[314] Balcarres Manuscripts, ii. 4 (see Appendix).
[315] Pfister, ii. 63, 188; Ravold, iii. 703.
[316] State Papers, Record Office, viii. 609.
BOOK VIII
CHRISTINA, DUCHESS OF LORRAINE
1541-1545
I.
Jan., 1477] KING RENÉ
The ducal house of Lorraine, into which Christina had now married, was one of the oldest and proudest in Europe. The duchy took its name of Lotharingia from Lothair, a great-grandson of Charlemagne, who reigned over a vast kingdom stretching from the banks of the Scheldt and Rhine to the Mediterranean. After this monarch's death, his territories became the object of perpetual contention between the German Empire and France, and were eventually divided among a number of Counts and Barons who owned the Emperor or the French King as their suzerain. Godfrey of Bouillon, the leader of the first Crusade, was one of many illustrious Princes who reigned over Lorraine; but Gerard d'Alsace, who died in 1046, was the ancestor of the ducal house to which Christina's husband belonged.[317] From him descended a long line of hereditary Princes, who were loyal vassals of France and took an active part in the wars against England. Raoul, the founder of the collegiate church and Chapter of St. Georges at Nancy, was killed fighting valiantly at Crécy, and his son John was taken prisoner with the French King by the Black Prince at Poitiers. Duke John's second son, Ferry, Count of Vaudemont and Joinville, fell at Agincourt. In 1444 this Prince's grandson, Ferry II., the representative of the younger branch of the House of Lorraine, married Yolande, daughter of René of Anjou, King of Provence, Jerusalem, and Sicily, and Duke of Lorraine in right of his wife, Isabella, the heiress of Duke Charles II. Yolande, whose sister, Margaret of Anjou, married Henry VI., became Duchess of Lorraine after the death of her nephew in 1473, and united the two branches of the family in her person. But she renounced the sovereignty in favour of her son, René II., who still bore the proud title of King of Sicily and Jerusalem, although, as the English Ambassador, Wotton, remarked, he had never seen either the one or the other. René had a fierce struggle for the possession of Lorraine with Charles of Burgundy, who defeated him completely in 1475, and entered Nancy in triumph. But in January, 1477, King René recovered his duchy with the help of the Swiss, and Charles was defeated and slain in a desperate battle under the walls of Nancy.[318]
Ten years later René married Philippa of Egmont, sister of Charles, Duke of Guelders, and, together with his admirable wife, devoted the rest of his life to the welfare of his subjects and the improvement of the capital. During his reign the ducal palace, founded by his ancestors in the fourteenth century, was enlarged and beautified, and the neighbouring church and convent of the Cordeliers were built. Here René was buried after his early death in 1508, and his sorrowing wife reared a noble monument in which he is represented kneeling under a pinnacled canopy crowned by a statue of the Virgin and Child.[319]