Charles the Bold Part 24

Through hatred of the absentee Austrians, the neighbouring cities repeatedly became the accomplices of these brigands, affording them asylums for refitting and free pa.s.sage when they were laden with evident booty.

In all departments of finance and administration disorder prevailed.

The chief officials, castellans and councillors, enjoyed high salaries for neglected duties. The castles were in wretched repair and there were insufficient troops to guard the roads. There was no dependence upon the receipts nominally to be expected. In the sub-mortgaged lands, the lords simply levied what they could, without the slightest responsibility for the order of the domain; they did not hesitate to charge their suzerain for repairs never made, confident that no one would verify their declaration.

In the territories of the immediate domain, the Austrian dukes and their officials had no notion of the rigid system maintained in Burgundy. Only here and there can little memoranda be found and these are confused and obscure. There is a dearth of accurate records like those voluminous registers of outlays kept by Burgundian receivers, registers so rich in detail that they are more valuable for the historian than any chronicle.

Exact appraisal of the resources of these _pays de par de la_ was very difficult. Between 1469 and 1473 there were three efforts to obtain reliable information by means of as many successive commissions despatched to the Rhine valley by the Duke of Burgundy.

Envoys drew up minutes of their observations in addition to their official reports and all were preserved in the archives. As these were written from testimony gathered on the spot, such as the accounts of the receivers now lost, etc., there is real value in the doc.u.ments.

The first commission in behalf of Burgundy was composed of two Germans and three Walloons. One of the former was Peter von Hagenbach, who won no enviable reputation in the later exercise of his office as lieutenant-governor of the annexed region, to which he was shortly afterwards appointed. This first commission entered into formal possession in Charles's name and inst.i.tuted some desired reforms immediately, such as policing the highways, etc.

The second commission made its visit in 1471. It consisted of Jean Pellet, treasurer of Vesoul, and Jean Poinsot, procureur-general of Amont.

The third commission (1473) was under the auspices of Monseigneur Coutault, master of accounts at Dijon. He carried with him the report of his predecessors and made his additions thereto.

Charles's directions to Poinsot and Pellet (June 13, 1471) were vague and general. They were "to see the conduct of his affairs" _(voir la conduite de ses affaires_). The important point was to find out how much revenue could be obtained. As the duke's plan of expansion grew larger he had need of all his resources.

The reports were eminently discouraging. Outlay was needed everywhere--income was small. As the chances of peculation diminished, the castellans deserted their posts and left the castles to decay.

The Burgundian commission of 1471 found the difficulties of their exploration increased by two items. Charles had not advanced an allowance for their expenses and they were anxious to be back at Vesoul by Michaelmas, the date of the change in munic.i.p.al offices and of appropriations for the year. It was in hopes of receiving advance moneys that they delayed in starting, but the approaching election and coming winter finally decided them to set out, pay their own expenses, and complete the business as rapidly as they could in a fortnight.

The summary of this report of 1471 was that there was little present prospect that Charles would be able to reimburse himself for his necessary expenses. An undue portion of authority and of revenue was legally lodged in alien hands. Charles was possessed of germs of rights rather than of actual rights. The earlier creditors of Austria held all the best mortgages with their attendant emoluments. The immediate profits accruing to the Duke of Burgundy fell far short of the minimum necessary to disburse to keep his government, his strongholds, his highways in repair. Very disturbed were the good treasurer of Vesoul and the procureur-general of Amont at this state of affairs, and distressed at the prospect of the ampler receipts from Burgundy being required to relieve the pressing necessities of the poor territories _de par de la_.

To avoid this contingency, the commissioners recommended the duke to redeem all the existing mortgages great and small. It would cost 140,000 florins, but the revenue would at once increase with the new security which would immediately follow under firm Burgundian rule.

Sole master, Charles could then enforce obedience from n.o.bles and cities and better conditions would be inaugurated.

Evidently this rational advice was not taken, for it is repeated by Coutault in 1473. Redemption of the mortgages, "if your affairs can afford it," is the counsel given by the chamber of accounts at Dijon, though this sage board adds that they were well aware that in the previous month Monseigneur could not put his hands on a hundred florins to redeem one wretched little _gagerie._ The native coffers of the region did not suffice to settle the salaries of the officers in charge.

Such then was the new acquisition of Charles after four years of his administration. Peter von Hagenbach, his deputy in charge of this unremunerative territory, is a character painted in the darkest colours by all historians. It is more than probable that his unpopular efforts to make bricks without straw were largely responsible for his unenviable reputation. Ground between the upper and lower millstones of Charles's clamours for revenues and popular clamours that the people had nothing wherewith to pay, Hagenbach developed into a taskmaster of the hardest and most unpitying type, who made himself thoroughly hated by the people he was set to rule.

