VOLUME V SLICE VIII Chariot to Chatelaine (continued 6)

Amidst such scenes of violence was at last effected the destruction of Charles. “It is lawful,” wrote Milton, “and hath been held so through all ages for any one who have the power to call to account a Tyrant or wicked King and after due conviction to depose and put him to death.”5 But here (it might well be contended) there had been no “due conviction.” The execution had been the act of the king’s personal enemies, of “only some fifty or sixty governing Englishmen with Oliver Cromwell in the midst of them” an act technically illegal, morally unjustifiable because the supposed crimes of Charles had been condoned by the later negotiations with him, and indefensible on the ground of public expediency, for the king’s death proved a far greater obstacle to the re-establishment of settled government than his life could have been. The result was an extraordinary revulsion of feeling in favour of Charles and the monarchy, in which the incidents of his misgovernment were completely forgotten. He soon became in the popular veneration a martyr and a saint. His fate was compared with the Crucifixion, and his trials and sufferings to those of the Saviour. Handkerchiefs dipped in his blood wrought “miracles,” and the Eikon Basilike, published on the day of his funeral, presented to the public a touching if not a genuine portrait of the unfortunate sovereign. At the Restoration the anniversary of his death was ordered to be kept as a day of fasting and humiliation, and the service appointed for use on the occasion was only removed from the prayer-book in 1859. The same conception of Charles as a martyr for religion appeals still to many, and has been stimulated by modern writers. “Had Charles been willing to abandon the church and give up episcopacy,” says Bishop Creighton, “he might have saved his throne and his life. But on this point Charles stood firm, for this he died and by dying saved it for the future.”6 Gladstone, Keble, Newman write in the same strain. “It was for the Church,” says Gladstone, “that Charles shed his blood upon the scaffold.”7 “I rest,” says Newman, “on the scenes of past years, from the Upper Room in Acts to the Court of Carisbrooke and Uxbridge.” The injustice and violence of the king’s death, however, the pathetic dignity of his last days, and the many noble traits in his character, cannot blind us to the real causes of his downfall and destruction, and a sober judgment cannot allow that Charles was really a martyr either for the church or for the popular liberties.

The constitutional struggle between the crown and parliament had not been initiated by Charles I. It was in full existence in the reign of James I., and distinct traces appear towards the latter part of that of Elizabeth. Charles, therefore, in some degree inherited a situation for which he was not responsible, nor can he be justly blamed, according to the ideas of kingship which then prevailed, for defending the prerogatives of the crown as precious and sacred personal possessions which it was his duty to hand down intact to his successors. Neither will his persistence in refusing to yield up the control of the executive to the parliament or the army, or his zeal in defending the national church, be altogether censured. In the event the parliament proved quite incapable of governing, an army uncontrolled by the sovereign was shown to constitute a more grievous tyranny than Charles’s most arbitrary rule, and the downfall of the church seen to make room only for a sectarian despotism as intolerable as the Laudian. The natural inference might be that both conceptions of government had much to support them, that they were bound sooner or later to come into collision, and that the actual individuals in the drama, including the king himself, were rather the victims of the greatness of events than real actors in the scene, still less the controllers of their own and the national destiny. A closer insight, however, shows that biographical more than abstract historical elements determined the actual course and issue of the Rebellion. The great constitutional and religious points of dispute between the king and parliament, though doubtless involving principles vital to the national interests, would not alone have sufficed to destroy Charles. Monarchy was too much venerated, was too deeply rooted in the national life, to be hastily and easily extirpated; the perils of removing the foundation of all government, law and order were too obvious not to be shunned at almost all costs. Still less can the crowning tragedy of the king’s death find its real explanation or justification in these disputes and antagonisms. The real cause was the complete discredit into which Charles had brought himself and the monarchy. The ordinary routine of daily life and of business cannot continue without some degree of mutual confidence between the individuals brought into contact, far less could relations be maintained by subjects with a king endowed with the enormous powers then attached to the kingship, and with whom agreements, promises, negotiations were merely subterfuges and prevarications. We have seen the series of unhappy falsehoods and deceptions which constituted Charles’s statecraft, beginning with the fraud concerning the concessions to the Roman Catholics at his marriage, the evasions with which he met the Petition of Right, the abandonment of Strafford, the simultaneous negotiation with, and betrayal of, all parties. Strafford’s reported words on hearing of his desertion by Charles, “Put not your trust in princes,” re-echo through the whole of Charles’s reign. It was the degradation and dishonour of the kingship, and the personal loss of credit which Charles suffered through these transactions—which never appear to have caused him a moment’s regret or uneasiness, but the fatal consequences of which were seen only too clearly by men like Hyde and Falkland—that were the real causes of the rebellion and of the king’s execution. The constitutional and religious grievances were the outward and visible sign of the corroding suspicions which slowly consumed the national loyalty. In themselves there was nothing incapable of settlement either through the spirit of union which existed between Elizabeth and her subjects, or by the principle of compromise which formed the basis of the constitutional settlement in 1688. The bond of union between his people and himself Charles had, however, early broken, and compromise is only possible between parties both of whom can acknowledge to some extent the force of the other’s position, which can trust one another, and which are sincere in their endeavour to reach agreement. Thus on Charles himself chiefly falls the responsibility for the catastrophe.

His character and motives fill a large place in English history, but they have never been fully understood and possibly were largely due to physical causes. His weakness as a child was so extreme that his life was despaired of. He outgrew physical defects, and as a young man excelled in horsemanship and in the sports of the times, but always retained an impediment of speech. At the time of his accession his reserve and reticence were especially noticed. Buckingham was the only person who ever enjoyed his friendship, and after his death Charles placed entire confidence in no man. This isolation was the cause of an ignorance of men and of the world, and of an incapacity to appreciate the ideas, principles and motives of others, while it prepared at the same time a fertile soil for receiving those exalted conceptions of kingship, of divine right and prerogative, which came into vogue at this period, together with those exaggerated ideas of his own personal supremacy and importance to which minds not quite normal are always especially inclined. His character was marked by a weakness which shirked and postponed the settlement of difficulties, by a meanness and ingratitude even when dealing with his most devoted followers, by an obstinacy which only feigned compliance and by an untruthfulness which differed widely from his son’s unblushing deceit, which found always some reservation or excuse, but which while more scrupulous was also more dangerous and insidious because employed continually as a principle of conduct. Yet Charles, in spite of his failings, had many fine qualities. Clarendon, who was fully conscious of them, who does not venture to call him a good king, and allows that “his kingly virtues had some mixture and alloy that hindered them from shining in full lustre,” declares that “he was if ever any, the most worthy of the title of an Honest Man, so great a lover of justice that no temptation could dispose him to a wrongful action except that it was disguised to him that he believed it just,” “the worthiest of gentlemen, the best master, the best friend, the best husband, the best father and the best Christian that the age in which he lived produced.” With all its deplorable mistakes and failings Charles I.’s reign belongs to a sphere infinitely superior to that of his unscrupulous, corrupt, selfish but more successful son. His private life was without a blemish. Immediately on his accession he had suppressed the disorder which had existed in the household of James I., and let it be known that whoever had business with him “must never approach him by backstairs or private doors.”8 He maintained a strict sobriety in food and dress. He had a fine artistic sense, and Milton reprehends him for having made Shakespeare “the closest companion of his solitudes.” “Monsieur le Prince de Galles,” wrote Rubens in 1625, “est le prince le plus amateur de la peinture qui soit au monde.” He succeeded in bringing together during twenty years an unrivalled collection, of which a great part was dispersed at his death. He showed a noble insensibility to flattery. He was deeply and sincerely religious. He wished to do right, and was conscious of the purity of his motives. Those who came into contact with him, even the most bitter of his opponents, were impressed with his goodness. The great tragedy of his life, to be read in his well-known, dignified, but weak and unhappy features, and to be followed in his inexplicable and mysterious choice of baneful instruments, such as Rupert, Laud, Hamilton, Glamorgan, Henrietta Maria—all in their several ways working out his destruction—seems to have been inspired by a fateful insanity or infirmity of mind or will, recalling the great Greek dramas in which the poets depicted frenzied mortals rushing into their own destruction, impelled by the unseen and superior powers.

The king’s body, after being embalmed, was buried by the few followers who remained with him to the last, hastily and without any funeral service, which was forbidden by the authorities, in the tomb of Henry VIII., in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, where his coffin was identified and opened in 1813. An “account of what appeared” was published by Sir Henry Halford, and a bone abstracted on the occasion was replaced in the vault by the prince of Wales (afterwards Edward VII.) in 1888. Charles I. left, besides three children who died in infancy, Charles (afterwards Charles II.); James (afterwards James II.); Henry, duke of Gloucester (1639-1660); Mary (1631-1660), who married William of Orange; Elizabeth (1635-1650); and Henrietta, duchess of Orleans (1644-1670).

Bibliography.—The leading authority for the life and reign of Charles I. is the History of England (1883) and History of the Great Civil War (1893), by S.R. Gardiner, with the references there given. Among recent works may be mentioned Memoirs of the Martyr King, by A. Fea (1905); Life of Charles I, 1600-1625, by E.B. Chancellor (1886); The Visits of Charles I. to Newcastle, by C.S. Terry (1898); Charles I., by Sir J. Skelton, valuable for its illustrations (1898); The Manner of the Coronation of King Charles I., ed. by C. Wordsworth (Henry Bradshaw Soc., 1892); The Picture Gallery of Charles I., by C. Phillips (1896). See also Calendars of State Papers, Irish and Domestic Series; Hist. MSS. Comm. Series, esp. MSS. of J. Eliot Hodgkin, F.J. Savile Foljambe, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle, Marquis of Ormonde, Earl Cowper (Coke MSS.), Earl of Lonsdale (note-books of parliaments of 1626 and 1628), Duke of Buccleuch at Montagu House, Duke of Portland, 11th Rep. app. pt. vi., Duke of Hamilton, pt. i., Salvetti Correspondence, 10th Rep. pt. vi., Lord Braye; Add. MSS. Brit. Mus., 33,596 fols. 21-32 (keys to ciphers), 34,171, 35,297; Notes and Queries, ser. vi., vii., viii., ix. indexes; Eng. Hist. Rev. ii. 687 (“Charles and Glamorgan” by S.R. Gardiner), vii. 176; Cornhill Mag. vol. 75, January 1897, “Execution of Charles,” by C.H. Firth.

