The Maid and the Queen (8 page)

“The first words the King said were, ‘Constable, how fares it with you?’ ‘Dear sire,’ he replied, ‘but so so, and very weak.’ ‘And who has put you in this state?’ ‘Pierre de Craon and his accomplices have traitorously, and without the smallest suspicion, attacked me.’ ‘Constable,’ said the King, ‘nothing shall ever be more severely punished than this crime…. They shall pay for it as if it were done to myself.’”

Charles ordered the assailant pursued, but Pierre had already fled the city. Eventually it was determined that he had sought refuge with the duke of Brittany, although the duke denied this. A furious Charles summoned an army and made preparations to attack Brittany and retrieve the criminal. He personally led his force out of Paris but made it only as far as Le Mans. There
he became so ill that he was unable to sit upon his horse. “He had been the whole summer feeble in mind and body, scarcely eating or drinking anything, and almost daily attacked with fever, to which he was naturally inclined, and which was increased by any contradiction or fatigue,” observed Froissart. Even more worrying, the Monk of Saint-Denis reported that while at Le Mans, the king would sometimes talk nonsense and behave in a manner “unbecoming to royalty.” Despite his obvious weakness, at the end of three weeks, over the objections of his physicians, Charles insisted upon persevering, and once more mounted his horse to lead his forces to Brittany.

By this time it was August and very hot. Charles was in full armor. As the army left Le Mans, they passed a local leper colony where they picked up a deranged vagrant who shadowed the king for half an hour, shouting, “Go no further, great king, for you are to be quickly betrayed!” before being run off by the royal guard. The army continued on its way through first a forest and then out onto a dry stretch of flat land, at which point there was quite a bit of dust kicked up by all the horses, so the king and two pages rode a little ahead of the procession to escape the dirt. The pages were young, and one of them, struggling to keep awake in the heat, let fall the lance he was carrying. It clattered against the armor of the other page, startling the king.

At once, Charles brandished his sword and turned on the boys. “Advance, advance on these traitors!” he cried. The pages, terrified, spurred their horses to get away, but the king, hallucinating and believing himself to be under attack, continued to strike out at those around him, including his brother, the duke of Orléans, who somehow managed to elude him. Others were not so lucky, however. Charles killed five of his own men before his sword broke and he was wrestled from his horse by one of his knights.

The company immediately turned around and took him back to Le Mans, where he lay completely unresponsive for two days, staring blankly at his uncles and unable to speak when they came to visit. Only on the third day did Charles recover his senses and realize what he had done. He was sent south to recuperate. He did not return to Paris until October.

T
HIS WAS THE BEGINNING
of Charles VI’s thirty-year struggle with what today doctors would likely diagnose as schizophrenia. During its most acute stages, which occurred annually and sometimes persisted for months at a time, Charles lost all sense of reality. He did not know who he was and denied being king. When he saw his own coat of arms, or those of the queen, he performed a bizarre little jig and then tried to efface them. He insisted that his name was George and that he had a different coat of arms altogether. During these episodes he was often uncontrollable, and would dash wildly through the castle, trying to find a way out, shrieking that his enemies were all around him. Eventually, his household had to block all the outside doorways so he did not run out into the street in this condition. During his most extreme bouts of madness Charles would refuse to bathe or change his apparel, often for as long as five months. He had to be tricked or frightened into removing his clothes, and when he did, his servants found his body covered in sores and smeared with his own excrement. Sometimes he threw his clothes into the fire. Sometimes he urinated on them. Often he made obscene gestures or babbled incoherently.

Charles VI suff ers his first psychotic episode, attacking his own men.

Although frequently he would recognize his household servants, he almost never knew his wife and children. The sight of Isabeau, in particular, upset him; he couldn’t bear to have her around him. According to the Monk of Saint-Denis, “when… she [Isabeau] approached to lavish attention on him, the king repulsed her, whispering to his people: ‘Who is this woman obstructing my view? Find out what she wants, and stop her from annoying and bothering me, if you can.’” Instead, to calm him, he was provided with a mistress who lived with him at his favorite Parisian domicile, the Hôtel Saint-Pol, and by whom he eventually had a child.

But then, sometimes after days, but more often after weeks or even months of raving, the hallucinations would disappear as abruptly as they had come. Charles would remember who and what he was and return to his wife and children. He would also once again resume rule. This was the great undoing of France. For although he appeared sane during these periods, the king was likely never really free of the disease, and his confusion and uncertainty, particularly about what had occurred in the kingdom during the intervals of his lunacy, made him highly susceptible to suggestion and the slightest persuasion. He became like one of those characters in a fairy tale who, stricken by Cupid’s arrow, or sprinkled with magic powder, or placed under a wizard’s spell, falls in love with the first person he sees upon waking. Eventually it became widely known among his relatives that whosoever succeeded at gaining entry into the king’s presence immediately upon his emergence from one of his cycles of madness could obtain pretty much anything he or she wanted out of him.

A
S SOON AS IT BECAME CLEAR
that Charles was mentally incapacitated, his uncles, especially the duke of Burgundy, moved quickly to once again take control of the kingdom. Unlike the period of the king’s minority, however, they were not openly named as regents. Because Charles was sometimes sane enough to govern, he was never removed from power, and his subjects continued to consider him to be the only legitimate ruler of France. Consequently, every policy that was implemented by his uncles or anyone else had to be done in the king’s name, whether the king was aware of the action or not. It could also be reversed by the king whenever he was rational
enough to do so. Additionally, any commandment issued by the king, even if it conflicted openly with a prior commandment, was automatically accepted as law.

This confusing state of affairs was further exacerbated by the introduction of a new and powerful rival to the duke of Burgundy. The king’s younger brother, Louis, duke of Orléans, married and with a family of his own to protect, was now old enough to jealously guard his prerogative. Louis was ambitious not only for power but for wealth, and was determined that his holdings should be on a par with—or preferably exceed—those of his uncles. In 1401, he took advantage of the duke of Burgundy’s absence from Paris to cajole his brother the king into ceding to him two important properties that Philip the Bold coveted. Furious, the duke of Burgundy responded by raising an army and marching on Paris. Civil war was only averted at the last minute through arbitration undertaken by the queen, the king being at the time locked up, raving, in the Hôtel Saint-Pol.

This was Isabeau’s first real foray into politics, and from the result she evidently decided it was better to wield power than to be at the mercy of someone else’s army, because the next year, when the king emerged from his annual period of madness, she made sure that
she
was the first person he saw. Consequently, in 1402, Charles ruled that if there was ever a disagreement in the future between two of the royal peers and he himself wasn’t available, the queen was authorized to settle the dispute as she saw fit. She was also empowered, in the king’s absence, to conduct or intervene in any business associated with governing the realm. To help her with these new responsibilities, Isabeau was allowed to consult as many or as few of the royal princes or the members of the council as she felt she needed. By these edicts, then, was the queen essentially made ruler of France.

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.