Lady Venus fills the throne, thy Court, by day and night, is the scene
of debauch and drunkenness. Dissolute dances do honour to the goddess.
Frequent bathing enervates your bodies. Fringes to your sleeves, and
long sleeves to your garments; yet are ye clothed upon with the sighs
and tears of the poorest of your people. Your hearts are corrupt and
your minds are all unmoved: _Domina Venus solium occupat_.”
There was a flutter of indignation in the Court. The monk’s sermon was
reported to the King, but to the surprise of all, Charles answered that
he was glad of it. On Whit-Sunday Legrand was commanded to preach again,
and in the royal presence. The monk repeated his sermon, but with larger
reference to a certain noble duke, “once good and dear, but hated now
for his oppression and his vice.” The King left his chair and sat down
face to face with the monk, listening earnestly, who can tell with what
cruel suspicions, what resolutions for inquiry and reform, in his dim
and altered mind. When the sermon was over, the King spoke to Legrand
for some moments. He thanked him earnestly.
Charles was deeply impressed with the words of the Augustine friar.
Struggling against continual relapses, he made a brave effort to do the
best he could for his disordered kingdom. When Orleans asked for the
government of Normandy, for the first time he was refused. Another day
the poor King called the Dauphin to him. “How long, my lad, is it since
your mother kissed you?”
“Three months,” the boy replied.
The King was much affected. His children were evidently pinched,
neglected, uncared for. He called the boy’s nurse to him, and gave her a
gold cup. “Look after my son when I am ill. If God grant me life I will
reward you later.”
This was in July, 1405. Burgundy was absent on his own estates. The King
wrote to him and implored him to return to Paris.
Orleans and the Queen were at St. Germains. They paid no heed to any
warning. On the 13th of July there was a fearful storm; torrents of
rain, eddies of wind. The Queen and Orleans were riding in the forest
when they were overtaken by the tempest. The Duke took refuge in the
Queen’s litter, but the frightened horses nearly drowned them in the
Seine. The people declared that it was the judgment of heaven upon
tyrants, and Orleans himself appeared impressed. He sent a herald to
Paris, and proclaimed that whosoever of his creditors should come on
Sunday next to the Hôtel de Behaigne should have his debt discharged in
full. On Sunday the halls and anterooms of the ducal palace were crowded
with eager burghers. Many, tired and anxious, had travelled from the
provinces. The Duke’s stewards laughed in their face and shut the doors.
This was the final touch to the exasperation of the people.
All this while Jean-sans-Peur was travelling to Paris. He came at the
head of six thousand men-at-arms. The King was mad again, and could not
support him; but none the less the Queen and Orleans feared an
insurrection in Burgundy’s favour. They decided to flee secretly away
into Luxembourg with the royal children. Valentine was with them; and
they had got as far as Pouilly when the troops of Burgundy suddenly
surrounded the litter of the Dauphin, some hours’ journey to the rear.
The boy was delighted; he embraced his father-in-law, and was carried in
triumph back to Paris. Isabel, with Valentine and Orleans, fled to the
Castle of Melun. Civil war seemed eminent; but when the two armies were
actually in the field, peace was arranged, and on the 15th of October
the Queen and Orleans re-entered Paris.
Orleans had learned nothing by his lesson. He was more than ever
arrogant, more than ever secure in his tyranny. Early in the next year
his young son Charles was married to the King’s daughter Isabel, the
widowed Queen of England, a girl of sixteen. In the first months of 1407
the King gave his brother the rich duchy of Aquitaine. Orleans began to
think again of the governorship of Normandy. He was richer and stronger
than the King.
And yet, if Valentine, if Orleans, had really read the future as the
people thought they did, or had they even cared to read the present,
they might well have paused. In that age the fate of tyrants was not
prosperous. The King of England was a leper. The King of France was mad.
The little Duke of Milan was mad also, with a furious Italian hemomania.
The King of Scotland was a prisoner in the hands of his enemies. There
were two Popes, things for scorn and laughter, held in derision of all
nations, and a song to the people all day long.
Already, in 1380, Miles de Dormans, Chancellor of France, had declared
“A government has no force save in the obedience of the people, for
kings only rule by the suffrage of their subjects: _Nam et si centies
negent, reges regnant suffragio populorum_.”
The judgment of heaven, the liberties of man, seemed to conspire alike
against the rule of tyrants.
XI.
Notwithstanding his deceptions in the affair of Genoa, and in spite of
his supremacy in France, Orleans still cherished designs on Lombardy;
and perhaps the chief cause why his Italian enterprises are less
noticeable in the fifteenth than in the seventeenth century is due, not
so much to his engrossment with affairs at home, as to the fact that in
Benedict XIII. he found an ally infinitely less subtle and less
brilliant than he had known in Clement VII. Benedict was little more
than a captive in the hands of Orleans;[41] Clement had been an
accomplice.
