Chapter VII · THE BETRAYAL OF THE KINGDOM (continued 2)

Henry was still young, but he had toiled much in this world, his time for rest was come; he had never had any since his birth. He was attacked, after his winter campaign, with an acute irritation of the bowels, a malady very common in those days. Being warned by the physicians that his end was at hand, he commended his son to his brothers, and gave them two wise counsels; first, to conciliate the duke of Burgundy, and secondly, in any treaty that might be made, to manage always so as to keep Normandy.

He died at Vincennes on the 31st of August, 1422; Charles VI followed him on the 21st of October. The people of Paris shed tears for their poor mad king as freely as the English for their victorious Henry V. “The whole people,” says the Bourgeois de Paris,q “were in the streets weeping and crying, as if each had lost the friend he most loved. Truly, their lamentations were like those of the prophet, ‘Quomodô sedet sola civitas plena populo!’ The petty folk of Paris cried, ‘Oh, most dear prince, never shall we have one so good! Never shall we see thee more! Cursed be death! We shall never have aught but war since thou hast left us. Thou art gone to rest; we remain in tribulation and sorrow.’”

Charles VI was carried to St. Denis, “poorly accompanied for a king of France. There were only his chamberlain, his chancellor, his confessor, and some subordinate officers.” One prince only attended the funeral, and that was the duke of Bedford. When the corpse was lowered into the grave, the ushers-at-arms broke their wands and threw them into the grave, and reversed their maces. Then Berri, king-at-arms of France, cried out, over the grave, “May it please God to have mercy on the soul of the very high and very excellent prince Charles, king of France, sixth of the name, our natural and sovereign lord.”p And then he added, “God grant long life to Henry, by the grace of God, king of France and of England, our sovereign lord.” About the same time at Mehun-sur-Yèvre, in Berri, some French knights unfurled the royal banner, crying, “Long live King Charles, seventh of the name, by the grace of God, king of France.”b

WOES OF THE PEOPLE—THE DANSE MACABRE

[1418-1424 A.D.]

After having spoken of the death of the king, we must mention that of the people. From 1418 to 1422, the depopulation was frightful. The history of those dismal years runs in a murderous circle; war leads to famine, famine to pestilence, and pestilence again brings round famine. It is like that night of the Exodus, in which the angel passes and repasses, touching each house with the sword.

When men have come to that pass they weep no more; there is an end to tears, or there mingle even with tears gleams of hellish joy and savage laughter. It was the most tragical characteristic of the times that in the gloomiest moments there were alternations of frantic gaiety. The beginning of that long series of evils, “of that woeful dance,” as the Bourgeois de Parisq says, was the madness of Charles VI, and contemporaneously therewith the too famous masquerade of the satyrs, the piously burlesque mysteries, and the basoche farces.[37]

The year in which the duke of Orleans was murdered was distinguished by the organisation of the corporation of minstrels. That corporation, quite indispensable of course in so joyous a period, became important and respected. Treaties of peace were cried through the streets with a mighty strumming of violins; hardly any six months passed in which a peace was not cried and sung. The eldest son of Charles VI, the first dauphin, was an indefatigable player on the harp and the spinet. He had a great staff of musicians; and in addition to these, he used to call in the aid of the choir-boys of Notre Dame. He sang, danced, and “balled” (balait), night and day, and that even in the year of the Cabochians, whilst they were killing his friends. He killed himself, too, by dint of singing and dancing.

It seems an ascertained fact that in the fourteenth century dancing became involuntary and maniacal in many countries. The violent processions of the Flagellants set the first example. The great epidemics, and the terrible and lasting shock they gave to the nerves of the survivors, easily gave occasion to St. Vitus’ dance. These phenomena are, as we know, contagious. The spectacle of the convulsions acted with so much the more force, as there was nothing in men’s souls but convulsion and vertigo; and then the sick and the hale danced together promiscuously. They would catch each other violently by the hand, in the streets and the churches, and foot it round in a ring. Many a one who at first laughed at this sight, or looked on coldly, became at last bewildered, his head reeled, and he, too, reeled and danced with the rest. The rings went on multiplying, interlacing; they became bigger and bigger, more and more heady, fast, and furious, as though they were huge coiling reptiles, that momently swelled to view. There was no stopping the monster, but its joints might be lopped; the electric chain was broken by one falling with feet and fists on some one of the dancers. The rude dissonance interrupting the harmony, they found themselves free, otherwise they would have gone on reeling until utterly exhausted, and have danced themselves to death.

This phenomenon of the fourteenth century does not occur again in the fifteenth; but in the latter we find, in England, France, and Germany, a strange amusement, which reminds us of those great popular dances of the sick and dying. It was called the dance of the dead, or danse macabre. It was a great favourite with the English, who introduced it into France.

The spectacle of the dance of the dead was enacted in Paris in 1424, in the cemetery of the Innocents. That narrow space in which the enormous city for so many ages accumulated the remains of almost all its inhabitants had been at first both a cemetery and a laystall, haunted at night by robbers, and in the evening by wantons, who plied their trade among the tombs. Philip Augustus enclosed it with walls, and to purify it dedicated it to St. Innocent, a child crucified by the Jews. In the fourteenth century the churches were already very full, and it became the fashion among the good citizens to bury their dead in the cemetery. Such was the suitable theatre of the danse macabre. It was begun in September, 1424, when the heat had diminished, and the first rain had rendered the smell of the place less offensive. The performances lasted many months.

Whatever disgust both the place and the spectacle might inspire, it was matter suggestive of much thought to see in that fatal period, in a town so frequently and so cruelly visited by death, the hungry, sickly, scarce living multitude, merrily making death itself a matter of spectacle, attending with insatiable avidity to its moralising buffooneries, and enjoying them so heartily as to tread heedlessly upon the bones of their fathers, and on the gaping graves they were themselves about to fill.p

THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS AND THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE

[1414-1424 A.D.]

