bright and vigorous young man, eager to be stirring in the world, brave
and fearless, with a stern grasp of things beneath all,--a very
sheet-anchor of firmness and determined character. Almost at the very
opening of his reign, the moment he had secured his throne, he began a
negotiation with France which boded no good. He offered to marry
Catharine, the King’s third daughter, and therewith to renew the old
Treaty of Bretigny, if her dower were Normandy, Maine, Anjou, not without
a good sum of money. The French Court, on the other hand, offered him
her hand with Aquitaine and the money, an offer rejected instantly; and
Henry made ready for a rough wooing in arms. In 1415 he crossed to
Harfleur, and while parties still fought in France, after a long and
exhausting siege, took the place; thence he rode northward for Calais,
feeling his army too much reduced to attempt more. The Armagnacs, who
had gathered at Rouen, also pushed fast to the north, and having choice
of passage over the Somme, Amiens being in their hands, got before King
Henry, while he had to make a long round before he could get across that
stream. Consequently, when, on his way, he reached Azincourt, he found
the whole chivalry of France arrayed against him in his path. The great
battle of Azincourt followed, with frightful ruin and carnage of the
French. With a huge crowd of prisoners the young King passed on to
Calais, and thence to England. The Armagnacs’ party lay buried in the
hasty graves of Azincourt; never had there been such slaughter of nobles.
Still, for three years they made head against their foes; till in 1418
the Duke of Burgundy’s friends opened Paris’s gates to his soldiers, and
for the time the Armagnacs seemed to be completely defeated; only the
Dauphin Charles made feeble war from Poitiers. Henry V. with a fresh
army had already made another descent on the Normandy coast; the Dukes of
Anjou, Brittany, and Burgundy made several and independent treaties with
him; and it seemed as though France had completely fallen in pieces.
Henry took Rouen, and although the common peril had somewhat silenced the
strife of faction, no steps were taken to meet him or check his course;
on the contrary, matters were made even more hopeless by the murder of
John, Duke of Burgundy, in 1419, even as he was kneeling and offering
reconciliation at the young Dauphin’s feet. The young Duke, Philip, now
drew at once towards Henry, whom his father had apparently wished with
sincerity to check; Paris, too, was weary of the Armagnac struggle, and
desired to welcome Henry of England; the Queen of France also went over
to the Anglo-Burgundian side. The end of it was that on May 21,1420, was
signed the famous Treaty of Troyes, which secured the Crown of France to
Henry, by the exclusion of the Dauphin Charles, whenever poor mad Charles
VI., should cease to live. Meanwhile, Henry was made Regent of France,
promising to maintain all rights and privileges of the Parliament and
nobles, and to crush the Dauphin with his Armagnac friends, in token
whereof he was at once wedded to Catharine of France, and set forth to
quell the opposition of the provinces. By Christmas all France north of
the Loire was in English hands. All the lands to the south of the river
remained firmly fixed in their allegiance to the Dauphin and the
Armagnacs, and these began to feel themselves to be the true French
party, as opposed to the foreign rule of the English. For barely two
years that rule was carried on by Henry V. with inflexible justice, and
Northern France saw with amazement the presence of a real king, and an
orderly government. In 1422 King Henry died; a few weeks later Charles
VI. died also, and the face of affairs began to change, although, at the
first, Charles VII. the “Well-served,” the lazy, listless prince, seemed
to have little heart for the perils and efforts of his position. He was
proclaimed King at Mehun, in Berri, for the true France for the time lay
on that side of the Loire, and the Regent Bedford, who took the reins at
Paris, was a vigorous and powerful prince, who was not likely to give way
to an idle dreamer. At the outset Charles suffered two defeats, at
Crevant in 1423, and at Verneuil in 1424, and things seemed to be come to
their worst. Yet he was prudent, conciliatory, and willing to wait; and
as the English power in France--that triangle of which the base was the
sea-line from Harfleur to Calais, and the apex Paris--was unnatural and
far from being really strong; and as the relations between Bedford and
Burgundy might not always be friendly, the man who could wait had many
chances in his favour. Before long, things began to mend; Charles wedded
Marie d’Anjou, and won over that great house to the French side; more and
more was he regarded as the nation’s King; symptoms of a wish for
reconciliation with Burgundy appeared; the most vehement Armagnacs were
sent away from Court. Causes of disagreement also shook the friendship
between Burgundy and England.
