But Isabeau’s avarice clouded her judgment and made her an easy target for her enemies. She took or wheedled as much treasure as she could from her husband. She was very fond of her brother and promoted his interests openly, much to the dismay of her subjects, who did not wish to see their hard-earned taxes lavished on a Bavarian. She has also been painted throughout history as having extremely lax sexual mores and as openly conducting an affair with her brother-in-law, the duke of Orléans, during the periods of her husband’s madness. Although recent scholarship suggests that these allegations came later as part of a deliberate effort by the English to undermine the legitimacy of the dauphin, there is no question that Isabeau cast about for allies and settled on her husband’s brother as a man she could trust. The pair worked together to forward their own interests, often to the detriment of their subjects’ pocketbooks. “They [Isabeau and the duke of Orléans] could be reproached also with insulting the people’s misery by spending heavily from the payments of others. Indifferent to the defense of the kingdom, they put all their vanity in riches, all their joy in the pleasures of the flesh. In a word, they so forgot the rules and duties of royalty that they became an object of scandal for France,” complained the Monk of Saint-Denis.
Naturally, the king’s uncles were not particularly happy that the queen (and by implication the duke of Orléans) was in control of the government. Evidently, Isabeau wasn’t quick enough the next time, because in 1403, after a private meeting with the dukes of Berry and Burgundy, the king amended his earlier ruling to state that in the event of his absence from court, the queen and his uncles were responsible for the administration of the realm, and that in the event of a disagreement, a decision would be taken by the majority and “sounder part” of the royal council—in other words, the duke of Burgundy.
And so it went, back and forth, back and forth. Sometimes the duke of Burgundy had the upper hand, sometimes the queen, sometimes the duke of Orléans. One ordinance cancelled out another. For example, again in 1403, by virtue of yet a later royal declaration, which stated very clearly that it could not be invalidated, the duke of Orléans was named regent in the event that Charles died while his heir was too young to rule. Four days later, in the presence of the duke of Burgundy, the king invalidated this edict.
Then, on April 27, 1404, Philip the Bold died and the balance of power shifted decisively in the duke of Orléans’s favor. Within six weeks, Charles had agreed to betroth his widowed daughter Isabelle (whose husband, Richard II, had been deposed and most likely murdered by his successor, Henry IV of England) and her immense dowry of 500,000 francs to Louis’s eldest son. Louis was also named lord of Pisa, a title that carried with it a special award of 40,000 francs, and received a number of French cities, gifts that Philip the Bold would no doubt have challenged vigorously had he been alive to do so. And the next year the duke of Orléans did even better, adding nearly 400,000 francs to his estate as a result of grants from the royal treasury, including a 20, 000-franc bequest that the duke put entirely to the purchase of a particularly fine gemstone that had caught his eye.
This level of ostentation and affluence did not go unnoticed by the rest of the kingdom. A vehement protest was raised when the duke of Orléans’s obviously improved financial circumstances necessitated an increase in taxes to replenish the treasury. Some of the populace’s anger directed against the king’s brother spilled off onto Isabeau as well, especially when it was revealed that she had secreted a fortune in gold in a convoy subsequently dispatched to Bavaria. The rampant public dissatisfaction with the queen and the duke of Orléans allowed a newcomer to rise to power: Philip the Bold’s son, John the Fearless, the new duke of Burgundy.
John the Fearless was thirty-three years old, as energetic, competent, and assured as his father had been, but also more direct and prone to impatience. He assumed that he held a degree of power and influence that he had not yet quite achieved, and this caused him to overreach politically. He was like an understudy who, from long years of observation in the wings, knew all the lines but whose performance once on stage lacked the nuance of the more seasoned principal actor.
