Charles VII “The Victorious” “The Well-Served” (1422-1461)
France was in a precarious position when nineteen-year-old Charles VII assumed the throne. “He was deeply pious, always firmly maintaining his innocence over Duke Johnson’s assassination, but tormented always by doubt: was he truly the heir to the House of Valois? His mother Isabeau had –perhaps forgivably—been serially unfaithful to her husband. He knew that the vast majority of his subjects –if subjects they were—would welcome him; they had no desire to be ruled by a foreigner. But how was he to make good on his claim?” (91).
Joan of Arc
With the English having conquered northern France and laying siege to Orleans, enter France’s beloved heroine in March 1429 –Joan of Arc. A peasant girl who began hearing “voices” at the age of thirteen, she embarked upon a divine quest to reassure Charles VII (then known as the dauphin) of his rightful claim to the throne. With food rations running low and murmurs of surrender beginning to grow, Joan arrived in the city of Orleans and ushered in a new enthusiasm for opposing the English. Even after being wounded in the neck by an arrow, she refused to leave the battle until the English were on the run. She then urged Charles to complete his coronation ceremony at the Cathedral at Reims which took place in her presence on July 17, 1429. Now, with her mission accomplished, Joan longed to return home to her village, but the people would simply not accept it. She disastrously bowed to their will and joined in the march to recapture Paris next, but she was again wounded, this time in the thigh. She was then taken prisoner shortly thereafter during an attempt to relieve Compiegne which was under siege by the Burgundians. Her captor, John of Luxembourg, handed her over to the English for 10,000 francs –they amusingly believed her to be an evil witch, or “the disciple and limb of the Fiend.”
An examination of Joan began on February 21, 1431 and her trial was set five weeks later (she was allowed no defense counsel or spiritual advisor at her trial). At nineteen-years-old, young Joan was summarily excommunicated and declared a heretic. She was then publicly burned at the stake in the marketplace at Rouens. After the death of Joan of Arc, English fortunes never truly recovered in France, even after ten-year-old Henry VI successfully invaded Paris and became the only English monarch to ever be crowned king of France in Notre-Dame Cathedral, however his arrival was unsurprisingly received poorly by the French –the coronation was poorly attended, the subsequent banquet was a fiasco, no amnesty was declared, no alms were distributed to the poor, and two days after Christmas, the king was quietly shuffled back to England.
By now, there was little appetite on either side of the Channel for continuing the fight. At long last, in 1435, Philip of Burgundy lost his patience and convened a peace conference at Arras. England refused to withdraw their claim to France and withdrew from the proceedings, but they were horrified when Burgundy and France effected a new reconciliation –King Charles would agree to deliver a public apology for the assassination of John the Fearless and hold those responsible for his death, while Philip would be absolved of his oath of allegiance to England by the attending cardinals. King Henry wept when he heard the news, while his people grew enraged at the Flemish betrayal. In London, Englishmen looted and burned Flemish merchant homes as recompense.
In 1436, King Charles VII solemnly entered Paris. The recovery of Normandy followed in 1450 and Guienne in 1453. At the end of The Hundred Years’ War, England only retained Calais.
With the war finally at a close, France flourished and Charles VII became the “King of Kings” in Europe, at least according to the Doge of Venice. Among his courtiers, he counted Jacques Couer, an immensely successful merchant with a base in the Middle East who had become the richest person in French history (likely owning more ships than even the king himself). According to John Julius Norwich, Couer’s house in Bourges remains one of the finest secular monuments of the late Middle Ages. However, Couer became unfairly accused of a widespread conspiracy about poisoning the king’s mistress (Agnes Sorel, la Dame de Beaute) which obliged him to pay a hefty sum and serve time in prison. He eventually fled to Rome where he died leading a fleet of sixteen ships to battle the Mameluke Sultan of Egypt at Rhodes.
Meanwhile, King Charles was growing wary of the vast riches possessed by the duchy at Burgundy, whose lavish court at Dijon had grown to rival that of Paris. Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy was the envy of Europe after having founded the Order of the Golden Fleece, one of the highest and most sought-after decorations in all of Europe. The other chief dilemma facing Charles was his son Louis the dauphin, a fiercely intelligent young man who was desperate for power and when he was denied it, he sought to destabilize his father’s reign from within. He took part in the Praguerie uprising against Charles and later fled to Burgundy for refuge. He also despised his father’s mistress, Agnes Sorel, and it was almost certainly he who was responsible for her death (perhaps by mercury poisoning) for which Jacques Couer had paid such a hefty price.
