Vermandois, found a jailor who kept him in confinement the remainder of his life. He died in 929.—J. S., G.
CHARLES IV., le Bel, third son of Philip IV., le Bel, born in 1294, succeeded his brother Phillip V., le Long, in 1322. His reign was short and unmarked by great events. He dealt severely with unjust judges and public defaulters of all kinds, extending his cognizance of defalcations backwards to the late reign, one of the financiers of which he even put to the torture. His sister Isabella was married to Edward II. of England. On the breaking out of hostilities between the brothers-in-law, Isabella undertook to compromise the quarrel, and coming to Paris, succeeded in conciliating the French king, from whom she obtained supplies of men and money, with which to assault the power of her husband and the favourite by whom it was wielded, Le Depenser. The intrigues of Charles at the papal court respecting the imperial crown were fruitless, although enforced by an invasion of Germany by a horde of pagan barbarians, whom his gold had lured to an attack on the empire. He died in 1328 without male issue. In him the direct succession of the line of Capet ceased, the crown passing into the collateral branch of the Valois.—J. S., G.
CHARLES V., le Sage, son of the unfortunate King John, who was taken prisoner by the English at the battle of Poitiers in 1316, was born in 1337, and died in 1380. During the captivity of his father, with the title first of lieutenant, and then of regent of the kingdom, but with an authority which the rising spirit of liberty in the states-general circumscribed within limits little flattering to his ambition, he conducted public affairs with considerable address and resolution, gaining often by the arts of diplomacy what it would have been madness to attempt by force, and averting the revolutionary schemes of his enemies by infusing discord into their councils. When assailed by the formidable provost of the merchants of Paris, Etienne Marcel, he detached, by secret means, from the party headed by the provost, Charles le Mauvais, king of Navarre, and with the aid of the mercenaries in the pay of that prince, maintained his position against popular outbreaks and the more dangerous movements of the states-general. After the murder of Marcel by some of his fellow-citizens, Charles gained possession of the capital, Paris, and with a firm hand set himself to redress the disorders of the kingdom. "The free companies" and "the Jacquerie" (see Guillaume Caillet,) were successively put down, and an invasion of the English, notwithstanding the anarchy of the time, met with a stout resistance on the part of the regent. By the treaty of Bretigny, King John being restored to his dominions, the power of the regent determined. In 1364, however, John died, and Charles resumed the government of the country with the undisputed title of king. In 1369 he declared war against Edward the Black Prince, and his father Edward III., both of whom, the one by disease and the other by age, were then incapacitated from taking the field in person. The task of answering the challenge of the French king was therefore committed to John of Gaunt, who marched with thirty thousand men from Calais to Bourdeaux without encountering an enemy. A truce for a year was concluded and renewed, and during its continuance occurred the deaths of the Black Prince and Edward III., 1376-77. Immediately after the news of the death of the king of England reached France, Charles prepared for a descent on the English coast, which was effected by a combined French and Castilian fleet, at the same time that the king's brother ravaged Guienne. In 1380 the English reinstated the duke of Bretagne, the enemy of Charles, in his dominions, and again traversed a great part of France unopposed. In the midst of such humiliations Charles expired in the forty-third year of his age. That he deserved the appellation of le Sage for his patronage of letters if not for his learning, is not disputed; but that he was cruel and perfidious is also placed beyond question, by many of the facts of his reign. He founded the biblotheque royale at Paris, and the no less celebrated institution of the bastile.—J. S., G.
