Orleans came nearer than to any mourner there. When Isabel heard that
Orleans was slain she went in terror of her life. Ill as she was, she
had herself carried in a litter to St. Paul’s, taking shelter there in
the arms of her mad husband, and so soon as she was fit for travel the
poor, light, beautiful, little Queen went out of Paris, far away from
Burgundy, far, too, from that maimed and slaughtered body lying in the
chapel of the Celestines. Terrified, indifferent, she could think of
nothing but her own imaginary danger.
The mistress and the wife took the matter in a very different spirit. At
first, in her transports of sorrow, Valentine could not act. She tore
out her hair and shred her garments; she sobbed so much, that for weeks
afterwards her voice was hoarse. But when the first paroxysm was over
her strong Italian character centred itself upon one fixed idea—justice,
vengeance for her murdered husband. Valentine had no thought of her own
safety. She sent her two elder sons and her girl into Blois, and then,
with the Princess Isabel and little John, her youngest child, on either
hand, the Duchess of Orleans set out from Château-Thierry for Paris.
Travelling was slow that terrible winter. It was not till the 10th of
December that Valentine entered the capital. She, her children, her
servants, were all dressed very plainly and roughly, and, of course, in
black. The King of Sicily and the Duke of Berri came out to meet them.
When they reached the palace Valentine threw herself upon her knees
before the King, demanding justice. The poor Charles (_azzez subtil pour
lors_) raised her up and kissed her, while they both wept together. He
promised strict justice upon Burgundy. Again, ten days later, he
declared, “What is done to my only brother is done to me.” Valentine and
her children, satisfied of vengeance, retired to their great hotel in
the Marais.
The King fell ill again so soon as Valentine had left him. “They say,...
but I affirm nothing,” suggests the Monk. Valentine the witch stayed on,
however, among the people who had murdered her husband. One thing that
we learn of Valentine at this moment shows us how profound, how selfless
was her love of Orleans. She sought out his bastard—the little John,
afterwards Count of Dunois, the son of Mariette de Canny—and brought him
up with her own children. It even seemed as though she loved him more
than the others. Glancing from the poetic Charles, the delicate Philip,
the child John, to his determined and eager little face, she exclaimed,
“None of your brothers is more fit than you to avenge your father.
Nature has cheated me of you!”
To avenge your father! This had become the unique preoccupation of
Valentine. But that promised vengeance tarried long. On the 8th of March
a learned doctor of theology, the chosen advocate of Burgundy, a certain
Maître Jean Petit, excused the murder of Orleans before the King. “_Il
est licite d’occire un Tyran._”
It was not only of tyranny that the Burgundians accused their victim.
The tremendous accusation of Jean Petit (which every student of the past
has read in Monstrelet) enumerates attempted regicide, and secret
poisoning, sorcery, necromancy, charms, incantations. “Sorcery, high
treason against God, and regicide, high treason against the King. There
is also tyranny,” says Maître Jean Petit. It was of course for this
third cause, treason against the people, that Orleans’ murder was
condoned in Paris.
For the people never hid their support of Jean-sans-Peur. Those who had
wept at the funeral of Orleans were ready now to cry again the cry of
Burgundy. The King, whose mind was again overcast, although he was not
actually mad, the King himself on the 9th of April, 1408, signed letters
patent granting pardon to Jean-sans-Peur. “Our very dear and
well-beloved cousin of Burgundy, _who for the public good and out of
faith and loyalty to us, has caused to be put out of this world our said
brother of Orleans_.” This was the last insult to his memory. Valentine
would not brook it; she rallied to the charge. Though she herself had
been seriously implicated in the tissue of villainy which his murderers
had woven about the memory of her husband, Valentine had no thoughts to
spare for her own safety. All through July and August she kept agitating
against Burgundy. Bringing her children with her she sought the King and
cried on her knees for justice. Twenty years’ exile for Burgundy! Her
two advocates, Sérisi and Cousinet pleaded eloquently for her; refuting
the vile accusations of poison and sorcery with a candour, a logic, a
fine and modern spirit worthy of the intellect of the dead man they
defended. It was all no use. “The Parisians,” says Monstrelet, “loved so
well this Duke of Burgundy; because they believed that if he undertook
the government, he would put down throughout the kingdom all salt taxes,
imposts, dues, and subsidies which were to the prejudice of the people.”
