Of all pleasures he loved hunting and hawking, but nothing pleased him more than dogs. As for ladies, he never got involved with them whilst I was with him, for about the time of my arrival he lost a son which caused him great grief, and he swore an oath to God, in my presence, to touch no other woman but the Queen, his wife.* And although this is no more than he ought to have done according to the laws of marriage, it was a considerable achievement, seeing that he had so many at his command, to persevere in this resolution, since the Queen, though a good woman, was not one of those in whom men take great pleasure …
Philippe de Commines
WITH THE WAR out of the way, France flourished. By 1440, and perhaps even a little before, King Charles VII had become the most influential ruler in Europe. ‘He is the King of Kings,’ wrote the Doge of Venice, ‘nothing is possible without him.’ He was lucky, too, to have at his court one of the most brilliant merchants of all time. Jacques Coeur had made his way in about 1430 to the Levant, basing himself in Damascus; and within a few years he had established France firmly in the Middle East to the point where it became a serious rival to the great trading republics of Italy. In 1436 Charles summoned him back to Paris and made him Master of the Mint; then in 1448 he travelled to Rome as the king’s ambassador to Pope Nicholas V, and from about that time made his master regular financial advances with which to carry on Charles’s wars when necessary. By now he was the richest private citizen in French history. He probably possessed more ships than the king, he employed three hundred managers and had business houses all over western Europe. His house in Bourges remains one of the finest secular monuments of the late Middle Ages to be found anywhere. He gave the cathedral its exquisite sanctuary, and his son Jean became its archbishop.
But it was too good to last. In February 1450, Agnès Sorel, the king’s ravishingly beautiful mistress – she was known as la Dame de Beauté and was the first officially recognised royal mistress in history – died mysteriously at twenty-eight, and one of the court ladies, deeply in debt to Jacques Coeur, formally accused him of having poisoned her. There was not a shred of evidence against him, but in July 1451 Charles bowed to the increasing pressure, giving orders for his arrest and for the confiscation of his goods. Accusations rained down: he had paid French gold to the infidel, he had kidnapped oarsmen for his galleys, he had sent back a Christian slave who had sought refuge in one of his ships, he had been guilty of sharp practice in Languedoc. Everyone knew he was innocent, but it made no difference: he was held for nearly two years in five different prisons, after which he was obliged to do public penance and to pay the king a vast additional sum, while the rest of his property was forfeited and he was exiled for an indefinite period. In 1455 he managed to get to Rome, where Pope Nicholas – who remembered him with affection – welcomed him warmly. On Nicholas’s death in 1455 his successor Calixtus III gave Coeur the command of a fleet of sixteen ships he was sending to Rhodes, which was suffering one of its periodic sieges by the Mameluke Sultan of Egypt. Coeur was taken ill on the way, and died soon after his arrival.
Did Charles have a guilty conscience over the fate of Jacques Coeur? He certainly should have, but in his last years there were two greater anxieties on his mind: the Duchy of Burgundy and his son Louis, the dauphin. The dukes of Burgundy, technically vassals of France, had – like Coeur – grown too rich and too powerful; but – being by now kings in all but name – they were a good deal less easily dealt with. Besides Burgundy – which Philip the Bold had received as an appanage from his father, John the Good – they had acquired Flanders through marriage and now controlled all the Low Countries as far west as the mouth of the Somme. Their duchy extended from the North Sea to the Jura, the foothills of the Alps. They had long since ceased to pay homage to the King of France – indeed, they had gone so far as to ally themselves with the English during the Hundred Years’ War. (It was they, far more than the English, who had been responsible for the capture and burning of Joan of Arc.) Their court at Dijon was every bit as cultivated as that of Paris; their architecture was superb, their sculpture – inspired by the astonishing genius of Claus Sluter – still more so. As early as 1429 Duke Philip the Good had founded the Order of the Golden Fleece, which was to become perhaps the highest and most-sought-after decoration in all Europe.