It must be remembered that there was no cleft in nationality or in language between governor and governed. He was not a foreigner set over them. He was one of them raised to a high position. There was then no French element in Lower Alsace. It was then German pure and simple.

[Ill.u.s.tration: UPPER ALSACE AND ADJACENT TERRITORY BY PERMISSION OF HACHETTE, 1902]

[Footnote 1: Gachard, _Doc. ined_., i., 204-209. "Relation de l'a.s.semblee solennelle tenue a Bruxelles le 15 Jan., 1469."]

[Footnote 2: See Toutey, _Charles le Temeraire et la ligue de Constance_, p. 7.]

[Footnote 3: See the text given in Comines-Lenglet, iii., 116. Charles is characterised as _ducem strenuum in armis ac just.i.tiae praecipium zelatorem_.]

[Footnote 4: See Toutey, p. 8; also Lavisse, iv^{ii}., 371.]

[Footnote 5: Thus was named the a.s.sembly of ten Alsatian towns from Strasburg to Basel, organised into a half independent confederation by the Emperor Charles IV.]

[Footnote 6: Toutey, p. 11.]

[Footnote 7: See "Fontes Rerum Austriacarum" Chmel, J., _Urkunden zur Geschichte von Osterreich_, etc., II^2, 223 _et pa.s.sim_. One doc.u.ment, p. 229, has _Marz_ as a misprint for _Mai_.]

[Footnote 8: Charles was, to be sure, already within that circle for some of his Netherland provinces, but his feudal obligations there were very shadowy.]

[Footnote 9: See Toutey, Lavisse, etc., and above all a valuable article by L. Stouff, ent.i.tled "Les Possessions Bourguignonnes dans la vallee du Rhin sous Charles le Temeraire," _Annales de l'Est,_ vol.

18. This article, is the result of a careful examination of the reports made by Poinsot and Pellet, Charles's commissioners.]

CHAPTER XIV

ENGLISH AFFAIRS

1470-1471

In order to follow out the extension of Burgundian jurisdiction in one direction, the course of events in the duke's life has been antic.i.p.ated a little. The thread of the story now returns to 1469, when Charles and Sigismund separated at St. Omer both well pleased with their bargain. Charles tarried for a time at Ghent and Bruges and then proceeded to Zealand and Holland, where his sojourn had been interrupted in 1468 by his alarm about French duplicity. In the glow caused by his past achievements, his present reputation, and future prospects, Charles of Burgundy was in a mood to prove to his subjects his excellence as a paternal ruler. Wherever he paused on his journey easy access was permitted to his presence and he was lavish in the time given to receiving pet.i.tions from the humblest plaintiff. The following gruesome incident is an ill.u.s.tration of the summary methods attributed to him.[1]

Shortly before the ducal visit to Middelburg, the governor, a man of n.o.ble birth, a knight, fell in love with a married woman who indignantly repudiated his advances. In revenge the governor had the husband arrested on a charge of high treason. The wife, left without a protector, continued obdurate to the knight until the alternative of her husband's release or his death was offered her as the reward for accepting the governor's base suit or as the penalty of her refusal.

She chose to redeem the prisoner. Having paid the price she went to the prison and was led to her husband truly, but he lay dead and in his coffin!

When the Duke of Burgundy was once within the Zealand capital, this injured woman hastened to throw herself at his feet, a pet.i.tioner for justice. He heard her complaint and straightway summoned the ex-governor to his presence. The accused confessed that he had been carried away by his adoration for the woman, reminded Charles of his long and faithful devotion to the late duke and to himself, and offered any possible reparation for his crime. The duke ordered him to marry his victim. The widow was horrified at the suggestion, but was forced by her family to accept it. After the nuptial benediction, the knight again appeared before Charles to a.s.sure him that the plaintiff was satisfied. "She, yes," replied the duke coldly, "but not I." He remanded the bridegroom to prison, had him shriven and executed all within an hour. Then the bride was summoned and shown her second husband in his coffin as she had seen her first, and on the same spot.

"It was a penalty that hit the innocent as well as the guilty, for the plaintiff died from the double shock."

The duke, satisfied with his rigour, went on to Holland. Everywhere he evinced himself equally uncompromising towards the n.o.bles, amiable and considerate towards the lower cla.s.ses and humble folk. Various other stories related about him at this epoch are difficult to accept as authentic, for the main detail has appeared at other times under different guises. Wandering tales seem to alight, like birds of pa.s.sage, on successive people in lands and epochs widely apart, mere hallmarks of certain characteristics re-embodied.

