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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

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