A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [235]
At the Loire the French had gathered the advantage in numbers. Coucy and his companions were determined, “whether the King willed it or not,” to give battle before the English crossed the Sarthe into Brittany. Meanwhile Charles, negotiating while the armies marched, had persuaded the city of Nantes, key to Brittany and pro-French, not to admit the English and to declare loyalty to France without reference to Montfort. In the first week of September the English crossed the Sarthe and in that week Charles entered his last illness. The secretion from the abscess on his arm dried up, heralding death, and physicians and patient accepted the signal. Moved by litter to his favorite château of Beauté on the Marne, Charles sent for his brothers and brother-in-law—excepting Anjou, whom he hoped to keep at a distance from the Royal Treasury—and prepared to make dispositions for the journey of his soul.
Philip the Bold hastened to Paris, and Coucy likewise because of his responsibility as a member of the Regency Council. Anjou, who was kept apprised of events by partisans in Paris, hurried up from Languedoc, whether wanted or not.
The King suffered physically in his last days, but his mental anguish was heavier. Two things weighed on his conscience: his part in the schism and the questionable legality of his taxation. He had stretched temporary grants by the Estates into ten years of continuous taxes, and though he had used them for defense of the realm and the “public weal,” he had filled the royal coffers in the process and bought the allegiance of nobles with the people’s tax money. How would he answer to God? He had raised France from a “heap of ruins”; he had canceled—except for Calais—the English conquests made in the time of his father and grandfather; he had uprooted Navarre permanently from Normandy; and if peace had receded from his grasp, he had, by the steady pursuit of national purpose, justified the loyalty of all who had felt themselves French in the hour of choice.
But had he bought recovery at the price of the people’s misery? The uprising in Languedoc had revealed the cost, and Charles was aware, through tax-collectors’ reports, of angry mutterings closer to home. Oppression of his subjects reacted upon the fate of his soul, for a sovereign’s illegal taxes could arouse the Divine wrath, and the complaints of those he had wronged would follow him to the judgment seat. In his own time the unknown author of the allegory Songe du Vergier (Dream of the Woodsman) branded as tyrants all princes who burdened their subjects with “taxes impossible to bear,” and theologians warned rulers that they should cancel all exactions and make restitution to great and small if they hoped for salvation. That hope dictated the King’s last act.
Within hours of death, fully dressed and laid on a chaise-longue before a perturbed group of prelates, seigneurs, and councillors representing the three estates, the King in a fading voice spoke first of the schism. He insisted in a troubled and rambling defense that he had sought to follow “in this as in all else, the surest road,” that “if ever rumor should say that the Cardinals acted under the inspiration of the Demon, you may be sure that no consideration of kinship dictated my choice but solely the statements of the said Cardinals and the advice of prelates, clerics and my councillors”; finally, that he would obey a decision of a General Council of the Church and “God could not reproach me if in my ignorance I acted contrary to a future decision of the Church.” It was the declaration of a very worried man.
At the door of death in the Middle Ages, the trembling traveler, more often than not, felt required to repudiate what he had done in life. When it came to taxes, the most conscientious