While he was king of Bourges, Charles VII’s horizons were very limited. However, the potential for his project of a France united under a new model of kingship was greatly enhanced when the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, called a peace conference at Arras in 1435. The Duke of Bedford, as regent in France for the fourteen-year-old Henry VI, Charles VII and Burgundy himself sent ambassadors. Representatives from the council of Basle were present on behalf of the Papacy because the civil war in France between Armagnacs and Burgundians, as well as the war against England, had reached European proportions against a background of Ottoman advances into the Balkans.
The English soon withdrew from the discussions because they saw that to negotiate at all would compromise the dual monarchy set up by the treaty of Troyes in 1420. The English had not wanted Charles VII to have any international recognition after his coronation at Reims in 1430, since it would mean that Henry VI would be King of England only. Philip freed himself from the obligations imposed upon him in 1420 by the oath he had taken to maintain the treaty of Troyes after consultation with a papal legate.1 He then offered a separate peace to Charles VII who accepted it. This put an end to the civil war in France by a reconciliation between the murdered Jean the Fearless’s son and the one who was seen as morally responsible for the assassination. The duke recognized Charles VII as his sovereign, and the king pandered to the duke’s self interest by handing great tracts of territory over to him: he yielded the Maconnais, the Auxerrois, the county of Boulogne, the castles at Roye, Peronne, Montdidier, and towns on the Somme, Saint-Quentin, Corbie, Amiens, Abbeville, Arleux, and Mortagne. Philip was excused from paying homage for his territories.2 After the Duke of Bedford died, Paris opened its gates to let Charles VII enter his capital in 1436 although the complete conquest of the île de France was not achieved until 1441.3
Even before he opened his campaign to recover Normandy, Charles VII started to prepare for his assault on Gascony.4 His supporters began to ferment unrest in the south-west, but they reckoned without the resistance of several influential Anglophiles in the region. Among the nobles, there were Gaston de Foix, who held the title of captal de Buch5 (whose nephew, Gaston IV, count of Foix-Béarn, would be fighting on the French side), Pierre de Montferrand, Gaillard de Durfort, Jean de Lalande, and Jehan d’Anglade. Some exporters of wines and dyestuffs in the urban centres of Bordeaux and Bayonne and their counterparts in smaller towns like Libourne, Bazas, Saint-Sever and Dax would put up a lively opposition. Archbishop Pey Berland of Bordeaux, several canons of cathedrals (at Bordeaux, Bazas and Bayonne) and collegiate churches, like Saint-Seurin in the Bordeaux suburbs, resisted the French approaches with their influential pens and from their persuasive pulpits. Rural populations in the Médoc and the Landes would actively resist the advance of the French commanders. In the recent past, especially when the French were nibbling away at their eastern territories, the Gascons were on the whole content with Lancastrian supremacy.
Charles VII began to ratchet up his tactics for attacking the frontiers of Gascony and occupying bastides and small towns of the flat landscape whose life was dominated by the rivers Garonne, Dordogne and, further south, the Adour. The rhythm of his attacks became regular: 1438, 1442, 1451, and the repeat performance at Bordeaux in 1453.6 Charles VII’s aim was to incorporate the whole region as far as the Pyrenees into his re-modelled system of monarchy.7
The prelude to his success was his assertion of power over an army loyal only to him, with noble commanders and subordinate captains acting in his name only. Such an objective demanded a certain energy which the king was increasingly able to assert. A gauge of his abilities during the middle years of his reign appeared in his response to the English. In February 1438, the king and the dauphin stopped at Saint-Jean d’Angély on their way to La Rochelle where the provincial estates were called upon to raise funds for war against the enemy (it was not enough). The English then took Saint-Maigrin and Saint-Thomas de Conac, mid-way down the Gironde Estuary.8 Then, in July 1440, a more effective English campaign in the Saintonge was undertaken by John Holland, Earl of Huntingdon, Admiral of England, who had been appointed as Henry VI’s lieutenant-general and granted his powers as such on 27 March 1439.9 He arrived in Bordeaux on 2 August10 causing a great deal of alarm. The commune of Saint-Jean d’Angély sent several letters: to La Rochelle, to the seneschal of Saintonge, to the Viscount of Thouars, and to the king himself, to ask for help against the English. They sent sergeants to Taillebourg, Saint-Savinien, Chaniers and Saint-Sauvant to ask whether the English would be able to cross the River Charente.11 Huntingdon was taking back places that the French had taken from the English the year before. He advanced at least as far as Saujon and burned the abbey at Sablonceaux.
The teenaged Dauphin Louis was appointed as his father’s lieutenant in Poitou and Saintonge on 12 December 1439 in order to put a stop to the ravages of independent companies of men-at-arms who were no longer needed in the armies of Burgundy and France after the conclusion of the Treaty of Arras. They had become freebooting adventurers under the command of down-at-heel noblemen, or by their younger or illegitimate sons who could expect no inheritance. Not content with pillaging and robbing people on their farms in the countryside, they tortured them and destroyed their crops and cottages, stripping them of their possessions, thus attracting the name écorcheurs (strippers) to themselves. The countryside became depopulated as the country people took refuge in the towns and castles and stayed in them.
