It was May, 1413, the court was at Saint Paul. The King had just recovered from one of his attacks. Every one had been, dressed in white hoods, to Notre Dame to give thanks, and now the important event was the wedding to be celebrated on the following day between the Queen’s brother, Duke Ludwig of Bavaria, and Catherine d’Alençon, widow of Pierre de Navarre, Comte de Mortaigne.
There had been a good deal of uneasiness in the air for some time and the war with England was going on. When peace was made between Burgundians and Armagnacs, the latter were obliged to break their alliance with the English king, whose troops under his second son, the Duke of Clarence, had ever since been ravaging Normandy, Picardy, and Maine, notwithstanding that the little Comte d’Angoulême, the youngest of the Orléans princes, had been given them as a hostage. They were also attacking some of the southern parts of France, and swore they would regain the duchy of Aquitaine, their ancient patrimony. Two months ago Henry IV. had died, and the Prince of Wales, now Henry V., hitherto remarkable chiefly for his fast, disorderly, somewhat scandalous life, seemed likely to be a powerful and dangerous enemy. The populace of Paris were deeply discontented, as well they might be, for it was openly declared that the expenses of the King’s household, which used to be 94,000 francs were now 450,000, and yet the tradesmen were not paid; that although the allowance for the King and Queen’s alms went on, scarcely any alms were ever given; that some of the royal servants and officers received enormous salaries, while others could never get any wages paid at all; and that, in spite of the sums allowed for the repair of the King’s castles and palaces, they were in such a state that they would soon fall into ruins.
{1413}
The Duke of Burgundy had his own reasons for wishing to stir up the people. He was afraid of certain transactions by which he had got hold of a large sum of money being made known by Pierre des Essarts, provost of Paris, who held his receipts for them, and now belonged to the Orléanists; he was uneasy about the power and favour of that party and the estrangement of the Duc d’Aquitaine, who disliked him because he was so overbearing and disagreeable.
The Duc d’Aquitaine had been warned that an attack upon the hôtel St. Paul was intended, and advised to arm his household, raise the banner with the fleur-de-lis over the entrance and defend himself. But while he was deliberating with the other princes, instead of taking immediate action, as any of his forefathers would have done, a dreadful noise began to be heard, and a shouting, howling, desperate mob was seen to be rushing down the streets towards the hôtel St. Paul. They surrounded that palace, planted the standard of the city, and with loud cries and threats demanded to speak to the Duc d’Aquitaine.
Among the chief characteristics that distinguish the history of France from that of any other Christian or civilised nation are the furious, credulous, ferocious mobs, whose atrocious deeds continually appear in her annals, and who seem to belong to no particular century; for whether we see them murdering nobles and gentlemen with their wives and children in the fourteenth century, Huguenots in the sixteenth, waggon loads of women, young girls, and little children in the eighteenth—or priests and unarmed hostages in the nineteenth, whether they are called Jacques, or Leaguers, or Septembriseurs, or Communists—they evidently do not excite either abhorrence or shame in the minds of the great mass of their countrymen who have just raised a statue in Paris in honour of one of the most bloodthirsty of the wretches who acted as their leader in the perpetration of those cowardly and brutal crimes against which the rest of civilised humanity revolts.
One of these mobs, not a whit more cruel and savage than those which yelled and howled and danced through the streets of Paris in our own and our fathers’ and grandfathers’ days, was now pressing round the hôtel of the Duc d’Aquitaine at Saint Paul. They had certainly much reason for their anger and complaints, but whether their cause is a bad or a good one the means by which they carry it out are always atrocious. On this occasion they put forward a Carmelite monk called Eustace, who gave a harangue on the calamities, bad government, and generally disastrous state of things. The Duke of Burgundy came down, said the King was only just recovered and could not bear this agitation, and advised them to go away. But they clamoured for the Duc d’Aquitaine, who, terrified by the tumult and urged by the Duke of Burgundy, appeared at a window and promised all they asked.
One of their leaders, named Jean de Troyes, then imposed silence, and in a speech received with enthusiastic applause by the people and with scarcely concealed indignation by the nobles, declared that they would do no harm to the Duc d’Aquitaine, but demanded that his evil counsellors should be given up to them; and on his chancellor imprudently asking to whom they referred handed up a list of fifty names, including not only the principal gentlemen of his household, but Ludwig of Bavaria, the Queen’s brother, Edouard, Duc de Bar, cousin of the King, and several of the Queen’s ladies. The princes could not pacify them, the Queen wept and raved, the King remonstrated in vain; the Duc d’Aquitaine, turning with a furious look to the Duke of Burgundy, exclaimed, “Father-in-law, this outrage is your doing, for the leaders of it are the people of your house. Know surely that the day will come when you shall repent of it, for things will not always go on according to your pleasure.”
Some of the nobles and ladies came down and gave themselves up, the others were seized by the mob, who broke into the palace and hunted all over the rooms and galleries to find them, tearing one gentleman out of the arms of the Duchesse d’Aquitaine, who tried to protect him. They were carried away on horseback and shut up, some in the Palais, some in the Louvre.
When they were gone, the King went to dinner and the Duc d’Aquitaine retired with the Queen into her room, where they shut themselves up and cried.