Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (3 page)

The succession of the French throne continued to remain in doubt. By the 1420 Treaty of Troyes, it was agreed that upon the death of the dauphin’s father, crazy Charles VI, Henry V’s son Henry VI would be recognized as the king of France. However, the kingdom would be ruled by the boy’s uncle, the Duke of Bedford, as his regent.

The following year, the dauphin’s paternity was called into question, when it was alleged that he was the by-blow of one of his mother’s numerous extramarital affairs. Fearing for his life after his parents’ repudiation of his legitimacy, Charles headed south, receiving sanctuary from his cousin Louis II of Anjou and his wife, Yolande of Aragon. In April 1422, the nineteen-year-old Charles married their eldest daughter, Marie.

While Marie was judged to be a brunette beauty, it’s difficult to conjecture, from contemporary portraiture, whether Charles was considered handsome. He has the high, plucked forehead that was deemed most attractive, but his nose has a Jimmy Durante aspect to it. The court painter Jean Fouquet’s portrait of him, circa 1445–1450, when Charles was in his forties, depicts a world-weary man with a woeful countenance.

Meanwhile, back in Paris in 1422, little Henry VI’s regent had taken up residence and was respected by the French. But the dauphin Charles, whom the English and their allies, the northern French Burgundians, had tauntingly nicknamed
le Roitelet de Bourges
(the Kinglet of Bourges), wanted what was rightfully his. He began amassing an army.

Charles VI died on October 21, 1422, and the dauphin began referring to himself as Charles VII, king of France, although it was the English boy-king Henry VI who was recognized as the sovereign, according to the documents registered on November 19 with the Parlement of Paris, the capital’s judicial body. Charles remained uncrowned, and he would have to fight for the right to sit on the throne of the Valois kings.

Five years later, the English had Orléans under siege, and things were not looking good for Charles. But on February 24, 1429, a peasant
girl from the village of Domrémy in the province of Lorraine arrived in Chinon, riding a bony horse. Her name was Jehane, daughter of Jacques d’Arc, Jack the Archer. She insisted that the Holy Virgin and saints Catherine and Marguerite had revealed her destiny to her: to deliver Orléans and conduct Charles under his own banner to be crowned at Reims Cathedral, the traditional site for French coronations.

Willing to believe in miracles, Charles’s superstitious troops were roused by the girl known to history as Joan of Arc. With Joan and the saints behind them, their war was transformed into a crusade, and the French trounced the Burgundian-English enemy forces. The Maid of Orléans, also known as
la Pucelle
(the virgin), did indeed escort Charles to Reims, where he was crowned. But in 1430, Joan was wounded in battle and was delivered into the hands of the English. Convinced that a French victory had to have been the devil’s work, they tried, convicted, and burned Joan as a witch, and her eight-month influence over Charles VII literally went up in smoke.

But then the Grim Reaper dealt him a winning hand. First, Charles’s mother, who had repudiated him and instead sided with the Burgundians, died. By the Treaty of Arras, in 1435, Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy (son of the duke that Charles had murdered back in 1419), recognized Charles VII as king of France. The death of the Duke of Bedford, one week before the Congress of Arras concluded, left the English with no regent to rule France in Henry’s name. And with no representative in Paris to uphold the authority of the absent king of England, the French turned to their hometown
homme
—Charles VII—and were willing to accept his restoration.

On November 12, 1437, Charles spent the night at the abbey of Saint-Denis, and on the following day he was formally received in the chapel as king of France.

Having finally gained the crown for himself after thirteen years of tussling with the English regent for the throne, Charles VII buckled down to the business of governing. But he would not prove to be one of France’s finest monarchs. His two greatest legacies to France thus far had been the creation of the kingdom’s first standing army, and the establishment in 1432 of the University of Poitiers. Charles spent the latter part of his reign quarreling with his oldest son, Louis, who
wanted a role in the government. Louis plotted against his own father and detested Charles’s mistress Agnès Sorel. The king banished Louis to a region known as the Dauphiné in 1446, and the two men never spoke to each other again.

