CHAPTER XIV

THE RISE OF THE MONARCHY

HISTORIANS, having a predilection for exactness, are concerned to find dates not only for kings and queens and battles and treaties, but for those great changes in the manners and morals of mankind which begin unconsciously, are wrought out in silence, and present themselves to the historian as accomplished revolutions before he is at all aware that anything of moment is going on. A revolution of this kind was in progress throughout Christendom in the fifteenth century; and its results are so astonishing, so bewildering in their magnitude and in their infinite ramifications that we resort to figurative language and call the movement the Renaissance, the Revival of Learning. It is, indeed, a new birth, a new life, rather newer and altogether more astonishing than any mere return of the learning of the ancients could have been; but the leaven in the decaying mass of feudalism operated slowly, and did not come to full power until long after the period which must be a limit for this book; therefore, we can but note certain significant facts in the mighty process which was to transform the feudal lady of the chateau into the lady of the court and of the brilliant literary salon, to substitute a Catherine de Medicis, or a Marguerite de Navarre, or a Madame de La Fayette, for an Eleanor of Guienne, a Mahaut d'Artois, or a Christine de Pisan. As nearly as can be determined, the age of feudalism ends in the fifteenth century; but the soul of the old civilization leaves its body imperceptibly and enters into that of the new: it "melts, and makes no noise,"

"As virtuous men pass mildly away,

And whisper to their souls to go,

Whilst some of their sad friends do say

Now his breath goes, and some say no."

Jeanne d'Arc herself, we have said in the preceding chapter, was no product of chivalry, found no chivalry to shield her. The old was already in her time yielding place to the new; for during the fifteenth century feudalism as well as chivalry was going to its death in France and in nearly all Europe. In France the civil wars had not only demoralized chivalry, they had also served to sever the intimate ties that bound the feudal lord and his family to the soil of their fief almost as rigidly as the villain was bound. Some families were utterly destroyed, some sought new lands, and found them in parts of the country far distant from their ancient holdings. With all his theoretically arbitrary power, the old baron, reared amid the peasants he was to govern, felt a certain kinship with them, and was often regardful of their time-honored customs and privileges, forgoing in their favor what arbitrary despotism or caprice suggested. No such ties bound the new nobles to their new vassals; the hold of the feudal lord upon his vassals was weakened, as was their influence upon him. Many new families had risen into prominence, and kings no longer hesitated to ennoble parvenus, a sure sign that the solidarity of the ancient nobility of the soil was broken. This had come to pass in France by the time the great Louis XI. ascended the throne, not a generation after Jeanne d'Arc, and the same process was going on in England through the Wars of the Roses. Louis was the determined enemy of feudalism, which he would have uprooted utterly. Much he did uproot; more he would have done, had he lived.

In the midst of this generation of struggles between the king and the faltering remnants of feudalism there are two or three instances in which the women as well as the men of the middle class deserve mention. Before we deal with the short and sad career of the last of the great house of Bourgogne, Marie, daughter of Charles le téméraire, we may glance at the simple story of a woman who defended Beauvais from this same Charles.

The danger from England had passed; there was no longer need of a Jeanne d'Arc to drive out the insolent Goddems; but a new enemy was found for France in the person of that great Duke of Burgundy whom modern history has named Charles the Bold, more properly Charles the Rash, or, as his contemporaries first called him, the Terrible, "that wild bull wearing a crown, that wild boar who rushed straight ahead, his eyes shut." In the spring of 1472, while Louis XI was intent upon reducing to submission the rebellious Duke of Brittany, Charles le téméraire, impatient at the tricky diplomacy which baffled him, declared war upon France and marched at once into Picardy with a great army, ravaging and burning as he went. Louis, unwilling to be diverted from his attempt upon the Duke of Brittany, whom he was holding fast in his grip, could spare few troops, and gave orders that the small towns be abandoned and resistance be concentrated in the larger cities. The brave little town of Nesle was the first to offer a determined but hopeless resistance to the enraged Burgundian: Nesle was carried by assault, its defenders put to the sword or mutilated by the lopping off of their right hands. The very church ran with blood as Charles rode into it, commending the savage butchery of the inhabitants by his soldiers.