Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/587

HUNDRED YEARS WAR.] FRANCE 551 53. the civil war were not lost on Charles ; he crushed the freebooters of Champagne, drove the English out of Pontoise in 1441, moved actively up and clown France, reducing anarchy, restoring order, resisting English attacks. In the last he was loyally supported by the dauphin, who was glad to find a field for his restless temper. He re pulsed the English at Dieppe, and put down the count of Armagnac in the south. During the two years truce with England which now followed, Charles VII. and Louis drew off their free-lances eastward, and the dauphin came into rude collision with the Swiss not far from Basel, in 1444. Some sixteen hundred mountaineers long and heroically withstood at Saint Jacob the attack of several thousand Frenchmen, righting stubbornly till they all perished. It is said that the experience so dearly bought on the field of Saint Jacob was very useful to Louis in after days, when he was content to leave Charles the Bold to ruin himself by his attacks on Switzerland. The red wine grown on the slopo of the graveyard where they fell is called " Schweitzer-blut," Swiss-blood, to this day. It was at this time also that the cardinal of Winchester wedded Henry VI. of England to Margaret of Anjou, the ambitious daughter of King Rene 1 , the laughter-loving troubadour of Provence, who cared so much for poetry and so little for kingship. The king and dauphin returned to Paris, having defended their border-lands with credit, and having much reduced the numbers of the lawless free-lances. They next set themselves to organize a regular army of fifteen com panies of one hundred lances (each lance representing six lighting men), led by fifteen captains appointed by the king, and raised in different districts of France. This army partly absorbed and partly crushed the troublesome free-lances, and became a powerful police, which restored security and made good government once more possible. Round his own person Charles placed those sturdy and faithful fight ing men the Scottish guard ; under John Stewart d Aubigne" they served the French king well, and at the end of his troubles were placed as a colony at St Martin d Auxigny near Bourges, where their descendants still live in the enjoyment of special village-advantages, preserved to them by long use and tradition through all the changes of French history. This army, with the contingent due from the nobles, which was also reduced to order and made to receive pay, raised the power of the French monarchy far above anything that had as yet been seen ; and had Charles VII. been more ambitious he might have begun to play the part reserved for his son. The dauphin, dis contented again, was obliged once more to withdraw into Dauphiny, where he governed prudently and with activity. In 1449 the last scene of the Anglo-French war began. In that year English adventurers landed on the Breton coast ; the duke called the French king to his aid. Charles did not tarry this time ; he broke the truce with England, sent Dunois into Normandy, and himself soon followed. In both duchies, Brittany and Normandy, the French were welcomed with delight; no love for England lingered in the west. Somerset and Talbot failed to defend Rouen, and were driven from point to point, till every stronghold was lost to them. Dunois then passed into Guienne, and in a few months Bayonne, the last stronghold of the English, fell into his hands (1451). When Talbot was sent over to Bordeaux with 5000 men to recover the south, the old English feeling revived, for England was their best cus tomer, and they had little in common with France. It was, however, but a last flicker of the flame; in July 1453, at the siege of Castillon, the aged Talbot was slain, and the war at once came to an end ; the south passed finally into the kingdom of France. Normandy and Guienne were assimilated to France in taxation and army organization; and all that remained to England across the Channel was Calais with Havre and Guines Castle. Her foreign ambi- 1453-Cl. tions and struggles over, England was left to consume her self in civil strife, while France might rest and recover from the terrible sufferings she had undergone. The state of the country had become utterly wretched. We are told that from the Loire to the Somme, as fertile a part as any in France, all lay desert, given up to wolves, and tra versed only by tho robber and the free-lance; the peasant, despairing of his tillage, got him a weapon, and took to tho roads ; the dansc Macabre, grimly limned on churchyard- walls, was a parable of the age, in which all men lived in the presence of death ; mysteries and moralities were the chief literature of the time ; Froissart was gone, and Commines had not yet come ; the duke of Orleans, so long a prisoner in England, is the one true poet of the time ; the " good king Rene" is but in his earlier days, and gave himself most to poetry in his old age ; within the walls of a few towns rose some splendid examples of domestic architecture, like the house of Jacques Cceur, the great merchant at Bourges ; the stir and movement of the Renaissance finds little sympathy in France in these dark days. With the end of the English wars new life began to gleam state of out on France ; the people grew more tranquil, finding that France, toil and thrift bore again their wholesome fruits ; Charles VII. did not fail in his duty, and took his part in restoring quiet, order, and justice in the land. With the return of peace came also the arts of peace; the poet s song is heard. Olivier Basselin, whose verses were afterwards retouched and published by Jean de Houx, belongs to this period; now, too, comes Villon, the first of French poets, whose writings ring still with some of the misery of the past; and Alain Chartier follows a little later. The French crown, though it had beaten back the English, was still closely girt in with rival neighbours, the great dukes on every frontier. All round the east and north lay the lands of Philip of Burgundy; to the west was the duke of Brittany, cherishing a jealous independence; the royal dukes, Berri, Bourbon, Anjou, are all so many poten tial sources of danger and difficulty to the crown. The conditions of the nobility are altogether changed; the old barons have sunk into insignificance ; the struggle of the future will lie between the king s cousins and himself, rather than with the older lords. A few non-royal princes, such as Armagnac, or St Pol, or Brittany, remain, and will go down with the others; the "new men" of the day, the bastard Duuois or the constables Du Guesclin and Clisson, grow to greater prominence ; it is clear that the old feudalism is giving place to a newer order, in which the aristocracy, from the king s brothers downwards, will group themselves around the throne, and begin the process which reaches its unhappy perfection under Louis XIV. Directly after the expulsion of the English, troubles began between King Charles VII. and the dauphin Louis; the latter could not brook a quiet life in Dauphiny, and the king refused him that larger sphere in the government of Nor mandy which he coveted. Against his father s will, Louis married Charlotte of Savoy, daughter of his strongest neigh bour in Dauphiny ; suspicion and bad feeling grew strong between father and son ; Louis was specially afraid of his father s counsellors ; the king was specially afraid of his son s craftiness and ambition. It came to an open rupture, and Louis in 1456 fled to the court of Duke Philip of Burgundy. There he lived at refuge at Geneppe, meddling a good deal in Burgundian politics, and already opposing himself to his great rival Charles of Charolais, after wards Charles the Bold, the last duke of Burgundy. Bickerings, under his bad influence, took place between king and duke ; they never burst out into flame. So things went on uncomfortably enough, till Charles VII. died in 1461, and the reign of Louis XI. began.