(P. C. Y.)

1 Hist. MSS. Comm. 11 Rep. app. Pt. iv. 21.

2 Hist. MSS. Comm.: MSS. of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, 141.

3 Notes and Queries, 7th ser., viii. 326.

4 Letters and Diaries of P. Henry (1882), 12.

5 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.

6 Lectures on Archbishop Laud (1895), p. 25.

7 Remarks on the Royal Supremacy (1850), p. 57.

8 Salvetti’s Corresp. in Hist. MSS. Comm. 11th Rep. app. pt. i. p. 6.

CHARLES II. (1630-1685), king of Great Britain and Ireland, second son of Charles I. and Queen Henrietta Maria, was born on the 29th of May 1630 at St James’s Palace, and was brought up under the care successively of the countess of Dorset, William Cavendish, duke of Newcastle, and the marquess of Hertford. He accompanied the king during the campaigns of the Civil War, and sat in the parliament at Oxford, but on the 4th of March 1645 he was sent by Charles I. to the west, accompanied by Hyde and others who formed his council. Owing, however, to the mutual jealousies and misconduct of Goring and Grenville, and the prince’s own disregard and contempt of the council, his presence was in no way advantageous, and could not prevent the final overthrow of the king’s forces in 1646. He retired (17th of February) to Pendennis Castle at Falmouth, and on the approach of Fairfax (2nd of March) to Scilly, where he remained with Hyde till the 16th of April. Thence he fled to Jersey, and finally refusing all the overtures from the parliament, and in opposition to the counsels of Hyde, who desired the prince to remain on English territory, he repaired to the queen at Paris, where he remained for two years. He is described at this time by Mme de Motteville as “well-made, with a swarthy complexion agreeing well with his fine black eyes, a large ugly mouth, a graceful and dignified carriage and a fine figure”; and according to the description circulated later for his capture after the battle of Worcester, he was over six feet tall. He received instruction in mathematics from Hobbes, and was early initiated into all the vices of the age by Buckingham and Percy. In July 1648 the prince joined the royalist fleet and blockaded the Thames with a fleet of eleven ships, returning to Holland, where he received the news of the final royalist defeats and afterwards of the execution of his father. On the 14th of January 1649 he had forwarded to the council a signed carte blanche, granting any conditions provided his father’s life were spared. He immediately assumed the title of king, and was proclaimed in Scotland (5th of February) and in some parts of Ireland. On the 17th of September, after a visit to his mother at St Germain, Charles went to Jersey and issued a declaration proclaiming his rights; but, owing to the arrival of the fleet at Portsmouth, he was obliged, on the 13th of February 1650, to return again to Breda. The projected invasion of Ireland was delayed through want of funds till it was too late; Hyde’s mission to Spain, in the midst of Cromwell’s’ successes, brought no assistance, and Charles now turned to Scotland for aid. Employing the same unscrupulous and treacherous methods which had proved so fatal to his father, he simultaneously supported and encouraged the expedition of Montrose and the royalists, and negotiated with the covenanters. On the 1st of May he signed the first draft of a treaty at Breda with the latter, in which he accepted the Solemn League and Covenant, conceded the control of public and church affairs to the parliament and the kirk, and undertook to establish Presbyterianism in the three kingdoms. He also signed privately a paper repudiating Ormonde and the loyal Irish, and recalling the commissions granted to them. In acting thus he did not scruple to desert his own royalist followers, and to repudiate and abandon the great and noble Montrose, whose heroic efforts he was apparently merely using in order to extort better terms from the covenanters, and who, having been captured on the 4th of May, was executed on the 21st in spite of some attempts by Charles to procure for him an indemnity.

Thus perjured and disgraced the young king embarked for Scotland on the 2nd of June; on the 11th when off Heligoland he signed the treaty, and on the 23rd, on his arrival at Speymouth, before landing, he swore to both the covenants. He proceeded to Falkland near Perth and passed through Aberdeen, where he saw the mutilated arm of Montrose suspended over the city gate. He was compelled to dismiss all his followers except Buckingham, and to submit to interminable sermons, which generally contained violent invectives against his parents and himself. To Argyll he promised the payment of £40,000 at his restoration, doubtless the sum owing as arrears of the Scottish army unpaid when Charles I. was surrendered to the English at Newcastle, and entered into negotiations for marrying his daughter. In August he was forced to sign a further declaration, confessing his own wickedness in dealing with the Irish, his father’s blood-guiltiness, his mother’s idolatry, and his abhorrence of prelacy, besides ratifying his allegiance to the covenants and to Presbyterianism. At the same time he declared himself secretly to King, dean of Tuam, “a true child of the Church of England,” “a true Cavalier,” and avowed that “what concerns Ireland is in no ways binding”; while to the Roman Catholics in England he promised concessions and expressed his goodwill towards their church to Pope Innocent X. His attempt, called “The Start,” on the 4th of October 1650, to escape from the faction at Perth and to join Huntly and the royalists in the north failed, and he was overtaken and compelled to return. On the 1st of January 1651 he was crowned at Scone, when he was forced to repeat his oaths to both the covenants.

Meanwhile Cromwell had advanced and had defeated the Presbyterians at Dunbar on the 3rd of September 1650, subsequently occupying Edinburgh. This defeat was not wholly unwelcome to Charles in the circumstances; in the following summer, during Cromwell’s advance to the north, he shook off the Presbyterian influence, and on the 31st of July 1651 marched south into England with an army of about 10,000 commanded by David Leslie. He was proclaimed king at Carlisle, joined by the earl of Derby in Lancashire, evaded the troops of Lambert and Harrison in Cheshire, marched through Shropshire, meeting with a rebuff at Shrewsbury, and entered Worcester with a small, tired and dispirited force of only 16,000 men (22nd of August). Here the decisive battle, which ruined his hopes, and in which Charles distinguished himself by conspicuous courage and fortitude, was fought on the 3rd of September. After leading an unsuccessful cavalry charge against the enemy he fled, about 6 P.M., accompanied by Buckingham, Derby, Wilmot, Lauderdale and others, towards Kidderminster, taking refuge at Whiteladies, about 25 m. from Worcester, where he separated himself from all his followers except Wilmot, concealing himself in the famous oak during the 6th of September, moving subsequently to Boscobel, to Moseley and Bentley Hall, and thence, disguised as Miss Lane’s attendant, to Abbots Leigh near Bristol, to Trent in Somersetshire, and finally to the George Inn at Brighton, having been recognized during the forty-one days of his wanderings by about fifty persons, none of whom, in spite of the reward of £1000 offered for his capture, or of the death penalty threatened for aiding his concealment, had betrayed him.

He set sail from Shoreham on the 15th of October 1651, and landed at Fécamp in Normandy the next day. He resided at Paris at St Germain till June 1654, in inactivity, unable to make any further effort, and living with difficulty on a grant from Louis XIV. of 600 livres a month. Various missions to foreign powers met with failure; he was excluded from Holland by the treaty made with England in April 1654, and he anticipated his expulsion from France, owing to the new relations of friendship established with Cromwell, by quitting the country in July. He visited his sister, the princess of Orange, at Spa, and went to Aix-la-Chapelle, thence finally proceeding in November to Cologne, where he was hospitably received. The conclusion of Cromwell’s treaty with France in October 1655, and the war between England and Spain, gave hope of aid from the latter power. In April 1656 Charles went to Bruges, and on the 7th of February 1658 to Brussels, where he signed a treaty with Don John of Austria, governor of the Spanish Netherlands, by which he received an allowance in place of his French pension and undertook to assemble all his subjects in France in aid of the Spanish against the French. This plan, however, came to nothing; projected risings in England were betrayed, and by the capture of Dunkirk in June 1658, after the battle of the Dunes, by the French and Cromwell’s Ironsides, the Spanish cause in Flanders was ruined.

As long as Cromwell lived there appeared little hope of the restoration of the monarchy, and Charles and Hyde had been aware of the plots for his assassination, which had aroused no disapproval. By the protector’s death on the 3rd of September 1658 the scene was wholly changed, and amidst the consequent confusion of factions the cry for the restoration of the monarchy grew daily in strength. The premature royalist rising, however, in August 1659 was defeated, and Charles, who had awaited the result on the coast of Brittany, proceeded to Fuenterrabia on the Spanish frontier, where Mazarin and Luis de Haro were negotiating the treaty of the Pyrenees, to induce both powers to support his cause; but the failure of the attempt in England ensured the rejection of his request, and he returned to Brussels in December, visiting his mother at Paris on the way. Events had meanwhile developed fast in favour of a restoration. Charles, by Hyde’s advice, had not interfered in the movement, and had avoided inconvenient concessions to the various factions by referring all to a “free parliament.” He left Brussels for Breda, and issued in April 1660, together with the letters to the council, the officers of the army and the houses of parliament and the city, the declaration of an amnesty for all except those specially excluded afterwards by parliament, which referred to parliament the settlement of estates and promised a liberty to tender consciences in matters of religion not contrary to the peace of the kingdom.

On the 8th of May Charles II. was proclaimed king in Westminster Hall and elsewhere in London. On the 24th he sailed from the Hague, landing on the 26th at Dover, where he was met by Monk, whom he saluted as father, and by the mayor, from whom he accepted a “very rich bible,” “the thing that he loved above all things in the world.” He reached London on the 29th, his thirtieth birthday, arriving with the procession, amidst general rejoicings and “through a lane of happy faces,” at seven in the evening at Whitehall, where the houses of parliament awaited his coming, to offer in the name of the nation their congratulations and allegiance.