Footnote 41:
“Arch. Nat.” Carton K. 55, No. 10: “Lettres par les-quelles le Roi
commect la garde du Pape Bénoist 13 au Duc d’Orléans, au-quel il donne
cent hommes de sa garde. No 14 bis: Lettres du Roy Charles VI.
déclaratrices que loin de tenir le Pape Bénoist XIII. prisonnier, il
l’a pris sur sa sauve garde et que pour plus grande sûreté de sa
personne et de ses biens il a établi son frère le Duc d’Orléans pour
en avoir garde.”
A greater than Clement failed him a little later. In the autumn of 1402,
in the very flush and zenith of victory, Giangaleazzo Visconti died. A
score of his captains soon were fighting for his kingdom. That vast
territory, whose coherence existed only in the brain of one man, fell
rapidly into fragments: city after city threw off the unwilling yoke of
union, and what had almost begun to be a national Italy reverted in a
few weeks to the old conditions of fragmentary independence. His two
sons ruled in a narrowed Lombardy, and with no vista, as it seemed, on
the ambitions of their father. In the very same year that the great
Visconti died, Charles VI. sent to Genoa a small, restless, quixotic man
of much ability, who to some extent filled the empty place of the dead
Giangaleazzo. But if Marshal Boucicaut had much of the ambition, and all
the audacity of the late Duke of Milan, he possessed nothing of his slow
wise mind, of the deep and subtle duplicity that Machiavelli may have
envied, or of the powers of combination, the cool tenacity to a grand
idea, which foreshadowed the genius of another North Italian, Count
Cavour. Moreover, while such share as Visconti meant to allow the French
in Italy was destined by him for his son-in-law of Orleans, Boucicaut
worked for the King. Thus, for the second time in his experience, the
Frenchman found his greatest rival in France.
Of the two legitimate sons of the great Duke of Milan—one was a handsome
young Nero, blood-mad, inept, given over to passion and cruelty; the
other an astute child, timid, unscrupulous, who later should develop a
trace of the genius of his father. At first their hold on their
inheritance was so slight that Orleans determined on invading Lombardy,
whether to defend or to supplant his nephews, who shall say? In October,
1403, he started for Lombardy, accompanied by 13 knights-banneret, 43
knights, 212 squires, 28 archers, 20 crossbow-men, and other
soldiers.[43] On the way south he passed by Beaucaire, and had an
interview with his charge, the Antipope Benedict. He took into his
service the famous captain of adventure, Bernardon de Serres. He made
friends with another mighty captain—an ancient enemy—the Count of
Armagnac.[42] Vast and serious appeared his project of invasion, but, on
the very verge of the Alps, suddenly, on January, 1404, he abandoned the
prosperous enterprise, turned right about, and faced home for Paris.
Footnote 42:
Communicated by Comte Albert de Circourt from transcripts in his
possession.
Footnote 43:
See M. Paul Durrieu, “Les Gascons en Italie,” p. 214.
What is the meaning of this sudden change of course, unexplained, and
perhaps inexplicable? What was the object of the Lombard invasion? What
was the cause which so unexpectedly suppressed it? Orleans believed
himself to have a certain claim on Pisa, bequeathed by the great
Visconti to his bastard son Gabriello-Maria. Gabriello Visconti was ill
at ease in Pisa. A little later, in 1404, as we know, he offered his
unruly city first to France, then to Florence. It is possible—it is even
from the nature of things a necessary hypothesis—to suppose that in 1403
Gabriello had come to terms with Orleans, and that the rights on Pisa
which Orleans vaunted as his own through Valentine Visconti were
supported by some cession of the actual lord, her half-brother. But
Orleans was not the only Frenchman capable of adventure and practice in
Italy. By the time his army reached the frontier he found himself
outwitted by a higher bidder, nearer at hand.
Jehan le Meingre, Marshal Boucicaut, Governor of Genoa, had intrigued
with Gabriello and procured the city of Pisa for the King. A few months
later, on the 15th of April, 1404,[44] a deed was drawn up declaring
Pisa henceforth a fief of France.
Footnote 44:
Dumont, Corps Diplomatique. II. ccxvii. and ccxxxi.
At the first word of the matter Orleans had turned his back on his
contemplated campaign and marched back to Paris, fury in his heart.
