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TWO The minority of Charles VIII and the Breton marriage(1483–94)

When Louis XI died on 30 August 1483, his son Charles was only thirteen years old – ten months short of the age of majority for a king of France as laid down by an ordinance of 1374. It was consequently necessary to provide a regent for the intervening period. Four people could claim this role: the queen mother, Charlotte of Savoy; the king’s cousin, Louis duc d’Orléans; and the king’s sister and brother-in-law, Anne and Pierre de Beaujeu. Charlotte could point to the precedent set by Blanche de Castille during the minority of Louis IX, but she was a meek woman who had been allowed only a minor political role by the late king. Orléans was old enough to rule (he was twenty-two years old), but lacked the necessary qualities, being flighty, dissolute and a spendthrift. Anne and Pierre de Beaujeu were better qualified. Anne, who was also twenty-two years old, was intelligent and proud, albeit vindictive and grasping. Her husband Pierre was her senior by twenty-one years and had gained administrative experience under Louis XI. The Beaujeus had important advantages over their rivals: they had custody of the young king and enjoyed the support of the royal civil service; but they could not be sure of the military backing of the great nobles.

Not much is known about the first year of Charles VIII’s reign. Historians have generally assumed that the Beaujeus kept a tenuous hold on the government till the duc d’Orléans fled from the court in 1485. This has been questioned by J. Russell Major, who believes that the Beaujeus were ‘supplanted’ by a council made up of great nobles and their protégés. ‘Supplanted’ seems too strong a word. The Beaujeus retained control while having to co-operate with members of the nobility. Their rival, Louis d’Orléans, became president of the king’s council and lieutenant-general of the Ile-de-France. His uncle, Dunois, was appointed governor of Dauphiné, Valentinois and Diois. Within their orbit were Charles comte d’Angoulême, who was next in line to the throne after Louis, and Jean de Foix, vicomte de Narbonne and comte d’Etampes. Jean duc de Bourbon, elder brother of Pierre de Beaujeu, was showered with favours: he became lieutenant-general of the kingdom, constable of France and governor of Languedoc. Among other prominent nobles who flocked to the court of Charles VIII in 1483 in quest of offices, privileges, gifts and pensions were René II, duc de Lorraine, Alain le Grand, sire d’Albret and Philippe of Savoy, comte de Bresse.

The Estates-General of 1484

The decision to call the Estates-General was taken soon after the death of Louis XI, no one knows by whom. Some historians believe that it was taken by Louis d’Orléans at the instigation of Dunois; others ascribe the responsibility to the Beaujeus. Both parties needed popular support. The estates were due to meet at Orléans on 1 January 1484, but they were moved to Tours because of the threat of plague and did not begin till 15 January. The 287 deputies were drawn from all parts of the kingdom. They were elected in the various bailliages and sénéchaussées without, it seems, any undue pressure being exerted on the electors by Orléans or the Beaujeus. ‘When all is said’, writes Major, ‘neither side made a concerted effort to influence all the elections or to bribe all the deputies when once they were chosen.’ Among them was Jean Masselin, who has left us a uniquely detailed, if somewhat one-sided, account of the proceedings; another was Philippe Pot, sénéchal of Burgundy, who made a remarkable speech on 9 February.

The estates opened, as was the custom, with a speech from the Chancellor of France, Guillaume de Rochefort. The French people, he said, had always been devoted to their rulers, unlike the English who had just crowned the murderer of Edward IV’s young sons, Richard III. He tried to calm the deputies’ fears about the age of their own monarch. Such was the trust that the king placed in them that he would ask them to share in the government: they were to inform him of their grievances, report any oppression by public officials, and advise on how peace, justice and good government might be achieved.

After dividing into six sections, the deputies set up a committee to prepare a general cahier for presentation to the king. This was read out on 2 February. It contained a sweeping denunciation of the government of Louis XI and a call for a return to the practices of Charles VII. The clergy wanted the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges to be enforced. The nobility complained that they were being impoverished by excessive use of the feudal levy (ban et arrière-ban). They wanted to see foreigners excluded from military commands and from offices in the royal household. They also complained of infringements of their hunting rights by royal officials. Poverty loomed large in the third estate’s submission: the current scarcity of money was blamed on wars and the export of bullion to Rome; taxation was described as excessive. The king was urged to remove the need for the taille by revoking all alienations of domain made by his father, reducing the size of the army, stopping or curbing pensions and decreasing the number and pay of royal officials. The longest chapter of the cahier was concerned with justice: it called for the replacement of officials who had been appointed by Louis XI out of favour rather than on merit.