In 1458, Charles fell ill with an ulcer in his leg and an infection in his jaw. Realizing he only had a few days to live, Charles summoned his son to his bedside, but Louis still refused. It was his final act of disobedience and betrayal to his father. Charles died on July 21, 1461 and was buried next to his parents in Saint-Denis.
“He had been a good king, if perhaps not 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” (99).
Louis XI “The Prudent” “The Universal Spider” (1461-1483)
“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 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 dreadful way, he was a greater king than his father, one who worked extremely hard, if never entirely selfless, to create a strong, centralized 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” (99).
When he ascended to the throne and made his way from Burgundy to Reims, Louis was thirty-eight-old and already a widower. He had earned the nickname “La Ruse” (or “The Cunning”) and was being described as “l’araignee universelle” (or “The Universal Spider”) due to his ceaseless attempts at spinning intricate webs of conspiracy against his enemies. And his top enemy quickly became his ally Burgundy under Duke Charles the Bold, who was seeking to make Burgundy an independent nation. Louis won a string of bloodless victories over Burgundy, all while England was undergoing its own far more bloody civil war between the houses of York and Lancaster in the Wars of the Roses. The weak, half-witted Henry VI had been deposed by the Yorkist Edward IV, thanks in large part to Richard, Earl of Warwick (“The King-Maker”), and Duke Philip of Burgundy made no secret of his support for the Yorkists, but both King Henry’s wife, Queen Margaret of Anjou, was Louis’s cousin and was thus she was granted safe harbor in France, as was Richard of Warwick when he fell out of favor with Edward IV. Together, they worked to reinstate Henry VI on the throne of England while Edward fled to the Low Countries but in the ensuing years, Burgundy did not greet Edward quite so fondly and eventually Louis and Edward met at Picquigny, a little village on the Somme, where they agreed to a seven year truce in which Louis was to pay Edward 75,000 crowns to never again pursue the French throne, plus a further two payments of 50,000 crowns (one of which was to sue for the ransom of Margaret). It was also settled that Edward’s daughter Elizabeth was to marry the dauphin Charles. Henry VI died in the Tower of London in May 1471, perhaps brutally murdered by Edward’s brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the future Richard III (when Henry’s coffin was opened in 1910, his skull was found to have been badly broken) and Louis XI had successfully driven out the English. This marked the true end of The Hundred Years’ War.
“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 appallingly cruelty: Philippe de Commines [the famous French historian] 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 history” (104-105).
Charles VIII “The Affable” (1483-1498)
The dauphin became King Charles VIII in 1483 at the age thirteen. He was an odd-looking child, his head seeming too big for his body which was weak and undersized. He was a dull boy with excellent manners who nevertheless did not impress his court. The regency was placed in the hands of his sister, Anne de Beaujeu.
The first crisis of his kingship came with the successorship of Francis II, Duke of Brittany, whose duchy was inherited by his unmarried daughter, Anne. The regent Anne de Beaujeu wasted no time arranging a marriage to Charles VIII to thus prevent suitors like Maximilian of Austria from gaining control of the region. But this meant young Margaret of Austria, who had been living at the French court, would return home carrying with her both Flanders and Austria. At any rate, by all accounts both Charles and Anne of Brittany had a happy marriage.
However, in 1494 Charles embarked on an ill-fated invasion of Naples (the infamous “Italian War”), after the death of Ferdinand I, but in response to the speed of France’s conquest, Pope Alexander VI formed an alliance with Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Italian powers known as the Holy League (or also the League of Venice). Its singular objective: to send Charles VIII back to France. And when Charles returned to France, his mercenaries brought with them the early European cases of syphilis as they settled in the warmer climate of Italy (John Julius Norwich subscribes to the theory that syphilis was introduced to Europe by the return of Columbus’s voyages). It became known as the “morbo gallico” to Italians, the French disease.
The death of Charles came on Palm Sunday evening 1498. He was on his way to watch a tennis match (the jeu de paume) when he struck his head on a low lintel (a doorway beam). Still, he continued onward to watch the game but later collapsed and died after nine hours of apparent agony. He was twenty-eight years old, and by this point all four of his children had already predeceased their father.
House of Valois
- Charles VII “The Victorious” “The Well-Served” (1422-1461)
- Louis XI “The Prudent” “The Universal Spider” (1461-1483)
- Charles VIII “The Affable” (1483-1498)
For this reading I used John Julius Norwich’s A History of France (2018), one of his final books before his death.