Probably behind the interference of Boucicaut he divined the inspiration
of Burgundy, his enemy;—Burgundy who, as events should prove, had
unsuspected designs of his own upon the State of Pisa. Back in wrath
marched Orleans: stalked indignant into Paris his men at his heels:
found the King in his senses, and docile as was his wont. From him, on
the 24th of May, Orleans extracted the deed which we append,[45] a deed
that repudiates the action of Boucicaut, and transfers all the rights of
France in Pisa to Orleans, who henceforth shall meet with neither let
nor hindrance in his projects.
Footnote 45:
Avd Nat. K. 55, No. 11, bis July 26, 1404. À tous ceulx qui ces
présentes lettres verront, Guilles, Seigneur de Tignonville,
chevalier, conseiller, chamberlain du Roy nostre seigneur et garde de
la prévosté de Paris, Salut! Savoir faisons que nous l’an de grace
1404, ce Mercredi 26 jour du mois de Juillet, vismes une lettre du Roy
nostre seigneur scellée de son grant scel sur double couronne, des
quelles la teneur s’ensuit:
Charles par la grace de Dieu Roy de France, à tous ceulx qui ces
lettres verront, Salut! Savoir faisons que après la supplication et
requeste à nous faictes par nostre très-cher et très-amé frère Loys
Duc d’Orléans, contenant que comme à cause de nostre très chère et
très amée soeur, sa femme, fille du feu nostre oncle le Duc de Milan,
plusieurs villes terres et seigneuries situées es parties d’Italie et
de Lombardie, entre lesquelles est et doit estre la ville et cité de
Pise avec toutes ses appartenances, la seigneurie de laquelle nostre
dit frère dit estre et appartenir au dit feu Duc de Milan auparavant
qu’il alla de vie à tres-passement appartiennent et doivent appartenir
à iceluy nostre très-cher frère. Il nous a exposé et il ait entendu de
nouvel que la dicte ville et cité de Pise et aucuns chasteaulx
appartenant d’icelle, par certains moyens sont à nous acquis et venues
en nostre main. Et ont été bailliz pour nous par nostre très-féal
Chevalier Chambellan et conseiller Jehan le Meingre dit Boucicaut,
Maréschal de France, et Gouverneur pour nous de nostre cité et
seigneurie de Jennes, pour quoy il nous a requis en tout le droit que
nous avons et pouvons avoir de la dicte ville et cité de Pise et ès
aultres cités et appartenances qui furent au dit Seigneur de Milan,
nous veuillons bailler et délaisser. Et tout empeschement mis de par
nous en la dicte ville et cité de Pise et ès dictes chateaulx et
aultres appartenances d’icelles, veuillons faire oster et cesser, sans
y plus procéder, ny faire procéder, en sa préjudice. Nous voulons
toujours condescendre au justes requestes de nostre-dit frère, comme
raison est. Qui avons baillie et délaissié de une certaine science par
ces présentes tout le droit et seigneurie par nous acquis de nouvel et
que nous avons et pouvons avoir en dicte ville et cité de Pise et ès
aultres chasteaulx et appartenances d’iceulx. Et voulons et ordonnons
par ces présentes que l’empeschement mis par et en nostre nom en la
dicte ville, cité et Seigneurie de Pise et ès chateaulx et aultres
appartenances d’icelles, soit osté. Si donnons en mandement par ces
présentes et envoyons très-expressement au dit gouverneur de nostre
dicte cité de Jeunes et à tous nos aultres justiciers et conseillers
ou à leurs lieutenants et à chaseur d’eulx, si que di luy appendra,
que de nostre bailli et délaissements dessus ditz faient, sueffrent et
laissent jouer et user paisiblement nostre diet frère. En mectant au
délivrement de luy ou à ses ditz gens officiers commis et députés de
par lui tous les ditz droit et seigneurie par nous acquis de nouvel ès
ditz ville cité et chasteaul dessus ditz. Et en ostant tout
l’empeschement qui en iceulx a esté mis de nostre part. En tesmoing de
ce nous avons fait mettre à ces lettres nostre scel. Donné a Paris le
24 jour de May l’an de grace mil quatre ans et quatre et le 24 de
nostre règne. Aussi signées par le Roy en son rayson. Messigneurs les
Ducs de Berry et de Bourbon, le Connestable, le Comte de Tancarville,
le grand maistre d’ostel et aultres.
Et nous a ce présent transcript in tesmoing de ce que usismes le scel
de la dicte prévosté de Paris l’an et jour dessus promis et dietz.
Manessier.
The deed was granted in Council, the King being then in his senses, and
assisted by Berri, Bourbon, Tancarville, and others. The reader will
remark the noteworthy absence of Burgundy. He will remember also that
Berry, in 1405, will join Orleans in a defensive league against
Jean-sans-Peur. It is possible that Burgundy knew nothing of the deed
drawn up behind his back.