No event in the history of England had been attended with more lively and general rejoicing than Charles’s restoration, and none was destined to cause greater subsequent disappointment and disillusion. Indolent, sensual and dissipated by nature, Charles’s vices had greatly increased during his exile abroad, and were now, with the great turn of fortune which gave him full opportunity to indulge them, to surpass all the bounds of decency and control. A long residence till the age of thirty abroad, together with his French blood, had made him politically more of a foreigner than an Englishman, and he returned to England ignorant of the English constitution, a Roman Catholic and a secret adversary of the national religion, and untouched by the sentiment of England’s greatness or of patriotism. Pure selfishness was the basis of his policy both in domestic and foreign affairs. Abroad the great national interests were eagerly sacrificed for the sake of a pension, and at home his personal ease and pleasure alone decided every measure, and the fate of every minister and subject. During his exile he had surrounded himself with young men of the same spirit as himself, such as Buckingham and Bennet, who, without having any claim to statesmanship, inattentive to business, neglectful of the national interests and national prejudices, became Charles’s chief advisers. With them, as with their master, public office was only desirable as a means of procuring enjoyment, for which an absolute monarchy provided the most favourable conditions. Such persons were now, accordingly, destined to supplant the older and responsible ministers of the type of Clarendon and Ormonde, men of high character and patriotism, who followed definite lines of policy, while at the same time the younger men of ability and standing were shut out from office.

The first period of Charles II.’s reign (1660-1667) was that of the administration of Lord Clarendon, the principal author of the Restoration settlement. The king was granted the large revenue of £1,300,000. The naval and military forces were disbanded, but Charles managed to retain under the name of guards three regiments, which remained the nucleus of a standing army. The settlement of estates on a legal basis provided ill for a large number of the king’s adherents who had impoverished themselves in his cause. The king’s honour was directly involved in their compensation and, except for the gratification of a few individuals, was tarnished by his neglect to afford them relief. Charles used his influence to carry through parliament the act of indemnity, and the execution of some of the regicides was a measure not more severe than was to be expected in the times and circumstances; but that of Sir Henry Vane, who was not a regicide and whose life Charles had promised the parliament to spare in case of his condemnation, was brought about by Charles’s personal insistence in revenge for the victim’s high bearing during his trial, and was an act of gross cruelty and perfidy. Charles was in favour of religious toleration, and a declaration issued by him in October 1660 aroused great hopes; but he made little effort to conciliate the Presbyterians or to effect a settlement through the Savoy conference, and his real object was to gain power over all the factions and to free his co-religionists, the Roman Catholics, in favour of whom he issued his first declaration of indulgence (26th of December 1662), the bill to give effect to it being opposed by Clarendon and defeated in the Lords, and being replied to by the passing of further acts against religious liberty. Meanwhile the plot of Venner and of the Fifth Monarchy men had been suppressed in January 1661, and the king was crowned on the 23rd of April. The convention parliament had been dissolved on the 29th of December 1660, and Charles’s first parliament, the Long Parliament of the Restoration, which met on the 8th of May 1661 and continued till January 1679, declared the command of the forces inherent in the crown, repudiated the taking up of arms against the king, and repealed in 1664 the Triennial Act, adding only a provision that there should not be intermission of parliaments for more than three years. In Ireland the church was re-established, and a new settlement of land introduced by the Act of Settlement 1661 and the Act of Explanation 1665. The island was excluded from the benefit of the Navigation Laws, and in 1666 the importation of cattle and horses into England was forbidden. In Scotland episcopacy was set up, the covenant to which Charles had taken so many solemn oaths burnt by the common hangman, and Argyll brought to the scaffold, while the kingdom was given over to the savage and corrupt administration of Lauderdale. On the 21st of May 1662, in pursuance of the pro-French and anti-Spanish policy, Charles married Catherine of Braganza, daughter of John IV. of Portugal, by which alliance England obtained Tangier and Bombay. She brought him no children, and her attractions for Charles were inferior to those of his mistress, Lady Castlemaine, whom she was compelled to receive as a lady of her bedchamber. In February 1665 the ill-omened war with Holland was declared, during the progress of which it became apparent how greatly the condition of the national services and the state of administration had deteriorated since the Commonwealth, and to what extent England was isolated and abandoned abroad, Michael de Ruyter, on the 13th of June 1667, carrying out his celebrated attack on Chatham and burning several warships. The disgrace was unprecedented. Charles did not show himself and it was reported that he had abdicated, but to allay the popular panic it was given out “that he was very cheerful that night at supper with his mistresses.” The treaty of Breda with Holland (21st of July 1667) removed the danger, but not the ignominy, and Charles showed the real baseness of his character when he joined in the popular outcry against Clarendon, the upright and devoted adherent of his father and himself during twenty-five years of misfortune, and drove him into poverty and exile in his old age, recalling ominously Charles I.’s betrayal of Strafford.

To Clarendon now succeeded the ministry of Buckingham and Arlington, who with Lauderdale, Ashley (afterwards Lord Shaftesbury) and Clifford, constituted the so-called Cabal ministry in 1672. With these advisers Charles entered into those schemes so antagonistic to the national interests which have disgraced his reign. His plan was to render himself independent of parliament and of the nation by binding himself to France and the French policy of aggrandizement, and receiving a French pension with the secret intention as well of introducing the Roman Catholic religion again into England. In 1661 under Clarendon’s rule, the evil precedent had been admitted of receiving money from France, in 1662 Dunkirk had been sold to Louis, and in February 1667 during the Dutch war a secret alliance had been made with Louis, Charles promising him a free hand in the Netherlands and Louis undertaking to support Charles’s designs “in or out of the kingdom.” In January 1668 Sir W. Temple had made with Sweden and Holland the Triple Alliance against the encroachments and aggrandizement of France, but this national policy was soon upset by the king’s own secret plans. In 1668 the conversion of his brother James to Romanism became known to Charles. Already in 1662 the king had sent Sir Richard Bellings to Rome to arrange the terms of England’s conversion, and now in 1668 he was in correspondence with Oliva, the general of the Jesuits in Rome, through James de la Cloche, the eldest of his natural sons, of whom he had become the father when scarcely sixteen during his residence at Jersey. On the 25th of January 1669, at a secret meeting between the two royal brothers, with Arlington, Clifford and Arundell of Wardour, it was determined to announce to Louis XIV. the projected conversion of Charles and the realm, and subsequent negotiations terminated in the two secret treaties of Dover. The first, signed only, among the ministers, by Arlington and Clifford, the rest not being initiated, on the 20th of May 1670, provided for the return of England to Rome and the joint attack of France and England upon Holland, England’s ally, together with Charles’s support of the Bourbon claims to the throne of Spain, while Charles received a pension of £200,000 a year. In the second, signed by Arlington, Buckingham, Lauderdale and Ashley on the 31st of December 1670, nothing was said about the conversion, and the pension provided for that purpose was added to the military subsidy, neither of these treaties being communicated to parliament or to the nation. An immediate gain to Charles was the acquisition of another mistress in the person of Louise de Kéroualle, the so-called “Madam Carwell,” who had accompanied the duchess of Orleans, the king’s sister, to Dover, at the time of the negotiations, and who joined Charles’s seraglio, being created duchess of Portsmouth, and acting as the agent of the French alliance throughout the reign.

On the 24th of October 1670, at the very time that these treaties were in progress, Charles opened parliament and obtained a vote of £800,000 on the plea of supporting the Triple Alliance. Parliament was prorogued in April 1671, not assembling again till February 1673, and on the 2nd of January 1672 was announced the “stop of the exchequer,” or national bankruptcy, one of the most blameworthy and unscrupulous acts of the reign, by which the payments from the exchequer ceased, and large numbers of persons who had lent to the government were thus ruined. On the reassembling of parliament on the 4th of February 1673 a strong opposition was shown to the Cabal ministry which had been constituted at the end of 1672. The Dutch War, declared on the 17th of March 1672, though the commercial and naval jealousies of Holland had certainly not disappeared in England, was unpopular because of the alliance with France and the attack upon Protestantism, while the king’s second declaration of indulgence (15th of March 1672) aroused still further antagonism, was declared illegal by the parliament, and was followed up by the Test Act, which obliged James and Clifford to resign their offices. In February 1674 the war with Holland was closed by the treaty of London or of Westminster, though Charles still gave Louis a free hand in his aggressive policy towards the Netherlands, and the Cabal was driven from office. Danby (afterwards duke of Leeds) now became chief minister; but, though in reality a strong supporter of the national policy, he could not hope to keep his place without acquiescence in the king’s schemes. In November 1675 Charles again prorogued parliament, and did not summon it again till February 1677, when it was almost immediately prorogued. On the 17th of February 1676, with Danby’s knowledge, Charles concluded a further treaty with Louis by which he undertook to subordinate entirely his foreign policy to that of France, and received an annual pension of £100,000. On the other hand, Danby succeeded in effecting the marriage (4th of November 1677) between William of Orange and the princess Mary, which proved the most important political event in the whole reign. Louis revenged himself by intriguing with the Opposition and by turning his streams of gold in that direction, and a further treaty with France for the annual payment to Charles of £300,000 and the dismissal of his parliament, concluded on the 17th of May 1678, was not executed. Louis made peace with Holland at Nijmwegen on the 10th of August, and punished Danby by disclosing his secret negotiations, thus causing the minister’s fall and impeachment. To save Danby Charles now prorogued the parliament on the 30th of December, dissolving it on the 24th of January 1679.

