Volume 3 — CHAPTER XXIV.——THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR. —CHARLES VII. AND JOAN OF ARC. 1422-1461. (continued 3)

Let it be added, in accordance with contemporary testimony, that at the same time that he established an all but arbitrary rule in military and financial matters, Charles VII. took care that “practical justice, in the case of every individual, was promptly rendered to poor as well as rich, to small as well as great; he forbade all trafficking in the offices of the magistracy, and every time that a place became vacant in a parliament he made no nomination to it, save on the presentations of the court.”

Questions of military, financial, and judicial organization were not the only ones which occupied the government of Charles VII. He attacked also ecclesiastical questions, which were at that period a subject of passionate discussion in Christian Europe amongst the councils of the Church and in the closets of princes. The celebrated ordinance, known by the name of Pragmatic Sanction, which Charles VII. issued at Bourges on the 7th of July, 1438, with the concurrence of a grand national council, laic and ecclesiastical, was directed towards the carrying out, in the internal regulations of the French Church, and in the relations either of the State with the Church in France, or of the Church of France with the papacy, of reforms long since desired or dreaded by the different powers and interests. It would be impossible to touch here upon these difficult and delicate questions without going far beyond the limits imposed upon the writer of this history. All that can be said is, that there was no lack of a religious spirit, or of a liberal spirit, in the Pragmatic Sanction of Charles VII., and that the majority of the measures contained in it were adopted with the approbation of the greater part of the French clergy, as well as of educated laymen in France.

In whatever light it is regarded, the government of Charles VII. in the latter part of his reign brought him not only in France, but throughout Europe, a great deal of fame and power. When he had driven the English out of his kingdom, he was called Charles the Victorious; and when he had introduced into the internal regulations of the state so many important and effective reforms, he was called Charles the Well-served. “The sense he had by nature,” says his historian Chastellain, “had been increased to twice as much again, in his straitened fortunes, by long constraint and perilous dangers, which sharpened his wits perforce.” “He is the king of kings,” was said of him by the Doge of Venice, Francis Foscari, a good judge of policy; “there is no doing without him.”

Nevertheless, at the close, so influential and so tranquil, of his reign, Charles VII. was, in his individual and private life, the most desolate, the most harassed, and the most unhappy man in his kingdom. In 1442 and 1450 he had lost the two women who had been, respectively, the most devoted and most useful, and the most delightful and dearest to him, his mother-in-law, Yolande of Arragon, Queen of Sicily, and his favorite, Agnes Sorel. His avowed intimacy with Agnes, and even, independently of her and after her death, the scandalous licentiousness of his morals, had justly offended his virtuous wife, Mary of Anjou, the only lady of the royal establishment who survived him. She had brought him twelve children, and the eldest, the dauphin Louis, after having from his very youth behaved in a factious, harebrained, turbulent way towards the king his father, had become at one time an open rebel, at another a venomous conspirator and a dangerous enemy. At his birth in 1423, he had been named Louis in remembrance of his ancestor, St. Louis, and in hopes that he would resemble him. In 1440, at seventeen years of age, he allied himself with the great lords, who were displeased with the new military system established by Charles VII., and allowed himself to be drawn by them into the transient rebellion known by the name of Praguery. When the king, having put it down, refused to receive the rebels to favor, the dauphin said to his father, “My lord, I must go back with them, then; for so I promised them.” “Louis,” replied the king, “the gates are open, and if they are not high enough I will have sixteen or twenty fathom of wall knocked down for you, that you may go whither it seems best to you.” Charles VII. had made his son marry Margaret Stuart of Scotland, that charming princess who was so smitten with the language and literature of France that, coming one day upon the poet Alan Chartier asleep upon a bench, she kissed him on the forehead in the presence of her mightily astonished train, for he was very ugly. The dauphin rendered his wife so wretched that she died in 1445, at the age of one and twenty, with these words upon her lips: “O! fie on life! Speak to me no more of it!” In 1449, just when the king his father was taking up arms to drive the English out of Normandy, the dauphin Louis, who was now living entirely in Dauphiny, concluded at Briancon a secret league with the Duke of Savoy “against the ministers of the King of France, his enemies.” In 1456, in order to escape from the perils brought upon him by the plots which he, in the heart of Dauphiny, was incessantly hatching against his father, Louis fled from Grenoble and went to take refuge in Brussels with the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, who willingly received him, at the same time excusing himself to Charles VII. “on the ground of the respect he owed to the son of his suzerain,” and putting at the disposal of Louis, “his guest,” a pension of thirty-six thousand livres. “He has received the fox at his court,” said Charles: “he will soon see what will become of his chickens.” But the pleasantries of the king did not chase away the sorrows of the father. “Mine enemies have full trust in me,” said Charles, “but my son will have none. If he had but once spoken with me, he would have known full well that he ought to have neither doubts nor fears. On my royal word, if he will but come to me, when he has opened his heart and learned my intentions, he may go away again whithersoever it seems good to him.” Charles, in his old age and his sorrow, forgot how distrustful and how fearful he himself had been. “It is ever your pleasure,” wrote one of his councillors to him in a burst of frankness, “to be shut up in castles, wretched places, and all sorts of little closets, without showing yourself and listening to the complaints of your poor people.” Charles VII. had shown scarcely more confidence to his son than to his people. Louis yielded neither to words, nor to sorrows of which proofs were reaching him nearly every day. He remained impassive at the Duke of Burgundy’s, where he seemed to be waiting with scandalous indifference for the news of his father’s death. Charles sank into a state of profound melancholy and general distrust. He had his doctor, Adam Fumee, put in prison; persuaded himself that his son had wished, and was still wishing, to poison him; and refused to take any kind of nourishment. No representation, no solicitation, could win him from his depression and obstinacy. It was in vain that Charles, Duke of Berry, his favorite child, offered to first taste the food set before him. It was in vain that his servants “represented to him with tears,” says Bossuet, “what madness it was to cause his own death for fear of dying; when at last he would have made an effort to eat, it was too late, and he must die.” On the 2nd of July, 1461, he asked what day it was, and was told that it was St. Magdalen’s day. “Ah!” said he, “I do laud my God, and thank Him for that it hath pleased Him that the most sinful man in the world should die on the sinful woman’s day! Dampmartin,” said he to the count of that name, who was leaning over his bed, “I do beseech you that after my death you will serve so far as you can the little lord, my son Charles.” He called his confessor, received the sacraments, gave orders that he should be buried at St. Denis beside the king his father, and expired. No more than his son Louis, though for different reasons, was his wife, Queen Mary of Anjou, at his side. She was living at Chinon, whither she had removed a long while before by order of the king her husband. Thus, deserted by them of his own household, and disgusted with his own life, died that king of whom a contemporary chronicler, whilst recommending his soul to God, re-marked, “When he was alive, he was a right wise and valiant lord, and he left his kingdom united, and in good case as to justice and tranquillity.”