MACHALE, JOHN (1791-1881), Irish divine, was born on the 15th of March 1791 at Tuber-na-Fian, Mayo, and was educated at Maynooth, where after graduating in 1814 he was ordained priest and appointed lecturer in theology, succeeding to the professoriate in 1820. In 1825 he became coadjutor bishop of Killala, and in July 1834 archbishop of Tuam and metropolitan. He visited Rome in 1831, and was there again at the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin (Dec. 1854) and in 1869-1870 at the Vatican council. Though he did not favour the dogma of Papal Infallibility he submitted as soon as it was defined. Machale was an intensely patriotic Irishman, who fought hard for Catholic Emancipation, for separate Roman Catholic schools, and against the Queen’s Colleges. He translated part of the Iliad (Dublin, 1861), and made an Irish version of some of Moore’s melodies and of the Pentateuch. He died at Tuam on the 7th of November 1881.
MACHAULT D’ARNOUVILLE, JEAN BAPTISTE DE (1701-1794), French statesman, was a son of Louis Charles Machault d’Arnouville, lieutenant of police. In 1721 he was counsel to the parlement of Paris, in 1728 maître des requêtes, and ten years later was made president of the Great Council; although he had opposed the court in the Unigenitus dispute, he was appointed intendant of Hainaut in 1743. From this position, through the influence at court of his old friend René Louis, Marquis d’Argenson, he was called to succeed Orry de Fulvy as controller-general of the finances in December 1745. He found, on taking office, that in the four years of the War of the Austrian Succession the economies of Cardinal Fleury had been exhausted, and he was forced to develop the system of borrowings which was bringing French finances to bankruptcy. He attempted in 1749 a reform in the levying of direct taxes, which, if carried out, would have done much to prevent the later Revolutionary movement. He proposed to abolish the old tax of a tenth, which was evaded by the clergy and most of the nobility, and substitute a tax of one-twentieth which should be levied on all without exception. The cry for exceptions, however, began at once. The clergy stood in a body by their historical privileges, and the outcry of the nobility was too great for the minister to make headway against. Still he managed to retain his office until July 1754, when he exchanged the controllership for the ministry of marine. Foreseeing the disastrous results of the alliance with Austria, he was drawn to oppose more decidedly the schemes of Mme de Pompadour, whose personal ill-will he had gained. Louis XV. acquiesced in her demand for his disgrace on the 1st of February 1757. Machault lived on his estate at Arnouville until the Revolution broke out, when, after a period of hiding, he was apprehended in 1794 at Rouen and brought to Paris as a suspect. He was imprisoned in the Madelonnettes, where he succumbed in a few weeks, at the age of ninety-three.
His son, Louis Charles Machault d’Arnouville (1737-1820), was bishop of Amiens from 1774 until the Revolution. He was famous for his charity; but proved to be a most uncompromising Conservative at the estates general of 1789, where he voted consistently against every reform. He emigrated in 1791, resigned his bishopric in 1801 to facilitate the concordat, and retired to the ancestral château of Arnouville, where he died in 1820.
MACHAUT, GUILLAUME DE (c. 1300-1377), French poet and musician, was born in the village of Machault near Réthel in Champagne. Machaut tells us that he served for thirty years the adventurous John of Luxembourg, king of Bohemia. He followed his master to Russia and Poland, and, though of peaceful tastes himself, saw twenty battles and a hundred tourneys. When John was killed at Crécy in 1346 Machaut was received at the court of Normandy, and on the accession of John the Good to the throne of France (1350) he received an office which enabled him to devote himself thenceforth to music and poetry. Machaut wrote about 1348 in honour of Charles III., king of Navarre, a long poem much admired by contemporaries, Le Jugement du roi de Navarre. When Charles was thrown into prison by his father-in-law, King John, Machaut addressed him a Confort d’ami to console him for his enforced separation from his young wife, then aged fifteen. This was followed about 1370 by a poem of 9000 lines entitled La Prise d’Alexandrie, one of the last chronicles cast in this form. Its hero was Pierre de Lusignan, king of Cyprus. Machaut is best known for the strange book telling of the love affair of his old age with a young and noble lady long supposed to be Agnes of Navarre, sister of Charles the Bad; Paulin Paris in his edition of the Voir dit (Historie vraie) identified her as Perronne d’Armentières, a noble lady of Champagne. In 1362, when Machaut must have been at least sixty-two years of age, he received a rondeau from Perronne, who was then eighteen, expressing her devotion. She no doubt wished to play Laura to his Petrarch, and the Voir dit contains the correspondence and the poems which they exchanged. The romance, which ended with Perronne’s marriage and Machaut’s desire to remain her doux ami, has gleams of poetry, especially in Perronne’s verses, but its subject and its length are both deterrent to modern readers. But Machaut with Deschamps marks a distinct transition. The trouvères had been impersonal. It is difficult to gather any details of their personal history from their work. Machaut and Deschamps wrote of their own affairs, and the next step in development was to be the self-analysis of Villon. Machaut was also a musician. He composed a number of motets, songs and ballads, also a mass supposed to have been sung at the coronation of Charles V. This was translated into modern notation by Perne, who read a notice on it before the Institute of France in 1817.
Machaut’s Oeuvres choisies were edited by P. Tarbé (Rheims and Paris, 1849); La Prise d’Alexandrie, by L. de Mas-Latrie (Geneva, 1877); and Le Livre du voir-dit, by Paulin Paris (1875). See also F. G. Fétis, Biog. universelle des musiciens ... (Paris, 1862), and a notice on the Instruments de musique au xive siècle d’après Guillaume de Machaut, by E. Travers (Paris, 1882).
MACHIAVELLI, NICCOLÒ (1469-1527), Italian statesman and writer, was born at Florence on the 3rd of May 1469. His ancestry claimed blood relationship with the lords of Montespertoli, a fief situated between Val di Pesa and Val d’Elsa, at no great distance from the city. Niccolò’s father, Bernardo (b. 1428), followed the profession of a jurist. He held landed property worth something like £250 a year of our money. His son, though not wealthy, was never wholly dependent upon official income.