Meanwhile the “Popish Plot,” the creation of a band of impostors encouraged by Shaftesbury and the most violent and unscrupulous of the extreme Protestant party in order to exclude James from the throne, had thrown the whole country into a panic. Charles’s conduct in this conjuncture was highly characteristic and was marked by his usual cynical selfishness. He carefully refrained from incurring suspicion and unpopularity by opposing the general outcry, and though he saw through the imposture from the beginning he made no attempt to moderate the popular frenzy or to save the life of any of the victims, his co-religionists, not even intervening in the case of Lord Stafford, and allowing Titus Oates to be lodged at Whitehall with a pension. His policy was to take advantage of the violence of the faction, to “give them line enough,” to use his own words, to encourage it rather than repress it, with the expectation of procuring finally a strong royalist reaction. In his resistance to the great movement for the exclusion of James from the succession, Charles was aided by moderate men such as Halifax, who desired only a restriction of James’s powers, and still more by the violence of the extreme exclusionists themselves, who headed by Shaftesbury brought about their own downfall and that of their cause by their support of the legitimacy and claims of Charles’s natural son, the duke of Monmouth. In 1679 Charles denied, in council, his supposed marriage with Lucy Walter, Monmouth’s mother, his declarations being published in 1680 to refute the legend of the black box which was supposed to contain the contract of marriage, and told Burnet he would rather see him hanged than legitimize him. He deprived him of his general’s commission in consequence of his quasi-royal progresses about the country, and in December on Monmouth’s return to England he was forbidden to appear at court. In February 1679 the king had consented to order James to go abroad, and even approved of the attempt of the primate and the bishop of Winchester to convert him to Protestantism. To weaken the opposition to his government Charles accepted Sir W Temple’s new scheme of governing by a council which included the leaders of the Opposition, and which might have become a rival to the parliament, but this was an immediate failure. In May 1679 he prorogued the new parliament which had attainted Danby, and in July dissolved it, while in October he prorogued another parliament of the same mind till January and finally till October 1680, having resolved “to wait till this violence should wear off.” He even made overtures to Shaftesbury in November 1679, but the latter insisted on the departure of both the queen and James. All attempts at compromise failed, and on the assembling of the parliament in October 1680 the Exclusion Bill passed the Commons, being, however, thrown out in the Lords through the influence of Halifax. Charles dissolved the parliament in January 1681, declaring that he would never give his consent to the Exclusion Bill, and summoned another at Oxford, which met there on the 21st of March 1681, Shaftesbury’s faction arriving accompanied by armed bands. Charles expressed his willingness to consent to the handing over of the administration to the control of a Protestant, in the case of a Roman Catholic sovereign, but the Opposition insisted on Charles’s nomination of Monmouth as his successor, and the parliament was accordingly once more (28th of March) dissolved by Charles, while a royal proclamation ordered to be read in all the churches proclaimed the ill-deeds of the parliament and the king’s affection for the Protestant religion.

Charles’s tenacity and clever tact were now rewarded. A great popular reaction ensued in favour of the monarchy, and a large number of loyal addresses were sent in, most of them condemning the Exclusion Bill. Shaftesbury was imprisoned, and though the Middlesex jury threw out his indictment and he was liberated, he never recovered his power, and in October 1682 left England for ever. The Exclusion Bill and the limitation of James’s powers were no more heard of, and full liberty was granted to the king to pursue the retrograde and arbitrary policy to which his disposition naturally inclined. In Scotland James set up a tyrannical administration of the worst type. The royal enmity towards William of Orange was increased by a visit of the latter to England in July. No more parliaments were called, and Charles subsisted on his permanent revenue and his French pensions. He continued the policy of double-dealing and treachery, deceiving his ministers as at the treaty of Dover, by pretending to support Holland and Spain while he was secretly engaged to Louis to betray them. On the 22nd of March 1681 he entered into a compact with Louis whereby he undertook to desert his allies and offer no resistance to French aggressions. In August he joined with Spain and Holland in a manifesto against France, while secretly for a million livres he engaged himself to Louis, and in 1682 he proposed himself as arbitrator with the intention of treacherously handing over Luxemburg to France, an offer which was rejected owing to Spanish suspicions of collusion. In the event, Charles’s duplicity enabled Louis to seize Strassburg in 1681 and Luxemburg in 1684. The government at home was carried on principally by Rochester, Sunderland and Godolphin, while Guilford was lord chancellor and Jeffreys lord chief justice. The laws against the Nonconformists were strictly enforced. In order to obtain servile parliaments and also obsequious juries, who with the co-operation of judges of the stamp of Jeffreys could be depended upon to carry out the wishes of the court, the borough charters were confiscated, the charter of the city of London being forfeited on the 12th of June 1683.

The popularity of Charles, now greatly increased, was raised to national enthusiasm by the discovery of the Rye House plot in 1683, said to be a scheme to assassinate Charles and James at an isolated house on the high road near Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire as they returned from Newmarket to London, among those implicated being Algernon Sidney, Lord Russell and Monmouth, the two former paying the death penalty and Monmouth being finally banished to the Hague. The administration became more and more despotic, and Tangier was abandoned in order to reduce expenses and to increase the forces at home for overawing opposition. The first preliminary steps were now taken for the reintroduction of the Roman Catholic religion. Danby and those confined on account of participation in the popish plot were liberated, and Titus Oates thrown into prison. A scheme was announced for withdrawing the control of the army in Ireland from Rochester, the lord-lieutenant, and placing it in the king’s own hands, and the commission to which the king had delegated ecclesiastical patronage was revoked. In May 1684 the office of lord high admiral, in spite of the Test Act, was again given to James, who had now returned from Scotland. To all appearances the same policy afterwards pursued so recklessly and disastrously by James was now cautiously initiated by Charles, who, however, not being inspired by the same religious zeal as his brother, and not desiring “to go on his travels again,” would probably have drawn back prudently before his throne was endangered. The developments of this movement were, however, now interrupted by the death of Charles after a short illness on the 6th of February 1685. He was buried on the 17th in Henry VII.’s chapel in Westminster Abbey with funeral ceremonies criticized by contemporaries as mean and wanting in respect, but the scantiness of which was probably owing to the fact that he had died a Roman Catholic.

On his death-bed Charles had at length declared himself an adherent of that religion and had received the last rites according to the Romanist usage. There appears to be no trustworthy record of his formal conversion, assigned to various times and various agencies. As a youth, says Clarendon, “the ill-bred familiarity of the Scotch divines had given him a distaste” for Presbyterianism, which he indeed declared “no religion for gentlemen,” and the mean figure which the fallen national church made in exile repelled him at the same time that he was attracted by the “genteel part of the Catholic religion.” With Charles religion was not the serious matter it was with James, and was largely regarded from the political aspect and from that of ease and personal convenience. Presbyterianism constituted a dangerous encroachment on the royal prerogative; the national church and the cavalier party were indeed the natural supporters of the authority of the crown, but on the other hand they refused to countenance the dependence upon France; Roman Catholicism at that moment was the obvious medium of governing without parliaments, of French pensions and of reigning without trouble, and was naturally the faith of Charles’s choice. Of the two papers in defence of the Roman Catholic religion in Charles’s own hand, published by James, Halifax says “though neither his temper nor education made him very fit to be an author, yet in this case ... he might write it all himself and yet not one word of it his own....”

Of his amours and mistresses the same shrewd observer of human character, who was also well acquainted with the king, declares “that his inclinations to love were the effects of health and a good constitution with as little mixture of the seraphic part as ever man had.... I am apt to think his stayed as much as any man’s ever did in the lower region.” His health was the one subject to which he gave unremitting attention, and his fine constitution and devotion to all kinds of sport and physical exercise kept off the effects of uncontrolled debauchery for thirty years. In later years the society of his mistresses seems to have been chiefly acceptable as a means to avoid business and petitioners, and in the case of the duchess of Portsmouth was the price paid for ease and the continuance of the French pensions. His ministers he never scrupled to sacrifice to his ease. The love of ease exercised an entire sovereignty in his thoughts. “The motive of his giving bounties was rather to make men less uneasy to him than more easy to themselves.” He would rob his own treasury and take bribes to press a measure through the council. He had a natural affability, but too general to be much valued, and he was fickle and deceitful. Neither gratitude nor revenge moved him, and good or ill services left little impression on his mind. Halifax, however, concludes by desiring to moderate the roughness of his picture by emphasizing the excellence of his intellect and memory and his mechanical talent, by deprecating a too censorious judgment and by dwelling upon the disadvantages of his bringing up, the difficulties and temptations of his position, and on the fact that his vices were those common to human frailty. His capacity for king-craft, knowledge of the world, and easy address enabled him to surmount difficulties and dangers which would have proved fatal to his father or to his brother. “It was a common saying that he could send away a person better pleased at receiving nothing than those in the good king his father’s time that had requests granted them,”1 and his good-humoured tact and familiarity compensated for and concealed his ingratitude and perfidy and preserved his popularity. He had good taste in art and literature, was fond of chemistry and science, and the Royal Society was founded in his reign. According to Evelyn he was “débonnaire and easy of access, naturally kind-hearted and possessed an excellent temper,” virtues which covered a multitude of sins.

These small traits of amiability, however, which pleased his contemporaries, cannot disguise for us the broad lines of Charles’s career and character. How far the extraordinary corruption of private morals which has gained for the restoration period so unenviable a notoriety was owing to the king’s own example of flagrant debauchery, how far to the natural reaction from an artificial Puritanism, is uncertain, but it is incontestable that Charles’s cynical selfishness was the chief cause of the degradation of public life which marks his reign, and of the disgraceful and unscrupulous betrayal of the national interests which raised France to a threatening predominance and imperilled the very existence of Britain for generations. The reign of his predecessor Charles I., and even of that of his successor James II., with their mistaken principles and ideals, have a saving dignity wholly wanting in that of Charles II., and the administration of Cromwell, in spite of the popularity of the restoration, was soon regretted. “A lazy Prince,” writes Pepys, “no Council, no money, no reputation at home or abroad. It is strange how ... everybody do nowadays reflect upon Oliver and commend him, what brave things he did and made all the neighbour princes fear him; while here a prince, come in with all the love and prayers and good liking of his people ... hath lost all so soon....”

Charles II. had no children by his queen. By his numerous mistresses he had a large illegitimate progeny. By Barbara Villiers, Mrs Palmer, afterwards countess of Castlemaine and duchess of Cleveland, mistress en titre till she was superseded by the duchess of Portsmouth, he had Charles Fitzroy, duke of Southampton and Cleveland, Henry Fitzroy, duke of Grafton, George Fitzroy, duke of Northumberland, Anne, countess of Sussex, Charlotte, countess of Lichfield, and Barbara, a nun; by Louise de Kéroualle, duchess of Portsmouth, Charles Lennox, duke of Richmond; by Lucy Walter, James, duke of Monmouth and Buccleuch, and a daughter; by Nell Gwyn, Charles Beauclerk, duke of St Albans, and James Beauclerk; by Catherine Peg, Charles Fitz Charles, earl of Plymouth; by Lady Shannon, Charlotte, countess of Yarmouth; by Mary Davis, Mary Tudor, countess of Derwentwater.

