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":[27] 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.[28]
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 jailers. 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. Beranger 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 Scots 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.[29] 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."[30] 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.[31] 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.[32] 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.[33] 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."[34]
Charles made laudable endeavours to acquire English, and even learned to
write a rondel in that tongue of quite average mediocrity.[35] 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 jailer: a fact of considerable interest
when we remember that Suffolk's wife was the grand-daughter of the poet
Geoffrey Chaucer.[36] 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 Alencon 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."[37] 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 any other of the
household; and I can bear witness he never said anything against Duke
Philip."[38] 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.[39] You see Charles throwing himself
head-foremost 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 farther to the left, a cavalcade defiles out
of the tower; the duke is on his way at last towards "the sunshine of
France."