CHARLES VI., called le Bien-Aime, and also l'Insense, son of the preceding, was born at Paris in 1368, and died in 1422. At the age of twelve he was called to the throne on the death of his father; his four uncles, the dukes of Anjou, Berry, Bourgogne, and Bourbon recognizing the authority of their nephew, and trusting to his youth for license to enrich themselves at his expense. Anjou confiscated for his own use the treasures left by the late king. To replenish the royal exchequer, a heavy tax was laid upon the nation. This, however, the people, already sufficiently irritated against their rulers, would not pay; "the Jacquerie" reappeared everywhere under other names, and, as Froissart declares, it seemed as if the time were come for gentlehood to perish utterly under the assaults of infuriated mobs. In these circumstances Bourgogne engaged his nephew to lead an army into Flanders, which had risen in insurrection against Count Louis, Bourgogne's father-in-law. The result was fatal to the spirit of insurrection in that country, the battle of Rosebecque (1382) and several successful sieges having been followed by a wholesale slaughter of the Flemish peasants; and was no less fatal to the insurgent subjects of Charles, who, on his return to Paris flushed with victory, were treated with merciless severity. In 1385 Charles married Isabella, daughter of Stephen duke of Bavaria, Ingolstadt. Shortly afterwards he proposed to make a descent on England; but this proposal miscarried through the avarice of his uncle, Berry, and before long the English were in possession of several of his fortresses. Charles having in 1388, by a bold exercise of his authority, rid himself of the tutelage of his uncles, recalled the most hateful of their enemies, the ministers of his father. Of these Clisson was particularly obnoxious to the duke of Bretagne, and this minister being assassinated in Paris, his murderer found protection at the court of the duke. This led to an invasion of Bretagne by the royal forces, which was rendered memorable by an incident that deprived the monarch of his reason. As he was traversing, almost unattended, a lonely spot in the forest of Maine, he was accosted by a person of sinister visage who so terrified him with assurances that treason tracked his footsteps, that, on issuing into the open country, he was discovered to be in a state of insanity. The malady never left him except for short periods, which recurred with less and less frequency; and for the rest of his life this unhappy king was thus what he had been in its earlier years, a mere tool in the hands of his perfidious relatives. Than the thirty years of French history which succeeded the first outbreak of the king's insanity, it would be impossible to find in the annals of any country a period more replete with disaster and disgrace. The detail of the bloody feuds which arose out of the division of the kingdom into two great factions, that of Burgundy and that of the Armagnacs, must, however, be sought elsewhere—the chronicles of the period, particularly Monstrelet's, give it with characteristic and appalling minuteness. In 1396 the infant daughter of Charles was affianced to Richard II. of England, but the deposition of Richard two or three years afterwards nullified the match. About this period the duke of Orleans, who was more than suspected of an improper intimacy with the queen, maintained his baneful ascendancy at court in spite of the utmost efforts of his rival the duke of Burgundy, and, on the death of the latter, he obtained the complete mastery of the kingdom; but in 1407, having unwarily ventured into the presence of the son of his late rival, he was treacherously murdered. Again the chiefs of the opposing factions resumed their deadly strife, and it seemed as if there were nothing so desirable for their unhappy country as political extinction, under the grinding yoke of a foreign tyrant. The battle of Agincourt, where Henry V. of England made good his demands for a daughter of France, dowered with all the provinces ceded to England by the treaty of Bretigny, and with the arrears of the ransom of King John, eventually gave to France for its salvation a foreign master. Although unaccountably induced to retire from France after this decisive victory, Henry was far from renouncing the claims he had put forth, and far even from renouncing his expectations of obtaining the crown of France. While the Armagnacs and the Burgundians butchered each other with remorseless eagerness, Henry kept together by pay and promises not a few partisans who steadily counselled the opposing factions to call in the king of England for the settlement of their quarrels, and who, after the massacre of the Armagnacs and the subsequent murder of the duke of Burgundy at Montereau, had doubtless some share in hastening the alliance of the party of the murdered duke with Henry, who had just completed the reduction of Normandy. The treaty of Troyes, which was concluded in 1420, placed the administration of France in the hands of the English monarch, and provided for his succession to the throne to the exclusion of the dauphin, who had retired to Poitiers. Henry survived the ratification of this treaty and his consequent marriage with the princess Catherine only two years, which were mainly occupied in prosecuting the war against the dauphin, afterwards Charles VII. He died in