Though nearly all the royal Princes were openly on the side of
Valentine, the King did not _dare_ avenge his brother. The Court was
impotent against the people.
In the early autumn Valentine left Paris. Life was over for her. “Rien
ne m’est plus. Plus ne m’est rien,” ran her melancholy motto. Anger and
bereavement and hopeless sorrow had worn her to a shadow. She took the
little Dunois with her children to the Castle of Blois. There were four
of them, Charles, the Poet, who should be the father of King Louis XII.;
and little John, the grandfather of Francis I.; Philip, Count of Vertus;
and Margaret, in later years the grandmother of Anne of Brittany. These
children, three of whom should be the grandparents or great-grandparents
of Henri II., Valentine ceaselessly instructed. All her contemporaries
bear witness to her untiring vigilance over them. “They are marvellously
good, and well-instructed for their years,” says Monstrelet: “Moult
notablement conduits et indoctrinés.” But there was one lesson, dearer
than the others, that Valentine perpetually taught her sons. “Avenge
your father,” she continually cried.
These children, so different in character and destiny, were the dearer
to their mother that she felt she had not long to love them. Valentine
was dying of a broken heart, “of anger and mourning,” writes Juvenal;
“of anger and impotent vengeance,” says Monstrelet. Her eyes were quite
dim with useless tears, and still she resented the very grief that
drained her life; for she did not want to leave her little children and
her unaccomplished task. “It was pitiful,” says Juvenal, “before she
died to hearken to her regrets and her complaints, so piteously she
regretted her children, and a bastard, called John, whom she could not
suffer out of her sight, saying none of her children was fitter to
avenge their father.”... “Since the tragic end of her husband,” says the
Monk, “this Duchess spent her days in tears, and many say the bitterness
of her heart induced that unhealthy languor of which she died.”
This was in November. Upon St. Clement’s day, upon that heart-sickening
anniversary of her husband’s murder, Jean-sans-Peur rode into Paris. It
was a triumph. As he passed the people, and their little children cried,
“Noel, noel au bon Duc.”
It was near a week before the news came down to Blois. When she heard
it, Valentine felt that all was over. No vengeance was possible. On the
4th of December the unhappy woman died, with her last breath entreating
her little children never to forget their father’s murder. But these
children were only children, and they were orphans. The death of
Valentine seemed to secure the triumph of her enemy. Jean-sans-Peur did
not seek to hide his rejoicing: “Car icelle Duchesse continuoit moult
asprement et diligemment sa poursuitte.“ But already Retribution at her
grindstone was sharpening the fatal battle-axe of Montereau.
THE CLAIM OF THE HOUSE OF ORLEANS
TO MILAN.
Let us recapitulate.
When, on September 16, 1380, Charles V. of France expired, he left
behind him two young sons. One was twelve years old, tall, stalwart,
healthy, amiable; the other was a lad of nine, less regularly handsome
than his brother, slighter, darker, more agile, more acute, and more
engaging.
Charles V. had left his younger son no more than the pension of a
private gentleman; the elder was the king of France. The dying monarch,
a man of many brothers, had seen the dangers that arise when royal
princes are too rich. But he had died before his time; and of his two
heirs the king was gentle, dull, and generous; the gentleman, brilliant,
grasping, and ambitious. The result was calculable. Twenty years later
the younger son was king in all but name; he was rich, puissant,
terrible, and hated; while his brother, impoverished and neglected,
starved on the throne, the best-beloved man in France. Circumstances had
made the rise of the younger son singularly easy. In his twenty-fourth
year King Charles VI. became violently mad, and henceforward till his
death there were long regencies (the subject of angry contests between
his uncle and his brother) interrupted by periods of lax and kindly
government. His younger brother, Louis, Duke of Orleans, became, as
first prince of the blood, more powerful than the king. He was too
powerful; and his arrogance and his extortions raised many enemies
against him. On November 23, 1407, he was cruelly murdered as he was
riding by night through the streets of Paris. He had made himself so
terrible that even the brother who loved him did not seek to avenge him,
but praised the murderer “who, for the public good and out of faith and
loyalty to us, has caused to be put out of this world our said brother
of Orleans.” No one mourned the murdered man absolutely and completely
except his devoted widow and his orphaned children.