Bibliography.—See the article in the Dict, of Nat. Biog. by A.W. Ward (1887), with authorities there given; Charles II., by O. Airy (1904); Life of Sir G. Savile, by H.C. Foxcroft, and esp. Halifax’s Character of Charles II. printed in the appendix (1898); The Essex Papers (Camden Soc., 1890); Despatches of W. Perwich (Royal Hist. Soc. Pubtns., 1903); History of England, of the Civil War and of the Commonwealth, by S.R. Gardiner; Hist. of Scotland, by A. Lang, vol. iii. (1904); Macaulay’s Hist, of England, vol. i.; Notes which passed at Meetings of the Privy Council between Charles II. and the Earl of Clarendon (Roxburghe Club, 1896); A French Ambassador at the Court of Charles II., by J.J. Jusserand (1902); The Story of Nell Gwyn and the Sayings of Charles II., by P. Cunningham, ed. by H.B. Wheatley (1892); for his adventures and period of exile see Memoiren der Herzogin Sophie, ed. by A. Köcher (1879); “Briefe der Elisabeth Stuart,” by A. Wendland (Litterarischer Verein in Stuttgart, No. 228); Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Mlle de Montpensier and Mme de Motteville; The King in Exile, by E. Scott (1905); Scottish History Pubtns. vols. 17 (Charles II. in Scotland, by S.R. Gardiner, 1894) and 18 (Scotland and the Commonwealth, 1651-1653, ed. by C.H. Firth, 1895); Charles II. in the Channel Islands, by S.E. Hoskins (1854) i Boscobel, by T. Blount, &c., ed. by C.G. Thomas (1894); The Flight of the King (1897) and After Worcester Fight (1904), by A. Fea; Edinburgh Review, (January 1894); Eng. Hist. Rev. xix. (1904) 363; Revue historique, xxviii. and xxix.; Art Journal (1889), p. 178 (“Boscobel and Whiteladies,” by J. Penderel-Brodhurst); England under Charles II., by W.F. Taylor (1889), a collection of passages from contemporary writers; and R. Crawfurd, The Last Days of Charles II. (1909).

(P. C. Y.)

1 Mem. of Thomas, earl of Ailesbury, p. 95.

CHARLES I. and II., kings of France. By the French, Charles the Great, Roman emperor and king of the Franks, is reckoned the first of the series of French kings named Charles (see Charlemagne). Similarly the emperor Charles II. the Bald (q.v.) is reckoned as Charles II. of France. In some enumerations the emperor Charles III. the Fat (q.v.) is reckoned as Charles II. of France, Charlemagne not being included in the list, and Charles the Bald being styled Charles I.

CHARLES III., the Simple (879-929), king of France, was a posthumous son of Louis the Stammerer and of his second wife Adelaide. On the deposition of Charles the Fat in 887 he was excluded from the throne by his youth; but during the reign of Odo, who had succeeded Charles, he succeeded in gaining the recognition of a certain number of notables and in securing his coronation at Reims on the 28th of January 893. He now obtained the alliance of the emperor, and forced Odo to cede part of Neustria. In 898, by the death of his rival (Jan. 1), he obtained possession of the whole kingdom. His most important act was the treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte with the Normans in 911. Some of them were baptized; the territory which was afterwards known as the duchy of Normandy was ceded to them; but the story of the marriage of their chief Rollo with a sister of the king, related by the chronicler Dudo of Saint Quentin, is very doubtful. The same year Charles, on the invitation of the barons, took possession of the kingdom of Lotharingia. In 920 the barons, jealous of the growth of the royal authority and discontented with the favour shown by the king to his counsellor Hagano, rebelled, and in 922 elected Robert, brother of King Odo, in place of Charles. Robert was killed in the battle of Soissons, but the victory remained with his party, who elected Rudolph, duke of Burgundy, king. In his extremity Charles trusted himself to Herbert, count of Vermandois, who deceived him, and threw him into confinement at Château-Thierry and afterwards at Péronne. In the latter town he died on the 7th of October 929. In 907 he had married Frederona, sister of Bovo, bishop of Chalons. After her death he married Eadgyfu (Odgiva), daughter of Edward the Elder, king of the English, who was the mother of Louis IV.

See A. Eckel, Charles le Simple (Paris, 1899).

CHARLES IV. (1294-1328), king of France, called The Fair, was the third and youngest son of Philip IV. and Jeanne of Navarre. In 1316 he was created count of La Marche, and succeeded his brother Philip V. as king of France and Navarre early in 1322. He followed the policy of his predecessors in enforcing the royal authority over the nobles, but the machinery of a centralized government strong enough to hold nobility in check increased the royal expenditure, to meet which Charles had recourse to doubtful financial expedients. At the beginning of his reign he ordered a recast of the coinage, with serious results to commerce; civil officials were deprived of offices, which had been conferred free, but were now put up to auction; duties were imposed on exported merchandise and on goods brought into Paris; the practice of exacting heavy fines was encouraged by making the salaries of the magistrates dependent on them; and on the pretext of a crusade to free Armenia from the Turks, Charles obtained from the pope a tithe levied on the clergy, the proceeds of which he kept for his own use; he also confiscated the property of the Lombard bankers who had been invited to France by his father at a time of financial crisis. The history of the assemblies summoned by Charles IV. is obscure, but in 1326, on the outbreak of war with England, an assembly of prelates and barons met at Meaux. Commissioners were afterwards despatched to the provinces to state the position of affairs and to receive complaints. The king justified his failure to summon the estates on the ground of the expense incurred by provincial deputies. The external politics of his reign were not marked by any striking events. He maintained excellent relations with Pope John XXII., who made overtures to him, indirectly, offering his support in case of his candidature for the imperial crown. Charles tried to form a party in Italy in support of the pope against the emperor Louis IV. of Bavaria, but failed. A treaty with the English which secured the district of Agenais for France was followed by a feudal war in Guienne. Isabella, Charles’s sister and the wife of Edward II., was sent to France to negotiate, and with her brother’s help arranged the final conspiracy against her husband. Charles’s first wife was Blanche, daughter of Otto IV., count of Burgundy, and of Matilda (Mahaut), countess of Artois, to whom he was married in 1307. In May 1314, by order of King Philip IV., she was arrested and imprisoned in the Château-Gaillard with her sister-in-law Marguerite, daughter of Robert II., duke of Burgundy, and wife of Louis Hutin, on the charge of adultery with two gentlemen of the royal household, Philippe and Gautier d’Aunai. Jeanne, sister of Marguerite and wife of Philip the Tall, was also arrested for not having denounced the culprits, and imprisoned at Dourdan. The two knights were put to the torture and executed, and their goods confiscated. It is impossible to say how far the charges were true. Tradition has involved and obscured the story, which is the origin of the legend of the tour de Nesle made famous by the drama of A. Dumas the elder. Marguerite died shortly in prison; Jeanne was declared innocent by the parlement and returned to her husband. Blanche was still in prison when Charles became king. He induced Pope John XXII. to declare the marriage null, on the ground that Blanche’s mother had been his godmother. Blanche died in 1326, still in confinement, though at the last in the abbey of Maubuisson.

In 1322, freed from his first marriage, Charles married his cousin Mary of Luxemburg, daughter of the emperor Henry VII., and upon her death, two years later, Jeanne, daughter of Louis, count of Evreux. Charles IV. died at Vincennes on the 1st of February 1328. He left no issue by his first two wives to succeed him, and daughters only by Jeanne of Evreux. He was the last of the direct line of Capetians.

See A. d’Herbomey, “Notes et documents pour servir à l’histoire des rois fils de Philippe le Bel,” in Bibl. de l’École des Chartes (lix. pp. 479 seq. and 689 seq.); de Bréquigny, “Mémoire sur les différends entre la France et l’Angleterre sous le règne de Charles le Bel,” in Mém. de l’Acad. des Inscriptions (xli. pp. 641-692); H. Lot, “Projets de crusade sous Charles le Bel et sous Philippe de Valois” (Bibl. de l’École des Chartes, xx. pp. 503-509); “Chronique parisienne anonyme de 1316 à 1339 ...” ed. Hellot in Mém. de la soc. de l’hist. de Paris (xi., 1884, pp. 1-207).

CHARLES V. (1337-1380), king of France, called The Wise, was born at the château of Vincennes on the 21st of January 1337, the son of John II. and Bonne of Luxemburg. In 1349 he became dauphin of the Viennois by purchase from Humbert II., and in 1355 he was created duke of Normandy. At the battle of Poitiers (1356) his father ordered him to leave the field when the battle turned against the French, and he was thus saved from the imprisonment that overtook his father. After arranging for the government of Normandy he proceeded to Paris, where he took the title of lieutenant of the kingdom. During the years of John II.’s imprisonment in England Charles was virtually king of France. He summoned the states-general of northern France (Langue d’oïl) to Paris in October 1356 to obtain men and money to carry on the war. But under the leadership of Étienne Marcel, provost of the Parisian merchants and president of the third estate, and Robert le Coq, bishop of Laon, president of the clergy, a partisan of Charles of Navarre, the states refused any “aid” except on conditions which Charles declined to accept. They demanded the dismissal of a number of the royal ministers; the establishment of a commission elected from the three estates to regulate the dauphin’s administration, and of another board to act as council of war; also the release of Charles the Bad, king of Navarre, who had been imprisoned by King John. The estates of Languedoc, summoned to Toulouse, also made protests against misgovernment, but they agreed to raise a war-levy on terms to which the dauphin acceded. Charles sought the alliance of his uncle, the emperor Charles IV., to whom he did homage at Metz as dauphin of the Viennois, and he was also made imperial vicar of Dauphiné, thus acknowledging the imperial jurisdiction. But he gained small material advantage from these proceedings. The states-general were again convoked in February 1357. Their demands were more moderate than in the preceding year, but they nominated members to replace certain obnoxious persons on the royal council, demanded the right to assemble without the royal summons, and certain administrative reforms. In return they promised to raise and finance an army of 30,000 men, but the money—a tithe levied on the annual revenues of the clergy and nobility—voted for this object was not to pass through the dauphin’s hands. Charles appeared to consent, but the agreement was annulled by letters from King John, announcing at the same time the conclusion of a two years’ truce, and the reformers failed to secure their ends. Charles had escaped from their power by leaving Paris, but he returned for a new meeting of the estates in the autumn of 1357.

