Charles VII of France

Dauphin

Charles began his political career at a difficult time for France. Henry V of England, who claimed the French throne and had recently defeated the French at the Battle of Agincourt, was about to begin another campaign in Normandy. Meanwhile, France was divided between the hostile Armagnac (supporters of Charles's cousin Charles I, Duke of Orléans) and Burgundian (partisans of John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy) parties, who fought for control over the insane King Charles VI. As Dauphin, Charles became the figurehead of the Armagnac party, which controlled Paris since 1413; in fact, he was under the influence of Bernard VII, Count of Armagnac (father-in-law to the Duke of Orléans). Charles quarreled with his mother and exiled her from Paris. On 29 May 1418, he was taken away from Paris by his servants Tanneguy du Châtel and Guillaume d'Avaugour after the Burgundians entered the city and staged a coup d'état against the Armagnacs, securing control over the King. The Count of Armagnac was murdered along with around 2,500 of his supporters. The fifteen-year-old Charles became the Armagnac leader and on 29 June took the title of lieutenant-general of France. On 26 December 1418, he claimed the title of Regent of France, proclaiming himself a sovereign ruler.

Charles established his own court in Bourges and a Parlement in Poitiers. John the Fearless thought the Dauphin was weak and trusting and sought a peace that would allow them to rally against the English. On 11 July, Charles and John the Fearless attempted a reconciliation on a small bridge near Pouilly-le-Fort, not far from Melun where Charles was staying. They signed the Treaty of Pouilly-le-Fort in which they would share authority of the government, assist each other and not to form any treaties without the other's consent. Charles and John also decided that a further meeting should take place the following 10 September. On that date, they met on the bridge at Montereau. The Duke assumed that the meeting would be entirely peaceful and diplomatic; thus, he brought only a small escort with him. The Dauphin's men reacted to the Duke's arrival by attacking and killing him. Charles's level of involvement has remained uncertain to this day. Although he claimed to have been unaware of his men's intentions, this was considered unlikely by those who heard of the murder. The assassination marked the end of any attempt of a reconciliation between the Armagnac and Burgundian factions, thus strengthening the position of Henry V of England. Charles was later required by a treaty with Philip the Good, the son of John the Fearless, to apologize for the murder of the previous duke, which he did through a representative.

Treaty of Troyes (1420)

At the death of Charles' father Charles VI in October 1422, the succession was cast into doubt. Under the Treaty of Troyes, signed by Charles VI on 21 May 1420, the throne would pass to Henry V or his heir. Henry had died in July 1422: his heir was the infant King Henry VI of England, son of Henry and Charles VI's daughter Catherine of Valois. However, Frenchmen loyal to the Valois regarded the treaty as invalid on grounds of coercion and Charles VI's diminished mental capacity. Those who did not recognize the treaty and believed the Dauphin Charles to be of legitimate birth considered him the rightful heir to the throne. Those who considered Charles illegitimate recognized as the rightful heir Charles, Duke of Orléans, cousin of the Dauphin, who was in English captivity. Only the supporters of Henry VI and the Dauphin Charles were able to enlist sufficient military force to press effectively for their candidates. The English, already in control of northern France, enforced Henry's claim in the regions of France that they occupied. Northern France, including Paris, was thus ruled by an English regent, Henry V's brother, John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford, based in Normandy (see Dual monarchy of England and France).

King of Bourges

On 25 June 1421, he took Gallardon and executed the garrison as traitors. By the end of June, he had invested Chartres. He then went south of the Loire River under the protection of Yolande of Aragon, known as "Queen of the Four Kingdoms" and, on 18 December 1422, married her daughter, Marie of Anjou, to whom he had been engaged since December 1413 in a ceremony at the Louvre Palace.

Charles claimed the title King of France for himself, but failed to make any attempts to expel the English from northern France out of indecision and a sense of hopelessness. Instead, he remained south of the Loire River, where he was still able to exert power, and maintained an itinerant court in the Loire Valley at castles such as Chinon. He was still customarily known as the "Dauphin", or derisively as the "King of Bourges", after the town where he generally lived. Periodically, he considered flight to the Iberian Peninsula, which would have allowed the English to capture even more territory in France.