A year and a week later the duchess died. Her three sons, her one
daughter, with Dunois, the natural son of Orleans, whom his widow had
adopted, were left fatherless and motherless in a kingdom full of
enemies, where their father’s murderers triumphed. They entered the
world as a battlefield; but, though so young, they entered armed and
mounted. From their father they inherited the duchies of Orleans,
Luxembourg, and Aquitaine, the counties of Valois, Beaumont, Soissons,
Blois, Dreux, Périgord, and Angoulême, with the seigneuries of Coucy and
Savona. Through their mother they acquired the county of Vertus in
Champagne, the county of Asti in Lombardy, and certain pretensions to
the ducal crown of Milan.
I.
In the year 1387 their father, Louis of France, not yet the Duke of
Orleans, had been contracted to the Duke of Milan’s only daughter,
Valentine Visconti, whom two years later he espoused. In relation to the
established monarchs of his time, the father of Valentine stood in much
the same situation as afterwards the great Napoleon, in the first years
of his empire, towards the kings of Germany. He was rich, too powerful
to be safely opposed, a conqueror of whom the end was still beyond
prediction; hence a man to conciliate and appease. Yet in their hearts
they despised him as a parvenu and an adventurer, and deplored and
deprecated the moral flaws that marred the beauty of his prosperity.
Giangaleazzo, first Duke of Milan, was the only son of Galeazzo
Visconti, who, in conjunction with Bernabò, his brother, swayed the city
of Milan and the greater part of Lombardy. They had murdered their own
brother, and divided his inheritance between them—Bernabò, the elder,
holding his state in Milan, Galeazzo in the city of Pavia.
Bernabò had no less than nine-and-twenty children. Galeazzo had but two,
but for these he was ambitious. He married his daughter to the son of
the King of England; his son he married to the daughter of the King of
France. This was in 1360. The bride and bridegroom were still of
childish age. Six years later their eldest child was born. It was a
girl, Valentine. The three brothers who followed her died in their
minority; but Valentine flourished, grew to womanhood, and brought into
the house of Orleans the tangled question of the Milanese succession.
At her birth and during her childhood her father was but one of several
rulers in Milan. The Visconti ruled as a clan rather than as an
organized dynasty. They were the descendants of a certain Captain
Eriprando, who, in the year 1037, defended Milan against the Emperor
Conrad. Notwithstanding this beginning the Visconti were eminently
Ghibelline, and depended for all their subsequent fortunes on the
emperor. In 1277 they chased the Guelfs from Milan, and made themselves
masters of the state. They became lords or _domini_ in Milan, lords of
an imperial fief, but with no pretence to an imperial investiture. The
emperor recognized them only as his captains, his viscounts, or his
imperial vicars.
In 1372 the Emperor Charles IV., alarmed at the pretensions of the
Visconti clan, deprived them of their office. The rich tyrants, not
afraid of a distant emperor beyond the Alps, paid little heed to this
punishment. The emperor died, and his son succeeded—the dissolute
Wenzel, who was to do so much for Milan. Almost his first act was to
create the youthful father of Valentine Imperial Vicar of the Milanese.
This taste of power whetted the ambition of the young man, left
fatherless now to confront the faction of his uncle Bernabò and his
numerous children. Lax and irregular forms of government favour a
violent ambition. By one bold stratagem Giangaleazzo took his uncle
prisoner, dispossessed his cousins, and established himself as lord of
Milan.
Milan was not enough. Fire and sword cleared the way before him, and his
territory stretched to the Apennine ridges. Florence, on the other side,
trembled for her independence. The Lombard kingdom was alive again, and,
though the Pope refused the indomitable conqueror the title of King of
Italy, in 1395 the Emperor Wenzel invested him with the duchy of Milan.
