From the battle of Agincourt (Oct. 1415) dates the second period of
Charles’s life. The English reader will remember the name of Orleans in
the play of _Henry V._; and it is at least odd that we can trace a
resemblance between the puppet and the original. The interjection, “I
have heard a sonnet begin so to one’s mistress” (Act iii. scene 7), may
very well indicate one who was already an expert in that sort of trifle;
and the game of proverbs he plays with the Constable in the same scene,
would be quite in character for a man who spent many years of his life
capping verses with his courtiers. Certainly, Charles was in the great
battle with five hundred lances (say, three thousand men), and there he
was made prisoner as he led the van. According to one story, some ragged
English archer shot him down; and some diligent English Pistol, hunting
ransoms on the field of battle, extracted him from under a heap of bodies
and retailed him to our King Henry. He was the most important capture of
the day, and used with all consideration. On the way to Calais, Henry
sent him a present of bread and wine (and bread, you will remember, was
an article of luxury in the English camp), but Charles would neither eat
nor drink. Thereupon, Henry came to visit him in his quarters. “Noble
cousin,” said he, “how are you?” Charles replied that he was well.
“Why, then, do you neither eat nor drink?” And then with some asperity,
as I imagine, the young duke told him that “truly he had no inclination
for food.” And our Henry improved the occasion with something of a
snuffle, assuring his prisoner that God had fought against the French on
account of their manifold sins and transgressions. Upon this there
supervened the agonies of a rough sea passage; and many French lords,
Charles, certainly, among the number, declared they would rather endure
such another defeat than such another sore trial on shipboard. Charles,
indeed, never forgot his sufferings. Long afterwards, he declared his
hatred to a seafaring life, and willingly yielded to England the empire
of the seas, “because there is danger and loss of life, and God knows
what pity when it storms; and sea-sickness is for many people hard to
bear; and the rough life that must be led is little suitable for the
nobility:” {253} which, of all babyish utterances that ever fell from any
public man, may surely bear the bell. Scarcely disembarked, he followed
his victor, with such wry face as we may fancy, through the streets of
holiday London. And then the doors closed upon his last day of garish
life for more than a quarter of a century. After a boyhood passed in the
dissipations of a luxurious court or in the camp of war, his ears still
stunned and his cheeks still burning from his enemies’ jubilations; out
of all this ringing of English bells and singing of English anthems, from
among all these shouting citizens in scarlet cloaks, and beautiful
virgins attired in white, he passed into the silence and solitude of a
political prison. {254}
His captivity was not without alleviations. He was allowed to go
hawking, and he found England an admirable country for the sport; he was
a favourite with English ladies, and admired their beauty; and he did not
lack for money, wine, or books; he was honourably imprisoned in the
strongholds of great nobles, in Windsor Castle and the Tower of London.
But when all is said, he was a prisoner for five-and-twenty years. For
five-and-twenty years he could not go where he would, or do what he
liked, or speak with any but his gaolers. We may talk very wisely of
alleviations; there is only one alleviation for which the man would thank
you: he would thank you to open the door. With what regret Scottish
James I. bethought him (in the next room perhaps to Charles) of the time
when he rose “as early as the day.” What would he not have given to wet
his boots once more with morning dew, and follow his vagrant fancy among
the meadows? The only alleviation to the misery of constraint lies in
the disposition of the prisoner. To each one this place of discipline
brings his own lesson. It stirs Latude or Baron Trenck into heroic
action; it is a hermitage for pious and conformable spirits. Béranger
tells us he found prison life, with its regular hours and long evenings,
both pleasant and profitable. _The Pilgrim’s Progress_ and _Don Quixote_
were begun in prison. It was after they were become (to use the words of
one of them), “Oh, worst imprisonment—the dungeon of themselves!” that
Homer and Milton worked so hard and so well for the profit of mankind.
In the year 1415 Henry V. had two distinguished prisoners, French Charles
of Orleans and Scottish James I., who whiled away the hours of their
captivity with rhyming. Indeed, there can be no better pastime for a
lonely man than the mechanical exercise of verse. Such intricate forms
as Charles had been used to from childhood, the ballade with its scanty
rhymes; the rondel, with the recurrence first of the whole, then of half
the burthen, in thirteen verses, seem to have been invented for the
prison and the sick bed. The common Scotch saying, on the sight of
anything operose and finical, “he must have had little to do that made
that!” might be put as epigraph on all the song books of old France.
