Part 11 (1/2)
had actually pledged himself that the mortgage should hold at least during Philip's life does not seem a.s.sured, but that any sum would be insufficient to induce the duke to release them unless his intellect were somewhat deadened, is clear.
In 1462, when he recovered from a sharp attack, possibly the result of his indulgence in the pleasures of the table during the prolonged festivities at Paris, he did not regain his previous vigour. This was the time, by the way, when opportunity was afforded his courtiers to prove that devotion to their seigneur outweighed personal vanity. When his head was shaved by order of the court physician, more than five hundred n.o.bles sacrificed their own locks so that their becoming curls might not remind their chief of his own bald head. The sacrifice was not always voluntary, adds an informant.[1] Philip forced compliance with this new fas.h.i.+on upon all who seemed reluctant to be unnecessarily shorn of what beauty was theirs by nature's gift. This servility may have consoled Philip for the deprivation of his hair. In his depressed condition any solace was acceptable.
It was just when the duke was in this enfeebled state that Louis, through the mediation of the Croys, pushed forward his proposition to redeem the towns and Philip agreed, possibly relying upon the chance that it would be no easy matter for the French king to wring the required sum from his impoverished land. Philip's a.s.sent was, however, promptly clinched by a cash payment of half the amount[2]; the remainder followed.
Amiens, Abbeville, and the other towns, valuable bulwarks for the Netherland provinces, fine nurseries for the human material requisite for Burgundian armies, rich tax payers as they were, all tumbled into the outstretched hands of the duke's wily rival.
The transaction was hurried through and completed before a rumour of its progress came to the ear of the interested heir. Charles was in Holland sulking and indignant. He had expected good results from his tender devotion during his father's acute illness, a devotion shared by Isabella of Portugal who hastened to her husband's bedside from her convent seclusion when Philip was in need of her ministrations. But, in his convalescence, Philip renewed his friends.h.i.+p for the Croys whom Charles continued to distrust with bitterness that varied in its intensity, but which never vanished from his consciousness. The young man felt misjudged, misused, and ever suspicious that personal danger to himself lurked in the air of his father's court.
The various rumours of plots against his life may not all have been baseless. At last, one of own cousins, the Count of Nevers, was accused of having recourse to diabolic means of doing away with the duke's legitimate heir.[2] Three little waxen images were found in his house, and it was alleged that he practised various magic arts withal in order to win the favour of the duke and of the French king, and still worse to cause Charles to waste away with a mysterious sickness.
The accusations were sufficient to make Nevers resign all his offices in his kinsman's court and retire, post-haste, to France. Had he been wholly innocent he would have demanded trial at the hands of his peers of the Golden Fleece as behooved one of the order. But he withdrew undefended, and left his tattered reputation fluttering raggedly in the breeze of gossip.
Charles stayed in Holland aloof from the ducal court until a fresh incident drove him thither to give vent to his indignation. Only three days had Philip de Commines been page to Duke Philip, then resident at Lille, when an emba.s.sy headed by Morvilliers, Chancellor of France, was given audience in the presence of the Burgundian court, including the Count of Charolais. The future historian,[4] then nineteen years old, was keenly alive to all that pa.s.sed on that November fifth, 1464.
Morvilliers used very bitter terms in his a.s.sertion that Charles had illegally stopped a little French s.h.i.+p of war and arrested a certain b.a.s.t.a.r.d of Rubempre on the false charge that his errand in Holland, where the incident occurred, was to seize and carry off Charles himself. Moreover, one knight of Burgundy, Sir Olivier de La Marche had caused this tale to be bruited everywhere,
”especially at Bruges whither strangers of all nations resort.
This had hurt Louis deeply, and he now demanded through his chancellor that Duke Philip should send this same Sir Olivier de La Marche prisoner to Paris, there to be punished as the case required. Whereupon, Duke Philip answered that the said Sir Olivier was steward of his house, born in the County of Burgundy and in no respect subject to the Crown of France.”
Philip added that if his servant had wrought ill to the king's honour he, the duke, would see to his punishment. As to the b.a.s.t.a.r.d of Rubempre, true it was that he had been apprehended in Holland,[5] but there was adequate ground for his arrest as his behaviour had been strange, at least so thought the Count of Charolais. Philip added that if his son were suspicious
”he took it not of him for he was never so, but of his mother who had been the most jealous lady that ever lived. But notwithstanding” [quoth he] ”that myself never were supicious, yet if I had been in my son's place at the same time that this b.a.s.t.a.r.d of Rubempre haunted those coasts I would surely have caused him to be apprehended as my son did.”
In conclusion, Philip promised to deliver up Rubempre to the king were his innocence satisfactorily proven.
