A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [236]
Other, indirect taxes existed, but the hearth tax was the basic property tax on which the financial system rested. To decree that it should “no longer be current” was to deceive the people and deprive his successors—supposing the decree were to be carried out—of the means of governing. Charles’s act was not an aberration. Sovereigns before him had been known to cancel taxes and return subsidies illegally exacted, and deathbed donors regularly made restitutions and established foundations that, if carried out, would bankrupt their families. Charles had amassed a huge fortune for his son, but by 1380 the theory that the King could live of his own domain was a ragged fiction. A regular financial footing, as Charles knew all too well, was government’s greatest need. In the chill of death, his soul’s need was stronger.
The King received extreme unction, commended to his brothers his twelve-year-old son, and urged on them with his last breath the lifting of taxes: “Take them off as speedily as you can.” Bureau de la Rivière, kneeling in tears at the bedside, embraced the King; the room was emptied of the sobbing crowd so that his last moments should be in peace. He died on September 16, 1380, and his last ordinance was proclaimed the next day. Between public rejoicing and the conflicting sentiments of the late King’s brothers, an explosive situation was created.
In Brittany in the same month Buckingham received an ambiguous welcome. Montfort, whose whole life was spent balancing enemies, intriguing, fighting, quarreling, and making treaties with everyone, was a habitual double-dealer. Charles being dead, he was prepared to make peace with the new King, and opened negotiations with the French while at the same time signing a compact of many oaths with Buckingham to jointly besiege Nantes. But the reluctance of Breton nobles to support an attack on their countrymen decided their lord to choose France. Coucy, warmly in favor of a reconciliation with Brittany, was one of the negotiators who concluded a treaty with Montfort in January 1381. Buckingham, who was not kept informed by his ally, found towns and castles closed to him and provisions withdrawn inside their walls. Through the winter months his wasted army wandered from place to place, often lacking food and shelter. Finally told by Montfort that he must leave, he and his companions took ship for England in March 1381. Except for individual knighthoods and ransoms and some fruits of pillage collected en route, Buckingham and his fellows had accomplished no military purpose, “to their great discomfort and the discomfort of the whole English nation.”
Both nations under boy kings now suffered the rule of ambitious and contending uncles who, wearing no crown, exercised power without responsibility. War receded; internal stress reached the bursting point.
Chapter 18
The Worms of the Earth Against the Lions
Let him go to the Devil! He lived long enough,” cried a workingman on the death of the King. “It would have been better for us if he had died ten years ago!” Within a few months of the King’s death, France experienced the explosion of working-class revolt that had already swept through Florence and Flanders. In addition to oppressive taxes, a rising rancor of the poor against the rich and a conscious demand by the lowest class for greater rights in the system supplied the impulse. Concentration of wealth was moving upward in the 14th century and enlarging the proportion of the poor, while the catastrophes of the century reduced large numbers to misery and want. The poor had remained manageable as long as their minimum subsistence could be maintained by charity, but the situation changed