Siege of Orléans

Political conditions in France took a decisive turn in the year 1429 just as the prospects for the Dauphin began to look hopeless. The town of Orléans had been under siege since October 1428. The English regent, the Duke of Bedford (the uncle of Henry VI), was advancing into the Duchy of Bar, ruled by Charles's brother-in-law, René. The French lords and soldiers loyal to Charles were becoming increasingly desperate. Then in the little village of Domrémy, on the border of Lorraine and Champagne, a teenage girl named Joan of Arc (French: Jeanne d'Arc), demanded that the garrison commander at Vaucouleurs, Robert de Baudricourt, collect the soldiers and resources necessary to bring her to the Dauphin at Chinon, stating that visions of angels and saints had given her a divine mission. Granted an escort of five veteran soldiers and a letter of referral to Charles by Lord Baudricourt, Joan rode to see Charles at Chinon. She arrived on 23 February 1429.

Simon Charles, the president of the royal treasury who arrived at Chinon not long after Joan's first meeting with the Dauphin, gave an account of the meeting at Joan's rehabilitation trial: "When the king knew that she was going to come, he withdrew slightly from the crowd; Joan nonetheless recognized him and made her reverence to him, speaking with him for some time. After hearing her, the king seemed radiant." According to Friar Jean Pasquerel, Joan's confessor who heard her own account of the meeting, "the king said to his courtiers that Joan had told him a certain secret that no one knew or could know except God; and that is why he had great confidence in her." What this secret was has been the subject of much speculation. It was later alleged during Joan's trial that she showed some "sign" to Charles which convinced him of his legitimacy. What is clear is that after the meeting Charles was willing to allow Joan to undertake her stated mission: to lift the siege of Orléans and to have Charles crowned at Reims.

After her encounter with Charles in March 1429, Joan of Arc set out to lead the French forces at Orléans. She was aided by skilled commanders such as Étienne de Vignolles, known as La Hire, and Jean Poton de Xaintrailles. They compelled the English to lift the siege on 8 May 1429, thus turning the tide of the war. The French won the Battle of Patay on 18 June, at which the English army present lost about half its troops. After pushing further into English and Burgundian-controlled territory, Charles was crowned King Charles VII of France in Reims Cathedral on 17 July 1429.

Joan was later captured by Burgundian troops under John of Luxembourg at the Siege of Compiègne on 24 May 1430. The Burgundians handed her over to their English allies. Tried for heresy by a court composed of pro-English clergymen such as Pierre Cauchon, who had long served under English authorities, she was burnt at the stake on 30 May 1431. Charles took no action to save Joan, "an inaction for which he has ever since been condemned by Joan’s friends and admirers."

French victory

Nearly as vital as Joan of Arc to the cause of Charles was the support of the powerful and wealthy family of his wife Marie d'Anjou, particularly his mother-in-law, Queen Yolande of Aragon.

On 5 August 1435, a diplomatic congress was held at Arras, in Burgundian territory. Philip the Good, seeing no further use in his alliance with England, was ready to come to terms with Charles VII. Charles and Philip signed the Treaty of Arras, by which the Burgundian faction rejected their alliance with England and became reconciled with the French king. The terms of the treaty were personally humiliating for Charles. He was obliged to apologize through a representative for the murder of Philip's father in 1418 and state that "at the time, he had been very young, possessed little understanding, and lacked the wisdom to prevent the event." Additionally, Philip was not required to pay homage to Charles and was allowed to keep all of his recently acquired territories. The treaty amounted to acceptance of the almost complete independence of the duke of Burgundy. Nevertheless, with this treaty Charles attained the essential goal of ensuring that no Prince of the Blood recognised Henry VI as King of France. In the long term, it opened up the way for Charles's ultimate victory over the English. Over the following two decades, the French recaptured Paris from the English and eventually recovered all of France with the exception of the northern port of Calais.

Charles entered Paris without resistance on 13 April 1436. The unified Parlement and the Chamber of Accounts, previously divided between the claimants to the throne, was now restored to Paris, although Charles stayed with his government in the Loire Valley. He enacted governmental and military reforms, dismissing Georges de La Trémoille, the worst of the royal favourites who had greatly influenced him in previous years, and appointing better advisers like Arthur de Richemont and Jacques Cœur. The former was a noble (he later became the duke of Brittany) who successfully commanded the French armies in the 1430s and oversaw the reform of the army in 1440s. The latter was a merchant who financed Charles's campaigns. In 1438, Charles claimed royal control of ecclesiastical appointments and revenues through the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges. The next year, he received approval from the Estates-General for new taxes and issued the first of his ordinances for the reform of the army. However, in 1440 Charles's efforts to expand royal authority provoked a revolt by the nobility known as the Praguerie, which also involved his son Louis, the Dauphin.