In Gascony, the activities of the écorcheurs were turned to the profit of Charles VII’s government and ‘sounded the death-knell of English domination’ in the duchy.12 After devastating great stretches of Burgundy, Auvergne, Rouergue and Languedoc, one of their companies, led by Rodrigue de Villandrando, ‘the emperor of the pillagers,’ entered Gascony early in 1438 ‘doubtless at the instigation of Charles VII’ rampaging right up to the gates of Bordeaux itself, ransacking Saint-Seurin Abbey which was outside the city walls. Villandrando then joined forces with the king’s officers, Poton de Xaintrailles and Charles II d’Albret, who had advanced northwards from the Landes.13 Because they had no siege equipment, their attack stopped short in the suburbs, but they destroyed the vines.14 They moved together to the fortress of Blanquefort, near the northern defences of Bordeaux, and then into the Médoc to take Lesparre and Castelnau at either end of it before moving south again into the Landes just before Huntingdon’s forces took their place.15
Charles VII, under the influence of his Angevin in-laws, found a practical solution to the écorcheurs north of the Bordelais by means of taking the French military system out of the hands of feudal lords to make it his own responsibility as the monarch. The Estates-General met at Orleans in October 1439 and he placed a very comprehensive plan before them. A royal ordinance was issued on 2 November containing forty-four clauses.16 It dealt comprehensively with all abuses that had been features of the military system for years. From now on, captains were to be appointed only by the king, and they were to raise companies consisting of men-at-arms and archers. Detailed instructions for artillery formations were also included. Abuses of the new system were to be punished as treason. The soldiers were to be paid regularly out of monies raised by a new system of taxation. Farmers’ work animals, flocks and herds were to be inviolable, as were seeds and standing crops in fields. Foodstuffs could be bought and must be paid for, but not seized from fields or barns. The lords in the vicinity of any infringements were to be responsible for the punishment of those guilty of them.
This ordinance would give the king of France his own army, created to serve the country and not to hold it to ransom. An unforeseen innovation, which caused scandal to some but pleasure to others, was the equal right of everyone to be respected for his life and property, and to have power to defend himself. So, by a single ordinance, the king would place himself above the military aristocracy, give himself an efficient army so as to avoid future disasters like Agincourt or Verneuil, and assure himself of the loyalty and obedience of all the labouring classes against feudal tyranny.17 This was Magna Carta and the Second Amendment rolled into one. Moreover, it established a further principle: the king could impose taxes without the consent of the Estates-General, and the feudal lords could not raise them at all. The ravages of the freebooters had made any objections to a standing army in royal hands irrelevant. Charles VII of France was not Charles I of England.
However, after his success with the November ordinance, Charles VII suffered a major military setback. Constable Richemont had been besieging an English force at Avranches which was resisted by John Talbot. The king was knocked sideways when he heard of Richemont’s failure to take the place. He was at Angers, where his hosts were Charles of Anjou, his brother-in-law, and his mother-in-law, Yolande of Aragon to whom he owed so much in terms of a spirit of determination, both of whom had encouraged him to set his army reforms in motion.18 These reforms were resisted by certain feudal lords, even princes of the blood royal, who realized that they were a means of transferring power and authority from the aristocracy to the crown.
A revolt began in 1440 which delayed the implementation of the ordinances for five years. The rebels were soon known as Praguois19 because they resembled the military rising of Jan Hus’s supporters against the future Emperor Sigismund when he had succeeded as King of Bohemia in 1419.20
One of the instigators of the Praguerie had his main territorial base in Poitou. Jean II, Duke of Alençon, was a peer of France whose principal domains were in lower Normandy, occupied by the English. In 1423, Charles VII had given him Niort, the second town in Poitou, instead of repaying him the loans he had offered or granting him a pension from the royal treasury. He was godfather to the Dauphin Louis – who was still at Niort as his father’s lieutenant-general against the écorcheurs – and had been close to Joan of Arc while she was winning battles. He was close to the king too: it was he that had knighted Charles at Reims just before the coronation. He had been a prisoner of the English for three years after his capture at Verneuil in 1424 and financially ruined by his ransom, which did not stop him from trying to involve the Earl of Huntingdon in the Praguerie,21 but the English commander, in return, asked for places in Poitou that France did not possess.22
Georges de La Tremouïlle was another leading light in the Praguerie. He had been Charles VII’s official favourite for six years from 1427 to 1433, the period that included the short ascendancy of Joan of Arc. His rival, Arthur, count of Richemont, supplanted him and was still in office and instrumental in defeating his revolt against the king by force of arms. When the Praguerie broke out, La Tremouïlle was still in his golden exile in his castle at Sully enjoying the prospect of gaining vengeance on the king, offering the conspirators considerable financial assistance.23
Like Alençon, de La Tremoïlle was well established in Bas-Poitou, with lands at Mareuil-sur-le-Lay and Saint-Hermine, and his second marriage brought him the castle at Gençay which dominated the roads into the Angoumois. Because the king’s financial difficulties did not allow the repayment of a large loan to him, he gave him the town of Melle instead, so the road to Saintes was in his power. He had been granted Lusignan Castle in the same way in 1428 but the king had taken it back, in view of its strategic importance, in 1432. The year after, under the ‘intelligent inspiration’ of Yolande of Aragon and Charles d’Anjou in favour of Richemont, the king deprived La Tremouïlle of his position but he was still a force to be reckoned with in Poitou.
