While all of this was going on, in February 1432, Philip finally met face-to-face with his captive in order to hammer out the conditions of René’s release. The negotiations lasted off and on until April. No ransom figure was agreed on at this time, but René was required to marry his eldest daughter (four years old at the time) to the son of his rival, Antoine. The duke of Bar and Lorraine was allowed temporary freedom from his cell, but only on the condition that he pay an upfront installment of 20,000 gold pieces and substitute his two young sons (the eldest was six) as hostages in his place. This René did, and he was released on April 30. René was then required to travel to Brussels to continue discussions with Antoine under the mediating influence of Philip the Good as to who would inherit Lorraine after his death. Nicolas Rolin, Philip’s chancellor, also attended these meetings and was responsible for drawing up the documentation.
As a result of all of these negotiations, René got to know Philip the Good and Nicolas Rolin quite well. It didn’t take him long to figure out that the duke of Burgundy was not all that happy with his English allies, and that the duke of Burgundy’s chancellor had found a way out of their treaty arrangements. (Actually, it seems likely from later events that Nicolas deliberately leaked this information to René as a means of opening a backdoor diplomatic channel to Charles’s court.) Whichever way René came to this information, however, the message was the same: the glimmer of an opportunity to dislodge Philip from his heretofore unshakable adherence to En gland had suddenly appeared.
The exploitation of so rare an opening was too important and sensitive to leave to routine officials. Upon completion of the talks in Brussels in February 1433, René did not go directly home to his wife in Nancy. Rather, he went to see his mother.
* This is perhaps why Regnauld de Chartres expressed such frustration with Joan when she acted independently at Compiègne: she had been told that a French army was being assembled and yet she refused to wait for it. At Orléans, when she had wanted to attack before the relieving troops had had a chance to return with the second cargo of supplies, the Bastard had been able to talk her out of it; not so here. This was particularly unfortunate, as had she been induced to wait and join the main body of troops, she would have had much more protection and might have eluded capture.
* For example, by letters of May 1431, Charles granted La Trémoïlle a duty of fifteen deniers on every cask of wine and every hogshead (barrel) of salt that passed, either by land or by water, in front of a specific castle near a well-traveled commercial route near the Loire. This at a time when the crown could not afford to pay its soldiers for their service in the war.
CHAPTER 13
The Queen
Takes
Control
OLANDE OF ARAGON was a sufficiently astute politician—after nearly two decades, perhaps the most experienced diplomat on Charles’s side in the war—to grasp instantly the implications of René’s intelligence. If what her son told her was true, the Burgundian chancellor was signaling that the duke might be receptive, or at least that the timing was propitious, and that Philip the Good might be coaxed into considering a separate peace agreement with Charles VII. And she also understood why this communication had come to her through René, and had not gone directly to the royal ambassadors. It was because Nicolas Rolin did not trust Georges de la Trémoïlle, and everybody on both sides of the French and Burgundian courts knew that the queen of Sicily opposed the lord of Trémoïlle as well, and openly advocated that he be replaced by her candidate, the constable Arthur of Richemont.
Nicolas Rolin’s misgivings about Charles’s favorite councillor were well founded. La Trémoïlle had completely misread the situation; instead of trying to work with Rolin, he was trying to get rid of him. La Trémoïlle’s idea of a diplomatic initiative was to have Nicolas kidnapped or killed, and he had already botched one attempt to ambush the Burgundian chancellor. Nicolas had been forced to surround himself with an escort of twenty-four bowmen whenever he appeared in public. He did not appreciate having to exercise this level of caution, and thought that perhaps the queen of Sicily might be able to do something about it.
Yolande was well aware of La Trémoïlle’s unsavory tactics. Arthur of Richemont had been targeted for political assassination by the lord of Trémoïlle as well, and only escaped death during a hunting party in the fall of 1430 when the three agents assigned to perpetrate the crime were betrayed and arrested before they had a chance to execute the plot. More than this, La Trémoïlle was deliberately impeding Yolande’s efforts to recover her properties in Anjou and Maine by sending in mercenaries, not to combat the English, but to battle the constable’s troops, who were fighting on her behalf. “La Trémoïlle’s… one thought was to overthrow Richemont and get rid of the Queen of Sicily, Queen Marie of Anjou, and her brother Charles of Maine,” the great French medievalist and specialist in the Hundred Years War, Edouard Perroy, stated flatly.