Meanwhile Charles of Navarre had been released by his partisans, and allying himself with Marcel had become a popular hero in Paris. The dauphin was obliged to receive him and to undergo an apparent reconciliation. In Paris Étienne Marcel was supreme. He forced his way into the dauphin’s palace (February 1358), and Charles’s servant, Jean de Conflans, marshal of Champagne, and Robert de Clermont, marshal of Normandy, were murdered before his eyes. Charles was powerless openly to resent these outrages, but he obtained from the provincial assemblies the money refused him by the states-general, and deferred his vengeance until the dissensions of his enemies should offer him an opportunity. Charles of Navarre, now in league with the English and master of lower Normandy and of the approaches to Paris, returned to the immediate neighbourhood of the city, and Marcel found himself driven to avowed co-operation with the dauphin’s enemies, the English and the Navarrese. Charles had been compelled in March to take the title of regent to prevent the possibility of further intervention from King John. In defiance of a recent ordinance prohibiting provincial assemblies, he presided over the estates of Picardy and Artois, and then over those of Champagne. The states-general of 1358 were summoned to Compiègne instead of Paris, and granted a large aid. The condition of northern France was rendered more desperate by the outbreak (May-June 1358) of the peasant revolt known as the Jacquerie, which was repressed with a barbarity far exceeding the excesses of the rebels. Within the walls of Paris Jean Maillart had formed a royalist party; Marcel was assassinated (31st July 1358), and the dauphin entered Paris in the following month. A reaction in Charles’s favour had set in, and from the estates of 1359 he regained the authority he had lost. It was with their full concurrence that he restored their honours to the officials who had been dismissed by the estates of 1356 and 1357. They supported him in repudiating the treaty of London (1359), which King John had signed in anxiety for his personal freedom, and voted money unconditionally for the continuation of the war. From this time the estates were only once convoked by Charles, who contented himself thenceforward by appeals to the assembly of notables or to the provincial bodies. Charles of Navarre was now at open war with the regent; Edward III. landed at Calais in October; and a great part of the country was exposed to double depredations from the English and the Navarrese troops. In the scarcity of money Charles had recourse to the debasement of the coinage, which suffered no less than twenty-two variations in the two years before the treaty of Brétigny. This disastrous financial expedient was made good later, the coinage being established on a firm basis during the last sixteen years of Charles’s reign in accordance with the principles of Nicolas Oresme. On the conclusion of peace King John was restored to France, but, being unable to raise his ransom, he returned in 1364 to England, where he died in April, leaving the crown to Charles, who was crowned at Reims on the 19th of May.

The new king found an able servant in Bertrand du Guesclin, who won a victory over the Navarrese troops at Cocherel and took prisoner their best general, Jean de Grailli, captal of Buch. The establishment of Charles’s brother, Philip the Bold, in the duchy of Burgundy, though it constituted in the event a serious menace to the monarchy, put an end to the king of Navarre’s ambitions in that direction. A treaty of peace between the two kings was signed in 1365, by which Charles of Navarre gave up Mantes, Meulan and the county of Longueville in exchange for Montpellier. Negotiations were renewed in 1370 when Charles of Navarre did homage for his French possessions, though he was then considering an offensive and defensive alliance with Edward III. Du Guesclin undertook to free France from the depredations of the “free companies,” mercenary soldiers put out of employment by the cessation of the war. An attempt to send them on a crusade against the Turks failed, and Du Guesclin led them to Spain to put Henry of Trastamara on the throne of Castile. By the marriage of his brother Philip the Bold with Margaret of Flanders, Charles detached the Flemings from the English alliance, and as soon as he had restored something like order in the internal affairs of the kingdom he provoked a quarrel with the English. The text of the treaty of Brétigny presented technical difficulties of which Charles was not slow to avail himself. The English power in Guienne was weakened by the disastrous Spanish expedition of the Black Prince, whom Charles summoned before the parlement of Paris in January 1369 to answer the charges preferred against him by his subjects, thus expressly repudiating the English supremacy in Guienne. War was renewed in May after a meeting of the states-general. Between 1371 and 1373 Poitou and Saintonge were reconquered by Du Guesclin, and soon the English had to abandon all their territory north of the Garonne. John IV. of Brittany (Jean de Montfort) had won his duchy with English help by the defeat of Charles of Blois, the French nominee, at Auray in 1364. His sympathies remained English, but he was now (1373) obliged to take refuge in England, and later in Flanders, while the English only retained a footing in two or three coast towns. Charles’s generals avoided pitched battles, and contented themselves with defensive and guerrilla tactics, with the result that in 1380 only Bayonne, Bordeaux, Brest and Calais were still in English hands.

Charles had in 1378 obtained proof of Charles of Navarre’s treasonable designs. He seized the Norman towns held by the Navarrese, while Henry of Trastamara invaded Navarre, and imposed conditions of peace which rendered his lifelong enemy at last powerless. A premature attempt to amalgamate the duchy of Brittany with the French crown failed. Charles summoned the duke to Paris in 1378, and on his non-appearance committed one of his rare errors of policy by confiscating his duchy. But the Bretons rose to defend their independence, and recalled their duke. The matter was still unsettled when Charles died at Vincennes on the 16th of September 1380. His health, always delicate, had been further weakened, according to popular report, by a slow poison prepared for him by the king of Navarre. His wife, Jeanne of Bourbon, died in 1378, and the succession devolved on their elder son Charles, a boy of twelve. Their younger son was Louis, duke of Orleans.

Personally Charles was no soldier. He owed the signal successes of his reign partly to his skilful choice of advisers and administrators, to his chancellors Jean and Guillaume de Dormans and Pierre d’Orgemont, to Hugues Aubriot, provost of Paris, Bureau de la Riviere and others; partly to a singular coolness and subtlety in the exercise of a not over-scrupulous diplomacy, which made him a dangerous enemy. He had learnt prudence and self-restraint in the troubled times of the regency, and did not lose his moderation in success. He modelled his private life on that of his predecessor Saint Louis, but was no fanatic in religion, for he refused his support to the violent methods of the Inquisition in southern France, and allowed the Jews to return to the country, at the same time confirming their privileges. His support of the schismatic pope Clement VII. at Avignon was doubtless due to political considerations, as favouring the independence of the Gallican church. Charles V. was a student of astrology, medicine, law and philosophy, and collected a large and valuable library at the Louvre. He gathered round him a group of distinguished writers and thinkers, among whom were Raoul de Presles, Philippe de Mézières, Nicolas Oresme and others. The ideas of these men were applied by him to the practical work of administration, though he confined himself chiefly to the consolidation and improvement of existing institutions. The power of the nobility was lessened by restrictions which, without prohibiting private wars, made them practically impossible. The feudal fortresses were regularly inspected by the central authority, and the nobles themselves became in many cases paid officers of the king. Charles established a merchant marine and a formidable navy, which under Jean de Vienne threatened the English coast between 1377 and 1380. The states-general were silenced and the royal prerogative increased; the royal domains were extended, and the wealth of the crown was augmented; additions were made to the revenue by the sale of municipal charters and patents; and taxation became heavier, since Charles set no limits to the gratification of his tastes either in the collection of jewels and precious objects, of books, or of his love of building, examples of which are the renovation of the Louvre and the erection of the palace of Saint Paul in Paris.

See the chronicles of Froissart, and of Pierre d’Orgemont (Grandes Chroniques de Saint Denis, Paris, vol. vi, 1838); Christine de Pisan, Le Livre des fais et bonnes moeurs du sage roy Charles V, written in 1404, ed. Michaud and Poujoulat, vol. ii. (1836); L. Delisle, Mandements et actes divers de Charles V (1886); letters of Charles V. from the English archives in Champollion-Figeac, Lettres de rois et de reines, ii. pp. 167 seq.; the anonymous Songe du vergier or Somnium viridarii, written in 1376 and giving the political ideas of Charles V. and his advisers; “Relation de la mort de Charles V” in Haureau, Notices et extraits, xxxi. pp. 278-284; Ch. Benoist, La Politique du roi Charles V (1874); S. Luce, La France pendant la guerre de cent ans; G. Clément Simon, La Rupture du traité de Brétigny (1898); A. Vuitry, Êtudes sur le régime financier de la France, vols. i. and ii. (1883); and R. Delachenal, Histoire de Charles V (Paris, 1908).