The other problem was the dauphin. Almost from the day of his birth in 1423, young Louis had been a problem. Eldest of the fourteen children borne to Charles VII by Marie of Anjou, as a boy he had shown himself to be fearsomely intelligent – a good deal more so than his father, whom he disliked and despised. Before long he was demanding real power, but Charles – who fully reciprocated his son’s feelings – always refused. Louis consequently did everything he could to destabilise his father’s reign. As early as 1440, when he was only seventeen, he had joined a vassals’ rebellion against the king known as the Praguerie,* and was soon obliged first to retire to his province of Dauphiné, and then in 1456 to seek refuge with Philip of Burgundy. ‘My cousin of Burgundy knows not what he does,’ said Charles with feeling. ‘He is suckling the fox who will eat his hens.’ Louis also showed particular animosity against his father’s mistress Agnès Sorel, on one occasion driving her with a drawn sword into Charles’s bed. It was almost certainly he who was responsible for her murder – now thought to be by mercury poisoning – for which the innocent Jacques Coeur paid so heavy a price.
In 1458 the king fell seriously ill. The disease began with an ulcer on his leg which refused to heal and began to suppurate; soon afterwards the infection spread to his jaw, where it caused a huge and painful abscess. This continued to grow in size until he could no longer swallow. Realising that he had probably only a few days to live, he summoned the dauphin to his bedside; but Louis predictably refused to come. It was his last disobedience, his last betrayal. Charles died on 21 July 1461, and was buried next to his parents in Saint-Denis. He had been a good king, if not perhaps a great one. The first part of his reign had been inevitably overshadowed by Joan of Arc and her martyrdom; but in the second he succeeded in doing something that his four predecessors had all failed to do – he had driven the English out of France, leaving only their last toehold in Calais. Finally, he had provided France with a standing army, her first since the days of the Romans. His subjects had good cause to be grateful.
With Louis XI it can safely be said that the age of chivalry was gone for ever. His character failed utterly to improve. He cared little for honour, breaking his word again and again, and fully expecting others to break theirs. Having been a consistently disobedient son, he expected his own children to behave in much the same manner and never trusted them an inch. And yet, in his own rather dreadful way, he was a greater king than his father, one who worked extremely hard, if never entirely selflessly, to create a strong, centralised monarchy in which the nobility would know its place. That last qualification was important: Louis had always been fearful of the great, whose power and influence he strove all his life to diminish. He infinitely preferred to employ the bourgeoisie and those of humble origins, raising them regularly to the highest offices of state, while he himself travelled constantly through his kingdom, taking provincial officials and local governments off their guard and instituting ruthless investigations if he was dissatisfied – which he very often was.
When he left the Burgundian court to receive the crown of France at Reims he was already thirty-eight years old and a widower:* now at last he could give free rein to the planning and plotting for which he was to become famous. Intrigue was in his blood. Before very long he had earned the sobriquet le Rusé – the Cunning – and before much longer he was being described as l’araignée universelle, ‘the universal spider’, spinning intricate webs of conspiracy, enmeshing his enemies one by one and slowly pulling them in. His principal enemy, not unnaturally, was Burgundy. The fact that the Burgundian court had given him refuge for five years mattered not a jot to him; his father’s prophecy was proved right, and once back in France he was resolved to do all he could to destroy it – a resolution which became even more determined after the succession in 1467 of Duke Charles the Bold, whom he knew to be planning to raise Burgundy into an independent kingdom. He had already found some unexpected allies in 1465, when the people of Liège first rose up against Duke Charles’s father Philip, and had immediately joined them.† This turned out to be a serious mistake. The rebels were defeated and Louis was forced into a humiliating treaty, giving up much of the territory that he had acquired from Philip. His subsequent conduct, however, was entirely typical of him. First he turned on the Liègeois, giving his support to Duke Charles in a siege of the city in which hundreds of his former allies were massacred; then he returned to France, whereupon he instantly repudiated the treaty and set about building up his forces for a full-scale war. This broke out in 1472, when Charles laid siege to Beauvais and several other towns; but he got nowhere and finally had to sue for peace.