Making such sorts of verse belongs to the same class of pleasures as
guessing acrostics or “burying proverbs.” It is almost purely formal,
almost purely verbal. It must be done gently and gingerly. It keeps the
mind occupied a long time, and never so intently as to be distressing;
for anything like strain is against the very nature of the craft.
Sometimes things go easily, the refrains fall into their place as if of
their own accord, and it becomes something of the nature of an
intellectual tennis; you must make your poem as the rhymes will go, just
as you must strike your ball as your adversary played it. So that these
forms are suitable rather for those who wish to make verses, than for
those who wish to express opinions. Sometimes, on the other hand,
difficulties arise: rival verses come into a man’s head, and fugitive
words elude his memory. Then it is that he enjoys at the same time the
deliberate pleasures of a connoisseur comparing wines, and the ardour of
the chase. He may have been sitting all day long in prison with folded
hands; but when he goes to bed, the retrospect will seem animated and
eventful.
Besides confirming himself as an habitual maker of verses, Charles
acquired some new opinions during his captivity. He was perpetually
reminded of the change that had befallen him. He found the climate of
England cold and “prejudicial to the human frame;” he had a great
contempt for English fruit and English beer; even the coal fires were
unpleasing in his eyes. {257a} He was rooted up from among his friends
and customs and the places that had known him. And so in this strange
land he began to learn the love of his own. Sad people all the world
over are like to be moved when the wind is in some particular quarter.
So Burns preferred when it was in the west, and blew to him from his
mistress; so the girl in the ballade, looking south to Yarrow, thought it
might carry a kiss betwixt her and her gallant; and so we find Charles
singing of the “pleasant wind that comes from France.” {257b} One day,
at “Dover-on-the-Sea,” he looked across the straits, and saw the
sandhills about Calais. And it happened to him, he tells us in a
ballade, to remember his happiness over there in the past; and he was
both sad and merry at the recollection, and could not have his fill of
gazing on the shores of France. {257c} Although guilty of unpatriotic
acts, he had never been exactly unpatriotic in feeling. But his sojourn
in England gave, for the time at least, some consistency to what had been
a very weak and ineffectual prejudice. He must have been under the
influence of more than usually solemn considerations, when he proceeded
to turn Henry’s puritanical homily after Agincourt into a ballade, and
reproach France, and himself by implication, with pride, gluttony,
idleness, unbridled covetousness, and sensuality. {258a} For the moment,
he must really have been thinking more of France than of Charles of
Orleans.
And another lesson he learned. He who was only to be released in case of
peace, begins to think upon the disadvantages of war. “Pray for peace,”
is his refrain: a strange enough subject for the ally of Bernard
d’Armagnac. {258b} But this lesson was plain and practical; it had one
side in particular that was specially attractive for Charles; and he did
not hesitate to explain it in so many words. “Everybody,” he writes—I
translate roughly—“everybody should be much inclined to peace, for
everybody has a deal to gain by it.” {258c}
Charles made laudable endeavours to acquire English, and even learned to
write a rondel in that tongue of quite average mediocrity. {259a} He was
for some time billeted on the unhappy Suffolk, who received fourteen
shillings and fourpence a day for his expenses; and from the fact that
Suffolk afterwards visited Charles in France while he was negotiating the
marriage of Henry VI., as well as the terms of that nobleman’s
impeachment, we may believe there was some not unkindly intercourse
between the prisoner and his gaoler: a fact of considerable interest when
we remember that Suffolk’s wife was the granddaughter of the poet
Geoffrey Chaucer. {259b} Apart from this, and a mere catalogue of dates
and places, only one thing seems evident in the story of Charles’s
captivity. It seems evident that, as these five-and-twenty years drew
on, he became less and less resigned. Circumstances were against the
growth of such a feeling. One after another of his fellow-prisoners was
ransomed and went home. More than once he was himself permitted to visit
France; where he worked on abortive treaties and showed himself more
eager for his own deliverance than for the profit of his native land.
