From this time, we find Isabeau intriguing with the Duke of Burgundy. As Jean was marching upon Paris he came into the neighborhood of Tours. The pious Isabeau was suddenly filled with a desire to hear mass at a particular convent some distance outside the walls. While she was engaged in her devotions the troops of Burgundy, in ambush, surrounded the convent and "captured" Isabeau and her guardians. The queen and her ally, styling themselves governors of France, established a parliament at Amiens, sent out decrees by authority of the "council of the queen and the duke," and fought the dauphin on paper and in the field. When in June, 1418, the Parisians, provoked beyond endurance by the exactions and the arrogance of the Armagnac nobles, massacred every Armagnac that they could find, Isabeau stood too much in awe of these fierce men of the common people to enter Paris. Had she not seen their violence before, merely because she lived in luxury while they starved? She waited for the arrival of Jean de Bourgogne, and the two entered Paris together on July 14th. The dauphin, the sole hope of France, fled before the armies of his mother.
As early as May, 1419, the queen had been in negotiation with the English to disinherit her son, when the sudden death of Jean Sans Peur, who was assassinated at a conference with the dauphin in September, 1419, interrupted her plans; but she was determined at all hazards not to fall into the hands of her son. She wrote a letter of condolence to the widowed Duchess of Burgundy, and promised the new duke, Philippe le Bon, to assist him in punishing the dauphin. Philippe, like all this race of Burgundian dukes, was a man of action, a man of strong character, slightly more scrupulous than his father, and yet not entirely without inclination to sacrifice honor to policy. It is not to be wondered at that, justly indignant at the treacherous murder of his father, he should have sacrificed the interests of France to satisfy his resentment against the dauphin.
The queen, the Duke of Burgundy, and the unhappy king, a mere tool in their hands, treated at once with Henry V. It was stipulated in the preliminaries that Henry should aid them and be aided by them in war upon the dauphin. The selfish mother who thus enlisted even foreigners in her war against her son was capable of yet worse things. It was agreed that Henry should marry Catherine de France, the youngest daughter of Isabeau, and should at once receive control of the entire kingdom, in consideration of the incapacity of Charles VI.
Isabeau de Bavière was merely a wanton, an idle, vain, shallow-hearted seeker after pleasure, utterly incapable of taking seriously her role as Queen of France. With such love as her heart was capable of feeling, she loved Catherine, while her mean nature could never forgive the son who was the heir of France. We need not be surprised, therefore, to find her signing and causing the king to sign a treaty which violated every principle of patriotism and honor. By the treaty signed at Troyes on May 21, 1420, Charles, Duke of Touraine, Dauphin of France, was disinherited; the very principles of the Salic law were set at naught; and the heritage of Charles was bestowed, not even upon one of his elder sisters, but upon that Catherine of France, the youngest child, now Queen of England, and, in failure of heirs of her body, upon her husband, Henry V. of England. The two nations were to be merged, each retaining its distinctive laws, but both were to be under the rule of English sovereigns, and Henry was to aid in restoring peace and in destroying "the rebels" under Charles, "called the Dauphin." One of the bribes paid to Isabeau for selling the kingdom of her son was a pension; for we find an ordinance of Henry, "heir and regent of France," granting to the queen the sum of two thousand francs per month.
Isabeau's enjoyment of her pension was not destined to be of long continuance. The brilliant Henry V. died on August 31, 1422; and less than two months later died Charles VI., le bien aimé. During thirty of the forty-two years of his reign he had been incapacitated by madness or by idiocy, and in the intervals France had been worse misgoverned than ever before in her history; so that, with wars foreign and domestic and with the shameless extravagance of the court, the kingdom had been reduced to a deplorable state, scores dying in the streets of Paris of sheer hunger while the English king was spending his first triumphant winter in that city. For all these evils and miseries the people placed the blame where, in good truth, it belonged, on the queen and the royal princes. For the mad king there was nothing but a compassionate love, a tender sympathy; the people pitied this kindly unfortunate, abandoned by his wife, used as a tool by first one set of princes and then another.
At the funeral of Charles VI. not a single prince of France was present; the English Bedford conducted the whole sad affair. "As the body of the King was put in the sepulchre beside his predecessors, the heralds broke their rods and cast them into the grave... And then the Berri king-at-arms, accompanied by several heralds and pursuivants, cried out over the grave: 'May God have mercy upon the very noble and very excellent Prince Charles, sixth of the name, our lawful and sovereign lord!' And after this the aforesaid king-at-arms cried out: 'May God grant long life and prosperity to Henry, by the grace of God King of France and of England, our sovereign lord!' And then the heralds raised aloft their truncheons with the fleur-de-lis, crying: 'Vive le roi! Vive le roi!' And some of those present answered Noël (the ancient salutation to the King); but there were some who wept."
Thus the wretched Isabeau's work was, it seemed, complete, her son being a fugitive before the arms of the foreigner, while her infant grandson was King of France. From this time she disappears completely from the scene of action, drawing her meagre pension from the hands of the English, who treated her with deserved contempt, and cursed by all France for the memory of her evil deeds. We catch but a fleeting glimpse of her, living in obscurity at the royal palace of Saint-Pol. When on December 2, 1431, the young King Henry VI. made his solemn entry into his capital of Paris, the royal procession passed by the windows of the palace, and the boy king, looking up, saw an old woman in faded finery, surrounded by a bevy of women attendants. They, told him it was his grand-mother, the frivolous and once beautiful Isabeau de Bavière, and he doffed his cap, while Isabeau bowed to him and turned aside to weep. Did she weep from sincere contrition, or merely from regret of the departed luxury and extravagance of her life? She was not to live many years longer; but it was long enough to know that France had survived even her treachery and that her son was at peace with the Duke of Burgundy. So far from rejoicing, it is said that she died of regret that the treaty of Troyes had come to naught, her death occurring on September 24, 1435. She died with outward show of piety, and was buried as meanly, says a contemporary, as if she had been a humble bourgeoise, but four persons being present at the graveside.
The very portraits of Isabeau de Bavière, and of other women of her court, suggest sensuality. They are fat, and of the earth, earthy, suggesting lives led in indolence and the pursuit of pleasures not of the highest. As Michelet says, "Obesity is a characteristic of the figures of this sensual epoch. See the statues at Saint Denys; those of the fourteenth century are clearly portraits. See, in particular, the statue of the Duke de Berri in the subterranean chapel of Bourges, with the ignoble fat dog lying at his feet." As was the epoch, so was the queen; she was not actively bad, except where interference with her pleasures was threatened; she was merely a vain and utterly incapable woman of low tastes and cold heart who was called upon to be Queen of France in the most disastrous period of the history of that land. We need not think her a second Fredegonde, as some historians have tried to represent her; for her follies and her vices were such as to cause abhorrence by their puerility or their bestiality rather than to stir the deeper feelings of fear and hate excited by the greater among the bad women of history.