was born on the 4th October, 1289, and died at Vincennes, 5th June, 1316. He came to the throne of Navarre in 1305, and married Margaret, daughter of Robert, duke of Burgundy. He was crowned king of France, 29th November, 1314, but left the government to his uncle, Charles of Valois. He was of irregular and depraved life, a course imitated by his consort. By some his name Hutin is supposed to mean a loose, quarrelsome person, of irregular morals. In this reign there was a powerful reaction of the feudal aristocracy against the "roturiers," or citizens who by talent, commerce, and law had risen to high position. The chancellor, Pierre de Latillé, was thrown into prison; Raoul de Presle, the principal advocate before parliament, was put to the torture; Enguerrand de Marigny, a statesman of high order who had risen from the people to the first offices under the crown, was hanged upon a charge of sorcery. Louis had his first wife suffocated in prison, and married Clemence of Hungary. He left one daughter and a posthumous son, John I., who died in infancy, and was succeeded by the count of Poitiers, under the title of Philip V.—P. E. D.
Louis XI., son of Charles VII. and of Maria of Anjou, was born 3rd July, 1423. From his early years he exhibited an ambitious, intriguing, and treacherous disposition; and in the prosecution of his selfish schemes he unhesitatingly trampled both on the laws of morality and the claims of natural affection. He was an ungrateful and rebellious son, and not only disturbed the peace of the kingdom by his seditious intrigues, but it is alleged poisoned Agnes Sorell, his father's favourite mistress, and even conspired to seize his person. For this offence he was banished in 1440 to his appanage of Dauphiny, which he governed with great prudence and firmness. He suppressed the bands of mercenary soldiers, who at this period inflicted great sufferings on the French people, and under the appropriate names of "Clippers" and "Flayers," seized castles and towns, where they bade defiance to the royal authority, and plundered and laid waste the country at their pleasure. In 1436 Louis espoused the Princess Margaret, daughter of James I. of Scotland, a lady of great beauty and accomplishments, who was neglected and contemned by her husband, and "done to death by slanderous tongues" in his court, not without his connivance. "Her accuser," says Pinkerton, "was proved to be a scoundrel and common liar"—qualities which doubtless recommended him to the special protection of Louis. After her death he married in 1451—greatly to his father's displeasure—Charlotte, daughter of the duke of Savoy. Other causes of offence followed; and at length, weary of the continued disobedience of his son, Charles ordered him, in 1456, to be arrested. Louis, however, saved himself by flight, and taking refuge in Franche Comtè, threw himself on the protection of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, who assigned him the chateau of Genappe for his residence, with a liberal pension. He repaid this generous hospitality with characteristic ingratitude, and destroyed the domestic peace of his benefactor, by sowing dissension between him and the count of Charolais, his son. The king died in 1461; and Louis, who did not even attempt to conceal his joy at his father's death, entirely neglected his dead body, which was interred at the expense of an attached friend of the deceased monarch. On ascending the throne Louis began cautiously to carry out the schemes which he had long and carefully revolved. He set himself steadily to diminish the power and to abridge the privileges of the great feudatories of the crown. He persuaded the mercantile classes to leave the perils and toils of war to mercenaries, whom they furnished him the means of paying, and thus craftily introduced a system which, carried out by his successors, ultimately placed the whole military power of the kingdom in the hands of the crown. He was the first king of France who recognized the rising influence of the middle classes, and the importance of trade and commerce. Though naturally proud and haughty, he flattered the people by affecting great familiarity and frankness of manners; and with a disregard of the arbitrary divisions of society which was then regarded with astonishment and alarm, he not unfrequently selected his ministers from the lowest rank, and selected them so judiciously that he was rarely disappointed in their qualities. His general policy, and his special ill treatment of the dukes of Brittany and Burgundy, excited the strong indignation of the great vassals of the crown, and in 1465 a formidable confederacy was formed against him, named the league of "the Public Good," which nearly overpowered him. They levied a formidable army, blockaded Paris, and fought a doubtful battle under its walls at Montlhery, in which Louis and his principal antagonist, the count of Charolais, displayed great valour, and about fifteen hundred men perished on each side. The latter remained master of the field, and the French monarchy seemed on the brink of ruin. But Louis, by his skill in conciliating the affections of the Parisians, and his dexterity in sowing jealousies among the confederates, neutralized their successes and ultimately dissolved the league. His most formidable antagonist was Charles, count of Charolais, who, on the death of his father, became duke of Burgundy.