The Hague was the duke's headquarters during two months, and there also he held open court and gave audience to many emba.s.sies in the midst of his administrative work pertaining to Holland and its nearest neighbours. He took measures to recover what he claimed had been usurped by Utrecht, and he initiated proceedings to make good the t.i.tle of Lord of Friesland, that will-o'-the wisp to successive Counts of Holland and never acknowledged by the Frisians. In efforts to weld together the various provinces the months pa.s.sed, until a new turn of foreign events began to absorb the duke's whole attention.

The details of English politics with all the reasons for revolution and counter-revolution involved in the complicated civil disorders, the Wars of the Roses, affected Charles's policy but they can only be suggested in his biography. It must be remembered that the modern impression of English stability and French fickleness in political inst.i.tutions, an impression casting reflections direct and indirect upon literature as well as history, is based on the changes in France from 1789 down to the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century. Quite the reverse is the earlier tradition based on the kaleidoscopic s.h.i.+fts familiar to several generations of observers in the fifteenth century[2]; stable and firm felt the French as they heard the tidings of the brief triumphs of belligerent factions across the Channel.

Since 1461, Henry VI. of the House of Lancaster had been a pa.s.sive prisoner, while Margaret of Anjou had exhausted herself in efforts to win adherents at home and abroad for her captive husband and her exiled son.[3] In 1463, she had received some aid, some encouragement from Philip of Burgundy, although he had recognised Edward IV. as king and although, too, his personal sympathies were Yorkish rather than Lancastrian.

It was Charles who escorted the errant lady into Lille, but later the duke himself entertained her munificently. The poverty-stricken exile probably found the accompanying ducal gifts more to the immediate purpose than the ducal feasts. Two thousand gold crowns were bestowed upon herself, a hundred upon each of her ladies, while various Lancastrian n.o.bles were tided over hard times by useful sums of money.

Pleasant though the recognition was, however, the pecuniary a.s.sistance was quite insufficient to accomplish Margaret's purpose. For nine years Edward IV. sat on his throne and no serious efforts were made to dislodge him. As he never forgot his mother's lineage, the sympathies of Charles of Burgundy were with the exiles, and Queen Margaret may have counted confidently on that sympathy proving valuable for her son as soon as Charles himself had a free hand. But when he came into his heritage, his marriage with Margaret of York put a definite end to those hopes. The new duke thereby declared his acceptance of the king whom the Earl of Warwick had seated upon the English throne. Then came clas.h.i.+ng of wills between that king and his too powerful subject-adviser.[4] To punish his unruly royal protege, Warwick turned his attention to the Duke of Clarence, brother and heir presumptive to Edward IV. A marriage was planned between this possible future monarch and the earl's eldest daughter and then quickly celebrated at Calais without the king's knowledge (July, 1469).

In the same summer occurred a rising in Yorks.h.i.+re, possibly instigated by Warwick.[5] The malcontents, sixty thousand strong, declared that the king was giving ear to base counsellors and must be coerced into better ways. An attempt to suppress this revolt by the royal troops resulted in a pitched battle where Earl Rivers, the father of Elizabeth Woodville, the young queen, was taken prisoner and beheaded.

Edward, baffled, finally turned for aid to Warwick. Over the Channel hastened the earl and his new son-in-law, levied troops, met the king at Olney, and--Edward found himself if not exactly a prisoner, at least under restraint. Two sovereigns--both without power even over their own actions,--such was the situation in England at the end of 1469, when Charles of Burgundy was self-complacently regarding Louis XI. as a foe convinced of his own inferiority.

A menacing letter from this redoubtable ducal brother-in-law was probably the reason why Edward IV. was set at liberty, and why a reconciliation was patched up between him and his councillor, with full pardon for Warwick's adherents. But it was short-lived. A fresh outbreak in March, 1470, made another change. Warwick and Clarence sided with the rebels, the king was victorious, and his unfaithful friend and brother were again forced to flee under a shower of menaces hurled after them.

"But, and He [Clarence] or Richart Erle of Warrewyk our Rebell and Traytour come into oure seid Land we woll ... that ye doo Hym and Theym to be arrested ... He that Taketh and Bryngeth unto Us either of theym, he shal have for his Reward C._l_ of Land in Yerely Value to Hym and to his Heyres or Mil. _Lib_ in Redy money at his election."[6]

Such was the proclamation issued on March 22d by the king himself at York.

Between Edward and Charles a new link had just been forged in the chain of friends.h.i.+p. The Order of the Garter is thus acknowledged by the duke: