Louis XI. was a very pleasant person when news was brought him that he liked to hear. Commines and Bouchage together had told him about the defeat of Morat and had each received two hundred silver marks. It was a Seigneur de Lude who had the good luck to bring him letters from Craon recounting the battle of Nancy. It was "really difficult for the king to keep his countenance so surprised was he with joy."[21] His letter to Craon was written on January 9th and ran as follows.[22]
"M. the Count, my friend, I have received your letter and heard the good news that you impart to me, for which I thank you as much as I can. Now is the time to use all your five natural senses to deliver the duchy and county of Burgundy into my hands. If the duke be dead, do you and the governor of Champagne take your troops and put yourselves within the land, and, if you love me, keep as good order among your men as if you were in Paris, and prove that I mean to treat them [the Burgundians] better than any one in my realm."
The "five natural senses" of the king's lieutenant were employed most loyally to his master's service. The duchy of Burgundy returned to the French crown. Before Easter, the Estates were convened by Louis XI, and there was no longer any duke in Burgundy to be an over powerful peer in France.
With the exception of Guelders the lands acquired by Charles fell away, but the remainder as inherited by him passed under the rule of his daughter Mary, who carried her heritage into the House of Austria, through which it passed finally to the King of Spain.
On that fatal fifth of January, Charles of Burgundy had only just passed middle life. He was forty-four years, one month, and twenty-six days old, an age when a man has the right to look forward to new achievements. Every circumstance of the dreary and premature death was in glaring contrast to his prospects at his birth in 1433, in insolent contradiction to his own estimation of the obligations assumed by Fate in his behalf. In certain details of the catastrophe there are, of course, accidents. No one could have predicted that the duke whose chief title was a synonym for magnificence, that this cherished heir to his House, who had been bathed in all the luxury known to his epoch, should have thus lain in death, many hours long, unattended and uncared-for, naked and frozen on a bed of congealed mud, with a winter sky as canopy. The actual adversity as it overwhelmed him was too appalling for any foresight. But the great dream of the man's life that vanished with his vitality owed its annihilation to no mere chance of warfare. Had it not been rudely ended by the battle of Nancy, other means of destruction, inevitable and sure, would have appeared. The projected erection of a solidified kingdom stretching from the North Sea to Switzerland and possibly to the Mediterranean, one that could hold the balance of power between France and Germany, contained elements of disintegration, latent at its foundation. It is clear, from a consideration of the Duke of Burgundy and his position in the Europe of his time, that the materials which he expected to mould into a realm were a collection of sentient units. Each separate one was instinct with individual life, individual desires, conscious of its own minute past, capable of directing its own contracted future. That the hereditary title of overlord to each political unity had lodged upon a head already dignified by a plurality of similar titles, was a mere chance and viewed by the burghers in a wholly different light from that in which this same overlord regarded it. The fishers in Holland, the manufacturers in Brabant, the merchants in Flanders, the vintners in Burgundy, cared nothing for being the wings of an imperial idea. They wanted safe fishing grounds, unmolested highways of commerce, vineyards free from the tramp of armies. And with their desires fixed on these as needful, their attitude towards the political centralisation planned by their common ruler, often betrayed both ignorance and inconsistency. At various epochs some degree of imperialism for the Netherland group had been quite to popular taste. In Holland, Zealand and Hainaut, it had been conceded that Jacqueline of Bavaria was less efficient to maintain desirable conditions than her cousin of Burgundy, and the exchange of sovereigns had been effected in spite of the manifest injustice involved in the transaction. But while there was willingness to accept any advantages that might accrue to a people from the reputation of a local overlord, it was never forgotten for an instant that his relation to his subjects was as their own count and strictly limited by conditions that had long existed within each petty territory. While Charles seemed to be on the straight road towards his goal, the people within each body politic of his inherited states were profoundly preoccupied with their own local concerns, and only alive to his schemes when they feared demands upon their internal revenues for external purposes.
It does not seem probable, however, that the abstract question of the projected kingdom was ever taken very seriously among those to be directly affected by the proposed change. The bars interposed by his own subjects in the duke's progress towards royalty were obstructions to his successive steps rather than to his theory. Indeed, strenuous opposition to details was allied to a vague and passive acceptance of the whole. Moreover when the idea was phrased it was distinctly as a revival, not as a novelty. The previous existence of a kingdom of Burgundy was undoubtedly a potent factor in the degree of progress made by Charles towards conjuring into new life a reincarnation of that ancient realm. Yet it was a factor clothed with a shadow rather than with the substance of truth. Geographically there was very little in common between the dominion projected more or less definitely in 1473 and any one of the kingdoms of Burgundy as they had successively existed. That of Charles corresponded very nearly to the ancient kingdom of Lorraine. Franche-Comté was the only ground common to the territories actually held by the duke and to the latest kingdom of Burgundy. His possessions in Picardy and Alsace lay wholly beyond the limits of either Burgundy or Lorraine. But the old name survived in his ducal title, and it was that name that lent a semblance of reality to this fifteenth-century dream of a middle kingdom as outlined in the duke's mind more or less definitely or as bounded by his ambition.