Feeling the evils of inaction most, Bedford in 1428 decided on a forward
movement, and sent the Earl of Salisbury to the south. He first secured
his position on the north of the Loire, then, crossing that river, laid
siege to Orleans, the key to the south, and the last bulwark of the
national party. All efforts to vex or dislodge him failed; and the
attempt early in 1429 to stop the English supplies was completely
defeated at Bouvray; from the salt fish captured, the battle has taken
the name of “the Day of the Herrings.” Dunois, Bastard of Orleans, was,
wounded; the Scots, the King’s body-guard, on whom fell ever the grimmest
of the fighting, suffered terribly, and their leader was killed. All
went well for Bedford till it suited the Duke of Burgundy to withdraw
from his side, carrying with him a large part of the fighting power of
the besiegers. Things were already looking rather gloomy in the English
camp, when a new and unexpected rumour struck all hearts cold with fear.
A virgin, an Amazon, had been raised up as a deliverer for France, and
would soon be on them, armed with mysterious powers.
A young peasant girl, one Jeanne d’Arc, had been brought up in the
village of Domremy, hard by the Lorraine border. The district, always
French in feeling, had lately suffered much from Burgundian raids; and
this young damsel, brooding over the treatment of her village and her
country, and filled with that strange vision-power which is no rare
phenomenon in itself with young girls, came at last to believe with warm
and active faith in heavenly appearances and messages, all urging her to
deliver France and her King. From faith to action the bridge is short;
and ere long the young dreamer of seventeen set forth to work her
miracle. Her history is quite unique in the world; and though probably
France would ere many years have shaken off the English yoke, for its
strength was rapidly going, still to her is the credit of having proved
its weakness, and of having asserted the triumphant power of a great
belief. All gave way before her; Charles VII., persuaded doubtless by
his mother-in-law, Yolande of Aragon, who warmly espoused her cause,
listened readily to the maiden’s voice; and as that voice urged only what
was noble and pure, she carried conviction as she went. In the end she
received the King’s commission to undertake the relief of Orleans. Her
coming was fresh blood to the defence; a new spirit seemed to be poured
out on all her followers, and in like manner a deep dejection settled
down on the English. The blockade was forced, and, in eight days the
besiegers raised the siege and marched away. They withdrew to Jargeau,
where they were attacked and routed with great loss. A little later
Talbot himself, who had marched to help them, was also defeated and
taken. Then, compelling Charles to come out from his in glorious ease,
she carried him triumphantly with her to Rheims, where he was duly
crowned King, the Maid of Orldans standing by, and holding aloft the
royal standard. She would gladly have gone home to Domremy now, her
mission being accomplished; for she was entirely free from all ambitious
or secondary aims. But she was too great a power to be spared. Northern
France was still in English hands, and till the English were cast out her
work was not complete; so they made her stay, sweet child, to do the work
which, had there been any manliness in them, they ought to have found it
easy to achieve for themselves. The dread of her went before her,--a
pillar of cloud and darkness to the English, but light and hope to her
countrymen. Men believed that she was called of God to regenerate the
world, to destroy the Saracen at last, to bring in the millennial age.
Her statue was set up in the churches, and crowds prayed before her image
as before a popular saint.
The incapacity and ill-faith of those round the King gave the English
some time to recover themselves; Bedford and Burgundy drew together
again, and steps were taken to secure Paris. When, however, Jeanne,
weary of courtly delays, marched, contemptuous of the King, as far as St.
Denis, friends sprang up on every side. In Normandy, on the English line
of communications, four strong places were surprised; and Bedford, made
timid as to his supplies, fell back to Rouen, leaving only a small
garrison in Paris. Jeanne, ill-supported by the royal troops, failed in
her attack on the city walls, and was made prisoner by the Burgundians;
they handed her over to the English, and she was, after previous
indignities, and such treatment as chivalry alone could have dealt her,
condemned as a witch, and burnt as a relapsed heretic at Rouen in 1431.
Betrayed by the French Court, sold by the Burgundians, murdered by the
English, unrescued by the people of France which she so much loved,
Jeanne d’Arc died the martyr’s death, a pious, simple soul, a heroine of
the purest metal. She saved her country, for the English power never
recovered from the shock. The churchmen who burnt her, the Frenchmen of
the unpatriotic party, would have been amazed could they have foreseen
that nearly 450 years afterwards, churchmen again would glorify her name
as the saint of the Church, in opposition to both the religious liberties
and the national feelings of her country.
The war, after having greatly weakened the noblesse, and having caused
infinite sufferings to France, now drew towards a close; the Duke of
Burgundy at last agreed to abandon his English allies, and at a great
congress at Arras, in 1435, signed a treaty with Charles VII. by which
he solemnly came over to the French side. On condition that he should
get Auxerre and Macon, as well as the towns on and near the river Somme,
he was willing to recognise Charles as King of France. His price was
high, yet it was worth all that was given; for, after all, he was of the
French blood royal, and not a foreigner. The death of Bedford, which
took place about the same time, was almost a more terrible blow to the
fortunes of the English. Paris opened her gates to her King in April,
1436; the long war kept on with slight movements now and then for several
years.