John began, much to the approval of the general populace, with a call for an audit and overhaul of the realm’s finances. To counter the threat, Isabeau and Louis banded together against him and largely prevailed. For the next two years, John the Fearless struggled with a notable lack of success to displace the duke of Orléans from his position of authority in France. John tried to reform the treasury; Louis thwarted him by deftly replacing those members of the royal council loyal to John with his own supporters. John received authority from the king to negotiate a general peace with England; Louis undermined his efforts by ordering the admiral of the French fleet to launch an assault against English ships in the Channel. Even more unsettling, funds that the king had promised would be paid to the account of the duke of Burgundy never arrived, an administrative omission that John attributed, not unreasonably, to the duke of Orléans’s influence.
It is unclear at what point exactly the duke of Burgundy decided to take a shortcut to power, but certainly by the fall of 1407 he had given up on the conventional avenues by which influence is acquired in favor of a more direct approach. On November 23, 1407, the duke of Orléans had dinner and spent the early evening alone with the queen at her private residence at the Hôtel Barbette in Paris. Isabeau had two weeks earlier given birth to a son who had died almost immediately, and was so affected by this death that she had taken to her bed. Louis was there to try to console the queen for her loss. After dinner, they were interrupted by a messenger purporting to come from the king, who claimed that the duke of Orléans was needed. Louis said good night to Isabeau and left her apartments in the company of a nominal retinue, with six valets bearing torches to light the way, a German page, and two young knights-in-training, who shared a horse and rode ahead of the duke. As this little procession turned a dark corner, after his sword-bearers had passed, a group of seventeen armed men rushed out of the shadows to attack Louis. Thinking his identity unknown to his assailants, to save himself he cried out, “I am the Duc d’Orléans!” but “It is you we want,” came the cold reply, and a scuffle ensued. The apprentice knights were too far ahead to be of use; by the time they had turned the horse around it was over. It had taken only moments for a prince of the royal blood and his German page to be stabbed to death and their corpses left to lie on the streets of Paris. To distract pursuers, the assassins set fire to a nearby building and then escaped furtively into the blackness of the winter night.
CHAPTER 4
Civil War
EWS OF THE MURDER of the duke of Orléans spread rapidly through Paris. Repulsed by the horrific crime, members of the royal council convened a meeting two days later, on November 25, to arrange for a thorough investigation. Present among these councillors was Yolande of Aragon’s husband, Louis II, king of Sicily.
Since his marriage, Louis II had been active in French politics. Possibly because his territorial aspirations were tied to Italy and not France, the king of Sicily had managed to maintain cordial relations with each of the various warring factions within the kingdom. He had been of invaluable aid to Isabeau in her effort to quell the hostility between Philip the Bold and the duke of Orléans, and was treated as a beloved member of the family by Charles VI. Two months before the duke of Orléans’s murder, John the Fearless, on the lookout for allies, had affianced his daughter Catherine to Louis’s eldest son, four-year-old Louis III. John had provided Catherine with a sizable dowry of 150,000 écus, 30,000 of which had already been paid. The money had made an extremely welcome addition to Louis II’s war chest for his upcoming expedition to Naples.
It therefore came as something of a shock to Louis when, during the meeting of the royal council, John the Fearless abruptly took him and the duke of Berry aside and confessed to having ordered the assassination himself. The duke’s sudden candor might have been prompted partly by conscience but was mostly of necessity.
The royal councillors had just agreed to conduct a house-by-house search for the killers, beginning with their own apartments. Apparently quite a few of the assassins, including their leader, had taken shelter at the Hôtel d’Artois, John the Fearless’s primary Parisian residence.
Louis II was a pragmatic man, but not a particularly quick-witted one. The duke of Burgundy’s admission, to which he is reported to have responded, “Ah, cousin, you have committed a dastardly act!” left him flailing around in search of the appropriate posture to take. The others, however, roundly condemned John the Fearless and began pressing for his arrest. (The king was indisposed—the duke of Burgundy, no fool, had chosen to murder his rival at a time when Charles had again taken leave of his senses.) Under the circumstances, John the Fearless decided that Paris was perhaps not the optimal location from which to discuss the matter, and the next day he escaped to Flanders, where he proceeded to raise a large army.
