Charles VII of France

Charles was born in Paris on February 22, 1403, the eleventh child of King Charles VI and Queen Isabeau of Bavaria. His father suffered from recurring episodes of mental illness that left the government of France contested between rival princely factions, the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, throughout Charles's childhood ^[1]. As a younger son he was not expected to reign, and he spent his early years at the margins of a court torn by faction and intrigue.

That expectation changed with startling speed. His elder brothers Louis and John, each in turn Dauphin of France, died in 1415 and 1417, leaving the fourteen-year-old Charles heir to the throne ^[2]. He was betrothed as a boy to Marie of Anjou, daughter of Louis II of Anjou and the formidable Yolande of Aragon, and he grew up largely within the Angevin household. Yolande became his protector and one of the shrewdest political managers of his early career, keeping him out of the hands of both his mother and the Burgundian party ^[3].

The kingdom he stood to inherit was in crisis. Henry V of England had crushed the French nobility at Agincourt in 1415 and was methodically conquering Normandy. In 1418 Burgundian partisans seized Paris in a bloody coup, and the young Dauphin escaped the city by night, beginning a long exile from his own capital ^[1].

In September 1419, during a parley on the bridge at Montereau, retainers of the Dauphin murdered John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy. Whether Charles ordered or even anticipated the killing remains uncertain, but its consequences were immediate and severe: the new duke, Philip the Good, allied with England, and the road to a punitive settlement lay open ^[2]. In May 1420 Charles VI signed the Treaty of Troyes, which married his daughter Catherine to Henry V, recognized Henry as heir to the French crown, and repudiated the Dauphin as illegitimate in right if not in birth ^[1].

When both Henry V and Charles VI died within weeks of each other in 1422, the infant Henry VI of England was proclaimed king of France in Paris, while Charles claimed the crown from his refuge south of the Loire. For anyone asking who was Charles VII of France in the 1420s, contemporaries had a dismissive answer: the 'King of Bourges', a monarch whose writ ran only in central and southern France ^[3]. His government operated from Bourges, Chinon, and Poitiers, chronically short of money and dependent on quarrelsome favorites.

The military situation deteriorated year by year. Anglo-Burgundian forces defeated his armies at Cravant in 1423 and Verneuil in 1424, the latter a disaster that destroyed much of his Scottish auxiliary force ^[2]. By October 1428 an English army had laid siege to Orléans, the key fortress guarding the Loire crossings. If Orléans fell, little stood between the English and the remaining Valois heartland.

In February 1429 a seventeen-year-old peasant girl from Domrémy arrived at Chinon claiming a divine commission to raise the siege of Orléans and see Charles crowned at Reims. After examination by clerics at Poitiers, Charles allowed Joan of Arc to accompany a relief convoy to the besieged city. Within nine days of her arrival in late April, the English abandoned the siege, and a string of victories along the Loire followed, culminating in the rout of an English field army at Patay on June 18, 1429 ^[4].

Joan then pressed Charles to undertake the risky march through Anglo-Burgundian territory to Reims, the traditional coronation city of French kings. Towns opened their gates along the route, and on July 17, 1429, Charles was anointed and crowned in Reims cathedral with Joan standing near the altar ^[4]. The ceremony mattered enormously: consecration with the holy oil of Reims answered the Treaty of Troyes with a sacral legitimacy no English claim could match, and support for the Valois cause swelled across northern France ^[1].

The partnership ended sadly. After a failed assault on Paris in September 1429, Joan's influence at court waned. Burgundian troops captured her at Compiègne in May 1430, sold her to the English, and she was burned at Rouen in May 1431 after a politically driven heresy trial. Charles made no recorded attempt to ransom her, a silence that has weighed on his reputation ever since, though in 1450 he ordered an inquiry into her trial, and a papal court annulled her condemnation in 1456 ^[4].

The decisive diplomatic stroke of the reign came in 1435. At the Congress of Arras, Charles reconciled with Philip the Good of Burgundy, formally disavowing the Montereau murder and granting territorial concessions in exchange for Burgundy's abandonment of the English alliance ^[2]. Paris surrendered to royal forces in April 1436, and Charles entered his capital in 1437 for the first time in nearly twenty years.

