appeared the most formidable among the new feudal chiefs so imprudently called into being by Louis XI.’s predecessors. Fleeing from the paternal wrath which he had drawn down upon himself by his ambition and by his unauthorized marriage with Charlotte of Savoy, the future Louis XI. had passed five years of voluntary exile at the court of the chief of the House of Burgundy, Philip the Good; and he was able to appreciate the territorial power of a duchy which extended from the Zuyder Zee to the Somme, with all the country between the Saône and the Loire in addition, and its geographical position as a commercial intermediary between Germany, England and France. He had traversed the fertile country of Flanders; he had visited the rich commercial and industrial republics of Bruges and Ghent, which had escaped the disasters of the Hundred Years’ War; and, finally, he had enjoyed a hospitality as princely as it was self-interested at Brussels and at Dijon, the two capitals, where he had seen the brilliancy of a court unique in Europe for the ideal of chivalric life it offered.
But the dauphin Louis, although a bad son and impatient for
the crown, was not dazzled by all this. With very simple
tastes, an inquiring mind, and an imagination always
at work, he combined a certain easy good-nature
which inspired confidence, and though stingy in
Louis XI.
(1461–1483)
spending money on himself, he could be lavish in
buying men either dangerous or likely to be useful. More inclined
to the subtleties of diplomacy than to the risks of battle, he had
recognized and speedily grasped the disadvantages of warfare.
The duke of Burgundy, however rich and powerful, was still the
king’s vassal; his wide but insecure authority, of too rapid
growth and unpopular, lacked sovereign rights. Hardly, therefore,
had Louis XI. heard of his father’s death than he made his
host aware of his perfectly independent spirit, and his very
definite intention to be master in his own house.
But by a kind of poetic justice, Louis XI. had for seven years,
from 1465 to 1472, to struggle against fresh Pragueries, called
Leagues of the Public Weal (presumably from their
disregard of it), composed of the most powerful
French nobles, to whom he had set the example of
The Leagues of
the Public Weal.
revolt. His first proceedings had indeed given no
promise of the moderation and prudence afterwards
to characterize him; he had succeeded in exasperating all
parties; the officials of his father, “the well-served,” whom he
dismissed in favour of inferiors like Jean Balue, Oliver le Daim
and Tristan Lermite; the clergy, by abrogating the Pragmatic
Sanction; the university of Paris, by his ill-treatment of it;
and the nobles, whom he deprived of their hunting rights, among
them being those whom Charles VII. had been most careful
to conciliate in view of the inevitable conflict with the duke of
Burgundy—in particular, Francis II., duke of Brittany. The
repurchase in 1463 of the towns of the Somme (to which Philip
the Good, now grown old and engaged in a quarrel with his son,
the count of Charolais, had felt obliged to consent on consideration
of receiving four hundred thousand gold crowns), and the
intrigues of Louis XI. during the periodical revolts of the Liégois
against their prince-bishop, set the powder alight. On three
different occasions (in 1465, 1467 and 1472), Louis XI.’s own
brother, the duke of Berry, urged by the duke of Brittany, the
count of Charolais, the duke of Bourbon, and the other feudal
lords, attempted to set up six kingdoms in France instead of one,
and to impose upon Louis XI. a regency which should give them
enormous pensions. This was their idea of Public Weal.
Louis XI. won by his favourite method, diplomacy
rather than arms. At the time of the first league, the battle
of Montlhéry (16th of July 1465) having remained
undecided between the two equally badly organized
armies, Louis XI. conceded everything in the treaties
Charles the Bold.
of Conflans and Saint-Maur—promises costing him little, since
he had no intention of keeping them. But during the course of
the second league, provoked by the recapture of Normandy,
which he had promised to his brother in exchange for Berry,
he was nearly caught in his own trap. On the 15th of June
1467 Philip the Good died, and the accession of the count of
Charolais was received with popular risings. In order to
embarrass him Louis XI., had secretly encouraged the people
of Liége to revolt; but preoccupied with the marriage of Charles
the Bold with Margaret of York, sister of Edward IV. of England,
he wished to negotiate personally with him at Péronne, and
hardly had he reached that place when news arrived there of the
revolt of Liége amid cries of “Vive France.” Charles the Bold,
proud, violent, pugnacious, as treacherous as his rival, a hardier
The interview
at Péronne.
soldier, though without his political sagacity, imprisoned
Louis in the tower where Charles the Simple
had died as a prisoner of the count of Vermandois.
He only let him depart when he had sworn in the
treaty of Péronne to fulfil the engagements made at Conflans
and Saint-Maur to assist in person at the subjugation of rebellious
Liége, and to give Champagne as an appanage to his ally the duke
of Berry.
Louis XI., supported by the assembly of notables at Tours (1470), had no intention of keeping this last promise, since the duchy of Champagne would have made a bridge between Burgundy and Flanders—the two isolated branches of the house of Burgundy. He gave the duke Ruin of the feudal coalitions. of Berry distant Guienne. But death eventually rid him of the duke in 1472, just when a third league was being organized, the object of which was to make the duke of Berry king with the help of Edward IV., king of England. The duke of Brittany, Francis II., was defeated; Charles the Bold, having failed at Beauvais in his attempt to recapture the towns of the Somme which had been promised him by the treaty of Conflans, was obliged to sign the peace of Senlis (1472). This was the end of the great feudal coalitions, for royal vengeance soon settled the account of the lesser vassals; the duke of Alençon was condemned to prison for life; the count of Armagnac was killed; and “the Germans” were soon to disembarrass Louis of Charles the Bold.
Charles had indeed only signed the peace so promptly because he was looking eastward towards that royal crown and territorial cohesion of which his father had also dreamed. The king, he said of Louis XI., is always ready. He wanted to provide his future sovereignty with organs analogous Charles the Bold’s imperial dreams. to those of France; a permanent army, and a judiciary and financial administration modelled on the French parlement and exchequer. Since he could not dismember the kingdom of France, his only course was to reconstitute the ancient kingdom of Lotharingia; while the conquest of the principality of Liége and of the duchy of Gelderland, and the temporary occupation of Alsace, pledged to him by Sigismund of Austria, made him greedy for Germany. To get himself elected king of the Romans he offered his daughter Mary, his eternal candidate for marriage, to the emperor Frederick III. for his son. Thus either he or his son-in-law Maximilian would have been emperor.
But the Tarpeian rock was a near neighbour of the Capitol.
Frederick—distrustful, and in the pay of Louis XI.—evaded a
meeting arranged at Trier, and Burgundian influence
in Alsace was suddenly brought to a violent end by the
putting to death of its tyrannical agent, Peter von
Fall of Charles
the Bold.
Hagenbach. Charles thought to repair the rebuff
of Trier at Cologne, and wasted his resources in an attempt to
win over its elector by besieging the insignificant town of Neuss.
But the “universal spider”—as he called Louis XI.—was
weaving his web in the darkness, and was eventually to entangle
him in it. First came the reconciliation, in his despite, of those
irreconcilables, the Swiss and Sigismund of Austria; and then
the union of both with the duke of Lorraine, who was also
disturbed at the duke of Burgundy’s ambition. In vain Charles
tried to kindle anew the embers of former feudal intrigues;
the execution of the duke of Nemours and the count of Saint
Pol cooled all enthusiasm. In vain did he get his dilatory
friends, the English Yorkists, to cross the Channel; on the 29th
of August 1475, at Picquigny, Louis XI. bribed them with a
sum of seventy-five thousand crowns to forsake him, Edward
further undertaking to guarantee the loyalty of the duke of
Brittany. Exasperated, Charles attacked and took Nancy,
