A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [223]
Legal evidence of Navarre’s treason was provided when his chamberlain, Jacques de Rue, arrived in Paris with letters for the two sons. Under interrogation, De Rue testified freely—without torture, as the King took care to have stated in the authorized chronicle—that Charles of Navarre planned to poison the King of France right after Easter through a steward of the royal bakery. Taking advantage of the ensuing disarray and succession of a minor, he would then open hostilities by seizing French strongholds along the Seine while the English landed in Normandy.
This story was easily believable of a prince who had already attempted the life of his other brother-in-law, the Count of Foix, in a melodrama infused with all the lurid glitter of the 14th century. Foix had married the flirtatious Agnes, Navarre’s sister, but, as a man of “impetuous passions,” had not ceased his gallantries, with the result that Agnes departed in umbrage to take refuge with her brother. The brothers-in-law were already at odds in a quarrel over money. When Agnes’ fifteen-year-old son, Gaston, came to plead with her to return, she refused to go unless the request came from her husband. Charles of Navarre then gave his nephew a bag of powder to take home, telling him that it would cause his father to desire the reconciliation, but that he must keep the agent secret or it would not work. On Gaston’s return to Foix, the bag of powder was discovered by his bastard brother Yvain, and shown to the Count, who fed it to one of his dogs, which promptly expired in painful convulsions.
Restrained from killing his heir and only legitimate son on the spot, the Count locked him up while all of Gaston’s household who had gone with him to Navarre were examined and fifteen of them executed. Meanwhile Gaston, realizing that his uncle had conspired to have him commit parricide, gave way to despair, refusing all food. On being informed of this situation while he was paring his nails with a knife, the Count of Foix rushed to his son’s cell, seized him by the throat saying, “Ha, traitor, why dost thou not eat?” and accidentally cut him across the jugular with the knife that was still in his hand. The boy turned on his side without a word and, the wound proving fatal, died the same day. One more mortal sin was added to the already overburdened record of Charles of Navarre.
Corroboration of Navarre’s “crimes and treasons” against the King of France was supplied when codes to his ciphered correspondence were taken from a second arrested counselor, Pierre du Tertre. All the collected evidence, and signed confessions by the two counselors, were made public in their formal trial, conducted with utmost solemnity before a great assembly of magistrates, clerics, notaries, merchants, and visitors to Paris. Upon sentence of death, both counselors were executed. Their headless bodies were hung on the gibbet and their severed limbs on the four principal gates of Paris. A public record was thus established to justify Charles of Navarre’s Norman subjects in transferring their allegiance to his son.
The Normandy campaign was already under way. At the first report of Navarre’s treason, the King had assembled an army at Rouen and “sent hastily for the Sire de Coucy and the Sire de Rivière,” whom he put in command under the nominal leadership of the Duke of Burgundy. Fearful of English landings, he instructed them to conquer Navarre’s towns and castles, especially those nearest the coast, as speedily as possible either by force or by negotiation. Bureau de la Rivière, the King’s Chamberlain, with whom Coucy was to be so closely associated in this campaign and afterward, belonged to the group of bourgeois-born councillors derisively called