Morvilliers then resumed his discourse, enlarging upon the treacherous designs of Francis, Duke of Brittany, with whom Charles had lately sworn brotherhood at the very moment when he was the honoured guest of King Louis at Tours. During this discussion the Count of Charolais became very restive. Finally he could no longer endure Morvilliers's indirect slurs, and
”made offer eftsoon to answer, being marvellously out of patience to hear such reproachful speeches used of his friend and confederate. But Morvilliers cut him off, saying: 'My Lord of Charolais, I am not come of amba.s.sage to you, but to my Lord your father.' The said earl besought his father divers times to give him leave to answer, who in the end said unto him: 'I have answered for thee as methinketh the father should answer for the son, notwithstanding if thou have so great desire to speak bethink thyself to-day and to-morrow speak and spare not.'”
Then Morvilliers to his former speech added that he could not imagine what had moved the earl to enter into the league with the Duke of Brittany unless it were because of a pension the king had once given him together with the government of Normandy and afterwards taken from him.
In regard to Rubempre, Commines adds to his story Charles's own statement given on the morrow:
”Notwithstanding, I think nothing was ever proved against him, though I confess the presumption to have been great. Five years after I myself saw him delivered out of prison.” This from Commines. La Marche is less detailed in his record[6] of the Rubempre incident:
”The b.a.s.t.a.r.d was put in prison and the Count of Charolais sent me to Hesdin to the duke to inform him of the arrest and its cause.
The good duke heard my report kindly like a wise prince. In truth he at once suspected that the craft of the King of France lurked at the bottom of the affair. Shortly afterwards the duke left Hesdin and returned to his own land, which did not please the King of France who despatched thither a great emba.s.sy with the Count d'Eu at the head. Demands were made that I should be delivered to him to be punished as he would, because he claimed that I had been the cause of the arrest of the b.a.s.t.a.r.d of Rubempre and also of the duke's departure from Hesdin without saying adieu to the King of France, but the good duke, moderate in all his actions, replied that I was his subject and his servitor, and that if the king or any one else had a grievance against me he would investigate it.
The matter was finally smoothed over [adds La Marche], and Louis evinced a readiness to conciliate his offended cousin.”
In spite of La Marche, the matter proved to be one not easily disposed of by soft phrases flung into the breach. Charles obeyed his father and prepared in advance his defence to the chancellor. When he had finished his own statement about Rubempre, he proceeded to the point of his friends.h.i.+p with the Duke of Brittany, declaring that it was right and proper and that if King Louis knew what was to the advantage of the French sovereign, he would be glad to see his n.o.bles welded together as a bulwark to his throne. As to his pension, he had never received but one quarter, nine thousand francs. He had made no suit for the remainder nor for the government of Normandy. So long as he enjoyed the favour and good will of his father he had no need to crave favour of any man.
”I think verily had it not been for the reverence he bore to his said father who was there present” continues the observant page, ”and to whom he addressed his speech that he would have used much bitterer terms. In the end, Duke Philip very wisely and humbly besought the king not lightly to conceive an evil opinion of him or his son but to continue his favour towards them. Then the banquet was brought in and the amba.s.sadors took their leave. As they pa.s.sed out Charles stood apart from his father and said to the archbishop of Narbonne, who brought up the rear of the little company:
”'Recommend me very humbly to the good grace of the king. Tell him he has had me scolded here by the chancellor but that he shall repent it before a year is past.'” His message was duly delivered and to this incident Commines attributes momentous results.
Exasperated at the nonchalant manner in which Louis's amba.s.sadors treated him, indignant at the injury to his heritage by the redemption of the towns on the Somme, and further, already alienated from his royal cousin through the long series of petty occasions where the different natures of the two young men clashed, in this year 1464, Charles was certainly more than ready to enter into an open contest with the French monarch. It was not long before the opportunity came for him to do so with a certain eclat.
In the early years of his own freedom, before he learned wisdom, Louis XI. had planted many seeds of enmity which brought forth a plentiful crop, and the fruit was an open conspiracy among the n.o.bles of the land.
One of the causes of loosening feudal ties was the gradual growth of the body of standing troops inst.i.tuted in 1439 by Charles VII. These, in the regular pay of the crown, gave the king a guarantee of support without the aid of his n.o.bles. By the date of Louis's accession, certain ducal houses besides that of Burgundy had grown very independent within their own boundaries: Orleans, Anjou, Bourbon, not to speak of Brittany.[7] Now the efforts to curtail the prerogatives of these petty sovereigns, begun by Charles VII., were steady and persistent in the new reign. They had no longer the power of coining money, of levying troops, or of imposing taxes, while the judicial authority of the crown had been extended little by little over France.
Then their privileges were further attacked by Louis's restrictions of the chase.
It was the acc.u.mulation of these invasions of local authority, added to a real disbelief in the king's ability, that led to a formation of a league among the n.o.bles, designed to check the centralisation policy of the monarch, a League of Public Weal to form a bulwark against the tyrannical encroachments of their liege lord.