Burgundy continued as a European power for another two years. It was finally defeated not by Louis but by the army of the Duke of Lorraine and the Swiss. The Battle of Nancy was fought on 5 January 1477. Duke Charles’s naked body was found several days later, locked into a frozen river, his head split almost in two, his face so badly mutilated that his physician was able to identify him only from his old battle scars and his curiously long fingernails. Here was a piece of luck for Louis, for Charles had no male heirs; Burgundy and Picardy accordingly reverted to the French crown, and the King of France could congratulate himself that he no longer had to endure a serious and troublesome rival on his north-eastern frontier.
It was only unfortunate that the duke had left a daughter, Mary, who inherited his personal fortune and all those territories that had previously belonged to the empire. To get his hands on these, Louis made a determined effort to arrange for her to marry his eldest son, but here again there was a problem: Mary was twenty, the dauphin was nine. Unsurprisingly she preferred Maximilian of Austria, who many years later was to become Holy Roman Emperor – bringing him, incidentally, as her dowry the entire territory of Flanders, including the city of Brussels which her family had made its capital. Mary herself never became empress; in 1482 she fell from her horse and was killed. She left a son – confusingly, another Philip the Fair, of whom we shall be hearing more later – and a daughter, Margaret; and it was Margaret rather than her mother who was eventually betrothed to the dauphin, bringing to France as her dowry Artois and the Franche-Comté on the Swiss border. She came to Paris as a child of three and grew up at the French court as a fille de France. Here for Louis was another bloodless victory.
While the French and the Burgundians were at each other’s throats, the English were fully occupied with a civil war of their own: that bitter struggle between the houses of York and Lancaster known as the Wars of the Roses. Louis, it need hardly be said, kept a watchful eye on its progress. The weak – some said half-witted – King Henry VI of Lancaster had been deposed in 1461 and succeeded on the throne by the Yorkist Edward IV, thanks largely to the machinations of Richard, Earl of Warwick (‘the King-maker’); and Duke Philip of Burgundy had made no secret of his support for the Yorkists. On the other hand King Henry’s queen, Margaret of Anjou, was Louis’s cousin.* Later that year she crossed to France and persuaded him to lend her money and send an expeditionary force to restore her husband, promising him Calais in return. In fact Duke Philip refused point-blank to allow French troops to cross his territory, so the whole scheme came to nothing; but Queen Margaret remained at the French court, and was still there when Warwick, having fallen out with King Edward, now arrived in France and made a formal request to Louis for protection.
Louis was only too pleased to agree. By this time Edward had succeeded in antagonising almost all of his most important erstwhile supporters, and there seemed at last to be a chance of restoring Henry VI and cementing an Anglo-French alliance against the Duke of Burgundy. The principal stumbling block was Queen Margaret. Could she ever be persuaded to overcome her hatred for Warwick – who had after all been responsible for her husband’s deposition – and ally herself with him? Louis prepared his ground carefully; and at last, on 22 July 1470, the Earl of Warwick presented himself before Margaret and flung himself at her feet. She left him, we are told, lying prone for some considerable time before agreeing to forgive him, and even then insisted on a further public act of contrition at Westminster after her husband had been restored. But Warwick was finally permitted to rise to his feet and, to celebrate their reconciliation, Margaret’s son Richard Prince of Wales was formally betrothed in the church of St Mary in Angers to his daughter Anne Neville, while all those present swore on a relic of the True Cross to remain faithful to Henry VI.
But this is a history of France, not of England. Let it be said simply that King Edward, having fled briefly to the Low Countries, returned shortly afterwards to destroy the Lancastrians at Tewkesbury in May 1471. Queen Margaret had meanwhile retired with her ladies to a ‘poor religious place’ on the Worcester road, and was still there three days later when she was taken prisoner. For the next four years she was under what might be called house arrest, being constantly transferred from place to place, and this might well have been the pattern for the rest of her life had Edward not decided, in 1475, to assert his claim – such as it was – to the throne of France.
Having as he thought concluded a profitable alliance with the Duke of Burgundy, Edward crossed the Channel in June, with an invasion force of some 16,000 men. His intention was to march through Burgundian territory to Reims, but to his astonishment he soon found that Burgundian troops were barring his way and Burgundian towns refusing him entry. Louis, characteristically, now sent word to him that he could offer better terms than his so-called allies. Edward accepted and on Louis’s suggestion, made his way to Amiens.