The government of the kingdom was also considered by the estates. The Beaujeus were anxious to prevent Louis d’Orléans becoming regent and their cause was championed by Philippe Pot on 9 February. ‘The throne’, he declared, ‘is an office of dignity, not an hereditary possession, and as such it does not pass to the nearest relatives in the way a patrimony passes to its natural guardians. If, then, the commonwealth is not to be bereft of government, its care must devolve upon the Estates-General of the realm, whose duty is not to administer it themselves, but to entrust its administration to worthy hands.’ A Norman deputy put forward Orléans’s claim: ‘If the king needs a governor and tutor, or, as it is said, a regent, the duke intends no one other than himself to hold that office.’ Having listened to both sides, the deputies decided that ‘the lord and lady of Beaujeu should remain with the king as they have been hitherto’. The king was given neither regent nor tutor, his intellectual maturity being deemed sufficient. In the chancellor’s words: ‘Our king, young as he is, is of an extraordinary wisdom and seriousness.’ On 6 February the estates were given a list of possible members of the king’s council, but they left the choice to the monarch and the princes.

The assembly of 1484 exerted relatively little influence on the future development of France, but the deputies were reasonably satisfied with their achievements. The taille, which had reached 4.5 million livres under Louis XI, was reduced to 1,500,000 livres. The nobility regained hunting rights on their own lands. Only the clergy were disappointed: their efforts to get the Pragmatic Sanction reinstated were successfully opposed by a pro-papal lobby of cardinals and prelates.

The Estates-General came to an end on 7 March. Orléans felt disgruntled that he had not been given the regency. In May he was awarded the lands of Olivier le Daim, Louis XI’s hated barber, but this was not enough to satisfy him. He continued to intrigue with the duke of Brittany, Richard III of England and Maximilian of Habsburg, who ruled Austria and the Netherlands. However, the threat inherent in such a coalition was temporarily averted by the recall of the nobles to attend the coronation of Charles VIII on 30 May. But a new danger arose for the Beaujeus. The young king became infatuated with Orléans’s athletic prowess and may have pleaded to be rid of his sister’s domination. The duke plotted to abduct Charles, but was forestalled by the Beaujeus who fled with the king from Paris to the security of the small fortified town of Montargis. Here various members of the Orléans faction were dismissed from court. The duke, after protesting about this action, retired to his gouvernement of Ile-de-France.

The ‘Mad War’

The princely revolts, which cast a shadow across the early years of Charles VIII’s reign, have sometimes been read as the sequel to the War of the Public Weal of 1465. The two movements, however, were quite different. The rising of 1465 had been aimed at Louis XI’s overthrow and had lasted only a few months. The Mad War (Guerre folle), by contrast, was not directed at Charles VIII but at the Beaujeus; it also developed surreptitiously over a period of two years, erupting in 1487. A major reason for the long gestation was the independence of the duchy of Brittany, which offered a safe haven to malcontents from the French court. The rising was given its pejorative name soon afterwards by the contemporary historian Paolo Emilio, in his De rebus gestis Francorum.

Brittany’s independence of France manifested itself in various ways. Duke Francis II had paid only a simple homage to King Louis XI which entailed none of the obligations customarily incumbent on a vassal to his suzerain; he had not even gone this far in respect of Charles VIII. Brittany seemed bent on becoming a second Burgundy. Yet it was poor, and militarily far inferior to its French neighbour; it could only hope to defend itself by calling in foreign help, especially from England. But paradoxically the duchy’s independence was undermined by its own subjects, for many Breton nobles chose to serve the king of France, attaching themselves to his court. They retained important estates in Brittany and longed to unite the duchy to the kingdom which provided them with offices, honours and wealth. Another Breton weakness was Duke Francis II, a feckless dilettante who became senile about 1484. His only offspring were two daughters, Anne and Isabeau. The affairs of the duchy fell into the hands of Pierre Landais, its treasurer and a much hated parvenu.

