In this shameful mockery of a peace, ratified in the great cathedral of Chartres, Isabeau de Bavière had acted for the Duke of Burgundy. She was soon to give still further proof of her heartlessness and ingratitude, when Jean de Bourgogne arbitrarily arrested, tortured, and executed Jean de Montaigu, superintendent of finances, who had been an old servant of the queen, who had even given her that splendid Hotel Barbette in which she had last supped with Louis d'Orléans, and who had drawn up the treaty of reconciliation between the houses of Burgundy and Orléans. Isabeau might have interceded in his behalf, and did make some move to do so; but a promise that her son should share in the confiscated wealth of Montaigu was enough to purchase her consent to the latter's death.
Isabeau was at this time busying herself less and less about affairs of state; since she had leagued herself in secret with Jean de Bourgogne she had no cares but those attendant upon providing pleasures and amusements for herself. Her son, the dauphin, following in Isabeau's footsteps, was scandalizing all Paris by his orgies. At last, the people of Paris rose in one of their occasional sincere but futile attempts to reform the manners of a corrupt court. We shall not deal with the horrors of this outburst, one of the many little wavelets of popular indignation presaging, but presaging only to heedless revellers, the great tidal wave that was to envelop and bear down the just and the unjust alike some four hundred years later. The butchers and bakers and honest workingmen, led chiefly by a surgeon, Jean de Troyes, came by thousands to reform the morals of the dauphin. This miserable debauchee, as well as the rest of the court, trembled before them, and willingly conceded anything that could be asked. Even the poor mad king, whom the people loved and did not blame, had the white hood, emblem of the commune, placed upon his head, and smiled pitifully at his rough but well-meaning subjects. Forthwith, Isabeau equipped her head with a white hood, and so did all the court, the judges, and even the learned doctors of the University. But Isabeau's white hood was not wide enough to cover the scandalous horns of her headdress. Rising to the point of fury upon hearing that the dauphin, probably at the instigation of his mother, had been in communication with the Orleanist forces to induce them to march upon Paris, the Cabochiens, as the communists called themselves, in May, 1413, invaded the palace itself and arrested Louis de Bavière, the queen's brother, and as many as fifteen of the ladies of her suite probably such as had made themselves peculiarly conspicuous and offensive by the extravagance and the indecency of their costumes. Isabeau wept, and pleaded vainly for a respite for her brother, then on the eve of his marriage; the stern moralists from the markets of Paris were inexorable and Louis went to jail unmarried, while Isabeau went to bed sick with childish fury.
For a moment turning our attention from the queen, let us advert to the political conditions in France. From the time of the assassination of Louis d' Orléans there had been civil war, with rare and brief intervals of peace, between the partisans of Burgundy and those of Orléans, now led by Bernard d'Armagnac, whose daughter Charles d'Orléans had married after the early death of his first wife, Isabelle de France. While civil war in itself would have caused misery and ruin enough, its horrors were enhanced by the crafty policy of Henry IV. of England, who, when he was not able to intervene in person, responded to the solicitations of first one party and then the other, and thus caused Armagnacs and Bourguignons to exhaust themselves in fruitless strife. It was the craft of Henry IV. and the folly of France that prepared the way for Agincourt, that crushing victory of the great Henry V., who in the presence of the overwhelming French army proclaimed, in Shakespeare's paraphrase of his words:
"We are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honor.
God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more!"
The event justified King Harry's boastful confidence: the chivalry of France found itself discredited, dead, or in captivity. And yet, even in the hour of France's distress, the indolent Isabeau could hardly be prevailed upon to take any action in behalf of her son, the dauphin, Louis de Guienne who, in fact, lived but a little over two months after Agincourt, and was succeeded by Jean de Touraine. In two years more (1417) Jean de Touraine was dead, poisoned, it was said, by Bernard d'Armagnac; the new dauphin, Charles, was a boy of but fourteen years.
This Charles, one of the most uncomfortably cold and contemptible personages in history, had been reared by the queen and the Armagnac party with sentiments of the bitterest hatred against the Burgundians. Determined to win complete control of Charles, Bernard d'Armagnac sought to discredit Isabeau with her son and with the king. There was no difficulty in finding pretexts, for the sober-minded Juvenal des Ursins tells us that in the chateau of Vincennes, whither Isabeau had retired to revel more at ease, "many shameful things were done" by the queen and her troop of rakes and gaudily dressed ladies; but indecency in dress was not the only scandal that Bernard revealed to the king, who was at the time in better mental condition than for years.
As he rode back from the chateau one evening the king met Loys de Boisbourdon, whom he knew to be one of Isabeau's associates. Suddenly suspicious and resolved to know the whole truth, Charles had him arrested and put to the question (i.e., tortured). Such horrors were revealed by this unlucky sharer of the queen's pleasures that Charles deemed them not fit for further circulation, and accordingly Loys de Boisbourdon carried his secrets with him into a sack, which was inscribed: Laissez passer la justice du roi, "Make way for the justice of the king," and the waters of the Seine covered the sack and the sinner. The mad king's justice, of which we read with a certain joyful sympathy, was not ended, for he sent the queen and the duchess of Bavaria to Blois, and later to Tours, where they were compelled to live under surveillance and in salutary simplicity. The dauphin seized some moneys belonging to Isabeau, who henceforth cherished the most unrelenting hatred for her own son, accusing him of being responsible for her exile. The real grief to her, we may feel sure, was the loss of her money.