Military victory required institutional change, and here Charles VII of France achievements were lasting. The ordinances of 1445 established the compagnies d'ordonnance, permanent companies of well-paid heavy cavalry that gave France its first standing army and curbed the freebooting soldiery, the écorcheurs, who had ravaged the countryside between campaigns ^[5]. A parallel ordinance of 1448 organized the francs-archers, a reserve of infantry archers raised from the parishes. To pay for it all, the crown made the taille, the principal direct tax, a permanent levy collected without the consent of the Estates General, a fiscal foundation for royal absolutism ^[1].

Charles also asserted control over the church in France. The Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges in 1438 limited papal taxation and reserved the election of bishops largely to French chapters, a landmark of Gallican independence ^[2]. In the towns, the merchant financier Jacques Coeur rebuilt trade with the Levant and lent the crown vast sums, until his spectacular arrest in 1451 on charges his creditors found convenient ^[6].

The reformed army proved itself quickly. Normandy was recovered in a single campaign crowned by the victory of Formigny in April 1450, where French cannon and cavalry broke an English relief force ^[5]. Guyenne, English for three centuries, fell next: the battle of Castillon in July 1453, decided by the massed artillery of the brothers Jean and Gaspard Bureau, killed the veteran English commander John Talbot and ended the fighting. Bordeaux surrendered that October, leaving Calais as England's only remaining possession in France ^[2].

Charles married Marie of Anjou in 1422, and the marriage, arranged in childhood, proved durable and fruitful. The couple had fourteen children, among them the future Louis XI, born in 1423, and several daughters married into the houses of Scotland, Savoy, and Bourbon ^[3]. Marie played little public political role, but her mother Yolande of Aragon remained a central adviser to the king until her death in 1442.

From the early 1440s the most visible woman at court was Agnès Sorel, the first officially acknowledged royal mistress in French history. Beautiful, extravagant, and politically connected to the reforming circle around Pierre de Brézé, she bore the king three daughters before dying suddenly in 1450 at the age of about twenty-eight. Modern analysis of her remains found mercury poisoning, though whether the dose was medicinal or murderous is still debated ^[6].

Contemporaries found the king himself an elusive figure: physically unimpressive, suspicious, prone to withdrawal, yet capable of choosing and keeping exceptionally able servants. That knack gave him his second epithet, 'le Bien Servi', the Well-Served ^[1]. His relations with his heir were poisonous. The Dauphin Louis joined a princely revolt called the Praguerie in 1440, was pardoned, intrigued again from his province of Dauphiné, and finally fled in 1456 to the court of Burgundy, where he remained until his father's death ^[2].

Victory did not bring the aging king peace of mind. He faced continued princely conspiracies, and in 1458 he presided over the treason trial of his old comrade in arms, Jean II, Duke of Alençon, who had corresponded with the English ^[2]. Royal justice in these years also produced one of the most consequential verdicts of the century: the rehabilitation trial that in July 1456 declared Joan of Arc's condemnation null, clearing both her name and, pointedly, the legitimacy of the coronation she had secured ^[4].

Charles's health failed steadily in the late 1450s. A chronic infection of the jaw or mouth made eating increasingly difficult, and stories circulated that fear of poison, allegedly at his son's instigation, made him refuse food altogether. He died at the castle of Mehun-sur-Yèvre in Berry on July 22, 1461, aged fifty-eight, and was buried at the abbey of Saint-Denis beside earlier kings of France ^[1]. The son who had defied him succeeded without opposition as Louis XI.

Few reigns in French history began so low and ended so high. The disinherited 'King of Bourges' of 1422 died as Charles the Victorious, master of a reunited kingdom with a permanent army, permanent taxation, and a chastened nobility ^[1]. Historians credit the reign with laying the administrative and fiscal groundwork on which Louis XI and the Renaissance monarchy built, even while noting how much of the work was done by ministers, financiers, and captains the king had the judgment to appoint ^[5].

Assessment of the man remains divided, which is why any Charles VII of France biography must balance two portraits: the listless, dependent prince of the 1420s and the patient, calculating ruler of the 1440s. His treatment of Joan of Arc and the fall of Jacques Coeur are the standing moral objections; the recovery of Normandy and Guyenne, the ordinance companies, and the Pragmatic Sanction are the standing answers ^[6]. Among the durable Charles VII of France facts is one that contemporaries would have found astonishing in 1422: when he died, the English crown held nothing in France but Calais, and the Hundred Years' War was effectively over ^[2].