CHAP. II.]

TREATY OF ANCENIS.

133

of the principal towns of the realm. The indignation roused by the alliance of the Dukes with England operated in favour of the King. The Assembly, although it complained of many domestic grievances, unanimously disapproved a separation of Normandy from the Crown; and they were of opinion that "Monsieur Charles" (the Duke of Berri) ought to be very well satisfied with his brother's handsome offer of a pension of 60,000 livres, seeing that an edict of Charles the Wise assigned only 12,000 to a younger son. Armed with this decision of his States, Louis hastened to strike a blow against Brittany, before the English succours could arrive. Besides the dread inspired by his arms, the King had gained by his liberalities the Sire de Lescun, the chief counsellor and favourite of Duke Francis, who persuaded his master to a truce, and finally to subscribe the peace of Ancenis, September 10th, 1468, by which he abjured all alliances except the King's, and submitted the question of "Monsieur Charles's" appanage to the arbitration of the Duke of Calabria and of the Chancellor of Brittany. The Duke of Berri subsequently acceded to this treaty.

One motive with Francis for entering into it was the nonappearance of the Duke of Burgundy. Charles had been retarded by fresh symptoms of an outbreak at Liége; whither had returned, armed with clubs and other rustic weapons, a crowd of half-naked, half-starved fugitives, who had been living in the woods. When Charles arrived on the Somme, nothing could equal his surprise at receiving a copy of the treaty: he could not be persuaded but that it was a stratagem contrived to arrest his advance, and he was on the point of hanging for an impostor the herald who brought the document. But when the truth, by further confirmation, at length stared him in the face, he displayed a readiness to negotiate; and the King himself, although he seemed to have Charles at an advantage, according to his habitual policy, preferred diplomacy to arms. His reliance, however, on his own superior dexterity brought him into a very awkward dilemma. He resolved on personally visiting Charles at Péronne, as he had previously done at Charenton during the War of the Public Weal; though he had no security but a letter of the Duke's, in which he said, that happen what might, the King should come, remain, and depart in safety.

On October 10th, the day after Louis's arrival at Péronne, news came to the Duke of Burgundy that the citizens of Liége had surprised Tongres on the night of St. Denis (8th to 9th October),

134

LOUIS ENTRAPPED AT PERONNE.

[CHAP. II. and killed the Bishop of Liége and several canons in presence of Louis's agents. At this news Charles affected a violent rage, and confined Louis in the castle, whence he could descry the tower where Charles the Simple had died as the prisoner of Herbert of Vermandois. The Duke's courtiers begged him not to spare "the universal spider," now at last caught in his own web; but Charles would have gained nothing by the King's death, and he contented himself with extorting from him some very hard conditions. Louis was required to confirm the treaties of Arras and Conflans, to convert the Duke of Burgundy's dependence on the French Crown into a mere empty homage for separate provinces, to abrogate the appellate jurisdiction of the Paris Parliament in Flanders, to abandon the revenues of Picardy, and to confer on his brother, the Duke of Berri, the provinces of Champagne and Brie instead of Normandy. Louis subscribed these terms, October 14, but with the secret determination, in this case perhaps in some degree justified, to break them on the first opportunity. The Duke of Burgundy, aware of the King's superstition, would not receive his oath except on a piece of the Cross of St. Lô, which Louis always carried with him. This precious relic, which derived its name from having been long kept in the church of St. Lô at Angers, was reputed to be a portion of the true Cross; it had always accompanied Charlemagne on his journeys, and Louis was known to entertain the opinion that if he perjured himself upon it he would die within the year.

But the hardest condition of all, if Louis retained any moral sense or feeling of honour, was, that he was compelled to accompany the Duke of Burgundy to Liége, and to behold the chastizement of those very citizens whom his own arts had excited to rebellion. He carried out, however, to the last the new character he had assumed of Charles's friend. Far from appearing at Liége as a mere forced and unwilling spectator, he exhibited himself before the town with the cross of St. Andrew in his hat, and to the citizens' cry of Vive la France! responded with a shout of Vive Bourgogne! Yet on this occasion he displayed as much military courage as moral cowardice, and repulsed a sortie from the town with great coolness, when the Duke had quite lost his head.

Liége was taken by assault on Sunday, October 30th, when the Duke of Burgundy exhibited the most deliberate cruelty in his treatment of the citizens. Those who had survived the assault and sack were proceeded against for weeks, nay months, after

CHAP. II.]

CHARLES ACQUIRES ALSACE, ETC.

135 wards, with a show of judicial inquiry; but few escaped except those who could purchase their lives, and thousands were either hanged or drowned in the Meuse. The town was burnt with the exception of the religious edifices and the houses belonging to the clergy, and gens d'armes were despatched into the Ardennes to make an end of those miserable fugitives who had not already died of cold and hunger.

Louis had been permitted to return to France, November 2nd, more vexed perhaps at being overreached than at the loss of his honour: but for the present, at least, he considered it advisable to carry out the stipulations of Péronne; and he ordered the treaty to be published at Paris, and to be registered by the Parliament. Yet with all his cynicism he could not help feeling his degradation. He displayed an unaccustomed sensitiveness to public opinion, especially that of his capital, and passed on to Tours instead of entering Paris. On the other hand, Charles the Bold now began to push those ambitious projects of founding a Burgundian Kingdom which had been entertained by his father; and with that view he entered into negotiations with the Austrian Duke Sigismund of Tyrol, surnamed the Weak, who was then staying in the Netherlands. In consideration of a sum of 80,000 ducats, Sigismund pledged to Charles in 1469 all the rights and possessions of the House of Habsburg in Alsace, the Breisgau, the Sundgau, the forest towns of the Rhine, and the lordship of Pfirt, or Ferrette. Charles thought of nothing less than overthrowing the King of France, and even obtaining the Imperial crown after the death of Frederick III.; little dreaming that his aspiring aims were only preparing the way for his own destruction.