But it was too late for Orleans to profit by the King’s good-will. The
Florentines were in Pisa, and an invasion against so powerful an enemy
could not be undertaken.
For a moment Orleans was obliged to pause in his Italian policy—to pause
only, not to abandon it, since in 1406[48] he still reclaimed authority
on Pisa, and in the very year of his death was taking an active part in
the affairs of Lombardy.[47] That pause was filled in a manner
disastrous, fatal, yet natural enough in a man suffocating under a sense
of bitter indignation and revolt. Burgundy had interfered with Orleans
abroad. Very well; Orleans would interfere with Burgundy at home.
Already the first steps were taken. In 1401, Orleans had married his
cousin Mary Harcourt to the Duke of Gueldres, the enemy and the
neighbour of Burgundy, with whom his rival now concluded an alliance and
a league. In 1402, Orleans purchased from the King of the Romans the
Duchy of Luxembourg. In 1405,[46] he assembled at Melun the entire
strength of his faction, sending even to Asti for the Governor and his
men. In 1405 also he allied himself with Berri and the Queen against
Jean-sans-Peur. With the Court on one hand, and on the other Gueldres,
the most reckless captain of his age;—with an army at his heels, and
(through the county of Soissons, and down the banks of the Oise and the
Marne), an uninterrupted passage through his own possessions into his
new Duchy of Luxembourg: Orleans was a deadly enemy to Burgundy. A
glance at the map will show the reader how, like a wedge or like a
rivet, Luxembourg must split apart or hold together the domains of the
Netherlands and the provinces of Franche Comté and Burgundy. In the
hands of Orleans, Luxembourg was a wedge; and the domains of Burgundy
were no longer a compact and formidable territory, but two
principalities with Brussels for the capital of the one, and Dijon for
the capital of the other. Should Orleans march an army into Luxembourg,
should Gueldres come to his aid with an armed force, the suppression of
the Dukedom of Burgundy would fall within the range of practical
politics.
Footnote 46:
A strange document in the Carton K. 55 Arch. Nat., under date July 27,
1406, in the form of a letter from the King in Council (Tancarville
“et autres” being present), notifies that that day the King has
received conjointly the Dukes of Burgundy and Orleans, who have made
him their united homage for Pisa. In 1407 the Signory of Florence,
having taken Pisa (a French fief), sent to the King, Orleans, and
Burgundy to justify their conduct. Orleans seized the Florentine
ambassadors and cast them into prison—a high-handed proceeding which
he probably considered warranted by his position as suzerain of the
captive city. In so doing Orleans probably meant to underline the fact
that _he_, not the King or Burgundy, was lord of Pisa, though all had
claims to suzerainty. There is a long correspondence on this subject
(Archives of Florence, filza xviii. della Signoria. Cancelleria 27).
Footnote 47:
It is in 1407 that the Italian projects of Orleans appear in vigorous
renascence. On the 6th of October he proclaimed himself Protector of
his nephews, Giovanni Maria, Duke of Milan, and Filippo Maria, Count
of Pavia, “frères de Dame Valentine épouse du Duc” (Arch. Nat. K. 56,
No. 16). He made the Governor of Asti their guardian, and appeared to
meditate an armed intervention. Was this conduct purely and merely
disinterested? Did Orleans in October at Beauté-sur-Marne contemplate
a great French protectorate in Lombardy of which he should be the soul
and centre? A month later a tragic silence suddenly interrupted any
answer to these questions.
Footnote 48:
See “Arch. Nat.” K K. 267 fo. 97. Also the chapter on Bernardon de
Serres in M. Paul Durrieu’s valuable work, “Les Gascons en Italie.”
Henceforth, between these two princes the struggle for power should take
on a new character and become the very struggle for existence. And while
the people, abject, all in tears, prayed to Heaven: “Jesu Christ, send
thou some man to deliver us from Orleans,” the hero of the people,
Jean-sans-Peur the Belovèd, was urged by every motive of self-interest,
every instinct of self-preservation, and with the assurance of popular
immunity, to interrupt for ever the fatal progress of the tyrant.
XII.
One Wednesday evening—it was St. Clement’s day, the 23rd of November,
1407—Orleans was supping with the Queen. Isabel was ill and dispirited.
Ten days ago her new-born baby had died at its birth, and she sorrowed
for this child and loved it as she had never loved her other children.
Isabel was away from her husband in her new Hôtel de Montaigu, near the
Porte Barbette. It was here that Orleans came every day to see her, and
here they “supped right joyously together,” says the Monk of St. Denis.
