In 1435 died the Duke of Bedford, and in the same year Charles VII, moved from his sluggishness, concluded at Arras a treaty with Philip of Burgundy that secured his entry into Paris. By good fortune his young rival in the ensuing campaigns, the English King, Henry VI, had inherited, not the energy and valour of his father, but an anaemic version of his French grandfather’s insanity. Even before his first lapse into melancholia, he was the weak puppet of first one set of influences, then another; and the factions that strove to govern for their own interests in his name lost him first Normandy and then Guienne. Finally they carried their feuds back across the Channel to work out what seemed an almost divine vengeance for the anarchy they had caused in France, in the troubled ‘Wars of the Roses’.
Under Charles VII, well named le bien servi, France, as she gradually freed herself from a foreign yoke, developed from a mediaeval into the semblance of a modern state. Wise ministers, whom in his later years the King had the sense to substitute for his earlier workless favourites, built up the power of the monarchy, restored its financial credit, and established in the place of the disorderly ‘companies’ a standing army recruited and controlled by the crown.
These things were not done without opposition, and the rebellion of ‘the Praguerie’, in which were implicated nearly all the leading nobles of France, including the King’s own son, the Dauphin Louis, was a desperate attempt on the part of the aristocracy to shake off the growing pressure of royal control. It failed because the nation, as a whole, saw in submission to an absolute monarch a means, imperfect perhaps but yet the only means available at the moment, of securing the regeneration of France.
It is significant that when Louis XI succeeded to Charles VII he inevitably followed in his father’s footsteps, forsaking the interests of the class with which he had first allied himself, in order to rule as an autocrat and fulfil the ideal of kingship in his day.
Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. [368–73].
| Philip VI of France | 1328–50 |
| John II of France | 1350–64 |
| Charles V of France | 1364–80 |
| Charles VI of France | 1380–1422 |
| Charles VII of France | 1422–61 |
| Henry V of England | 1413–22 |
| Henry VI of England | 1422–61 |
| Boccaccio | 1313–75 |
| Jeanne d’Arc | 1412–30 |
XIX
SPAIN IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Spain has been rightly described as ‘one of the most cut up portions of the earth’s surface’. A glance at her map will show the numerous mountain ranges that pierce into the heart of the country, dividing her into districts utterly unlike both in climate and soil. Even rivers that elsewhere in Europe, as in the case of the Rhine and the Danube, act as roads of friendship and commerce, are in Spain for the most part unnavigable, running in wild torrents between precipitous banks so as to form an additional hindrance to intercourse.