—(See Charles the Bold.) This duke, who was one of the most powerful princes of Europe, despised the cautious, crafty policy of Louis, and hated him for the ingratitude he had manifested for the kindness shown him by the duke and his father, and for the personal injuries he had done to them. Charles now entered into a new league with Duke Francis of Brittany against their common enemy; but Louis concluded a peace with Francis, and confiding in his own dexterity and talents for negotiations, he suddenly paid a visit to Charles in 1468 at Peronne, attended only by three of his nobles and a few servants. His rashness and overweening confidence in his own powers had nearly cost him dear. His crooked policy from the first had been to find employment for the duke of Burgundy at home, by fomenting dissensions among his subjects; and at the critical moment when he was in the castle of Peronne, the inhabitants of Liege, incited by the emissaries of Louis, had revolted, seized the bishop and governor, and massacred many of the adherents of Charles. The duke, transported with rage, vowed vengeance on his perfidious visitor who was completely at his mercy; and it was only by lavish bribes to the ministers of Charles, and by liberal concessions, that this resentment was appeased, and a treaty of peace concluded between the two princes on moderate terms. It was impossible, however, that an alliance could long be maintained with a monarch so faithless as Louis, and a new league was formed against him between his own brother the duke of Guienne, and his old enemy the duke of Burgundy, to which Edward IV. of England afterwards acceded. But the former was poisoned by an emissary of Louis, and his duchy was immediately seized and annexed to the French dominions. Charles exasperated by this villany invaded France, took a number of towns and wasted the country with fire and sword, while the English king, the duke of Brittany, and the Count De St. Pol, prepared to unite their arms in an attack on another quarter. But once more, Louis by bribes, promises, and intrigues contrived to dissolve this formidable confederacy, which seemed at one time to threaten the total destruction of the monarchy. The death of the duke of Burgundy in 1477 relieved the French monarch from an enemy, whom he both hated intensely, and feared. The immense estates of the duke were inherited by his only daughter; and if Louis had followed the course which honesty and policy alike dictated, both Flanders and Burgundy might have been annexed to France. But he overreached himself, and frustrated his own schemes by his detestable falsehood and treachery. In the end Mary was induced to bestow her hand upon the Emperor Maximilian, and Louis had the mortification to find that all his arts had served only to aggrandize his rival. Being now freed from the apprehensions of foreign enemies, the French king directed all his energies against the principal nobility of his own kingdom, whom he sought in every way to humble and destroy. The duke of Nemours, who was induced by the most solemn promises of safety to trust himself to the royal clemency, was shut up in an iron cage in the Bastile, and afterwards beheaded. Four thousand persons perished on this occasion without trial. The estates of the duke of Bourbon were seized, and himself kept a kind of prisoner, for no other reason than that his power made him formidable. The queen even became an object of suspicion to the jealous tyrant, and was banished to Savoy. Though his strength was weakened by repeated attacks of apoplexy, he pursued his schemes of ambition to the last. His deathbed was an appalling spectacle. Shut up in his castle of Plessis, suspicious of every one around him, and jealous especially of his own son, he importuned the saints and heaven for the prolongation of his life, and exhausted the skill of his physicians, who insulted and plundered him. He expired at length, 30th August, 1483, in the sixtieth year of his age, and the twenty-third of his reign.
Louis was possessed of great natural sagacity and firmness of
