policy to such a point that on the return of a last unfortunate
expedition into Gelderland Charles VI., who had been made
Madness of
Charles VI.
by him to marry Isabel of Bavaria, took the government
from his uncles on the 3rd of May 1389, and
recalled the Marmousets. But this young king, aged
only twenty, very much in love with his young wife
and excessively fond of pleasure, soon wrecked the delicate
poise of his mental faculties in the festivities of the Hôtel Saint-Paul;
and a violent attack of Pierre de Craon on the constable
de Clisson having led to an expedition against his accomplice,
the duke of Brittany, Charles was seized by insanity on the
road. The Marmousets were deposed, the king’s brother, the
duke of Orleans, set aside, and the old condition of affairs began
again (1392).
The struggle was now between the two branches of the royal family, the Orleanist and the Burgundian, between the aristocratic south and the democratic north; while the deposition of Richard II. of England in favour of Henry of Lancaster permitted them to vary civil war Struggle between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians. by war against the foreigner. Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, the king’s uncle, had certain advantages over his rival Louis of Orleans, Charles VI.’s brother: superiority in age, relations with the Lancastrians and with Germany, and territorial wealth and power. The two adversaries had each the same scheme of government: each wanted to take charge of Charles VI., who was intermittently insane, and to exclude his rival from the pillage of the royal exchequer; but this rivalry of desires brought them into opposition on all the great questions of the day—the war with England, the Great Schism and the imperial election. The struggle became acute when John the Fearless of Burgundy succeeded his father in 1404. Up to this time the queen, Isabel of Bavaria, had been held in a kind of dependency upon Philip of Burgundy, who had brought about her marriage; but less eager for influence than for money, since political questions were unintelligible to her and her situation was a precarious one, she suddenly became favourable to the duke of Orleans. Whether due to passion or caprice this cost the duke his life, for John the Fearless had him assassinated in 1407, and thus let loose against one another the Burgundians and the Armagnacs, so-called because the son of the murdered duke was the son-in-law of the count of Armagnac (see Armagnac). Despite all attempts at reconciliation the country was divided into two parties. Paris, with her tradesmen—the butchers in particular—and her university, played an important part in this quarrel; for to be master of Paris was to be master of the king. In 1413 the duke of Burgundy gained the upper hand there, partly owing to the rising of the Cabochiens, i.e. the butchers led by the skinner Simon Caboche, partly to the hostility of the university to the Avignon pope and partly to the Parisian bourgeoisie.
Amid this reign of terror and of revolt the university, the only moral and intellectual force, taking the place of the impotent states-general and of a parlement carefully restricted to the judiciary sphere, vainly tried to re-establish a firm monarchical system by means of the Ordonnance Cabochienne; The Ordonnance Cabochienne, 1413. but this had no effect, the government being now at the mercy of the mob, themselves at the mercy of incapable hot-headed leaders. The struggle ended in becoming one between factions of the townsmen, led respectively by the hûchier Cirasse and by Jean Caboche. The former overwhelmed John the Fearless, who fled from Paris; and the Armagnacs, re-entering on his exit, substituted white terror for red terror, from the 12th of December 1413 to the 28th of July 1414. The butchers’ organization was suppressed and all hope of reform lost. Such disorders allowed Henry V. of England to take the offensive again.
The Armagnacs were in possession of Paris and the king when Henry V. crushed them at Agincourt on the 25th of October 1415. It was as at Crécy and Poitiers; the French chivalry, accustomed to mere playing at battle in the tourneys, no longer knew how to fight. Charles Agincourt. of Orleans being a captive and his father-in-law, the count of Armagnac, highly unpopular, John the Fearless, hitherto prudently neutral, re-entered Paris, amid scenes of carnage, on the invitation of the citizen Perrinet le Clerc.
Secure from interference, Henry V. had occupied the whole of Normandy and destroyed in two years the work of Philip Augustus. The duke of Burgundy, feeling as incapable of coming to an understanding with the masterful Englishman as of resisting him unaided, tried to The Treaty of Troyes, 1420. effect a reconciliation with the Armagnacs, who had with them the heir to the throne, the dauphin Charles; but his assassination at Montereau in 1419 nearly caused the destruction of the kingdom, the whole Burgundian party going over to the side of the English. By the treaty of Troyes (1420) the son of John the Fearless, Philip the Good, in order to avenge his father recognized Henry V. (now married to Catherine, Charles VI.’s daughter) as heir to the crown of France, to the detriment of the dauphin Charles, who was disavowed by his mother and called in derision “the soi-disant dauphin of Viennois.” When Henry V. and Charles VI. died in 1422, Henry VI.—son of Henry V. and Catherine—was proclaimed at Paris king of France and of England, with the concurrence of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy. Thus in 1428 the English occupied all eastern and northern France, as far as the Loire; while the two most important civil powers of the time, the parlement and the university of Paris, had acknowledged the English king.
But the cause of greatest weakness to the French party was
still Charles VII. himself, the king of Bourges. This youth of
nineteen, the ill-omened son of a madman and of a
Bavarian of loose morals, was a symbol of France,
timorous and mistrustful. The châteaux of the
Charles VII.
(1422–1461).
Loire, where he led a restless and enervating existence,
held an atmosphere little favourable to enthusiasm and energy.
After his victories at Cravant (1423) and Verneuil (1424), the
duke of Bedford, appointed regent of the kingdom, had given
Charles VII. four years’ respite, and these had been occupied
in violent intrigues between the constable de Richemont[1] and
the sire de la Trémoille, the young king’s favourites, and solely
desirous of enriching themselves at his expense. The king,
melancholy spectacle as he was, seemed indeed to suit that tragic
hour when Orleans, the last bulwark of the south, was besieged
by the earl of Salisbury, now roused from inactivity (1428).
He had neither taste nor capacity like Philip VI. or John the
Good for undertaking “belles apertises d’armes”; but then
a lack of chivalry combined with a temporizing policy had
not been particularly unsuccessful in the case of his grandfather
Charles V.
Powerful aid now came from an unexpected quarter. The war had been long and cruel, and each successive year naturally increased feeling against the English. The damage done to Burgundian interests by the harsh yet impotent government of Bedford, disgust at the iniquitous Joan of Arc. treaty of Troyes, the monarchist loyalty of many of the warriors, the still deeper sentiment felt by men like Alain Chartier towards “Dame France,” and the “great misery that there was in the kingdom of France”; all these suddenly became incarnate in the person of Joan of Arc, a young peasant of Domrémy in Lorraine. Determined in her faith and proud in her meekness, in opposition to the timid counsels of the military leaders, to the interested delays of the courtiers, to the scruples of the experts and the quarrelling of the doctors, she quoted her “voices,” who had, she said, commissioned her to raise the siege of Orleans and to conduct the gentle dauphin to Reims, there to be crowned. Her sublime folly turned out to be wiser than their wisdom; in two months, from May to July 1429, she had freed Orleans, destroyed the prestige of the English army at Patay, and dragged the doubting and passive king against his will to be crowned at Reims. All this produced a marvellous revulsion of political feeling throughout France, Charles VII. now becoming incontestably “him to whom the kingdom of France ought to belong.” After Reims Joan’s first thought was for Paris, and to achieve the final overthrow
- ↑ Earl of Richmond; afterwards Arthur, duke of Brittany (q.v.).