Orleans had been ill all autumn at his Castle of Beauté, and had only
recently come back to Paris. Valentine, with her four children and the
Princess Isabel, was still in the country.
As these two persons, both ill, both weary, forgot their troubles for a
while in each other’s company, a page came to the door with a feigned
message: the King earnestly beseeched his brother to come and see him at
the palace of St. Paul. Orleans arose at once and left the Queen. He had
at least six hundred men of his own lodged that day in Paris, as
Monstrelet informs us. Orleans, however, took none of them with him. He
leapt on his mule and rode away with two squires on horseback at his
side. Two or three footmen with torches ran after him. No gentleman
could go more simply than the King’s brother in his plain suit of black
damask, riding with no more than five attendants, quickly and gaily down
the frosty street. It was the coldest winter ever known, and muffled in
their cloaks the little party rode briskly ahead, looking neither to the
right or left. Orleans was singing softly to himself and playing with
one of his gloves. He feared no enemies. Last Sunday he had taken the
Sacrament with Burgundy, and yesterday they two had dined together.
It was eight o’clock. All was dark and silent in the Rue Vieille du
Temple, then an outlying and quiet district. Orleans and his two squires
rode along so fast that the runners with the torches were left some way
behind. At last they came to a wider place in the street where there was
a well. As the three horsemen passed the Hôtel de l’Image de Notre-Dame,
seventeen or eighteen men sprang suddenly out of the shadow of the
house. One with an axe chopped off the bridle hand of Orleans. The
King’s brother gave a cry of surprise and pain. “I am the Duke of
Orleans!” “It is he we seek.”
In another moment the Duke was beaten off his mule on to the frozen
paving-stones. Seventeen axes were aimed at him; blow after blow fell
heavily; his head was cloven, his brains gushed out into the street. His
servants had all fled and left him there, save one of his squires who
had been his page (a German, says Monstrelet; a Fleming, says the Monk),
who, more constant than Orleans’ compatriots, flung himself upon the
body of his master, and was pierced and slaughtered there. When both
were murdered the assassins dragged the body of Orleans across the
street, propped it up against a heap of mud that was standing frozen
there, and lighting a torch of straw, they looked to see if he were
really dead. A woman, a cobbler’s wife, looking from a garret window,
saw it all, and set up a shriek of “Murder, murder!” “Peace, harlot,”
cried the armed men in the street, and began to shoot their arrows at
the open casement. At that moment a man with a scarlet hood drawn well
over his face, came out of the house opposite, and struck the dead body
with his club. “Put out the light. He’s dead. Let us go.” The eighteen
assassins rode away in great merriment, sowing caltrops after them; but
before they left they set fire to the house where, for the last
fortnight, Jean-sans-Peur had kept them hidden. The flames of the
burning Hôtel de l’Image streamed up through the darkness of the night,
awakening the city, and shedding a strange light on the murdered body of
Orleans, still propped up in a sitting posture, his wounded head hanging
on one side. Just then a nephew of Maréchal de Rieulx, whose great Hôtel
stood opposite, a young man, one of Orleans’ squires, rode up as he left
his uncle’s house, and saw his master sitting thus dead, the left hand
off, the right arm hanging by a thread. A little distance off, on the
stones of the street, lay the page, dying in his faithful youth,
murmuring still in his German language, “Ach, my master!” At his side,
on the ground, was a white hand severed from the wrist. Close by there
lay a fallen glove. The young squire gave the alarm and the dead bodies
were carried into the Hôtel de Rieulx.
There was wailing and mourning in the house of Orleans, grief and horror
in the house of the King. The deed was soon known, though as yet it was
only surmised that one Raoul d’Actonville, a dismissed steward, had
wreaked in this ghastly fashion his spite against his master. The next
day the royal princes, all in black, with a great multitude of the
people of Paris, brought the murdered Duke to the church of St.
Guillaume, close at hand. He who had ever loved the good through all his
wickedness, lay now among the watching friars, who sang psalms and
repeated vigils day and night for his soul; there he lay until they took
him to be buried in his own chapel of the Celestines, which is called
the Blancs-Manteaux to-day. The people followed him with torches,
remembering only his gay and gracious qualities, his capricious
generosity, his gentle raillery, his rhetoric and eloquence, how he had
loved learning, and that he had often lived as a monk for days among the
Celestines. All Paris wept, those also who had prayed Jesus Christ in
heaven to deliver them from Orleans; even Burgundy went in the funeral
procession, all in black, weeping also. But when the funeral was over
Jean-sans-Peur took Berri and the King of Sicily aside: “I had it done.
I slew him. It was an inspiration of the demon’s.”
XIII.