In October 1484 the Breton exiles in France came to an agreement at Montargis with the French government. They swore to recognize Charles VIII as their duke’s successor, should the latter die without male issue. The king, for his part, promised to respect Breton privileges and to arrange good marriages for the duke’s two daughters. Francis’s riposte was to take an oath from his subjects acknowledging his daughters as his heirs. On 23 November he also made a treaty with Louis d’Orléans aimed at freeing Charles VIII from Beaujeu tutelage. The duke, at the same time, won the support of a number of French malcontents and courted the Parisians. Early in 1485, Dunois, Orléans’s evil genius, produced a manifesto condemning the government’s financial management. Orléans begged Charles to emancipate himself from the Beaujeus and return to Paris. The king refused, whereupon Orléans left the capital and started raising troops. He appealed to all his friends, including Francis II, for armed assistance, but the first fires of rebellion were soon put out by the Beaujeus. In February, Charles VIII returned to Paris and measures were taken against the rebels: Orléans was deprived of his governorships of Ile-de-France and Champagne, and Dunois of that of Dauphiné. On 23 March the duke made his submission and was readmitted to the council.

Orléans, however, was biding his time. On 30 August he issued a new manifesto critical of the government’s financial policy. In league with him were Beaujeu’s brother Jean, Constable of Bourbon, the comte d’Angoulême, the comte d’Etampes, Cardinal Pierre de Foix, the sire d’Albret and, of course, Dunois. The rebels hoped to have a larger army than the Beaujeus, who had just sent 4000 men to help Henry Tudor gain the English throne; but their hopes were soon dashed. Charles VIII besieged Orléans and Dunois in Beaugency and within a week the revolt was over. By mid-September the duke was again penitent and had to accept royal garrisons in the towns of his apanage. Dunois lost his office of great chamberlain and was banished to Asti for a year. Bourbon and the other rebels also capitulated. The Peace of Bourges (2 November) gave France several months of domestic tranquillity.

In June 1486, Maximilian of Habsburg, who had recently been elected King of the Romans, launched a surprise attack on France’s northern border. It soon ran out of steam because Maximilian was, as usual, unable to pay his troops, but it triggered off another rebellion within France. The pretext was again fiscal: the Beaujeus had imposed a new crue de taille of 300,000 livres in October. In January 1487, Orléans joined Dunois in Brittany, but Charles VIII and Anne de Beaujeu decided to deal with the rebels in Guyenne before attending to Brittany. Their campaign, which lasted a month and a half, comprised a series of successful sieges. The leading rebel in the south-west, Charles d’Angoulême, surrendered on 19 March and was married off to Louise of Savoy. The future King Francis I was their son.

The Breton Wars

In March 1487 an important treaty was signed at Châteaubriant between the king of France and some sixty Breton nobles, led by Marshal de Rieux. The king promised to supply them with an army of not more than 400 lances and 4000 foot, and to withdraw it once the French rebels left Brittany. Charles also undertook not to attack Duke Francis in person or any town where he might be residing. The Bretons, for their part, agreed to serve in the king’s army. But the Beaujeus were keen to overrun Brittany swiftly before any foreign power could come to its aid. In May a French army, much larger than that envisaged in the treaty, moved into the duchy. By 1 June it had reached Vannes, forcing the dukes of Brittany and Orléans to escape by sea to Nantes. On 19 June the French broke the treaty again by laying siege to Nantes. The operation was directed by Charles VIII from his headquarters at Ancenis. On 6 August, however, the siege was lifted, possibly because word had reached the king of Rieux’s impending betrayal. On 20 February, after returning to Paris, Charles presided over a meeting of the parlement which sentenced Orléans to the confiscation of all his property and also punished his accomplices. From the government’s point of view these were timely confiscations, since it was in urgent need of money.

Early in 1488, Rieux recaptured most of the Breton towns that had fallen into French hands. On 11 March, La Trémoïlle was appointed by Charles as his lieutenant-general in the duchy. Their correspondence survives, revealing the king, though still only eighteen, in full charge of military operations from his headquarters in Anjou: he gathered in supplies, armaments and troops and sent them into Brittany. The decisive phase of the campaign began when La Trémoïlle captured Châteaubriant. Fougères, which was reputed impregnable, fell to the French on 19 July. The Bretons received some armed assistance from the sire d’Albret, but nothing from Henry VII of England or from Maximilian. On 28 July the French won a decisive victory at Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier, capturing the duc d’Orléans along with many Bretons.

The Bretons sued for peace soon afterwards, but a majority of the French king’s council wanted to press on with the war; they reckoned that Brittany would be conquered in a month. The chancellor, however, warned against alienating the Bretons by using violence instead of investigating the legal rights of both sides, and the king, rather surprisingly, accepted this view. Peace was accordingly signed at Le Verger on 20 August. In exchange for the withdrawal of the French army from Brittany, Francis II promised to expel all foreign troops from his own soil. He also agreed not to marry his daughters without Charles VIII’s consent and to hand over four Breton towns to the French as securities, pending an examination of the claims of both parties. A few days later he died.