CHARLES VI. (1368-1422), king of France, son of Charles V. and Jeanne of Bourbon, was born in Paris on the 3rd of December 1368. He received the appanage of Dauphiné at his birth, and was thus the first of the princes of France to bear the title of dauphin from infancy. Charles V. had entrusted his education to Philippe de Mézières, and had fixed his majority at fourteen. He succeeded to the throne in 1380, at the age of twelve, and the royal authority was divided between his paternal uncles, Louis, duke of Anjou, John, duke of Berry, Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, and his mother’s brother, Louis II., duke of Bourbon. In accordance with an ordinance of the late king the duke of Anjou became regent, while the guardianship of the young king, together with the control of Paris and Normandy, passed to the dukes of Burgundy and Bourbon, who were to be assisted by certain of the councillors of Charles V. The duke of Berry, excluded by this arrangement, was compensated by the government of Languedoc and Guienne. Anjou held the regency for a few months only, until the king’s coronation in November 1380. He enriched himself from the estate of Charles V. and by excessive exactions, before he set out in 1382 for Italy to effect the conquest of Naples. Considerable discontent existed in the south of France at the time of the death of Charles V., and when the duke of Anjou re-imposed certain taxes which the late king had remitted at the end of his reign, there were revolts at Puy and Montpellier. Paris, Rouen, the cities of Flanders, with Amiens, Orleans, Reims and other French towns, also rose (1382) in revolt against their masters. The Maillotins, as the Parisian insurgents were named from the weapon they used, gained the upper hand in Paris, and were able temporarily to make terms, but the commune of Rouen was abolished, and the Tuchins, as the marauders in Languedoc were called, were pitilessly hunted down. Charles VI. marched to the help of the count of Flanders against the insurgents headed by Philip van Artevelde, and gained a complete victory at Roosebeke (November 27th, 1382). Strengthened by this success the king, on his return to Paris in the following January, exacted vengeance on the citizens by fines, executions and the suppression of the privileges of the city. The help sent by the English to the Flemish cities resulted in a second Flemish campaign. In 1385 Jean de Vienne made an unsuccessful descent on the Scottish coast, and Charles equipped a fleet at Sluys for the invasion of England, but a series of delays ended in the destruction of the ships by the English.

In 1385 Charles VI. married Elizabeth, daughter of Stephen II., duke of Bavaria, her name being gallicized as Isabeau. Three years later, with the help of his brother, Louis of Orleans, duke of Touraine, he threw off the tutelage of his uncles, whom he replaced by Bureau de la Rivière and others among his father’s counsellors, nicknamed by the royal princes the marmousets because of their humble origin. Two years later he deprived the duke of Berry of the government of Languedoc. The opening years of Charles VI.’s effective rule promised well, but excess in gaiety of all kinds undermined his constitution, and in 1392 he had an attack of madness at Le Mans, when on his way to Brittany to force from John V. the surrender of his cousin Pierre de Craon, who had tried to assassinate the constable Olivier de Clisson in the streets of Paris. Other attacks followed, and it became evident that Charles was unable permanently to sustain the royal authority. Clisson, Bureau de la Rivière, Jean de Mercier, and the other marmousets were driven from office, and the royal dukes regained their power. The rivalries between the most powerful of these—the duke of Burgundy, who during the king’s attacks of madness practically ruled the country, and the duke of Orleans—were a constant menace to peace. In 1306 peace with England seemed assured by the marriage of Richard II. with Charles VI.’s daughter Isabella, but the Lancastrian revolution of 1399 destroyed the diplomatic advantages gained by this union. In France the country was disturbed by the papal schism. At an assembly of the clergy held in Paris in 1398 it was resolved to refuse to recognize the authority of Benedict XIII., who succeeded Clement VII. as schismatic pope at Avignon. The question became a party one; Benedict was supported by Louis of Orleans, while Philip the Bold and the university of Paris opposed him. Obedience to Benedict’s authority was resumed in 1403, only to be withdrawn again in 1408, when the king declared himself the guardian and protector of the French church, which was indeed for a time self-governing. Edicts further extending the royal power in ecclesiastical affairs were even issued in 1418, after the schism was at an end.

The king’s intelligence became yearly feebler, and in 1404 the death of Philip the Bold aggravated the position of affairs. The new duke, John the Fearless, did not immediately replace his father in general affairs, and the influence of the duke of Orleans increased. Queen Isabeau, who had generally supported the Burgundian party, was now practically separated from her husband, whose madness had become pronounced. She was replaced by a young Burgundian lady, Odette de Champdivers, called by her contemporaries la petite reine, who rescued the king from the state of neglect into which he had fallen. Isabeau of Bavaria was freely accused of intrigue with the duke of Orleans. She was from time to time regent of France, and as her policy was directed by personal considerations and by her love of splendour she further added to the general distress. The relations between John the Fearless and the duke of Orleans became more embittered, and on the 23rd of November 1407 Orleans was murdered in the streets of Paris at the instigation of his rival. The young duke Charles of Orleans married the daughter of the Gascon count Bernard VII. of Armagnac, and presently formed alliances with the dukes of Berry, Bourbon and Brittany, and others who formed the party known as the Armagnacs (see Armagnac), against the Burgundians who had gained the upper hand in the royal council. In 1411 John the Fearless contracted an alliance with Henry IV. of England, and civil war began in the autumn, but in 1412 the Armagnacs in their turn sought English aid, and, by promising the sovereignty of Aquitaine to the English king, gave John the opportunity of posing as defender of France. In Paris the Burgundians were hand in hand with the corporation of the butchers, who were the leaders of the Parisian populace. The malcontents, who took their name from one of their number, Caboche, penetrated into the palace of the dauphin Louis, and demanded the surrender of the unpopular members of his household. A royal ordinance, promising reforms in administration, was promulgated on the 27th of May 1413, and some of the royal advisers were executed. The king and the dauphin, powerless in the hands of Duke John and the Parisians, appealed secretly to the Armagnac princes for deliverance. They entered Paris in September; the ordinance extracted by the Cabochiens was rescinded; and numbers of the insurgents were banished the city.

In the next year Henry V. of England, after concluding an alliance with Burgundy, resumed the pretensions of Edward III. to the crown of France, and in 1415 followed the disastrous battle of Agincourt. The two elder sons of Charles VI., Louis, duke of Guienne, and John, duke of Touraine, died in 1415 and 1417, and Charles, count of Ponthieu, became heir apparent. Paris was governed by Bernard of Armagnac, constable of France, who expelled all suspected of Burgundian sympathies and treated Paris like a conquered city. Queen Isabeau was imprisoned at Tours, but escaped to Burgundy. The capture of Paris by the Burgundians on the 20th of May 1418 was followed by a series of horrible massacres of the Armagnacs; and in July Duke John and Isabeau, who assumed the title of regent, entered Paris. Meanwhile Henry V. had completed the conquest of Normandy. The murder of John the Fearless in 1419 under the eyes of the dauphin Charles threw the Burgundians definitely into the arms of the English, and his successor Philip the Good, in concert with Queen Isabeau, concluded (1420) the treaty of Troyes with Henry V., who became master of France. Charles VI. had long been of no account in the government, and the state of neglect in which he existed at Senlis induced Henry V. to undertake the re-organization of his household. He came to Paris in September 1422, and died on the 21st of October.

The chief authorities for the reign of Charles VI. are:—Chronica Caroli VI., written by a monk of Saint Denis, commissioned officially to write the history of his time, edited by C. Bellaguet with a French translation (6 vols., 1839-1852); Jean Juvenal des Ursins, Chronique, printed by D. Godefroy in Histoire de Charles VI (1653), chiefly an abridgment of the monk of St Denis’s narrative; a fragment of the Grandes Chroniques de Saint Denis covering the years 1381 to 1383 (ed. J. Pichon 1864); correspondence of Charles VI. printed by Champollion-Figeac in Lettres de rois, vol. ii.; Choix de pièces inédites rel. au règne de Charles VI (2 vols., 1863-1864), edited by L. Douët d’Arcq for the Société de l’Histoire de France; J. Froissart, Chroniques; Enguerrand de Monstrelet, Chroniques, covering the first half of the 15th century (Eng. trans., 4 vols., 1809); Chronique des quatre premiers Valois, by an unknown author, ed. S. Luce (1862). See also E. Lavisse, Hist, de France, iv. 267 seq.; E. Petit, “Séjours de Charles VI,” Bull. du com. des travaux hist. (1893); Vallet de Viriville, “Isabeau de Bavière,” Revue française (1858-1859); M. Thibaut, Isabeau de Bavière (1903).

CHARLES VII. (1403-1461), king of France, fifth son of Charles VI. and Isabeau of Bavaria, was born in Paris on the 22nd of February 1403. The count of Ponthieu, as he was called in his boyhood, was betrothed in 1413 to Mary of Anjou, daughter of Louis II., duke of Anjou and king of Sicily, and spent the next two years at the Angevin court. He received the duchy of Touraine in 1416, and in the next year the death of his brother John made him dauphin of France. He became lieutenant-general of the kingdom in 1417, and made active efforts to combat the complaisance of his mother. He assumed the title of regent in December 1418, but his authority in northern France was paralysed in 1419 by the murder of John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, in his presence at Montereau. Although the deed was not apparently premeditated, as the English and Burgundians declared, it ruined Charles’s cause for the time. He was disinherited by the treaty of Troyes in 1420, and at the time of his father’s death in 1422 had retired to Mehun-sur-Yèvre, near Bourges, which had been the nominal seat of government since 1418. He was recognized as king in Touraine, Berry and Poitou, in Languedoc and other provinces of southern France; but the English power in the north was presently increased by the provinces of Champagne and Maine, as the result of the victories of Crevant (1423) and Verneuil (1424). The Armagnac administrators who had been driven out of Paris by the duke of Bedford gathered round the young king, nicknamed the “king of Bourges,” but he was weak in body and mind, and was under the domination of Jean Louvet and Tanguy du Chastel, the instigators of the murder of John the Fearless, and other discredited partisans. The power of these favourites was shaken by the influence of the queen’s mother, Yolande of Aragon, duchess of Anjou. She sought the alliance of John V., duke of Brittany, who, however, vacillated throughout his life between the English and French alliance, concerned chiefly to maintain the independence of his duchy. His brother, Arthur of Brittany, earl of Richmond (comte de Richemont), was reconciled with the king, and became constable in 1425, with the avowed intention of making peace between Charles VII. and the duke of Burgundy. Richemont caused the assassination of Charles’s favourites Pierre de Giac and Le Camus de Beaulieu, and imposed one of his own choosing, Georges de la Trémoille, an adventurer who rapidly usurped the constable’s power. For five years (1427-1432) a private war between these two exhausted the Armagnac forces, and central France returned to anarchy.