Jean de La Roche was important in Poitou on account of his family’s origins there. He was captain of a company of écorcheurs, then a servant of the king who pardoned him for his previous activity and appointed him seneschal of the province, where he feathered his own nest as well as asserting the power of the Crown. He was also lord of Barbezieux in the Haute-Saintonge. Still seneschal when the Praguerie erupted, he took the side of Alençon and the others until his defeat and death in the same year, 1440.24
Charles, Duke of Bourbon, was another prominent Praguois, despite not being a Poitevin lord. He was a prince of the blood, and the king’s great chamberlain. He joined the plotters despite being involved in the preparation of the November ordinance at Orleans. He went with the court to Tours, and, when the dauphin arrived there, aggravated the tensions that already existed between him and his father. After that, still with the court, he was at Angers where his associates met him and drew up a plan to take the castle, put the king into their safe-keeping and assassinate several of his councillors. Arrangements were all in hand, using the complicity of certain captains who had returned from the failed siege of the English at Avranches, when he changed his plans. Under pretext of going to see his wife in the Bourbonnais, before going on to the Estates-General at Bourges, he took leave of the king. A few days later, he assembled all the malcontents together at Blois and made contact with Jean V of Brittany who had been giving active support to the English when they were besieged at Avranches.25
The Bastard of Orleans had heard a rumour that the king, during peace negotiations with the English at Gravelines in 1439, had no intention of pressing for the release of his half-brother Charles, Duke of Orleans, who had been held prisoner in England since Agincourt, twenty-five years before. He took this seriously and joined with the other conspirators in the Praguerie until he found that there were no grounds for the rumour. As soon as he learnt that the duke was about to be released by the English, he was reconciled with Charles VII who created him count of Dunois, and actively supported the defeat of the rebellion. Ten years later, we shall see him as commander-in-chief for the king’s invasion of Guyenne.
The conspirators succeeded in gaining the support of the precocious Dauphin Louis, the future Louis XI, who was sixteen years old in 1440. For three years now, Charles VII had been taking him on all his journeys in the kingdom like an apprentice, and had been entrusting him with tasks of considerable responsibility, like the collection of taxes in Beaucaire and Carcassonne. Louis had taken part in battles against the English in the Velay and was in command when the town of Château-Landon was taken. Then he was present at the siege of Montereau and was with his father when he made his solemn entry into Paris in 1436. He took part in provincial estates held in Limousin, Auvergne and Languedoc, and was even appointed lieutenant-general in the first of these, entrusted with raising 46,000 livres in taxes from the Estates-General there.
This made him conscious of his own importance and he began to resent the supervision of his father’s officials.26 Nevertheless, the king had sent him into Poitou and Saintonge to overcome the resistance of certain écorcheur captains to the 2 November ordinance. Along with three royal councillors, he was arranging the prosecution of those who were opposing the king’s orders. Even while he was engaged in this, he threw in his lot with Bourbon and the rest when they exploited his ambition and resentment. He dismissed those of his household officers who did not support him when his godfather Alençon met him at Niort and completely won him over.
Charles VII was on his way from Angers to Niort when he heard about the princes’ conspiracy. He realized that they intended to put him under protection, take over the direction of his government, and give royal authority to the dauphin. Once arrived at Amboise, he arranged for a circular letter to be sent to all his bonnes villes to put them on their guard against his opponents. This was of immense significance. There was a tradition of alliance between the monarchy and the towns against the feudal lords. The bourgeoisie realized that their trade was at risk if ever the great nobles were able to dominate the monarchy, or if the king were not able to enforce his authority over the great nobles. Even if royal taxation were severe, monarchical order was preferable to feudal anarchy when it came to the protection of their market days and the transport of their goods. Without it the traders would have to submit to the protection payments known as the patis exacted by the brigands in return for a measure of security. During the Praguerie, the loyalty of the towns to Charles VII turned out to be the deciding factor.27
Constable Richemont, Gaucourt and Poton de Xaintrailles were sent to find Bourbon and to explain to him how much harm he was doing to the king and to the poor people of the kingdom. Charles VII moved to the fortress of Loches, made several arrests there, and nearly caught Bourbon himself. Then he moved into Poitou with Richemont, Charles d’Anjou, Marshal Lohéac, Admiral Culant, Xaintrailles and de Brézé. Alençon had established himself in Melle and La Roche and was threatening Saint-Maixent. The king occupied Mirebeau, and Niort welcomed him. It took him less than five days to suppress Alençon, who prevaricated by his overtures to Richemont and Charles d’Anjou – both of whom were his uncles. The king accepted the apparent reality of these discussions which brought about a truce, but Alençon duplicitously appealed to the Earl of Huntingdon for English support.28
The king was at Poitiers for Easter, waiting for reinforcements from the Midi. There was to be a great deal of combat involved in the king’s suppression of the Praguerie, and he conducted a systematic campaign against the conspirators himself. The emblematic encounter was at Saint-Maixent in April 1440. Alençon had been let into the town and castle by treason. From there, the road was open to Poitiers for him to take the king into custody. From there also, he could easily make contact with Charles de Bourbon’s forces.
Saint-Maixent was enclosed by walls and contained a castle. There was another, older walled enclosure inside with towers and two gates guarding the ancient Benedictine abbey which gave the town its name. The king had given the revenues of the town to Perette de La Rivière, the Dame de Roche-Guyon, and she lived in the abbey. Her captain, Guyot Le Tirant, commanded the castle, but he was pocketing the revenue meant to pay the garrison while reducing its effective strength. He did not even keep the keys to the town himself. On the morning of 3 April, Guyot took ineffective action, defending a different part of the town while five hundred rebels were let into the castle by one of Dame Rivière’s servants whose name was given simply as Jacquet, comme faux et traitre.29 Guyot hid without his armour in the gateway of Saint-Croix and refused to take command of the defenders. He did send a messenger to intercept the king to tell him what was happening, but the man stopped at Lusignan and sold the horse he had borrowed for his journey.