As tempting as René’s intelligence was, Yolande moved cautiously. She looked first for proof of the estrangement between Philip the Good and his English allies. It was not long in coming. On November 14, 1432, Anne of Burgundy, the duke of Bedford’s wife and Philip the Good’s sister, died in Paris, severing the important familial link between the regent and the duke of Burgundy. The duke of Bedford remarried in April of the following year. He did not bother to consult Philip, as was customary, before entering into this contract. This insult did not recommend the regent to his ally. By the next month, May 1433, the coolness between Bedford and his former brother-in-law was publicly observed when the two arranged to meet for talks in the Burgundian town of Saint-Omer. Both men arrived at the appointed time and place, but they never met or spoke as neither would stoop to call upon the other. “The duke of Bedford expected that the duke of Burgundy should come to him at his lodgings, which he would not do,” the chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet reported. “Many of their lords went from the one to the other to endeavor to settle this matter of ceremony, but in vain…. Within a short time, the two dukes departed from Saint-Omer without anything further being done, but more discontented with each other than before,” the chronicler noted.
This was all the proof Yolande needed. In June 1433, soon after the episode at Saint-Omer, Georges de la Trémoïlle was given a taste of his own methods. The king was back in Chinon and La Trémoïlle was with him, housed as was customary in the castle of Coudray. Late one night, four men, all of them in service to Yolande of Aragon, having previously subverted the guard, quietly entered the castle through an ulterior doorway and made their way to La Trémoïlle’s chamber. They surprised the councillor in his bed, and when he made a move to resist, they made use of their swords, but only to injure, as the councillor survived and quickly surrendered. (The chroniclers claim that La Trémoïlle was protected from their knife thrusts by his considerable fat, which prevented his enemies’ blades from penetrating too deeply into his organs.) Bleeding from his wounds, the king’s favorite adviser was hustled out of the castle and out into the grounds where a larger group, numbering some dozen men-at-arms in all, were waiting. “They made him prisoner, and carried him away, taking him from the government of the king,” Enguerrand de Monstrelet reported. “He afterward, by treaty… promised never to return to the king, yielding up many forts that he held as security for keeping the said treaty. Shortly after, the constable [Arthur of Richemont] was restored to the good graces of his monarch, who was well satisfied to receive him, although he was much vexed at the conduct that had been held to the lord de La Trémoïlle.”
Although another chronicler, Jean Chartier, assigned the responsibility for this successful maneuver to Yolande’s nineteen-year-old son, Charles of Anjou, the organization of so efficient an operation bore all the trademarks of his far more capable and sensible mother. Overweight or no, it was four against one and the councillor could easily have been killed; the fact that he was not indicated that the conspirators had been told to exercise restraint. It was not Yolande’s way t
o murder her opponents. Assassinating people was what had gotten the French into this mess in the first place.
To ensure a smooth political transition, Yolande also enlisted the aid of her daughter Queen Marie, who was only too thrilled to see the last of this particular adviser. Charles VII was angry at first, thinking that Arthur of Richemont had planned and executed the coup for his own purposes, but Yolande had been clever enough to keep the constable out of it. Marie made her husband realize that Arthur was not among those who had spirited his favorite away, and calmed him down so that he could hear the charges against La Trémoïlle. It turned out that the chamberlain had been engaged in some rather unorthodox financial transactions that were much to the detriment of the king and the royal treasury. The disclosure of these indiscretions was exactly calculated to turn the king’s anger away from the perpetrators of the coup and toward its victim. Charles VII was quickly resigned to his loss and “Yolande [of Aragon] resumed all her lost ascendancy over her son-in-law, and the Constable… returned to favor,” Edouard Perroy reported.