In 1458, a sore on Charles’s leg grew infected, and he developed a raging fever. In one of the longest death scenes in history, the king’s illness persisted for nearly thirty months. During the last days of his life, a jaw infection led to an abscess in his mouth that prevented him from ingesting any food or water because he could not swallow it. Charles VII died on July 22, 1461, at the age of fifty-eight. He was buried at Saint-Denis, the traditional resting place for the kings of France.

C
HARLES
VII
AND
A
GNÈS
S
OREL
(1409–1449)

Charles’s April 1422 marriage to the seventeen-year-old Marie of Anjou brought more adherents to his campaign for his father’s crown than he could ever have imagined. The girl’s family had connections. The inhabitants of Brittany, Touraine, Lorraine, and southern France became pro-Charles. And after he claimed the throne upon the death of his father that October, aware that maintaining allies was even more important than gaining them, the clever new queen personally worked on her relatives the way savvy socialites used to spin their Rolodexes.

Marie was everything Charles could want from a wife. She bore a dauphin, the future Louis XI (as well as thirteen other children, seven of whom lived to adulthood), she was deeply devoted to him, and she was passionately in love with him. Best of all, like all good medieval wives, she was submissive to his will, never uttering a word of remonstrance (this no doubt came in handy when he took a mistress). Instead she averred, “He is my lord; he has a right to guide all my actions, and I have none.”

Unfortunately for Marie, her love, devotion, and humility weren’t enough.

The court of Charles VII and Marie of Anjou typified the age of chivalry, with colorful pageants and jousting tournaments, gallant knights on their brave steeds, ladies fair in their towering hennins with fluttering silk veils, and, of course, the poetry of the troubadours, of whom the queen’s brother René was one of the finest and most famous. Within the retinue of René’s wife, Isabelle of Lorraine, was a maid of honor named Agnès Sorel.

The original spelling of her surname was Soreau. Born in 1409, Agnès, who had entered Isabelle’s service when she was quite young, was the daughter of Jean Soreau, Lord of Codun, squire of the comte de Clermont. Her mother, Catherine de Maignelais, came from an aristocratic family in Touraine.

It’s difficult to judge the portraiture of the fifteenth century against our contemporary standards of beauty. But Olivier de la Marche, who lived at the court of Burgundy around 1444, described Agnès Sorel as “one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen, and by this beauty she had a great influence on the realm of France.”

Indeed, by any account, Agnès Sorel was thought to be a stunner in her day. Her forehead was extremely high, making her hairline appear almost bald, which at the time was considered a hallmark of beauty. Her blue eyes, long lashes, and sultry lids, then, as now, were favorable assets. Her mouth was small and her nose was judged the perfect shape by her peers, which likely means it was aquiline. Her neck and shoulders were perfectly symmetrical and fashionably pale. Jean Fouquet’s painting
Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels
, circa 1449, for which Agnès is supposed to have modeled, shows one exposed, snowy breast that is absolutely perfect in its roundness. The viewer can almost feel its weight, and become curious to touch it. The portrait therefore becomes erotic, more the image of a royal mistress and her russet-haired love child than the Madonna gazing at the infant deity. Is the child representing the Baby Jesus really one of the three illegitimate daughters that Agnès Sorel bore the king?

Charles VII met Agnès in 1424, at one of the lowest points in his life. In the years after his father’s death, although he was recognized as king in parts of France, the English (and the rest of the French) still acknowledged Henry VI as their sovereign. Charles had been fighting
to regain his entire kingdom. His several military companies had met with hammering defeats. His Scots forces had been scattered at the Battle of Verneuil in Normandy on August 17.

Charles and Agnès became lovers, but her relationship with the king was far more than amatory. She became both coach and head cheerleader, personally responsible for spurring him to victory. And according to the courtier Olivier de la Marche, Agnès “brought to the King young men-at-arms and noble comrades by whom the King was well served.”

Contemporary chronicles as well as sixteenth-century texts refer to an interesting incident that may have occurred at the court of Bourges. An astrologer had announced to the assembled lords and ladies that the Lady of Fromenteau, Agnès Sorel, would be loved by a great king. Agnès then dropped into a profound curtsy before Charles. “[S]he asked permission to withdraw to the Court of England, for it was that King whom this prediction referred to, since the King of France was going to lose his Crown, and the King of England to place it on his head.”