Charles VII's military reforms have attracted considerable attention from historians. In 1439, a royal decree established the Crown's exclusive right to raise troops in an attempt to suppress private armies and armed bands, although this was not easy to enforce. (During the years of war, mobile bands of soldiers called écorcheurs preyed upon the countryside, and mercenary garrisons extorted money from the provinces.) The reforms involved the formation, between 1445 and 1448, of a 12,000 strong cavalry force, called the companies of grande and petite ordonnance. This force was not intended to be a standing army, but rather to recover the English-occupied territories and address military disorder. An infantry force of francs-archers was assembled in 1448 by conscription. Many of the members of the new French army were already professional soldiers, and some were "nothing more than old écorcheurs ". The reforms were successful in establishing some degree of control over the unruly soldiery and reducing the influence of magnates in the military. This came at a high financial cost; the later author Philippe de Commines estimated that over half of the 1,800,000 francs raised annually by the Crown was spent on the army.

By 1444, the English had been confined to Normandy, Calais, and Aquitaine, and a ten-year truce was signed at Tours. Charles's reforms had given him the power necessary to achieve a final victory. On 17 July 1449, he alleged that the English had broken the truce and resumed warfare. The French won major victories at the battles of Formigny (15 April 1450) and Castillon (27 July 1453), which allowed for the swift capture of Normandy and then of Aquitaine. Only Calais remained in English hands. Although no peace or truce was signed by the two kings, the Wars of the Roses (1453–1483) prevented England from trying to recover its lost territories.

Later reign and death

Charles's later years were marked by hostile relations with his heir, Louis, who demanded real power to accompany his position as the Dauphin. Charles consistently refused him. Accordingly, Louis stirred up dissent and fomented plots in attempts to destabilise his father's reign. He quarrelled with his father's mistress, Agnès Sorel, and on one occasion drove her with a bared sword into Charles' bed, according to one source. Eventually, in 1446, after Charles's last son, also named Charles, was born, the king banished the Dauphin to the Dauphiné. The two never met again. Louis thereafter refused the king's demands to return to court, and he eventually fled to the protection of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, in 1456.

In 1458, Charles became ill. A sore on his leg (an early symptom, perhaps, of diabetes or another condition) refused to heal, and the infection in it caused a serious fever. The king summoned Louis to him from his exile in Burgundy, but the Dauphin refused to come. He employed astrologers to foretell the exact hour of his father's death. The king lingered on for the next two and a half years, increasingly ill, but unwilling to die. During this time he also had to deal with the case of his rebellious vassal John V of Armagnac.

Finally, however, there came a point in July 1461 when the king's physicians concluded that Charles would not live past August. Ill and weary, the king became delirious, convinced that he was surrounded by traitors loyal only to his son. Under the pressure of sickness and fever, he went mad. By now another infection in his jaw had caused an abscess in his mouth. The swelling caused by this became so large that, for the last week of his life, Charles was unable to swallow food or water. Although he asked the Dauphin to come to his deathbed, Louis refused, instead waiting at Avesnes, in Burgundy, for his father to die. At Mehun-sur-Yèvre, attended by his younger son, Charles, and aware of his elder son's final betrayal, the King starved to death. He died on 22 July 1461, and was buried, at his request, beside his parents in Saint-Denis.

Legacy

Although Charles VII's legacy is far overshadowed by the deeds and eventual martyrdom of Joan of Arc and his early reign was at times marked by indecisiveness and inaction, he was responsible for successes unprecedented in the history of the Kingdom of France. He succeeded in what four generations of his predecessors (namely his father Charles VI, his grandfather Charles V, his great-grandfather John II and great-great grandfather Philip VI) failed to do – the expulsion of the English and the conclusion of the Hundred Years' War.

Charles V had created the first standing army in western Europe since Roman times, but the force had been disbanded in the tumultuous regency period after his death in 1380. Charles VII successfully reestablished a standing army which would survive until eventually replaced with the gendarmerie system in the 17th century.

Charles VII secured himself against papal power by the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges. He also established the University of Poitiers in 1432, and his policies brought some economic prosperity to his subjects.

Family

Children

Charles married his second cousin Marie of Anjou on 18 December 1422. They were both great-grandchildren of King John II of France and his first wife Bonne of Bohemia through the male line. They had fourteen children:

Mistresses

• Agnès Sorel, by whom he had three illegitimate daughters:
  • Marie, possibly born the summer of 1444.
  • Charlotte, m. Jacques de Brézé (their son, Louis de Brézé, seigneur d'Anet, in turn married Diane de Poitiers, herself ultimately a famous royal mistress).
• Antoinette de Maignelais, cousin of Agnès Sorel.

Ancestors