However, the bourgeoisie of Saint-Maixent did not side with the traitors. Their messengers covered the fifty miles to Poitiers in only three hours. The king took to horse immediately sending Admiral Prégent de Coëtivy and Pierre de Brézé, the seneschal of Poitou, on ahead of him with four hundred lances. When they reached Saint-Maixent, they found the bourgeois defenders in possession of the three town gates in the process of lighting fires so that the attackers could not see their way in the smoke. At the same time, the Abbot, Pierre de Clervaux, had sent some of the monks up through the abbey roof to throw tiles down on Alençon’s soldiers. At the Saint-Croix Gate, the twenty-four defenders refused to accept defeat when the attackers led out Dame La Rivière’ son, the lord of La Roche-Guyon, threatening to execute him there and then. The attackers had pillaged the town and sent their booty to Niort. They destroyed the town’s legal archives. The town’s losses were later reckoned to be of the value of 40,000 francs.30
Charles VII took care to reward the town’s residents. Jean Sachier, one of the defenders of the Saint-Croix Gate, was made one of his valets de chambre, and then given the profitable post of aumonier in the town itself. The abbot de Clervaux was rewarded by being made a member of the king’s Great Council and by having all the damage to the fabric of his abbey repaired at the crown’s expense. Several additional privileges were granted, like the abbey’s monopoly of fishing in the Sèvre Niortaise river, and certain tax exemptions.31 The king granted the bourgeoisie of Saint-Maixent the privilege of having their own governing body presided over by two elected officials who had the right to have coats of arms.32
As soon as Admiral de Coëtivy and Seneschal de Brézé arrived by way of the Saint-Croix Gate in the evening, Alençon shut himself in the castle and then escaped to Niort during the night, leaving his troops to be captured by the king’s soldiers. Alençon’s men were pardoned because of their previous war record against the English. The king laid siege to Niort and the bourgeoisie there quickly opened the gates to him.33
Advancing towards the Bourbonnais, the king received Dunois’s submission and was reconciled with him. The payment of Charles d’Orleans’ ransom and his release from captivity was imminent. Charles VII issued letters patent from Guéret on 2 May forbidding anyone to obey the princes in revolt on pain of being regarded as traitors and suffering the consequences. All nobles and any others who had the right to bear arms were to rally to him when he required it of them. He then proceeded to dislodge the rebels from Chambord and twenty-five other fortresses.
The outcome was that the princes empowered the Count of Eu, Bourbon’s half-brother, and Bertraudon, the Duke of Burgundy’s emissary, to offer their submission to the king. The king did not call his campaign off but accepted their surrender on condition that they set Raoul de Gaucourt free, whom they had captured when he surrendered his command of Dauphiné to them. They released him immediately and declared themselves willing to meet the king whenever he proposed. Parleys were held in religious houses in and around Clermont for several days. The princes presented their complaints and the king replied with a long memorandum listing all the crimes, deshonneurs and déplaisirs for which the Duke of Bourbon and his accomplices had been responsible, both before and after they had taken up arms against him.34
Apart from La Trémouïlle, who was sent back home to Sully, the leaders were amnestied. The Dauphin was sent away to the Dauphiné with sufficient funds to administer his province, but he was excluded from any participation in government for six years. Nevertheless, hostilities continued until September, especially in the Saintonge where pacification was a long-drawn-out affair. Olivier de Coëtivy, the Admiral’s younger brother, took Taillebourg from Maurice and Henri Plusquelec and arrested them for rebellion. The king confiscated their domain and used it to reward Prégent de Coëtivy and Olivier later inherited it (after a dispute with his sister-in-law, a member of the de Raïs family) when Prégent had been taken out by a stray cannonball during the siege of Cherbourg in 1450.
The king relied upon the towns to refuse any overtures made to them by the rebellious princes and free companies of écorcheurs in the Midi. There had been a revolt there, associated with the Praguerie, led by several independent commanders, and the Viscount of Lomagne, Jean IV of Armagnac’s son, was enrolled as captain-general of Languedoc and Guyenne in order to put it down. The seneschal of the Auvergne and the militia of Languedoc, together with the nobles of Velay and the Vivarais, acted together against the rebels. The king was winning public opinion over and learned treatises were written in his support.35 The Estates of the Auvergne assembled at the same time as the king arrived in Clermont, and spontaneously voted him a supply of 20,000 francs for the conduct of his urgent affairs.
Bourbon and Alençon left Clermont, intending to bring the dauphin to the king, but this headstrong young man could not be persuaded to return with them. Hostilities began again. The king advanced to Roanne. Alençon gave up his struggle soon afterwards, submitted and was reinstated in the king’s favour, but Bourbon and the Dauphin, joined by La Tremouïlle and others, moved eastwards to continue with theirs. A message from the king threatened them with reprisals. The Dauphin remained intransigent, but Bourbon persuaded him that further rebellion was impossible. They both came to kneel before the king.
Charles VII told Louis that he was welcome, but when Tremouïlle and some lesser figures were banished to their estates, the Dauphin remonstrated that he had to go to his as well because he had promised his associates that he would. The king’s reported reply36 reveals his own psychology:37
Louis, the gates are open, and if they are not large enough for you I will have a long stretch of the wall knocked down for you to go where it seems best to you. You are my son and you cannot engage yourself to serve anyone else without my permission. But if it pleases you to go, God willing, we shall choose someone else of our blood, who will be of more help to us in maintaining our honour and lordship than you have up to this time.
Then he turned to Bourbon, who was rebuked but, nevertheless, reinstated as a prince of the blood – even renaissance kings thought twice before executing their relations. Most of the commoners in the rebellion, not protected by the privileges of noble birth, felt the full force of the royal vengeance.