The prospect of new violence prompted Louis II and the duke of Berry to adopt a policy of appeasement. They arranged to meet John in Amiens, where they promised to intervene with the king if the duke of Burgundy would only show some remorse by apologizing to the duke of Orléans’s widow and children. But John’s guilt had hardened him, and he chose to pursue a course of justification rather than admit to error. To the dismay of the two ambassadors, he appeared at the meeting in Amiens accompanied by a force of some three thousand men, rejected all of their proposals, and then proceeded to march on Paris, arriving at the beginning of March 1408.
Here the duke of Burgundy was the beneficiary of a piece of good luck. Just as he and his army had settled into the capital (no one being in a position to stop them), the king was slowly returning to rationality. It was simply a question of who got in to see him first. On March 9, even before Charles had time to make a full recovery, the Burgundian army made sure that John the Fearless was that person.
The interview was held at night in the king’s chamber. Although Louis II and the duke of Berry were also present, as were several other prominent noblemen, John and his lawyer did all the talking. The duke of Burgundy stood by Charles’s bedside and informed the king of France with a straight face that he had been forced to kill Louis because he had discovered that the duke of Orléans was plotting to murder the king and all of his heirs, and that this had been the only way to save the monarchy. Since this explanation fit in completely with Charles’s own paranoid fantasies, the king accepted this extraordinary pronouncement without further investigation. He not only immediately signed a document pardoning John, he also personally authorized a second edict allowing the duke of Burgundy to punish anyone who sought to dishonor him by spreading further rumors or allegations against him.
And so one of the most sensational and despicable murders in French history went unpunished. The bitterness engendered by this evil act ran deeply through the kingdom, severing the realm as effectively as though it had been sliced in two by a sword. Very soon, the breach between those citizens who supported John the Fearless and those who remained loyal to the memory of the murdered duke of Orléans and his heirs would erupt into civil war.
VIOLENCE AND RUIN became endemic to the kingdom in the years following John the Fearless’s pardon. In 1410, six of the most important noblemen in France—the dukes of Berry, Brittany, and Orléans (Louis’s eldest son, who had inherited his murdered father’s title and estates), along with the counts of Armagnac, Alençon, and Clermont—signed a pact pledging to raise an army to go to war against their enemies (understood to be the Burgundians). Members of this faction were called Armagnacs because the new duke of Orléans was married to the count of Armagnac’s daughter, and his father-in-law, more experienced militarily and politically, was widely regarded as the leader of the alliance.
True to their word, that summer the six confederates summoned their men-at-arms and descended on the capital, which necessitated the duke of Burgundy’s hastily summoning his men-at-arms to meet them. “About the end of August, each one brought up so many troops around Paris that everything was devastated for twenty leagues round about,” wrote a chronicler who was in the city for these events. Two years later, the duke of Burgundy took the fight to the Armagnacs and besieged his opponents, who were holed up in the city of Bourges. Charles VI, who was having a good spell, actually accompanied John the Fearless on this expedition, as did Charles’s eldest son, the duke of Guyenne. “The King of France arrived with his army…[and] made a vigorous attack upon the town,” wrote the chronicler. “Towards the end of July, when all the poor people had been eaten up, the first by taxation and the others by pillaging, they induced the young Duke of Guienne to negotiate…. He promised them… that he would reconcile them all to the King. And so he did, in spite of all objections, for everyone was very tired of the war on account of the extremely hot weather.”
But this climate-based peace lasted less than a year. The following spring, the duke of Burgundy used a popular uprising in Paris led by the city’s butchers and their cohorts, the flayers—clearly not men to be trifled with—as an excuse to take over the capital. Unhappy with the worsening economic conditions brought on by what was perceived to be extravagant spending by the queen and her eldest son, on April 28, 1413, a mob assembled in front of the duke of Guyenne’s palace. Waving a list of names (helpfully provided by the duke of Burgundy), the insurgents demanded the surrender of some fifty members of the royal household accused of improprieties. When the duke of Guyenne refused, the butchers overran the front door, seized the offending noblemen, and took them prisoner. Afterward, the rioters openly delivered their captives to the Hôtel d’Artois, John the Fearless’s Paris residence. The sixteen-year-old duke of Guyenne, furious at the offense, confronted his cousin. “Know with certainty that one day you will be sorry,” he warned the duke of Burgundy, “and things will not always turn out as you would like.”
