A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [240]
By edict of November 16, the government, as promised, abolished “henceforth and forever all taxes, tithes, gabelles, by which our subjects are much grieved, quitting and remitting all aids and subsidies which have been imposed for the said wars since our predecessor, King Philip, until today.” This stroke of fiscal suicide reflected momentary panic rather than serious intention. Aside from Charles V, most rulers governed by impulse in the 14th century.
In search of other money, the government immediately appealed to the provincial Estates for voluntary aids, with generally meager results. At the Estates of Normandy, when one member proposed to vote a grant, the assembly cried with one voice, “Nothing! Nothing!” At Rouen and Amiens, the people “were all of one will” against it. “By God’s blood, it shall never pass!” shouted a bourgeois orator to a protest meeting in the pig market of Sens. Opinion was general that the King’s treasure was enough for his needs and that more money would only go into greater extravagances by the nobles. While some districts voted aids, the major result of summoning the provincial Estates was to spread discussion and excite resistance.
Divided interests in the Third Estate complicated the struggle. The petty bourgeois were seeking to wrest control from the ruling oligarchy of merchants and masters of guilds, and both parties used the rising agitation of the working class for their own ends. They had inflammable tinder in the unhappy ranks of the unskilled and in dispossessed peasants, driven into the cities by the wars, who created a reservoir of anger and misery.
The late King’s ministerial structure, like the financial, was soon riddled by the uncles’ efforts to remove his councillors. Bureau de la Rivière, whom Charles V had loved and wished to have buried at his feet, was accused of treason by a spokesman of the Dukes but was saved when Clisson threw down his glove in the presence of the whole court and no one dared take up the awful challenge. In fear of reprisals, Rivière afterward left office, d’Orgement and Mercier were eventually pushed out, and another of the former councillors, Jean de La Grange, Cardinal of Amiens, found good reason to depart.
La Grange was disliked by the young King, who had been led by the Cardinal’s enemies to believe that he kept a familiar demon. On one occasion when Charles was ten, he had crossed himself at the Cardinal’s approach, crying, “Flee from the Devil! Throw out the Devil!”—to the considerable annoyance of that prince of the Church. On learning that the young King, on his accession, had said to a friend, “This is the moment to revenge ourselves on this priest,” Cardinal La Grange put his treasure in safekeeping and fled to Avignon, never to return.
The sensational fall of the Provost of Paris added to the sense of crumbling authority. Hugues Aubriot was a man in his sixties who had won the favor of Philip of Burgundy by extravagant banquets and gifts, and the favor of the bourgeois by construction of the first sewers and by vigorous repair of walls and bridges. But he was marked for destruction by the clergy, whom he openly insulted, and by the University, which he scorned as that “nursery of priests” and whose privileges he combatted and members he arrested on any pretext. It was said that he reserved two dungeons in the Châtelet expressly for scholars and clerics. At the funeral of Charles V, when Aubriot refused to allow the University to take precedence in the procession, a furious fracas broke out between the Provost’s sergeants and the scholars, ending with many of the University wounded and 36 thrown in jail. “Ha, that rabble!