The king issued lettres d’abolition (reinstatement) to Bourbon on 15 July 1440 giving him full amnesty, together with Guy, comte de Montpensier his brother, Jacques and Antoine de Chabannes, as well as other captains and their retinues. Letters were issued confirming these decisions and announcing that military action against the rebels was at an end. The king declared in a letter to the residents of Reims that he was satisfied with the princes’ full submission.38
Alexandre, bastard of Bourbon, had been pardoned for supporting the duke, his half-brother, who had made him his agent in the armed rising. His actions showed him to be, like the dauphin, a rebel by nature. He had been prominent among the écorcheur captains, assisting Rodrigo de Villandrando in 1437, and he was insubordinate towards the king on several occasions. Complaints had been made to the king about his excessive violence and criminality when he was at Bar-sur-Aube. Charles VII was also informed that he and other freebooters were preparing to set out on an unauthorized expedition and he ordered Constable Richemont to arrest him. He was put on trial and condemned to death. On the orders of the Provost of the Merchants, he was sewn into a sack and drowned in the River Aube. Eight of his accomplices were hanged and a further ten or twelve beheaded. This was enough of an example to make the rest of the écorcheur captains make their submission. Charles VII enrolled them in his new army, giving them paid responsibility for certain town garrisons, while under threat of severe punishments for infringement of his orders.39
It was this energetic suppression of the Praguerie and the little revolts in the wake of it that established Charles VII in a position to overcome the English in Normandy and in Gascony and unite France as a single entity. His nineteenth-century biographer expressed this succinctly:
This audacious feat of arms ended with the complete victory of royalty; and this triumph, it is impossible to deny, was due to the energy and ability of Charles VII. In the midst of the universal disarray occasioned by this revolt he had, with rare promptitude, taken the measures which the events made necessary; after having suppressed the insurrection in his household at the moment when it was supported by the English, he pursued it wherever it raised its head and it was by imposing [his will] on public opinion that he had imposed his law on the rebels.40
The final submission was at Cusset in the middle of July.41 Resistance to the rebellion by the bourgeoisie of Saint-Maixent was a major factor in the king’s triumph over the feudal magnates who had rebelled against his 1439 ordinances. The towns shared his triumph. It was largely the support of the Angevin party led by Yolande of Aragon and Charles of Anjou, together with Constable Richemont and Admiral de Coëtivy, which had brought it about, enhancing a ‘patriotic’ spirit that was growing in the context of the war with the English, at the same time as the value of endless war with France was beginning to be called in question by members of the household of Henry VI of England and by the king himself when he had assumed authority in 1437.42
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Now that Charles VII had established his supremacy over the feudal rebels, he was able to implement what he had intended in the ordinance issued in the Estates-General at Orleans on 2 November 1439. He began with a reform of the national taxation system. From 1443 onwards, he re-ordered the financial organization of France based upon what Charles V had achieved in the fourteenth century. He had separated ordinary receipts of taxation from extraordinary ones. The former were imposed on the domains of the seigneurs, managed by the treasurer of France; the latter were those of the fisc, the system of royal taxation, overseen by the finance managers of the five territorial generalities which were Languedoil, Languedoc, Outre-Seine, Yonne and Normandy. The Treasury Court in Paris managed disputes concerning taxes due from the lordships, and the Court of Aids dealt with extraordinary taxation related to the occasional and extra financial needs of the crown at any particular time.43 Charles VII controlled a similar system more stringently and made possible the essential army reforms that substituted a regular army under the king’s direct control for a feudal levy that had recently lapsed into brigandage.
The royal ordinance of 26 May 1445 created a permanent army of fifteen companies of men-at-arms for which the king himself appointed the captains on the basis of their competence, loyalty to the crown and their nobility from among those who had held commands previously. Each of these captains was to be responsible for the recruitment of a company consisting of a hundred ‘lances’ of six cavalrymen each: a heavy cavalryman (man-at-arms), assisted by an armourer and a page, two archers and a valet de guerre. These ‘Companies of the Great Ordinance’ were to be well and regularly paid. They provided a cavalry stationed in the fortified towns of France. These cavalrymen were to be complemented by a force of nine hundred men for each garrison, men-at-arms and archers, known as ‘of the little ordinance’, which would be installed in Normandy and Gascony as and when they were taken back from English control. Besides this, the king provided himself with artillery commanded by forty officers organized by Jean and Gaspard Bureau, which would play a decisive role in both conquests. These were lasting improvements, developed still further by Louis XI and Charles VIII.44
Thus was created a new kind of military caste, separate from the rest of urban and rural society, always in readiness and at the disposition of the king and those appointed by him. In 1448, the king created a reserve army made up of non-noble archers on foot recruited in each parish on the basis of one archer for each eighty hearths who kept themselves in a state of training for military readiness in return for certain tax exemptions: hence their title of Free Archers. This army of 50,000 was only to be mobilized in case of specific necessity. This gave Charles VII a ‘monopoly of warfare’.45
The best from among the former écorcheurs, like the Bastard of Orleans, now created count of Dunois, were assumed as commanders in the companies of ordinance. This was the instrument with which Charles VII mastered his princes, incorporating them into his new military system, and by which he chased the English out of all French territory except for the pale around Calais. It is worth noting that this military instrument entirely under the king’s direction was being perfected at the same time as Le Mans and the other fortresses in Maine were being handed over to Charles VII and that the improbable prospect of a meeting in person between the sovereigns of England and France to conclude a final peace – instead of making temporary truces – was draining into the sand.46
* * *