Anne, the duke’s elder daughter, was only eleven and a half at this time and the question of her guardianship immediately caused friction between the Bretons and the French. Francis II in his will had entrusted his daughters to the custody of Marshal de Rieux and the sire de Lescun; but on 18 September, Charles VIII claimed it for himself by virtue of his kinship with the girls. Matters were complicated further when Anne fell out with Rieux, who was planning to marry her off to Alain d’Albret. While Anne shut herself up in Rennes with Dunois and a force of German mercenaries, Rieux occupied Nantes, seizing the ducal treasury.

The French threat to the independence of Brittany was a matter of serious concern to other European powers, especially Spain, Maximilian of Habsburg and England. They used the respite provided by the Treaty of Le Verger to draw closer together. The Iberian peninsula had recently become more unified as a result of the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon with Isabella of Castile. As each was a monarch in his or her own right, they were known as ‘the Catholic Kings’. But the unification of Spain still had a long way to go. It needed to annex the Moorish kingdom of Granada in the south, and the counties of Cerdagne and Roussillon, not to mention the small kingdom of Navarre in the north. Ferdinand had claimed Roussillon since the accession of Charles VIII, but France did nothing to oblige him as long as she knew that the bulk of his army was engaged in the conquest of Granada. Yet if Ferdinand could not act himself, he could obstruct French designs by using other European powers, such as England. Though Henry VII was indebted to the French government for assistance in gaining his throne, he was unable to resist Ferdinand’s tempting offer of a matrimonial alliance. This was concluded in 1489, when Ferdinand’s daughter Catherine married Arthur Prince of Wales.

Maximilian of Habsburg viewed himself as the heir to Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy (d. 1477), who had built up a powerful state stretching from the North Sea to Switzerland and sandwiched between France in the west and the Holy Roman Empire in the east. He had been succeeded by his daughter Mary, but some of her territories, notably Burgundy, had been forcibly annexed by Louis XI of France. He had wanted to win her by any means for his son, the future Charles VIII, but she would marry only Maximilian who thus acquired his claim to the old Burgundian territories. His efforts to regain those that had been taken by France, however, were hampered by his chronic insolvency and by the need to defend his patrimonial domain in central Europe (Austria and Bohemia) against the Hungarians and Turks. France, for her part, sought to embarrass Maximilian by meddling in the Low Countries. When he attacked France in 1484, the Beaujeus sent troops into Flanders. Some had to be recalled at the start of the Mad War, but in 1487 the French captured Saint-Omer and Thérouanne. In an engagement at Béthune on 27 July they captured the count of Nassau and the duke of Guelders, narrowly missing Maximilian himself. In the following year, Flanders rose in revolt. The inhabitants of Ghent declared themselves subjects of the king of France, while the people of Bruges seized Maximilian; they kept him prisoner for a few months and put to death his Flemish councillors. In May 1488 he regained his freedom as a result of French arbitration, and in 1489 he signed the Peace of Frankfurt.

England kept a close watch on continental events from her vantage point in Calais. In 1485 the Beaujeus had helped to place Henry Tudor on the English throne: they had supplied him with ships, troops and money. He was not ungrateful, but his subjects regarded the independence of Brittany as essential to their security. As the archbishop of Sens reported in 1489: ‘The English, in their king’s presence, told them [the French ambassadors] that Brittany was “little England”. They will send there up to the last man in England in spite of the king.’

On 11 December 1488, France declared war on Brittany. Within a few weeks her troops overran the duchy, occupying Brest, Concarneau and Vannes, but swift as it was, the French campaign was not quite swift enough. Troops sent by Brittany’s allies – Henry VII, Ferdinand of Aragon and Maximilian – soon arrived in the duchy. Encouraged by this help, Breton resistance stiffened; and by May all of Lower Brittany save Brest had reverted to the duchess Anne. Yet the Bretons were by no means united: several nobles went over to the French side during the year, while Rieux tried to win power for himself by isolating Anne from her allies. On 22 July 1489, Maximilian signed a peace treaty with France in which the question of Brittany was referred to a court of arbitration in Avignon chaired by the papal legate, Giuliano della Rovere, who at this time was a notorious Francophile. In October 1490 a truce ended the fighting in Brittany until 1 May 1491.