Meanwhile, in 1389, Valentine Visconti had gone to her husband in
France. When she left Milan she was no longer her father’s only child. A
few months before, her stepmother, Caterina Visconti, had given birth to
a son. A little later a second son was born. The greatest conqueror of
his age could now divide his possessions between two sons born in
wedlock, a bastard boy named Gabriello, and his only daughter Valentine,
the child of his first wife, the Princess Isabelle of France. The first
question that confronts us is this: What provision did Giangaleazzo
Visconti make for his daughter Valentine of Orleans?
For many centuries there has been much debate concerning the claim of
Orleans to Milan. Much argument and little evidence has confused the
question; it is only the evidence that we shall examine here. In the
National Archives of Paris[50] there exists the original
marriage-contract of Valentine Visconti. A copy of this document is
contained in a brown leather folio, stamped with the Visconti serpent,
existing in the British Museum.[49] It is an instrument granted by the
Antipope, Clement of Avignon, on January 27, 1387, in favour of Louis of
Orleans and Bertrand de Guasche, Governor of Vertus, as representing the
father of Valentine. To the marriage contract are appended a
dispensation (Louis and Valentine were cousins), a deed of transfer for
the bride’s dowry of Asti and its dependencies, and a declaration of her
right to succeed her father in Milan, in case his direct male line
should become extinct. The clause which chiefly concerns us runs as
follows: “_Item est actum et in pactum solempni stipulatione vallatum et
expresse deductum quod in casu quo præfatus dominus Johannes Galeas
vicecomes, comes Virtutum, dominus Mediolanensis, decedat sine filiis
masculis de suo proprio corpore ex legitimo matrimonio procreatis, dicta
domina Valentina, nata sua, succedat et succedere debeat in solidum in
toto dominio suo presente et futuro quocumque, absque eo quod per viam
testamenti, codicillorum, seu alicujus alterius ultimæ voluntatis, aut
donatione inter vivos, ipsa aliquid faciat seu facere possit in
contrarium quovis modo._”
Footnote 49:
J. 409, No. 42. Contrat de Mariage. 42 _bis_, Vidimus du Contrat et
Acte de la remise d’Asti. Pavia, April 8, 1387. 42 _ter_, Confirmation
du Contrat par Clement VII. à Avignon. For further documents on the
subject see Carton K. 553.
Footnote 50:
Additional MSS., No. 30,669, fo. 215.
The husband of Valentine was for many years the tool with which the
astute Visconti hoped to assure his own supremacy in Italy. In 1393 and
in 1394 Visconti had no dearer scheme than that Clement, the Antipope at
Avignon, should make the Duke of Orleans king of Adria. With Clement at
Rome, Anjou at Naples, Orleans ruling the centre from Spoleto to
Ferrara, Visconti beheld the annihilation of Venice and the Tuscan
republics—a united Italy north of Rome. Doubtless he intended the
kingdom of Adria and the kingdom of Lombardy to lose themselves in one
monarchy: but whether that result was to be attained by the subsequent
spoliation of Orleans or by his adoption as heir to Milan, was a
question which probably depended on the living or dying of the sons of
Giangaleazzo. Orleans, however, though so young, proved himself no
facile instrument. He had no intention that Adria and Lombardy should
unite to his own disadvantage; and silently he contemplated another
scheme—to secure the docility of Lombardy by bounding it on the south by
Adria and on the north by another French principality, to be formed by a
fusion of Asti and Genoa. Orleans, therefore, determined to begin by the
conquest of Genoa; and for three years he displayed so much ability that
Giangaleazzo began to suspect this count of Asti and seigneur of Savona,
whom the Genoese implored to become the governor of the Ligurian
republic. Then came the scandal of the acquisition of Genoa by Charles
VI., to the detriment of his brother. From 1395 to 1397 there is a
moment of division between the interests of Orleans and Visconti; but,
as we shall see, the last act of Visconti was to enforce the claims of
Orleans to Milan, and the Duke of Orleans in his will[51] expressly
bequeaths to his eldest son “_la comté d’Ast et autres terres que j’ay
et puis avoir au pays de Lombardy et d’outre les monts_.” As far as
Orleans and Visconti could decide, there is no doubt of the claim of
Orleans to Milan. But it is more difficult to decide by what right
Giangaleazzo Visconti disposed of the emperor’s fiefs of Milan; for
although, when Visconti signed his daughter’s marriage-contract, he was
simply the illegal despot of Milan, eight years later the emperor made
him duke and received tribute at his hands. The lands which Visconti had
gained by succession, by fraud, and by conquest, which he had ruled by
force and national custom, were now indubitably his by feudal right. But
in order to acquire the security of this legality, the Duke of Milan, in
theory at all events, had sacrificed a certain portion of his
independence.
