A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [206]
Charles spoke for two hours, tracing the ancient quarrel down the centuries from Eleanor of Aquitaine to the Treaty of Brétigny and rehearsing the intricate legalities under which the treaty had been voided and war renewed in 1369. If the speech was a tour de force of legal and historical argument, the Emperor’s response was a masterpiece of ornate formula. He spoke of loyalty and kinship, and the depth of his and his son’s and his subjects’ devotion which entitled them to be considered the defenders of the King’s honor and realm, brothers and children—let them indeed be called “allies.” Yet, when examined, the substance was shadowy. If, in the end, the speech—and the entire visit—produced no concrete alliance, the imposing verbal effect may have been what Charles of France wanted.
He did not stint in further courtesies and gift-giving, exchanging with the Emperor presents of enameled goblets and jeweled daggers set with rubies and diamonds, sapphires and pearls. Princely magnificence, Charles considered, was best displayed by jewels, tapestries, and the goldsmith’s art. His uncle was not embarrassed to ask for an exquisite Book of Hours, and when Charles set two before him, one large and one small from which to choose, the Emperor, preferring not to select, kept both. Sensibility had its hour when he visited the Queen and her mother, the dowager Duchess of Bourbon, whose sister Beatrice had been his first wife. Tears flowed freely in mutual memory although Beatrice had been dead for thirty years and her place filled by three wives since. The last day was spent in sylvan pleasure at Vincennes, where at the edge of the noble forest on the bank of the river the King had built his favorite country manor, called Beauté-sur-Marne. Furnished in luxury and comfort with beautiful tapestries, a Flemish organ, and turtledoves cooing in the courtyard, it was lauded by the poet Deschamps as “Of all places pleasant and agreeable, / Gay and lovely for joyous living.”
Departing by way of Reims, the Emperor was escorted to the frontiers of the kingdom by Coucy and attendant nobles. Possibly hastened by the exertions of so much ceremonial, his death followed ten months later in November 1378.
The memorable visit, even if devoid of practical effect, honored and enhanced the crown of France. Although royal powers were undefined, and the Council’s authority unformulated, and the institutions of royal government always in flux, Charles V’s sense of the crown’s role was firm: kingship depended on the King’s will. The sovereign was not above the law; rather, his duty was to maintain the law, for God denied Paradise to tyrants. Sanction derived in theory from the consent of the governed, for kings and princes, as a great theologian, Jean Gerson, was to remind Charles’s successor, “were created in the beginning by the common consent of all.” As Charles knew well, the cult of monarchy was the basis of the people’s consent. He deliberately fed the cult while at the same time he was the first to show that rulership could be exercised “from the chamber” independent of personal leadership in battle.
In the bright apogee of 1378, France was not immune from trouble. War had come back to Brittany and Normandy; Charles of Navarre, as venomous as ever after twenty years, was again in dangerous league with the English; heresy and sorcery were on the rise, testifying to needs unsatisfied by the Church.
For all its dominance, there never was a time when the Church was not resisted somewhere by dissent. In the distracted