The magnates of Poitou and the Duke of Bourbon had been reconciled to the king’s design for a renewal of the monarchy, and Charles VII was active on the southern border of his projected kingdom. Feudal magnates there too, Charles II of Albret and Gaston IV of Foix-Béarn assisted the establishment of his authority. The latter was instrumental in the taking of Saint-Sever and Dax and even threatening Bayonne in 1442.47
Charles II of Albret threw in his lot with the House of Valois in very special circumstances. Henry VI’s lieutenant-general, the Earl of Huntingdon, had laid siege to Tartas at the beginning of August 1440. This was a lordship that belonged to Albret. His men resisted valiantly but were forced to capitulate by a treaty negotiated on the English side by Huntingdon himself, the English seneschal of Gascony, Thomas Rampston, and for the French by Albret’s nominees. This treaty contained stipulations tilted very much against the interests of France. A day was fixed between the two sides on which each of them were to appear with an army at Tartas, and if the French army were to prove larger in numbers than that sent by the English, the capitulation would be nullified and Tartas would become French again. This day is usually designated in French as the ‘journée de Tartas’. If the English were to gain in this contest, many lordships would fall into English hands in this most southern part of French-occupied Gascony. Charles VII’s reaction was immediate: he wrote to Albret to say that he would be present at Tartas on the appointed day ‘at the head of the most numerous army that he would be able to assemble.’48
Albret showed signs of sharing the same disloyalty as Armagnac had been showing in his marriage project with Henry VI discussed in the last chapter. But the support offered him at this point by Charles VII was sufficient to remind him that he was still the French king’s vassal and was to serve under his banner. The ‘Day’ had been set for 1 May 1442 and Charles VII began his preparations for assembling a very large army at Toulouse. When at the request of the English the day was put off until 24 June, Charles did not want to leave this large force together with nothing to do. It was too soon after the Praguerie for him to have established his companies of ordinance, and he could not trust the former écorcheurs who were his captains, so he dispersed this army with orders to re-assemble when required. The order to reassemble, as it turned out, was soon given. The King came to Toulouse in person, and began his advance to Tartas on 11 June 1442, leaving behind a considerable number of troops because he heard that the English were counting on winning the day with a small contingent. Some towns on the way refused him obedience, but he did not waste time in subduing them so as to be in place on the morning agreed. The army took up its position in battle order before the walls of Tartas and waited for the English to arrive. They waited all day. No English troops appeared. At the end of the afternoon, the keeper of the keys of the town appeared and surrendered to Charles VII. Albret had been given his town back, and he remained on the king’s side from then on.49
* * *
However, there was one feudal magnate in the south who would demand more time and effort on the king’s part, and even then it would be only be his son who gave Charles VII his entire support. We are concerned here with Jean IV, count of Armagnac who emerges as an opportunistic character on the frontiers of France and the Spanish kingdoms. His career illustrates, certainly as much as the story of the Praguerie, the nature of resistance to the new monarchical order, maintaining his opposition to the house of Valois for a far longer time by a policy of vacillation.
He inherited his extensive domains at the age of twenty-two from his father, the Constable Bernard VII of Armagnac, who was killed in Paris in June 1418 amid the faction struggle with the Burgundians for control of Paris while the English were making inroads into Normandy subsequent upon Agincourt and before the arrangements for the dual monarchy made at Troyes in 1420. These events would set the scene for the drama of Jean IV of Armagnac’s career.50
Ambiguous dynastic considerations complicated his situation at the outset. Bernard VII and two of his sisters were married to members of prominent French families. Jean himself had married Blanche, Duke Jean V of Brittany’s sister. Her widowed mother had married Henry IV of England in 1401. Jean’s second marriage, contracted after he became count, was to the Infante Isabelle, daughter of Charles the Noble, King of Navarre. The couple had been betrothed in 1416 as soon as Blanche had died, and while he was still Viscount of Lomagne.51 His new marriage would give him five domains and a barony in Navarre and relations with his father-in-law’s kingdom that sent messengers criss-crossing the Pyrenees, remained firmly established until Charles the Noble died in 1425. In addition, Jean gave homage through intermediaries to the King of Castille, claiming family ties with that kingdom’s royal house in the past. Isabelle’s father was Jean’s uncle by marriage, and a papal dispensation for the marriage of first cousins was necessary. Jean chose to obtain it from the deposed Spanish anti-pope Benedict XIII, who had retired to his rock of Peñiscola in Valencia, and continued to support him, and his successor, Clement VIII afterwards. His primary liege lord, Charles VI of France, supported Pope Martin V in whose person the Great Schism of the western church was ended at the Council of Constance in 1417. Jean embarrassingly wrote a letter to Joan of Arc while she was in the ascendant to ask her for her inspired opinion on which pope was the authentic one. She replied to him that she was rather busy at the moment preparing her attack on Paris, but that she would give consideration to this important question – twelve years after Martin V’s election had ended the schism – once Paris had been taken, which, of course, she was not able to do.52
These were the years when Jean IV had to hold off incursions into his territories from independent brigand captains and English contingents alike, which usually meant paying them large sums in what amounted to protection money (known as patis or souffrances) out of grants-inaid made by the Three Estates of his Armagnac baronies. An example of this occurred in 1427 when André de Ribes, a notorious écorcheur, rampaged in Armagnac territory in service of the English. Jean connived at his activities and gave him privileged protection, being at that moment better disposed towards England than to France. The letters of abolition granted to him later (in 1445) by Charles VII make it clear that he even handed over to Ribes certain baronies in the Agenais and in Quercy to be his legitimately-owned property.53 In 1431, certain English brigands were destructively active around the town of Condom, and the bourgeois consuls asked for Jean’s help against them. Soon afterwards, Rodrigo de Villandrando entered the Rouergue moving around between towns such as Millau and Rodez before Jean paid him to go away. It is unlikely that Jean kept himself aloof from Villandrando’s incursions.54 Thereafter, fresh rampages by Villandrando followed each year, paid off by grants from various meetings of local estates in the county of Armagnac.