John’s role in instigating a mob attack on the royal family seems finally to have aroused the moral indignation of Louis II, as it was only after this that he and Yolande of Aragon took a step that placed them firmly and irrevocably on the side of the Armagnacs.* In November 1413 they abruptly repudiated the engagement between Louis III and the duke of Burgundy’s daughter, Catherine. Ten-year-old Catherine, who had been living with Yolande and her family for the past four years in preparation for the consummation of her marriage, was obliged to pack up and, together with all of her worldly goods, was returned to John the Fearless like last year’s coronet.
To be publicly discarded in this fashion was an insult of unfathomable proportions. Furious, the duke of Burgundy severed all relations with the king of Sicily. Nor did he ever forget this humiliation to his family. From this time on, John the Fearless and Louis II were sworn enemies.
But the king and queen of Sicily had already taken steps to compensate for any damage to their position incurred by the rupture. On October 21, 1413, just prior to Catherine’s departure, Yolande of Aragon met privately with the queen of France at Isabeau’s residence in Marcoussis, just south of Paris. The purpose of this interview was to finalize the terms of a marriage contract between Yolande’s eldest daughter, nine-year-old Marie, and the king of France’s third son, ten-year-old Charles. The mob assault on the duke of Guyenne had frightened Isabeau sufficiently that she was openly seeking new allies as a means of isolating the duke of Burgundy from the rest of the peerage. By this engagement was a new and powerful political alignment created in France.
That Yolande and not her husband was responsible for these negotiations is an indication of how much Louis II now relied on his wife’s experience and advice. Yolande was by this time thirty-two years old and the mother of four (soon to be five) children. She had matured into a supremely self-possessed, forceful, and politically astute woman who was not afraid to fight for what she believed to be her rights and property. To help finance her husband’s military operations in Naples she had pawned her jewels to his Florentine bankers and managed his estates in Provence and Anj
ou in his absence. In 1410, while Louis II was away in Italy, Yolande’s uncle Martin, king of Aragon, had died without an heir. Yolande sent ambassadors to the special assembly charged with determining the succession to demand that her eldest son, Louis III, be invested with the kingdom. Although the cortes eventually chose a different candidate, they were forced to pay the queen of Sicily a settlement of 150,000 florins as compensation for her claim. Despite this substantial remuneration, Yolande never recognized this abrogation of her rights and insisted on adding the honorifics “Queen of Aragon” and “King of Aragon” to her and Louis III’s other titles.*
Yolande and Isabeau had no difficulty reaching an agreement at their October meeting, and the engagement of Charles and Marie was celebrated with much pomp and gaiety on December 18, 1413, in Paris. (John the Fearless’s support of the butchers had backfired on him and he had been obliged to flee the city in August, so it was safe to hold these festivities in the capital.) It is a simple matter to surmise the partisan nature of this alliance from the guest list; those assembled could just as easily have been attending an anti-Burgundian rally as a sovereign betrothal. The king was again raving and so was unable to attend the engagement of his son. Yolande had brought all of her children with her, and as a special mark of favor Isabeau invited everyone to stay at her favorite palace, the Hôtel Barbette. A number of feasts were given in the children’s honor, and Isabeau, pleased by the success of her maneuver, was exceptionally generous in her gift-giving. Yolande received six hanaps—stemmed, oversized wine goblets, almost the size of vases—fashioned of gold and decorated with a rich enamel of transparent ruby to commemorate her daughter’s engagement. Even adorable little René, just four years old, was the beneficiary of an expensive diamond and a ring from the queen of France.
The Maid and the Queen Page 6