In retrospect it is clear that more was requisite for the realisation of the vision of the wished-for nation, than imperial investiture of a crowned monarch with sovereignty over a group of lands. A modern writer has pointed out how infinitely subtle is the vital principle of a nation, one not even to be created by common interests. A Zollverein is no patria. An element of sentiment is needful, and an element of growth.[23] The nation like the individual is the result of what has gone before. An heroic past, great men, glory that can command respect at home and abroad—that is the capital on which is based a national idea. To have wrought in common, to wish to accomplish more in the future, are essential conditions to be a people. "The existence of a nation is a plebiscite of every day, just as the existence of the individual is a perpetual affirmation of life."
Now it is evident, in summing up the salient features of this failure, that a vital principle was not germinating in the inchoate mass. Charles himself never attained the rank of a national hero. More than that, with all his individual states, he never had any nation, great or small, at his back. Personally he was a man without a country. His father, Philip, was French, pure and simple, quite as French as his grandfather, Philip the Hardy, the first Duke of Burgundy out of the House of Valois, even though Philip the Good had extended his sway to many non-French-speaking peoples and was able to use the Flemish speech if it suited his whim. But that was as a condescension and as something extraneous. The chief of French peers remained his proudest title; his ability to influence French affairs, the task he liked best.
His son was quite different in his attitude towards France. He minimised his degree of French blood royal. More than once he boasted of his kinship with Portuguese, with English stock. He had certain characteristics of an immigrant, who has abandoned family traditions and is proudly confident that his bequest to posterity is to outshine what he has inherited. Charles was not exactly a stupid man, but he certainly was dazzled by his early surroundings into an overestimate of himself, into a conceit that was a tremendous stumbling-block in his path. He had not the kind of intelligence that would have enabled him to take at their worth the rhetorical phrases of adulation heaped upon him on festal occasions. Yet this same conceit, this very self-confidence, gave him a high conception of his duties. At his accession, he showed a sense of his responsibilities, a definite theory of conduct which he fully intended to act upon. His very belief in his own powers gave him an intrinsic honesty of purpose. He was convinced that he could maintain law, order, justice in his domain, and he fully intended to do so in a paternal way, but he left out of consideration the rights of the people, rights older than his dynasty. In his military career, too, at the outset, he evinced the strongest bent towards preserving the best conditions possible amid the brutalities of warfare. He curbed the soldiers' passions, he protected women, and was as relentless towards miscreants in his ranks as towards his foe. In civil matters he exerted himself to secure impartial equity for all alike. When he gave a promise, he fully intended to make his words good. It was only in the face of repeated deceptions of the cleverer and more unscrupulous Louis XI. that Charles changed for the worse. Exasperated by the knowledge that the king's solemn pledges were given repeatedly with no intention of fulfilment, he attempted to adopt a similar policy and was singularly infelicitous in his imitation. His political methods degenerated into mere barefaced lying, softened by no graces, illumined by no clever intuition of where to draw the line. From 1472 on, the duke's word was worth no more than the king's, and words were assuredly at a discount just then. A perusal of the international correspondence of the period leaves the reader marvelling why time was wasted in covering paper, with flimsy, insincere phrases, mendacious sign-posts which gave no true indication of the road to be travelled. There are, however, differences in the art of dissimulation and Charles never attained a mastery of the science.
The adjective which has attached itself to his name in English in an inaccurate rendering of le téméraire which belongs to him in French. There were other terms too applied to Charles at different periods of his career. He was Charles the Hardy in his early youth, Charles the Terrible in those last months when he tried to fortify himself with wine unsuited to his constitution, but at all times he might have been called Charles the self-absorbed, Charles the solitary. There have been many men more passionate, more uncontrolled, than Charles of Burgundy, whose personal magnetism yet enabled them to win friends and to keep them, as the duke was powerless to do. The failure to command personal devotion, unquestioning loyalty, was one of his chief personal misfortunes. Philip, magnificent, lavish, debonair, found many lenient apologists for his crimes, while his son received criticism for his faults even from the faithful among his servitors. How a reflection of his bearing glows out from the mirror turned casually upon him by Commines' skilful hand! Take the glimpse of Louis XI. as he lures on St. Pol's messenger to imitate Charles. The Sire de Créville inspired by the royal interest in his narration about an incident at the court of Burgundy, puffs out his cheeks, stamps his feet in a dictatorial manner, and swears by St. George as he quotes the duke's words. Behind a screen are hidden Commines, and a Burgundian envoy aghast at hearing his liege lord so mocked. It is a time when St. Pol is trying to ride three horses at once and the French king takes this method to have Charles informed of his duplicity. "Speak louder" he says, "I grow a little deaf," and the flattered envoy repeats his dramatic performance in a way to engrave it on the memory of the duke's retainer.