Meanwhile Bedford had established settled government throughout the north of France, and in 1428 he advanced to the siege of Orleans. For the movement which was to lead to the deliverance of France from the English invaders, see Joan of Arc. The siege of Orleans was raised by her efforts on the 8th of May 1429, and two months later Charles VII. was crowned at Reims. Charles’s intimate counsellors, La Trémoille and Regnault de Chartres, archbishop of Reims, saw their profits menaced by the triumphs of Joan of Arc, and accordingly the court put every difficulty in the way of her military career, and received the news of her capture before Compiègne (1430) with indifference. No measures were taken for her deliverance or her ransom, and Normandy and the Isle of France remained in English hands. Fifteen years of anarchy and civil war intervened before peace was restored. Bands of armed men fighting for their own hand traversed the country, and in the ten years between 1434 and 1444 the provinces were terrorized by these écorcheurs, who, with the decline of discipline in the English army, were also recruited from the ranks of the invaders. The duke of Bedford died in 1435, and in the same year Philip the Good of Burgundy concluded a treaty with Charles VII. at Arras, after fruitless negotiations for an English treaty. From this time Charles’s policy was strengthened. La Trémoille had been assassinated in 1433 by the constable’s orders, with the connivance of Yolande of Aragon. For his former favourites were substituted energetic advisers, his brother-in-law Charles of Anjou, Dunois (the famous bastard of Orleans), Pierre de Brézé, Richemont and others. Richemont entered Paris on the 13th of April 1436, and in the next five years the finance of the country was re-established on a settled basis. Charles himself commanded the troops who captured Pontoise in 1441, and in the next year he made a successful expedition in the south.

Meanwhile the princes of the blood and the great nobles resented the ascendancy of councillors and soldiers drawn from the smaller nobility and the bourgeoisie. They made a formidable league against the crown in 1440 which included Charles I., duke of Bourbon, John II., duke of Alençon, John IV. of Armagnac, and the dauphin, afterwards Louis XI. The revolt broke out in Poitou in 1440 and was known as the Praguerie. Charles VII. repressed the rising, and showed great skill with the rebel nobles, finally buying them over individually by considerable concessions. In 1444 a truce was concluded with England at Tours, and Charles proceeded to organize a regular army. The central authority was gradually made effective, and a definite system of payment, by removing the original cause of brigandage, and the establishment of a strict discipline learnt perhaps from the English troops, gradually stamped out the most serious of the many evils under which the country had suffered. Pierre Bessonneau, and the brothers Gaspard and Jean Bureau created a considerable force of artillery. Domestic troubles in their own country weakened the English in France. The conquest of Normandy was completed by the battle of Formigny (15th of April 1450). Guienne was conquered in 1451 by Duncis, but not subdued, and another expedition was necessary in 1453, when Talbot was defeated and slain at Castillon. Meanwhile in 1450 Charles VII. had resolved on the rehabilitation of Joan of Arc, thus rendering a tardy recognition of her services. This was granted in 1456 by the Holy See. The only foothold retained by the English on French ground was Calais. In its earlier stages the deliverance of France from the English had been the work of the people themselves. The change which made Charles take an active part in public affairs is said to have been largely due to the influence of Agnes Sorel, who became his mistress in 1444 and died in 1450. She was the first to play a public and political rôle as mistress of a king of France, and may be said to have established a tradition. Pierre de Brézé, who had had a large share in the repression of the Praguerie, obtained through her a dominating influence over the king, and he inspired the monarch himself and the whole administration with new vigour. Charles and René of Anjou retired from court, and the greater part of the members of the king’s council were drawn from the bourgeois classes. The most famous of all these was Jacques Coeur (q.v.). It was by the zeal of these councillors that Charles obtained the surname of “The Well-Served.”

Charles VII. continued his father’s general policy in church matters. He desired to lessen the power of the Holy See in France and to preserve as far as possible the liberties of the Gallican church. With the council of Constance (1414-1418) the great schism was practically healed. Charles, while careful to protest against its renewal, supported the anti-papal contentions of the French members of the council of Basel (1431-1449), and in 1438 he promulgated the Pragmatic Sanction at Bourges, by which the patronage of ecclesiastical benefices was removed from the Holy See, while certain interventions of the royal power were admitted. Bishops and abbots were to be elected, in accordance with ancient custom, by their clergy. After the English had evacuated French territory Charles still had to cope with feudal revolt, and with the hostility of the dauphin, who was in open revolt in 1446, and for the next ten years ruled like an independent sovereign in Dauphiné. He took refuge in 1457 with Charles’s most formidable enemy, Philip of Burgundy. Charles VII. nevertheless found means to prevent Philip from attaining his ambitions in Lorraine and in Germany. But the dauphin succeeded in embarrassing his father’s policy at home and abroad, and had his own party in the court itself. Charles VII. died at Mehun-sur-Yévre on the 22nd of July 1461. He believed that he was poisoned by his son, who cannot, however, be accused of anything more than an eager expectation of his death.

Authorities.—The history of the reign of Charles VII. has been written by two modern historians,—Vallet de Viriville, Histoire de Charles VII ... et de son époque (Paris, 3 vols., 1862-1865), and G. du Fresne de Beaucourt, Hist, de Charles VII (Paris, 6 vols., 1881-1891). There is abundant contemporary material. The herald, Jacques le Bouvier or Berry (b. 1386), whose Chronicques du feu roi Charles VII was first printed in 1528 as the work of Alain Chartier, was an eye-witness of many of the events he described. His Recouvrement de Normandie, with other material on the same subject, was edited for the “Rolls” series (Chronicles and Memorials) by Joseph Stevenson in 1863. The Histoire de Charles VII by Jean Chartier, historiographer-royal from 1437, was included in the Grandes Chroniques de Saint-Denis, and was first printed under Chartier’s name by Denis Godefroy, together with other contemporary narratives, in 1661. It was re-edited by Vallet de Viriville (Paris, 3 vols., 1858-1859). With these must be considered the Burgundian chroniclers Enguerrand de Monstrelet, whose chronicle (ed. L. Douët d’Arcq; Paris, 6 vols., 1857-1862) covers the years 1400-1444, and Georges Chastellain, the existing fragments of whose chronicle are published in his Œuvres (ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove; Brussels, 8 vols., 1863-1866). For a detailed bibliography and an account of printed and MS. documents see du Fresne de Beaucourt, already cited, also A. Molinier, Manuel de bibliographie historique, iv. 240-306.

CHARLES VIII. (1470-1498), king of France, was the only son of Louis XI. During the whole of his childhood Charles lived far from his father at the château of Amboise, which was throughout his life his favourite residence. On the death of Louis XI in 1483 Charles, a lad of thirteen, was of age, but was absolutely incapable of governing. Until 1492 he abandoned the government to his sister Anne of Beaujeu. In 1491 he married Anne, duchess of Brittany, who was already betrothed to Maximilian of Austria. Urged by his favourite, Étienne de Vesc, he then, at the age of twenty-two, threw off the yoke of the Beaujeus, and at the same time discarded their wise and able policy. But he was a thoroughly worthless man with a weak and ill-balanced intellect. He had a romantic imagination and conceived vast projects. He proposed at first to claim the rights of the house of Anjou, to which Louis XI. had succeeded, on the kingdom of Naples, and to use this as a stepping-stone to the capture of Constantinople from the Turks and his own coronation as emperor of the East. He sacrificed everything to this adventurous policy, signed disastrous treaties to keep his hands free, and set out for Italy in 1494. The ceremonial side of the expedition being in his eyes the most important, he allowed himself to be intoxicated by his easy triumph and duped by the Italians. On the 12th of May 1495 he entered Naples in great pomp, clothed in the imperial insignia. A general coalition was, however, formed against him, and he was forced to return precipitately to France. It cannot be denied that he showed bravery at the battle of Fornovo (the 5th of July 1495). He was preparing a fresh expedition to Italy, when he died on the 8th of April 1498, from the results of an accident, at the château of Amboise.

See Histoire de Charles VIII, roy de France, by G. de Jaligny, André de la Vigne, &c., edited by Godefroy (Paris, 1684); De Cherrier, Histoire de Charles VIII (Paris, 1868); H. Fr. Delaborde, Expédition de Charles VIII en Italie (Paris, 1888). For a complete bibliography see H. Hauser, Les Sources de l’histoire de France, 1494-1610, vol. i. (Paris, 1906); and E. Lavisse, Histoire de France, vol. v. part i., by H. Lemonnier (Paris, 1903).

CHARLES IX. (1550-1574), king of France, was the third son of Henry II. and Catherine de’ Medici. At first he bore the title of duke of Orleans. He became king in 1560 by the death of his brother Francis II., but as he was only ten years old the power was in the hands of the queen-mother, Catherine. Charles seems to have been a youth of good parts, lively and agreeable, but he had a weak, passionate and fantastic nature. His education had spoiled him. He was left to his whims—even the strangest—and to his taste for violent exercises; and the excesses to which he gave himself up ruined his health. Proclaimed of age on the 17th of August 1563, he continued to be absorbed in his fantasies and his hunting, and submitted docilely to the authority of his mother. In 1570 he was married to Elizabeth of Austria, daughter of Maximilian II. It was about this time that he dreamed of making a figure in the world. The successes of his brother, the duke of Anjou, at Jarnac and Moncontour had already caused him some jealousy. When Coligny came to court, he received him very warmly, and seemed at first to accept the idea of an intervention in the Netherlands against the Spaniards. For the upshot of this adventure see the article St Bartholomew, Massacre of. Charles was in these circumstances no hypocrite, but weak, hesitating and ill-balanced. Moreover, the terrible events in which he had played a part transformed his character. He became melancholy, severe and taciturn. “It is feared,” said the Venetian ambassador, “that he may become cruel.” Undermined by fever, at the age of twenty he had the appearance of an old man, and night and day he was haunted with nightmares. He died on the 30th of May 1574. By his mistress, Marie Touchet, he had one son, Charles, duke of Angoulême. Charles IX. had a sincere love of letters, himself practised poetry, was the patron of Ronsard and the poets of the Pleiad, and granted privileges to the first academy founded by Antoine de Baïf (afterwards the Académie du Palais). He left a work on hunting, Traité de la chasse royale, which was published in 1625, and reprinted in 1859.