kingdom, and in restoring it to peace and good order, for so I found it, and right rich also. Therefrom much mischief came to me, for thence I had the war called the Common Weal, which all but cost me my crown.”
With the experience and paternal care of an old man, whom the near prospect of death rendered perfectly disinterested, wholly selfish as his own life had been, Louis’s heart was bent upon saving his son from the first error which he himself had committed on mounting the throne. “Gentlemen,” said Dunois on rising from table at the funeral-banquet held at the abbey of St. Denis in honor of the obsequies of King Charles VII., “we have lost our master; let each look after himself.” The old warrior foresaw that the new reign would not be like that which had just ended. Charles VII. had been a prince of indolent disposition, more inclined to pleasure than ambition, whom the long and severe trials of his life had moulded to government without his having any passion for governing, and who had become in a quiet way a wise and powerful king, without any eager desire to be incessantly and everywhere chief actor and master. His son Louis, on the contrary, was completely possessed with a craving for doing, talking, agitating, domineering, and reaching, no matter by what means, the different and manifold ends he proposed to himself. Anything but prepossessing in appearance, supported on long and thin shanks, vulgar in looks and often designedly ill-dressed, and undignified in his manners though haughty in mind, he was powerful by the sheer force of a mind marvellously lively, subtle, unerring, ready, and inventive, and of a character indefatigably active, and pursuing success as a passion without any scruple or embarrassment in the employment of means. His contemporaries, after observing his reign for some time, gave him the name of the universal spider, so relentlessly did he labor to weave a web of which he himself occupied the centre and extended the filaments in all directions.
As soon as he was king, he indulged himself with that first piece of vindictive satisfaction of which he was in his last moments obliged to acknowledge the mistake. At Rheims, at the time of his coronation, the aged and judicious Duke Philip of Burgundy had begged him to forgive all those who had offended him. Louis promised to do so, with the exception, however, of seven persons whom he did not name. They were the most faithful and most able advisers of the king his father, those who had best served Charles VII. even in his embroilments with the dauphin, his conspiring and rebellious son, viz., Anthony de Chabannes, Count of Dampmartin, Peter de Breze, Andrew de Laval, Juvenal des Ursins, &c. Some lost their places, and were even, for a while, subjected to persecution; the others, remaining still at court, received there many marks of the king’s disfavor. On the other hand, Louis made a show of treating graciously the men who had most incurred and deserved disgrace at his father’s hands, notably the Duke of Alencon and the Count of Armagnac. Nor was it only in respect of persons that he departed from paternal tradition; he rejected it openly in the case of one of the most important acts of Charles VII.‘s reign, the Pragmatic Sanction, issued by that prince at Bourses, in 1438, touching the internal regulations of the Church of France and its relations towards the papacy. The popes, and especially Pius II., Louis XI.‘s contemporary, had constantly and vigorously protested against that act. Barely four months after his accession, on the 27th of November, 1461, Louis, in order to gain favor with the pope, abrogated the Pragmatic Sanction, and informed the pope of the fact in a letter full of devotion. There was great joy at Rome, and the pope replied to the king’s letter in the strongest terms of gratitude and commendation. But Louis’s courtesy had not been so disinterested as it was prompt. He had hoped that Pius II. would abandon the cause of Ferdinand of Arragon, a claimant to the throne of Naples, and would uphold that of his rival, the French prince, John of Anjou, Duke of Calabria, whose champion Louis had declared himself. He bade his ambassador at Rome to remind the pope of the royal hopes. “You know,” said the ambassador to Pius II., “it is only on this condition that the king my master abolished the Pragmatic; he was pleased to desire that in his kingdom full obedience should be rendered to you; he demands, on the other hand, that you should be pleased to be a friend to France; otherwise I have orders to bid all the French cardinals withdraw, and you cannot doubt but that they will obey.” But Pius II. was more proud than Louis XI. dared to be imperious. He answered, “We are under very great obligations to the King of France, but that gives him no right to exact from us things contrary to justice and to our honor; we have sent aid to Ferdinand by virtue of the treaties we have with him; let the king your master compel the Duke of Anjou to lay down arms and prosecute his rights by course of justice, and if Ferdinand refuse to submit thereto we will declare against him; but we cannot promise more. If the French who are at our court wish to withdraw, the gates are open to them.” The king, a little ashamed at the fruitlessness of his concession and of his threat, had for an instant some desire to re-establish the Pragmatic Sanction, for which the parliament of Paris had taken up the cudgels; but, all considered, he thought it better to put up in silence with his rebuff, and pay the penalty for a rash concession, than to get involved with the court of Rome in a struggle of which he could not measure the gravity; and he contented himself with letting the parliament maintain in principle and partially keep up the Pragmatic. This was his first apprenticeship in that outward resignation and patience, amidst his own mistakes, of which he was destined to be called upon more than once in the course of his life to make a humble but skilful use.