These culminated in the great raid of 1438 up to the walls of Bordeaux and then into the Médoc in which Villandrando’s brigands received the support of Charles VII’s generals, Foix, Albret, and Xaintrailles. The Earl of Huntingdon’s arrival meant that the French troops were soon no nearer to Bordeaux than Tartas. In 1439, Jean d’Armagnac’s heir, the Viscount of Lomagne, ceased to co-operate in the ambiguous behaviour of his father, and accepted Charles VII’s appointment of him as captain-general of Languedoc with a particular mission to disperse the brigands with the aid of the seneschals of Toulouse, Carcassonne and Beaucaire, and paid for by 2,000 livres voted by the Languedoc estates. The Dauphin Louis, before his association with the princes in the Praguerie, negotiated with Villandrando, paying him off in June 1439 with 1,000 gold écus to return to his native Castille and to stay there. In all these developments, Jean IV found himself looking both ways towards the kings of France and of England. To understand this ambiguity, we shall have to retrace our steps to his accession twenty years earlier.55
As soon as the Constable Bernard d’Armagnac was dead, the new count went to the Dauphin Charles accompanied by several other nobles to ask for justice, says the chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet,56 both for himself and for other lords who had met their end57 in the riots in the capital. The dauphin replied that those who had thus suffered ‘would receive justice in time and place’. This was obviously an empty promise in 1418 in the circumstances of repeated English victories: Henry V was encamped in Normandy and had given orders to the Gascon nobles, Gaillard de Durfort, Lord of Duras, and Bernard de Lesparre together with Jean de Saint-Jean, Mayor of Bordeaux, to receive the homage of Jean d’Armagnac and his brother Bernard. The king/duke also ordered all his Gascon subjects to obey his envoys. Jean IV hedged his bets: he went to Aire-sur-l’Adour on 16 November 1418 to meet Gaston de Foix and Charles d’Albret to make a defensive and offensive alliance against the Burgundians but, even so, signed a truce with the Anglo-Gascons to last until Easter 1419. In February, safe-conducts were issued for a deputation from Armagnac, including the Bishop of Rodez, to travel to Normandy while, at the same time, Jean IV and his brother went to Toulouse to meet the Dauphin who was beginning to assert himself against the English.
The Dauphin effectively prevented Gaston of Foix from allying himself with Henry V, and it was likely that Jean d’Armagnac received similar blandishments. ‘The words of the Count of Armagnac were honeyed but his actions were suspect.’58 His real agenda was to enlarge his own domains as he subsequently showed by encouraging captains in English pay and being indifferent to Joan of Arc’s raising of French self-awareness in 1429, despite his letter to her about the authenticity of an anti-pope’s dubious but persistent successor.
In 1427, Jean IV had been involved in Jean Duke of Orleans’ attempt to make peace with Henry VI’s minority government. Orleans had been a prisoner in England since Agincourt, twelve years before, and he wanted to attach a lasting peace to his own release. He was looking for support in France, and Armagnac gave him his, making an engagement with him in a document dated 2 June at his castle at L’Isle Jourdain. ‘Such a peace,’ he asserted, ‘would be profitable and expedient, not only for the public utility of both kingdoms but also for all Christendom which is in trouble as a result of war between them.’59 Of course, nothing came of all this, but Charles d’Orleans tried again in the same vein in 1433, and Jean IV once more agreed to take part in any negotiation that might be arranged.60 Once more, Orleans had to stay in England, becoming more of a poet than a diplomat. For Armagnac, there was too much of a Burgundian tendency in these negotiations, and he turned more towards Charles VII for a time. But three years on, and we see him intriguing against the king once more: this time with the Dukes of Bourbon, Alençon and Brittany with support from the inevitable bad penny, Villandrando. Their intention was to remove two of the king’s councillors, Christophe Harcourt and Martin Gouge, Bishop of Clermont, and replace them with d’Albret, who was more likely to further their interests with the king.
All that was needed was for the king to arrive at Rodez as expected. But Charles VII uncovered the intrigue, rapidly left Montpelier, and arrived at Saint-Flour on 14 May 1437 with 4,500 men to surprise the conspirators into abandoning their project. Other plans were soon drawn up by Armagnac for a truce with Henry VI of England, now allegedly in charge of his own government. Charles VII tried to detach him from his double game but had to be content with securing only the support of his son, Lomagne, against him. This latter became a staunch supporter of Charles VII’s designs for an authoritarian monarchy which left no place for intransigent feudal magnates. The next five years saw Jean IV becoming more and more eager for an alliance with England, a tendency which resulted in his attempt at a marriage of one of his three daughters to Henry VI, which appeared possible in 1442 when the twenty-one-year-old king took the initiative himself.61
Charles VII was too astute at masterminding not to know about Jean IV’s secret negotiations with the English ambassadors. He was looking for an opportunity to undercut the independence of the feudal lords on the southern border of France as he had already done in overcoming the open rebellion of the Praguerie. His motive was to gain their co-operation as his subordinates for the coming invasion of Gascony. He had gained Charles d’Albret’s support by his participation in the ‘Day of Tartas’, and Gaston IV of Foix-Béarn was already actively on his side. He wanted Armagnac as an ally in this undertaking as well. But he knew that it was going to be difficult to persuade him.
The king saw his chance in the possible resolution of the problem of Marguerite, Countess of Comminges whose story was a long one. In 1419, she had married Mathieu de Foix as her third husband, being twice widowed already. She was twenty-two years older than Mathieu. Her county of Comminges was her dowry, and her new husband had taken over the territory and assumed the title she offered – his only purpose in marrying her. He then proceeded to lock her up, first at Saverdun, and then in his castle at Foix. She was still there twenty years later.