If the story is true (although Victor Duruy’s
A Short History of France
relegates it to the realm of legend), Charles was so taken aback by Agnès’s remark that he immediately pulled himself out of his funk. Charles’s chronicler, Brantôme, says that the king “began to weep, and then taking courage, and quitting his hunting and his gardens, he acted so as to drive the English from his kingdom by his bravery and courage.”

Some historians may take the level of Agnès’s influence on Charles VII with a large dose of salt, but she did manage to wean him from the cadre of chieftains he’d run with in his youth—the council of roustabouts who had consistently given him bad advice and who had led him into one military defeat after another. With Agnès in his corner—whether it was due to the self-confidence that comes from loving and being loved, or as a result of the appropriate martial and financial connections that Charles gained by their romance, or because of a lot of both—he started winning.

Agnès acted as a go-between in the negotiations to heal the rift between Charles VII and the House of Burgundy, as his murder of the Duke of Burgundy a few years earlier hadn’t exactly endeared
him to his vassals there. She also helped repair the breach with his vassals in Anjou and Brittany. Interestingly, the primary diplomat in this summit was another woman: Agnès’s employer, Charles’s sister-in-law Isabelle, the Duchess of Lorraine.

Known for her gentle spirit, Agnès possessed “eloquence…so much beyond that of other women that she was looked upon as a prodigy.” It was Agnès who purportedly convinced the Burgundians to absolve Charles of all responsibility for the duke’s death by falsely pinning the murder solely on his evil advisers. As Philip, the present Duke of Burgundy, was angry because the English were reneging on certain terms of their treaties, he was primed to switch allegiances and support Charles. Although Agnès unceasingly inspired the king with “the thought of France’s restoration,” according to the fifteenth-century monastic chronicler Jean Chartier, Charles could not have recaptured Paris from the English without the might of the Duke of Burgundy behind him.

But Charles needed money as well to finance his war.

It’s almost axiomatic for a royal mistress to be fond of luxury, and Agnès was no different. Also typical of French royal mistresses, she set the fashions at court. Even when the queen was in mourning (seven of her fourteen children died young), Agnès and the rest of the ladies displayed such deep décolletage that their nipples and breasts were exposed. Charles liked the vogue so much that he scoffed when others were scandalized.

Another of Agnès’s passions—jewelry—ended up benefiting her royal lover as well. Her friend the goldsmith Jean Coeur amassed such a fortune in the luxury goods business importing fine textiles and cutting gemstones (he was the first to cut the diamond in Western Europe; they had previously been uncut and unpolished) that he became the royal treasurer. Encouraged and protected by Agnès against his numerous detractors, who were envious that someone who was not an aristocrat should possess such great wealth, Jean Coeur personally financed Charles’s military campaign against the English.

In November 1437, when Charles was hailed at Saint-Denis as the king of France, the people of Paris couldn’t help but notice the beautifully dressed woman dripping in furs and gold and precious stones
who accompanied the queen as she rode into the city on a horse as richly caparisoned as Her Majesty. The whispers began; it was Agnès Sorel—the king’s companion—who was so bedecked with diamonds and pearls. Unsurprisingly, the clergy were among her first and most vociferous detractors. She was the new Herodias, a beast of the apocalypse, thundered the bishop of Thérouine.

Upon hearing these insults, Agnès grew anxious. “The Parisians are but villains; if I had known that they would not have done me more honor, I should never have set foot in their city,” she told her lover nervously. Agnès could hardly forget that Joan of Arc’s persecutors had come from Paris as well. Would she share the fate of
la Pucelle
?

However, the outcry against Agnès’s opulence was in some measure justified. The Parisians had endured a particularly severe winter. The Seine had frozen solid, halting all commerce, and as a consequence, poverty had become rampant and people were starving. The famine had sparked outbreaks of contagious diseases. Although by right the festivities for the king’s entry into Paris should have been extravagant, the stark contrast between the haves, as exemplified by his mistress, and the have-nots of the spectators was too much for people to bear.