Resignation may follow after a reasonable time upon despair; but if a man
is persecuted by a series of brief and irritating hopes, his mind no more
attains to a settled frame of resolution, than his eye would grow
familiar with a night of thunder and lightning. Years after, when he was
speaking at the trial of that Duke of Alençon, who began life so
hopefully as the boyish favourite of Joan of Arc, he sought to prove that
captivity was a harder punishment than death. “For I have had experience
myself,” he said; “and in my prison of England, for the weariness,
danger, and displeasure in which I then lay, I have many a time wished I
had been slain at the battle where they took me.” {260} This is a
flourish, if you will, but it is something more. His spirit would
sometimes rise up in a fine anger against the petty desires and
contrarieties of life. He would compare his own condition with the quiet
and dignified estate of the dead; and aspire to lie among his comrades on
the field of Agincourt, as the Psalmist prayed to have the wings of a
dove and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea. But such high thoughts
came to Charles only in a flash.
John the Fearless had been murdered in his turn on the bridge of
Montereau so far back as 1419. His son, Philip the Good—partly to
extinguish the feud, partly that he might do a popular action, and
partly, in view of his ambitious schemes, to detach another great vassal
from the throne of France—had taken up the cause of Charles of Orleans,
and negotiated diligently for his release. In 1433 a Burgundian embassy
was admitted to an interview with the captive duke, in the presence of
Suffolk. Charles shook hands most affectionately with the ambassadors.
They asked after his health. “I am well enough in body,” he replied,
“but far from well in mind. I am dying of grief at having to pass the
best days of my life in prison, with none to sympathise.” The talk
falling on the chances of peace, Charles referred to Suffolk if he were
not sincere and constant in his endeavours to bring it about. “If peace
depended on me,” he said, “I should procure it gladly, were it to cost me
my life seven days after.” We may take this as showing what a large
price he set, not so much on peace, as on seven days of freedom. Seven
days!—he would make them seven years in the employment. Finally, he
assured the ambassadors of his good will to Philip of Burgundy; squeezed
one of them by the hand and nipped him twice in the arm to signify things
unspeakable before Suffolk; and two days after sent them Suffolk’s
barber, one Jean Carnet, a native of Lille, to testify more freely of his
sentiments. “As I speak French,” said this emissary, “the Duke of
Orleans is more familiar with me than with any other of the household;
and I can bear witness he never said anything against Duke Philip.”
{262a} It will be remembered that this person, with whom he was so
anxious to stand well, was no other than his hereditary enemy, the son of
his father’s murderer. But the honest fellow bore no malice, indeed not
he. He began exchanging ballades with Philip, whom he apostrophises as
his companion, his cousin, and his brother. He assures him that, soul
and body, he is altogether Burgundian; and protests that he has given his
heart in pledge to him. Regarded as the history of a vendetta, it must
be owned that Charles’s life has points of some originality. And yet
there is an engaging frankness about these ballades which disarms
criticism. {262b} You see Charles throwing himself headforemost into the
trap; you hear Burgundy, in his answers begin to inspire him with his own
prejudices, and draw melancholy pictures of the misgovernment of France.
But Charles’s own spirits are so high and so amiable, and he is so
thoroughly convinced his cousin is a fine fellow, that one’s scruples are
carried away in the torrent of his happiness and gratitude. And his
would be a sordid spirit who would not clap hands at the consummation
(Nov. 1440); when Charles, after having sworn on the Sacrament that he
would never again bear arms against England, and pledged himself body and
soul to the unpatriotic faction in his own country, set out from London
with a light heart and a damaged integrity.
In the magnificent copy of Charles’s poems, given by our Henry VII. to
Elizabeth of York on the occasion of their marriage, a large illumination
figures at the head of one of the pages, which, in chronological
perspective, is almost a history of his imprisonment. It gives a view of
London with all its spires, the river passing through the old bridge and
busy with boats. One side of the White Tower has been taken out, and we
can see, as under a sort of shrine, the paved room where the duke sits
writing. He occupies a high-backed bench in front of a great chimney;
red and black ink are before him; and the upper end of the apartment is
guarded by many halberdiers, with the red cross of England on their
breast. On the next side of the tower he appears again, leaning out of
window and gazing on the river; doubtless there blows just then “a
pleasant wind from out the land of France,” and some ship comes up the
river: “the ship of good news.” At the door we find him yet again; this
time embracing a messenger, while a groom stands by holding two saddled
horses. And yet further to the left, a cavalcade defiles out of the
tower; the duke is on his way at last towards “the sunshine of France.”