Two months later, at a council in Basel that had been convened earlier in the year by the Church to discuss the conflict between France and England, the duke of Burgundy suddenly and without warning ordered his representatives, who had been sitting for the past months on the same bench with the delegation representing England, to change their seats and remove themselves from their English counterparts. The process of reconciliation with France had begun.
WITH YOLANDE OF ARAGON and her protégé Arthur of Richemont once more in control of the court, Charles VII’s diplomatic policy focused on an all-out effort to isolate England by coming to a separate peace arrangement with Philip the Good. But this time, the king did not, as he had after his coronation at Reims, make the mistake of suspending French combat efforts during the negotiations in order to induce the duke of Burgundy to come to terms; rather, he increased the pressure, both diplomatically and militarily, on his adversary. After so many years spent in conflict, even Charles had learned how to prosecute a war.
And so raids continued to be conducted into English and Burgundian territory, penetrating as far as the capital. “The war got worse and worse,” the anonymous chronicler known as the Bourgeois of Paris complained in 1434. “Those who called themselves Frenchmen [Charles VII’s supporters]—at Lagny and the other fortresses around Paris—came every day right up to the gates of Paris. They stole, they killed…. There was no news at this time of the Regent or of the Duke of Burgundy; they might have been dead. Every day the people were told that they were coming very soon, now this one, now that; meanwhile the enemy came every day and plundered right outside Paris because no one… did anything to stop them.” As a result of the perpetual conflict prices rose and food became scarce; an epidemic of plague struck the city, and the death rate increased alarmingly. In the face of such horrendous conditions, even those Parisians who had supported the regency government began to turn against the English.
The French royal court also secured a major diplomatic coup by coaxing the Holy Roman Empire into the conflict. In April 1434 the emperor, who claimed suzerainty over Lorraine, declared René to be its legitimate duke, dashing Antoine’s hope of assuming power. Philip the Good was so incensed by this decision that he demanded that his hostage, who had been granted a temporary leave of absence from captivity in order to negotiate the terms of his ransom and permanent release, return at once to his prison cell in Dijon, an order that the hapless René, bound by the code of chivalry and honor, was reluctantly compelled to obey. This act of pique on Philip’s part, while no doubt emotionally satisfying, turned out to be somewhat less effective diplomatically. The following month the emperor retaliated by signing a treaty with Charles VII in which Philip was labeled as a “disobedient rebel, self-styled duke of Burgundy,” an unpropitious turn of phrase that was followed six months later by a formal declaration of imperial war.
THE PROSPECT of having to fight the French and the empire simultaneously was sufficiently unpleasant that in January 1435, strongly encouraged by his chancellor, Philip the Good agreed to participate in a series of secret meetings with key ambassadors from Charles VII’s court, including the constable, Regnault of Chartres, and the duke of Bourbon (formerly the count of Clermont). The talks were held in the Burgundian town of Nevers. The duke of Bourbon, who was specifically chosen for this assignment because he had the good fortune to be married to another of Philip’s sisters, sent his wife and children to Nevers in advance of the negotiations to soften the duke of Burgundy. The stratagem worked: “At length the duchess came, accompanied by her two sons and a brilliant attendance of knights, esquires, ladies, and damsels,” reported Enguerrand de Monstrelet. “The duke of Burgundy went out of the place to meet her, and received her with much affection and joy, for he had not seen his sister for a long time, and showed the same love to his nephews, although they were very young…. On the next day a council was held, when it was determined that Arthur of Brittany, constable of France, and the archbishop of Reims, should be sent for.” In due course these gentlemen arrived and the parley began in earnest. To everyone’s great relief, the prospect of peace, so long elusive, began to take shape. In fact, Philip experienced such a change of heart at these meetings, and demonstrated such goodwill and hospitality toward his former enemies, that a Burgundian knight, observing his master’s behavior, complained aloud that “we are very foolish to risk our bodies and souls at the will of princes and great lords who, when they please, make up their quarrels, while we oftentimes remain poor and in distress.”