The next year was marked by the meeting of the States General, and the
establishment, in principle at least, of a standing army. The Estates
petitioned the willing King that the system of finance in the realm
should be remodelled, and a permanent tax established for the support of
an army. Thus, it was thought, solidity would be given to the royal
power, and the long-standing curse of the freebooters and brigands
cleared away. No sooner was this done than the nobles began to chafe
under it; they scented in the air the coming troubles; they, took as
their head, poor innocents, the young Dauphin Louis, who was willing
enough to resist the concentration of power in royal hands. Their
champion of 1439, the leader of the “Praguerie,” as this new league was
called, in imitation, it is said, of the Hussite movement at Prague, the
enthusiastic defender of noble privilege against the royal power, was the
man who afterwards, as Louis XI., was the destroyer of the noblesse on
behalf of royalty. Some of the nobles stood firmly by the King, and,
aided by them and by an army of paid soldiers serving under the new
conditions, Charles VII., no contemptible antagonist when once aroused,
attacked and overthrew the Praguerie; the cities and the country people
would have none of it; they preferred peace under a king’s strong hand.
Louis was sent down to the east to govern Dauphiny; the lessons of the
civil war were not lost on Charles; he crushed the freebooters of
Champagne, drove the English out of Pontois in 1441, moved actively up
and down 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 repulsed the English at
Dieppe, and put down the Comte d’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 St. Jacob the attack of
several thousand Frenchmen, fighting stubbornly till they all perished.
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. The Dauphin, discontented 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; he 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 five
thousand men to recover the south, the old English feeling revived, for
England was their best customer, 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
organisation; and all that remained to England across the Channel was
Calais, with Havre and Guines Castle. Her foreign ambitions and
struggles over, England was left to consume herself 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.
With the end of the English wars new life began to gleam out on France;
the people grew more tranquil, finding that 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.
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 potential 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 Saint-Pol, or Brittany, remain and will go down with the
others; the “new men” of the day, the bastard Dunois 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 Normandy which he coveted. Against his father’s will,
Louis married Charlotte of Savoy, daughter of his strongest neighbour 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, afterwards 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.
Between father and son what contrast could be greater? Charles VII.,
“the Well-served,” so easygoing, so open and free from guile; Louis XI.,
so shy of counsellors, so energetic and untiring, so close and guileful.
History does but apologise for Charles, and even when she fears and
dislikes Louis, she cannot forbear to wonder and admire. And yet Louis
enslaved his country, while Charles had seen it rescued from foreign
rule; Charles restored something of its prosperity, while Louis spent his
life in crushing its institutions and in destroying its elements of
independence. A great and terrible prince, Louis XI. failed in having
little or no constructive power; he was strong to throw down the older
society, he built little in its room. Most serious of all was his action
with respect to the district of the River Somme, at that time the
northern frontier of France. The towns there had been handed over to
Philip of Burgundy by the Treaty of Arras, with a stipulation that the
Crown might ransom them at any time, and this Louis succeeded in doing in
1463. The act was quite blameless and patriotic in itself, yet it was
exceedingly unwise, for it thoroughly alienated Charles the Bold, and led
to the wars of the earlier period of the reign. Lastly, as if he had not
done enough to offend the nobles, Louis in 1464 attacked their hunting
rights, touching them in their tenderest part. No wonder that this year
saw the formation of a great league against him, and the outbreak of a
dangerous civil war. The “League of the Public Weal” was nominally
headed by his own brother Charles, heir to the throne; it was joined by
Charles of Charolais, who had completely taken the command of affairs in
the Burgundian territories, his father the old duke being too feeble to
withstand him; the Dukes of Brittany, Nemours, Bourbon, John of Anjou,
Duke of Calabria, the Comte d’Armagnac, the aged Dunois, and a host of
other princes and nobles flocked in; and the King had scarcely any forces
at his back with which to withstand them. His plans for the campaign
against the league were admirable, though they were frustrated by the bad
faith of his captains, who mostly sympathised with this outbreak of the
feudal nobility. Louis himself marched southward to quell the Duc de
Bourbon and his friends, and returning from that task, only half done for
lack of time, he found that Charles of Charolais had passed by Paris,
which was faithful to the King, and was coming down southwards, intending
to join the Dukes of Berri and Brittany, who were on their way towards
the capital. The hostile armies met at Montleheri on the Orleans road;
and after a strange battle--minutely described by Commines--a battle in
which both sides ran away, and neither ventured at first to claim a
victory, the King withdrew to Corbeil, and then marched into Paris
(1465). There the armies of the league closed in on him; and after a
siege of several weeks, Louis, feeling disaffection all around him, and
doubtful how long Paris herself would bear for him the burdens of
blockade, signed the Peace of Conflans, which, to all appearances,
secured the complete victory to the noblesse, “each man carrying off his
piece.” Instantly the contented princes broke up their half-starved
armies and went home, leaving Louis behind to plot and contrive against
them, a far wiser man, thanks to the lesson they had taught him. They
did not let him wait long for a chance. The Treaty of Conflans had given
the duchy of Normandy to the King’s brother Charles; he speedily
quarrelled with his neighbour, the Duke of Brittany, and Louis came down
at once into Normandy, which threw itself into his arms, and the whole
work of the league was broken up. The Comte de Charolais, occupied with
revolts at Dinan and Liege, could not interfere, and presently his
father, the old Duke Philip, died (1467), leaving to him the vast
lordships of the House of Burgundy.