Rieux now abandoned Albret as a prospective husband for Anne and rallied to the idea of marrying her off to Maximilian, King of the Romans. This project became something of a reality in March 1490 when Maximilian appointed four proxies to marry the duchess. The ceremony, which had the approval of the Breton estates, took place in Rennes cathedral on 19 December. Such a marriage was in breach of the Treaty of Le Verger, which had forbidden the duchess to marry without the consent of the king of France, and gave serious offence to Alain d’Albret who had hoped to marry her himself. As captain of Nantes, he was well placed to influence events in the duchy. He began secret talks with Charles VIII and, on 2 January, offered him the keys of Nantes in return for major concessions which the king was unlikely ever to implement. French troops entered Nantes on 19 March and, after elaborate preparations, Charles made his own entry on Palm Sunday (4 April). As soon as the truce expired the French resumed their military operations in the duchy, capturing Vannes on 19 May and Concarneau on 6 June. La Trémoïlle, who had once again become lieutenant-general, took Redon and Guingamp. Only Rennes and the duchess remained independent.

Charles VIII now staged a coup d’état. Realizing that Louis d’Orléans might help a settlement of the Breton question, he ordered his release from prison in Bourges and pardoned his treason. The duke, for his part, was glad to make his peace with Charles. Much as they disliked this turn of events, the Beaujeus resigned themselves to it. On 4 September, Pierre de Beaujeu (now duc de Bourbon) and Orléans were formally reconciled and, according to Commynes, became inseparable. Meanwhile, the war in Brittany drew to a close. In mid-June 1491, 15,000 French troops encircled Rennes, and Anne, finding herself without money or effective allies, had to seek a settlement. On 27 October she was advised by the Breton estates to marry the king of France, but Anne was only prepared to exchange Rennes for her own personal freedom. Charles, meanwhile, waited patiently. On 15 October, Rennes capitulated. Under a treaty the town was declared to be neutral and handed over to the dukes of Orléans and Bourbon and the prince of Orange, Anne’s freedom being respected.

The king did not ask for Anne’s hand. Instead, he offered her an escort should she wish to join Maximilian and 120,000 livres for her upkeep. He even offered to settle the wages of her foreign auxiliaries. When Anne refused to go into exile, Charles, invoking his rights of suzerain, offered her marriage to a high-ranking French nobleman, but she declared that she would marry only a king or the son of a king. Eventually, under strong pressure from members of her entourage, Anne, who was not yet fifteen, agreed to meet the French king. He came to Rennes on 15 November and, although his first impressions of the duchess were unfavourable, he agreed to take her as his wife. After the betrothal on 17 November, Charles returned to Plessis-lez-Tours.

His conscience was not, it seems, untroubled. In 1483 he had solemnly promised to marry Margaret of Austria, the daughter of Maximilian, and he was afraid that his breach of promise might stain his honour as head of the knightly Order of St Michael. What is more, he seems to have had tender feelings for the princess, who reciprocated them. She wept bitterly on hearing of the king’s marriage and kept his portrait for the rest of her life. When she eventually left France he gave her a valuable chain symbolizing eternal friendship. Another source of anxiety for Charles was the proxy marriage between Anne and Maximilian. Theologians were divided on its validity, though all agreed that an unconsummated marriage could easily be annulled by the church. The necessary dispensation was obtained without difficulty from Pope Innocent VIII.

Charles VIII and Anne of Brittany were married at the chateâu of Langeais on 6 December 1491. Both parties renounced their rights of ownership in Brittany. If Charles predeceased Anne, she was to remarry his successor. If he died without male issue, she was to regain possession of her duchy. On 4 January a Milanese diplomat reported from the French court: ‘There is no sign of rejoicing over this marriage on the part of the king or anyone else.’ Yet Bretons and Frenchmen were evidently pleased to see an end to their conflicts. Anne was welcomed by her French subjects, though doubts regarding the validity of her marriage were not immediately dispelled. They were confirmed by the accidental death of Dunois, one of its architects, shortly before it took place. Doubts were also to be raised by the premature deaths of children born of the marriage.

The Breton marriage, which effectively destroyed Brittany’s independence of France, was naturally viewed with concern by France’s neighbours. However, Maximilian was too preoccupied in central Europe to react forcefully. He was, it seems, far more irritated by the slowness with which the French returned Margaret of Austria and her dowry than by the overthrow of his own Breton marriage. Instead of resorting to arms, he tried to turn international opinion against Charles by branding him as an adulterer. Ferdinand of Aragon also was too busy besieging Granada to react strongly to the Franco-Breton marriage. He gladly accepted an offer from Charles to open serious talks on the future of Roussillon. By contrast, Henry VII of England protested at the marriage and assembled a fleet, but, as a French observer pointed out, this did not necessarily presage an English invasion of France.