In this congenial atmosphere, which could easily have been mistaken for a joyous family reunion rather than a serious political conference, the duke of Burgundy at last overcame his aversion to treating with his father’s killer, and allowed himself to be munificently bribed. In exchange for formally abandoning England and allying with Charles, Philip got 50,000 gold crowns, payable on signing of the peace treaty. He was allowed to keep all the territory he had already been given by the English, and the French ambassadors even threw in some new property, including the lucrative Somme towns and the county of Ponthieu (although these could be redeemed in the future by Charles for 400,000 gold crowns). Charles would issue a formal apology acknowledging any emotional hardship the duke of Burgundy might have suffered as a result of the murder of his father, and although Philip would officially recognize Charles as the legitimate sovereign of France and become his vassal once again, in deference to any lingering sensitivity he was absolved during his lifetime from having to do personal obeisance to the king.* (The duke of Burgundy’s heirs would, however, have to pay homage to future kings of France.)
Portrait of Philip the Good.
Nor was the Burgundian architect of this peace forgotten. On July 6, 1435, Charles VII wrote from his castle in Amboise to Nicolas Rolin and others on Philip the Good’s council: “Charles, by the grace of God, king of France, greetings to all those who see these letters. Be it known that we, having heard on good authority… of the good will and affection which Nicolas Rolin, knight… and chancellor [of Burgundy] and the lords of Croy, Charny and Baucignies, councilors and chamberlains of our cousin of Burgundy, and other servants of his, cherish for the reconciliation and reunion of us and our cousin… bearing in mind that this peace and reconciliation is more likely to be brought about by our cousin’s leading confidential advisers, in whom he places his trust, than by others of his entourage… we grant and have granted by these present letters the sum of 60,000 gold saluts… to divide between them as follows: To the said Nicolas Rolin, 10,000 saluts, to the said lord of Croy, likewise… to the said lord of Charny, 8,000 [saluts]… to the lord of Baucignies, 8,000.”
After the agreement of Nevers, there remained only the uncomfortable task of Philip’s informing the unsuspecting English that, alas, he was no longer their ally. Sensitive to the charge that his behavior might be construed as falling somewhat short of the cherished chivalric ideal of honor—Philip was, after all
, secretly conspiring with Charles VII while still pretending to remain faithful to his sworn oath to support Henry VI—to save face the duke of Burgundy insisted that Charles at least try to make peace with England by calling for a general conference, at which all sides would be present, to be mediated by representatives of the Church. He even offered to host the event, and it was decided, before everyone left Nevers, to issue an invitation to the English to meet later in the year in Arras. “Within a few days many councils were held respecting a peace between the king of France and the duke of Burgundy; and various proposals were made to the duke concerning the murder of the late duke John that were agreeable to him, insomuch that preliminaries were agreed on, and a day appointed for a convention at Arras to put a final conclusion on it,” reported Enguerrand de Monstrelet. “When this was done, they separated most amicably; and news of this event was published throughout the realm, and other countries: notice of it was sent to the pope and the council at Basel, that all persons who chose might order ambassadors to attend the convention at Arras.”
THE CONGRESS OF ARRAS, universally recognized as the turning point of the Hundred Years War, began in August 1435. It was a grand affair, as opulent and illustrious as the great wealth of its sponsor, the duke of Burgundy (whose estate had recently been given a significant boost by his secret deal with the French), could provide. The three participating nations—France, England, and Burgundy—all sent multiple ambassadors accompanied by impressively large, resplendent entourages, so that the total number of emissaries, including bureaucrats, secretaries, servants, and other minions associated with each embassy, reached nearly a thousand people apiece. The French delegation, headed by Philip’s brother-in-law the duke of Bourbon, was composed of the leading members of the royal council: Regnault of Chartres, Arthur of Richemont, and the count of Vendôme, among others. Although she did not herself attend, Yolande maintained her influence over these proceedings through her servant, the treasurer of Anjou, who was one of the principal negotiators for the French. The queen of Sicily also sent separate representatives charged with protecting her specific interests and those of her family.
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