And now the “imperial dreamer,” Charles the Bold, was brought into
immediate rivalry with that royal trickster, the “universal spider,”
Louis XI. Charles was by far the nobler spirit of the two: his vigour
and intelligence, his industry and wish to raise all around him to a
higher cultivation, his wise reforms at home, and attempts to render his
father’s dissolute and careless rule into a well-ordered lordship, all
these things marked him out as the leading spirit of the time. His
territories were partly held under France, partly under the empire: the
Artois district, which also may be taken to include the Somme towns, the
county of Rhetel, the duchy of Bar, the duchy of Burgundy, with Auxerre
and Nevers, were feudally in France; the rest of his lands under the
empire. He had, therefore, interests and means of interference on either
hand; and it is clear that Charles set before himself two different lines
of policy, according as he looked one way or the other.
At the time of Duke Philip’s death a new league had been formed against
Louis, embracing the King of England, Edward IV., the Dukes of Burgundy
and Brittany, and the Kings of Aragon and Castile. Louis strained every
nerve, he conciliated Paris, struck hard at disaffected partisans, and in
1468 convoked the States General at Tours. The three Estates were asked
to give an opinion as to the power of the Crown to alienate Normandy, the
step insisted upon by the Duke of Burgundy. Their reply was to the
effect that the nation forbids the Crown to dismember the realm; they
supported their opinion by liberal promises of help. Thus fortified by
the sympathy of his people, Louis began to break up the coalition. He
made terms with the Duc de Bourbon and the House of Anjou; his brother
Charles was a cipher; the King of England was paralysed by the antagonism
of Warwick; he attacked and reduced Brittany; Burgundy, the most
formidable, alone remained to be dealt with. How should he meet him?--by
war or by negotiation? His Court was divided in opinion; the King
decided for himself in favour of the way of negotiation, and came to the
astonishing conclusion that he would go and meet the Duke and win him
over to friendship. He miscalculated both his own powers of persuasion
and the force of his antagonist’s temper. The interview of Peronne
followed; Charles held his visitor as a captive, and in the end compelled
him to sign a treaty, of peace, on the basis of that of Conflans, which
had closed the War of the Public Weal. And as if this were not
sufficient humiliation, Charles made the King accompany him on his
expedition to punish the men of Liege, who, trusting to the help of
Louis, had again revolted (1469). This done, he allowed the degraded
monarch to return home to Paris. An assembly of notables of Tours
speedily declared the Treaty of Perrone null, and the King made some
small frontier war on the Duke, which was ended by a truce at Amiens, in
1471. The truce was spent in preparation for a fresh struggle, which
Louis, to whom time was everything, succeeded in deferring from point to
point, till the death of his brother Charles, now Duc de Guienne, in
1472, broke up the formidable combination. Charles the Bold at once
broke truce and made war on the King, marching into northern France,
sacking towns and ravaging the country, till he reached Beauvais. There
the despair of the citizens and the bravery of the women saved the town.
Charles raised the siege and marched on Rouen, hoping to meet the Duke of
Brittany; but that Prince had his hands full, for Louis had overrun his
territories, and had reduced him to terms. The Duke of Burgundy saw that
the coalition had completely failed; he too made fresh truce with Louis
at Senlis (1472), and only, deferred, he no doubt thought, the direct
attack on his dangerous rival. Henceforth Charles the Bold turned his
attention mainly to the east, and Louis gladly saw him go forth to spend
his strength on distant ventures; saw the interview at Treves with the
Emperor Frederick III., at which the Duke’s plans were foiled by the
suspicions of the Germans and the King’s intrigues; saw the long siege of
the Neusz wearing out his power; bought off the hostility of Edward IV.
of England, who had undertaken to march on Paris; saw Charles embark on
his Swiss enterprise; saw the subjugation of Lorraine and capture of
Nancy (1475), the battle of Granson, the still more fatal defeat of Morat
(1476), and lastly the final struggle of Nancy, and the Duke’s death on
the field (January, 1477).
While Duke Charles had thus been running on his fate, Louis XI. had
actively attacked the larger nobles of France, and had either reduced
them to submission or had destroyed them.