Her first husband had been Jean III of Armagnac, Jean IV’s uncle, and her second was another Armagnac, the Viscount of Ferzensaguet. So Jean IV declared an interest in the lady’s lands if not in her plight, which was why, it appeared, the king decided to intervene. In 1439, Charles VII sent commissioners to release her from captivity, ordering them that, should there be resistance from Mathieu de Foix, they were to take her under royal protection and summon her captor to appear before the Dauphin Louis who had just been declared lieutenant-general of Languedoc. The dauphin did not stay in the south very long, on account of moving to Angers when English activity was threatened, and the king sent Poton de Xaintrailles to Languedoc instead. Poton rashly entrusted the elderly countess’s protection to Jean IV and, naturally, Jean IV saw his chance of taking over the county and its resources under the pretext of an inheritance from his uncle. He would have succeeded had not Mathieu de Foix called for help from Gaston IV, his brother, and his uncle, the captal de Buch who had five hundred men at their disposal between them.62
However, the king was at Toulouse, and received a delegation from the Estates of Comminges seeking his help in the matter. The king intervened again to order Mathieu to set his wife free. He further decreed that the couple should divide the usufruct of the county’s revenues between them for their lifetimes, and the survivor should have them all. Mathieu was reconciled to the crown by this means, paying homage to the king and receiving from him letters of abolition for his past cruelty towards the countess. She herself was taken to Toulouse and then to Poitiers for a brief period of liberty. She died before the year was over.63 The king ordered Jean IV to surrender her lands which he had seized despite the previous decree, but he claimed that she had surrendered them into his keeping by a secret agreement.64 She was his aunt before she had met Mathieu de Foix, when all was said and done.
Jean IV retained his independent attitude towards the Valois monarchy as seen in this next incident. He had styled himself in his official documents ‘by the Grace of God, Count of Armagnac’. The other counts in this story had done the same, and now the king ordered them, under threat of punishment for non-compliance, to abandon the practice. Jean IV did not submit to this, but made an appeal to the Parlement of Paris, after the law’s delays, on 19 March 1442.65 The next year, his opposition to the king was even more blatant: he absolutely refused to make his county contribute to the war effort against the English, which Charles VII had been conducting with considerable success after the ‘Day of Tartas’ had engaged Charles II of Albret and Gaston IV, Count of Foix-Béarn, on his side.
The king had had enough of such pretentiousness on the part of a vassal and sent the Dauphin Louis into the Midi with an army for a punitive expedition. He reached Entraygues at the end of November 1443 and called for help from the seneschal of Toulouse. A well-known écorcheur captain with 600 lances, Jean de Salazar, bastard of Armagnac, who had links with Rodrigo de Villandrando and Georges de La Trémouïlle, enrolled with Jean IV against the dauphin. The dauphin was entirely successful in his military walkabout66 passing through Toulouse and Albi and retaking the county of Comminges which Jean had not surrendered to the crown as ordered.
Jean IV had taken refuge with his family in his castle at L’Isle Jourdain. When the dauphin arrived there, he came out to meet him but was immediately taken prisoner in the king’s name. The countess of Armagnac, Isabelle of Navarre, was also arrested along with the rest of the family. The dauphin handed over L’Isle Jourdain to be pillaged, taking jewels which he later gave as a present to the king’s mistress, Agnès Sorel. ‘Certain sources’ report that a box was found which contained Jean’s correspondence with Henry VI’s court in England. Not being English, Jean realized that he was beaten and ordered the people of Rodez to take an oath of fidelity to the dauphin, who then returned to the county of Rouergue, captured the bastard of Armagnac at Séverac and put the seneschal of Lyon in charge of the Armagnac lands. Jean IV himself was taken by a circuitous route via Toulouse and Albi to Carcassonne where he was put in prison.
The Viscount of Lomagne, the future Jean V d’Armagnac, had declared himself independent from his father’s perpetually autonomous stance and had allied himself with the fortunes of Charles VII. Nevertheless, his filial loyalty caused him to cross the Pyrenees to make contact with his maternal grandfather, John II, King of Castille, to ask him to plead Armagnac’s cause with the Valois king. In the winter of 1444–1445, John II sent an envoy, Diego de Valera, to meet Charles VII at Nancy, who took forty days to reflect on the grave wrongs done to him by the Count of Armagnac and accepted that the king of Castille and Leon would act as guarantor for his future good behaviour. Meanwhile Armagnac himself made contact with influential people to plead his cause with the king: the Dukes of Savoy, Orleans, Alençon, and Bourbon, the counts of Foix, Maine, Richemont, and Dunois, and even with the Dauphin. He took the very risky step of writing to the king on his own behalf to plead the deleterious effects of his incarceration, his douleur et tristesse.
The king agreed to hold audiences about his case, and the end result was that Armagnac’s friends advised him to throw himself upon the king’s mercy; and this is what he did. The king issued letters of abolition in August 1445 stipulating his conditions. All the members of Armagnac’s family had to take an oath of fidelity to the monarchy, renouncing any alliances made with the King of England, and not to use the formula ‘by the grace of God’ in their legal acts and deeds. Comminges became a royal domain as did several important Armagnac towns. Jean IV d’Armagnac was pardoned and punished at the same time. He was not actually set free from Carcassonne until February 1446.67
He protested against the king’s judgement on his treasonable behaviour, but the king kept watch on him, ready to strike if he were to get out of line again. He resigned himself to his son’s service in the king’s new army and he lived quietly until his final hours in his castle at L’Isle Jourdain where he felt most at home despite its sacking by the king’s soldiery. He died there on 5 November 1450.
Jean IV was succeeded by Lomagne, whose loyalty to the king had been long before secured, and so all the southern magnates were in the Valois camp now that the time had come for the final act of the drama of the conquest of Guyenne.