For Edward’s expedition – and for much of the reign of Louis XI – we have a fascinating contemporary source. Philippe de Commines was a writer and diplomat in the courts of France and Burgundy; he has been described as ‘the first critical and philosophical historian since classical times’* and he gives a meticulously detailed account of all that took place. ‘The King of England’, he writes,
camped half a league from Amiens … The King sent the King of England three hundred wagons loaded with the best wine it was possible to find and this supply train appeared to be an army almost as large as the English one … He had ordered two large tables to be set up at the entrance to the gate of the town, one on either side, laden with all kinds of foodstuffs which would make them want to drink the wine. Men stood by to serve it, and not a drop of water could be seen … As soon as the English approached the gate they saw this arrangement … They took it all in very good part. When they were in the town, they paid for nothing wherever they went. There were nine or ten taverns fully stocked with everything they needed where they could eat and drink. They asked for whatever they wanted and paid nothing; this lasted for three or four days.
The two monarchs finally met at Picquigny, a little village on the Somme just outside Amiens, on a specially constructed bridge with a wooden grille at its centre. Such conditions seemed hardly favourable for serious negotiations affecting the future of both countries; yet somehow they proved successful. In an agreement signed by the two monarchs on 29 August 1475, they agreed to a seven-year truce, with free trade between them. Louis was to pay Edward 75,000 crowns, essentially a bribe never again to pursue his claim to the French throne. This would be followed by an annual payment of 50,000 crowns. Another 50,000 provided a ransom for Queen Margaret. It was settled that Edward’s daughter Elizabeth was to marry the dauphin, Charles, when she came of age.
Here now was the real end of the Hundred Years’ War. It was entirely due to Louis, and was in every way typical of him. He believed that every man had his price, and when necessary he was perfectly happy to pay it. Of course the whole Picquigny adventure was bribery, and not only of the king; half a dozen of his leading advisers were also granted generous pensions. There were those on both sides – Richard of Gloucester among them – who denounced it as dishonourable; Louis de Bretaylle, English envoy to Spain, remarked that this one shady deal had taken away the honour of all King Edward’s previous military victories. But Louis XI was not bothered by such considerations; he had got what he wanted, and without a drop of blood being shed. As he put it, his father might have driven out the English by force of arms; he had been equally successful with pâté, venison and good French wine.
And not only had he driven out the English; he had freed his cousin Margaret from what would otherwise have been life-long captivity. He regretted only that he had been less successful with her husband, Henry, who had died on the night of 21 May 1471 in the Tower of London. The circumstances of his death are not absolutely clear. According to the subsequent proclamation it was the result of ‘pure displeasure and melancholy’; but both in England and in France it was an open secret that he had been murdered, almost certainly by Edward’s brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the future King Richard III. When his coffin was opened in 1910, the skull was found to be ‘much broken’. It was a sad end indeed for the only English king who had also been crowned King of France in Notre-Dame.
Louis XI was never popular; he made not the slightest effort to be loved by his subjects, whom he taxed mercilessly and to whom he frequently showed appalling cruelty: Philippe de Commines described the wooden cages, only eight feet square, in which he kept his enemies, sometimes for years. In 1481, however, there came at least partial deliverance. Louis suffered the first of a series of strokes, which utterly unhinged him: he became dangerously paranoid and no longer capable of governing. He died at eight o’clock in the evening on Saturday 30 August 1483, at the age of sixty-one. He was not, by any standards, a good man; but he left France as she emerged from the Middle Ages stronger, safer and better governed than she had ever been throughout her history.
* Charlotte of Savoy.
* It was connected with the contemporary Hussite uprisings in Prague, in which he was also involved.
* His first wife, Margaret of Scotland (daughter of King James I), had died, childless and miserable, in 1445 at the age of twenty. In 1451, without his father’s consent, Louis had taken as his second wife Charlotte of Savoy; he was twenty-seven, she was nine.
† The story is told in Sir Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward.
* Louis’s mother, Marie of Anjou, was the sister of Margaret’s father René.
* Oxford Companion to English Literature.