An unguarded expression of the Duke of Burgundy's seemed to the superstitious yet unscrupulous mind of Louis to afford him a loophole of escape from his oath. He had suddenly asked the Duke at parting what he should do in case his brother were not content with the portion assigned him? And Charles had carelessly answered that he must satisfy him in some other way, and that he left the matter to them. Regarding this answer as absolving him from his terrible oath, Louis offered his brother the Duchy of Guienne in place of Champagne and Brie; but the Duke of Berri, who was at that time governed by the counsels of Cardinal Balue, would by no means consent to the exchange. Balue, a roguish simoniacal priest, whom Louis had raised from low condition to the height of trust and power, had sold himself

136

CARDINAL BALUE.

[CHAP. II. to the Duke of Burgundy, and it is suspected to have been through his machinations that Louis was entrapped at Péronne : after which, finding that he had lost the King's confidence, he attached himself to the Duke of Berri. This was far from being the only instance in which Louis was betrayed by his ministers ; for, clever and unprincipled himself, he selected his advisers for the same qualities. He was a great admirer of Italian politics, and especially of the government of Venice, in whose principles he had employed two Venetians to instruct him. A certain flexi

bility of conscience was in his view a recommendation of a statesman, provided it were combined with the requisite dexterity and audacity; and thus, for instance, Pierre de Morvilliers, Bishop of Orleans, was actually under prosecution for malversation in his judicial functions as conseiller-clerc in the Parliament of Paris, at the very time when he was made Chancellor. It was, therefore, no wonder that Louis was often deceived, for which he had nobody but himself to blame. On discovering Balue's treachery, he caused him to be apprehended, together with the Bishop of Verdun, his creature; he sequestered the Cardinal's enormous wealth, and he requested the Pope to send Apostolic Vicars into France to try the Roman prelate. But the Court of Rome replied that a Roman Cardinal could be tried only in Consistory; and Louis, afraid to put Balue to death, subjected him to a punishment which the Cardinal himself is said to have suggested in the case of another criminal, and which had been long in use in Spain and Italy. Louis confined him in an iron cage eight feet square, in the Castle of Loches, in Touraine, where he remained ten years without being brought to trial. The Bishop of Verdun was sent to the Bastille. After the removal of these counsellors, the King effected an arrangement with the Duke of Berri, April 1469; the latter consenting to accept Guienne in compensation for Normandy, and binding himself by oath on the Cross of St. Lô not to marry Charles's daughter, the heiress of Burgundy. By this arrangement Louis removed his brother from the sphere of the Duke of Burgundy's influence, rendered him an object of suspicion to the Duke of Brittany, and opposed him to the English, whose views were still directed towards Guienne.

The Duke of Burgundy expected that his brother-in-law, Edward IV., would make a descent on Guienne in 1470; but this was prevented by the insurrection of the Duke of Clarence, undertaken at the instigation of Warwick, whose daughter that Prince had married. The secret history of the Courts of England and

CHAP. II.]

LOUIS XI. AND WARWICK.

137 France at this period is so important that we must take up the subject a little earlier. After the marrige of Edward IV. with Elizabeth Woodville, in 1464, the advancement of Elizabeth's" family gave great umbrage to many of the old nobility, and especially to the Earl of Warwick, who had also other causes of discontent. That powerful nobleman, with his two brothers, the Archbishop of York and Lord Montague, now Earl of Northumberland, had hitherto governed the kingdom, but since the appearance of this rival family, the King seemed to have grown weary of Warwick's counsels. The first open symptom of coldness, however, between Edward and that nobleman arose on the occasion of the marriage of Margaret of York and the Duke of Burgundy, before mentioned. Warwick had advised a union with a French Prince, and Edward had authorized him to negotiate with Louis on the subject; for which purpose Warwick proceeded to Rouen, in 1467. Here he was treated by the French King in the most intimate and confidential manner. The wall between their lodgings was pierced, in order that they might confer at all hours unobserved; Louis, by his presents and flattering attentions, converted Warwick into a lasting friend, and from this time they appear to have kept up a constant secret correspondence.1 At the very same time the Bastard of Burgundy was in London, employed, it was suspected, in negotiating the marriage which afterwards took place between Charles and Margaret. Warwick returned in a month or two, accompanied by certain French ambassadors, whose object it was to prevent this marriage and the alliance that must spring from it between Edward and Charles, now become, by the death of his father, Duke of Burgundy; and they offered Edward an annual pension from the King of France, as well as to refer his claims to Normandy and Aquitaine to the decision of the Pope. Bribery and corruption were Louis's familiar arts; and it is not improbable that the bearer of such a message to his Sovereign was himself not insensible to the charms of gold; a supposition which would at least explain much that is acknowledged to be unaccountable in Warwick's conduct.2 Edward disdainfully rejected the proposals of France, and Warwick retired in discontent to his castle at Middleham, in Yorkshire. In his absence he was accused of being a secret partisan

Michelet, Histoire de France, t. ix. p. 42; Hearne's Fragments, p. 296 sqq. ap. Turner, Middle Ages, vol. iii. p. 281.

2 See Hume, vol. iii. p. 234. M. Michelet does not hesitate to charge Warwick

with having received bribes from Louis as early as 1462 (Hist. de France, t. viii. p. 146), but there seems little in his conduct, previously to Edward's marriage at least, to justify the suspicion.