A very different phase of life which demands at least a passing notice is that which clustered about the wonderful University of Paris.a As early as the thirteenth century, the university shone in all its glory. Born in the shadow of the cloister of the bishopric, and primarily confounded with the ancient cathedral college of the town, it had obtained, little by little, immunities and privileges by favour of which it had grown and had reached a point where it was dependent upon no one but the court of Rome. Among the popes who conferred the most important privileges may be cited Alexander III, Innocent III, and his successor Honorius III, all promoters of the progress of knowledge, all jealously seeking to retain for the church that superiority of studies and learning to which its power was bound. The University of Paris rose rapidly above the universities of Italy, the only ones with which it was then in serious rivalry. It became the most important ecclesiastical and scientific college of Europe, the school whence the high clergy of France was recruited, as well as that of a large part of Christianity. It belonged to the church by its creation, by its studies in which theology predominated, and by its object, which was to prepare the learned candidates for the obtention of livings. For all its rights it depended on the holy see, which subjected it to visits and regulations. Meanwhile it formed in the bosom of the church itself a vast corporation (universitas), governing itself by its own laws with an extended liberty.

It was divided into four faculties: arts or philosophy which comprised nearly all the known sciences; theology; decree or canonical law; and medicine. The faculty of arts had a particular celebrity; it is to it that the capital of France owes its appellation of the Modern Athens. The faculty of theology was not less celebrated after the lectures of Roscellinus and Abelard. That of law was incomplete, since civil law, which restored to honour the work of the great Italian jurists, was taught in Paris only subsidiarily. It even ceased to exist at the beginning of the year 1220, although the laws of Justinian had found able interpreters in France as well as in Italy. The decree of the pope, Honorius III, to suppress its instruction in Paris, had probably its entire concentration in the college of Boulogne for an object. In any case, that suppression was only for a time, and a little later at Orleans a special university was founded, called the University of Law. As to the study and profession of medicine, it is well known that in the Middle Ages it was a prerogative of the religious orders almost exclusively.

Each faculty held special assemblies, in which the masters and graduates had deliberative voice. The four faculties met once a year to elect their rector, the formulæ of which elections, determined with infinite care, in order to guarantee liberty of vote and prevent intrigue, presented a great analogy to the election of a pope. Thus the University of Paris possessed a liberal government, with a regular hierarchy, where degrees conferred powers, and where superior intelligence ruled.

The pope gave it its highest protection. He made the rules of study, intervened in disputes with the civil authorities. The principal ecclesiastical privilege of the University of Paris was that of being dependent on no bishop, and having its own jurisdiction. Its members could not be excommunicated except by the court of Rome.g

It is one of the strangest contrasts of history that while France was at the lowest ebb of its national history, the University of Paris was attempting to carry out one of the greatest revolutions in the history of Europe. The conciliar movement in the church, which produced such great international gatherings as the councils of Constance and of Bâle, and which aimed to limit papal absolutism by something like a parliamentary system, was due to the work of men like Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, and Pierre D’Ailly, scholar and prelate. It was universally admitted that abuses had crept into the administration of the church. There was evidently something wrong when, while Frenchmen were perishing from famine, and France was on the verge of ruin, the papal court at Avignon luxuriated on a revenue that was more than royal, and a pope (John XXII) could accumulate a treasure of eighteen millions of gold florins, and jewels and vestments estimated at seven millions more.

But the evils which date from the residence at Avignon were increased twofold during the schism. All Christendom was in doubt how this would end. For the civil war in the church had divided the countries under rival obediences. France, Scotland, and Spain adhered to the pope at Avignon; and England, Germany, and Italy obeyed the Italian pope.

At first they tried to induce the rivals to resign; and Pedro de Luna, who was elected pope at Avignon as Benedict XIII, won the high office by declaring that he would resign as easily as take off his hat. But the wily prelate, after his election, declared that no earthly power could dethrone him, and for more than a decade defied the attempts of reformers to achieve union. It was then that in the University of Paris the theologians began agitation for a universal council, as supreme over the pope. It is said that a German doctor began the movement, but the credit has gone to France. First at Pisa and then at Constance, the great parliaments of the church took in hand the reformation.

In the later council (1414-1418) union was achieved by the deposition of opposing popes and the election of Martin V (see volume on The Papacy), but the decree Frequens which demanded regular meeting of councils in the future, was gradually lost sight of in the following pontificates, and the great experiment of a constitutional church was a failure. That such an attempt should be made while France was in the throes of this great Hundred Years’ War, and that mostly by Frenchmen, shows that alongside of the story of carnage, crime, and superstition, there were signs of intellectual life and earnest effort of reformers, which are suggestive in the age of Wycliffe and Huss.

A strange page of history is opened here. Sigismund, emperor of Germany, who presided at the council of Constance, was anxious to play a great part in the world’s affairs. He took advantage of the great international assemblage in his dominions to attempt to put himself at the head of a European confederacy to fight the Turks, who were advancing along the Danube.

To accomplish this he made a journey into France and England to try to prevent the war. His visit took place just before the fatal invasion of Henry V which brought the victory of Agincourt.[38] To raise the money for that journey Sigismund made over the mark of Brandenburg to Frederick of Hohenzollern, burggraf of Nuremberg, and thus founded the power of the Hohenzollern.

Henry V, was willing to accede to Sigismund’s plans, but although he even offered the succession of Hungary as a bribe, the court of France refused to make the peace he desired, and Sigismund’s great effort at European concord resulted in only one thing—the foundation of the great dynasty which rules in Germany to-day. France and England went their own way, bringing mutual disaster for another generation.a

FOOTNOTES