Footnote 51:
Champollion-Figeac, “Louis et Charles ducs d’Orléans,” p. 253. The
will is dated Oct. 17, 1403: Pisa was probably counted in the “autres
terres que puis avoir.”
The first investiture was granted him on Sept. 5, 1395. From this date
he held his duchy of Milan as an imperial fief. But as what manner of
fief? And which class of fiefs admits a woman to be her father’s heir?
These questions, seemingly simple, are in reality difficult to answer,
because feudal law was quite indefinitely modified by provincial custom.
It was chiefly custom which decided if an hereditary fief could be
inherited by a woman in default of males. Thus in France the provinces
of Burgundy and Normandy were strictly masculine fiefs; but Lorraine,
Guienne, and Artois descended to daughters in default of sons; and the
duchy of Brittany, the kingdoms of Cyprus, Navarre, and Naples (a Papal
fief), will occur to every mind; while in Germany itself, in the
stronghold of feudalism, the duchy of Mecklenburg descended to daughters
on extinction of the masculine branch; many fiefs in Swabia, Zutphen,
Pomerania, and Saxony, followed this example.
In the North of Italy the distinction between legitimacy and
illegitimacy had become so trivial a thing, that sons, born in or out of
wedlock, were generally forthcoming in sufficient numbers to distance
any feminine claim; and the Imperial investiture—save in the case when
it carried with it the Imperial Vicariat—was rather a rose in the
buttonhole of the tyrant than a necessary legalization of a tyranny
stronger than the law. Yet the marquisate of Montferrat was brought into
the house of the Palæologi through a feminine succession; and in 1387
Valentine Visconti brought the country of Asti (no less than Milan an
Imperial fief) unquestioned to her husband, and with only the Pope’s
investiture. A century later Caterina Sforza ruled in Pesaro. The custom
in Italy, then, though dubious, various, and full of irregularities and
confusions was, on the whole, the same as the custom in Mecklenburg,
Pomerania, Swabia, Hungary, Brittany, Navarre, and other places: on
extinction of the male descent a woman might succeed. If her succession
were provided for by the terms of the investiture; or, in other cases,
unless she were deliberately excluded.[52]
Footnote 52:
In the ordinary imperial fiefs, which, even so late as the end of the
fourteenth century, still in many cases preserved their original idea
of military service granted in return for territorial possessions, a
woman could not succeed without direct and especial mention of this
fact in the investiture, or in some subsequent privilege. But in a
purchased fief daughters were admitted to the succession in default of
males. Milan was an imperial fief, derived directly from the emperor,
and held by the peculiar sort of tenure known as _Fahnlehen_, from the
homage of a banner or standard paid by its possessor to his feudal
lord; it was destined, even if not explicitly reserved, for masculine
operation only. Giangaleazzo Visconti paid the enormous price of
100,000 florins (about £50,000 sterling) for the title and
investiture, but I am not aware whether this is or is not sufficient
to grant the fief the looser privileges of a _feudum emptum_.
In the investiture of 1395 which made Giangaleazzo duke of Milan there
is no mention of Valentine, but neither is there any direct mention of
the sons of Giangaleazzo. The duchy of Milan is bestowed on him, _sui
heredes et successores_. Now this term in Italy, where the Pandects were
still the model of civil law, might be held to include _all_ the
children of the possessor; and, on failure of the male line, the
daughter would be entitled to put in her claim. I am not aware how much
was implied in Germany at this date by the employment of this term; but
probably there also it was at least ambiguous, since, under the
Hohenstaufen emperors, Roman law had made a great advance through
Germany, and since, later on, it was found necessary to formulate a
special clause that the use of the expression _sui heredes_ should not
be considered sufficient to authorize females to claim succession to a
masculine fief.