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favourites, Charles of Spain, an energetic military commander, and one who was a stranger to the intrigues of the French noblesse. To deprive the Count d'Eu of his constable's office, without motive alleged, would have made him an enemy, and afforded a cause of offence to his noblesse. The constable had come to Paris from England, to collect the price of his ransom. The king charged him with having written some letters, perhaps disrespectful of his majesty, for the count was smart of speech and petulant. But John would never pardon these letters, nor yet make known the reason of his grudge to the constable. He could not sleep, he declared, whilst the latter lived. And, accordingly, the Duke of Bourbon and some other of the courtiers were deputed to seize the Count of Eu, in his hotel, and have him instantly decapitated. The office of constable was immediately conferred upon Charles of Spain, and the estates and title of Count d'Eu upon one of the sons of Robert d'Artois. This oriental mode of decapitation and confiscation greatly displeased the barons of France, says Froissart, as well as the nobles and princes of the

frontier.

A coronation at Rheims was not sufficient to manifest to all his subjects the accession of a King of France. It was necessary to visit the south, to assemble its several estates, to receive the homage of the noblesse, and the recognition of the cities. The war with England occupied apart the different regions of north and south. It was necessary to make head from the Loire against English armies from Guienne, from the Seine to repel invasion from Normandy or from Calais. In his progress to the south, John made a grant of franchises to several towns, and regulated the mode of their war services against the enemy. The citizen militia was bound to follow the king to battle or campaign; and within a day's journey of their homes and walls, they were to perform this service gratuitously. If led

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further, they were to receive a daily pay. The States of Languedoc begged to be exempt from the vexatious tax upon sales and purchases, and voted a sum instead. As the king returned by the west, he granted each province the immunities or the privileges it required. He then held in 1351, at Paris, an assembly of the states of the north, from which he demanded and obtained the levy of the usual war subsidies and aids, continuing, at the same time, that periodical manipulation of the coin, which, as a chronicler observes, rendered all commerce impossible.*

The war with the English had, in the meantime, recommenced. John, on his return from the south, found himself near the enemy's country, whilst he had around him numbers of the French and Poitevin noblesse. In his newness, says Froissart, desirous to inaugurate his accession with a conquest, he laid siege to St. Jean d'Angely. Edward, on hearing it, sent succours under Beauchamp, Audley, and Chandos. They advanced from Bordeaux, and finding the enemy too strongly posted on the Charente, hesitated to attack, when the French, fearing the English would escape them, crossed the river, and engaged in action. It was fought vigorously on both sides, but in the end the English carried off numbers of French knights prisoners. They thus won rich ransoms, although they could not prevent St. Jean d'Angely from surrendering to John. In the midst of these conflicts, which were not confined to the south, but were repeated in

*At the same time John undertook to regulate the rate of wages and the prices of commodities, so much disturbed by his own derangement of the coin, as well as by the effects of the famine and the pestilence. These commercial difficulties and disturbances were not confined to France. Edington, Edward's treasurer, who, says Walsingham,

"consulted more the convenience of the king than that of the community," issued a new coinage, of much less value than the sterling. This raised the price of provisions; and the English artisans were cunning enough to demand higher wages in consequence, which it required an act of parliament to regulate and resist.

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Brittany and Artois, Henry of Lancaster visited Paris CHAP. for the purpose of engaging in single combat with Otho of Brunswick. He was exceedingly well and courteously received by King John, and still more so by the King of Navarre, and was the more honoured when Otho of Brunswick declined the single combat which he had provoked. Soon after, the Duke of Lancaster proceeded to Avignon, to endeavour to negotiate peace under the arbitrage of the Pope, the Duke of Bourbon appearing there on the part of John. The French, according to Knighton, demanded that Edward should cease to quarter the arms of France, and that he should do homage for Gascony. But Henry of Lancaster replied, that his sovereign would never do homage to one of lesser rights and lineage than himself; and so the negotiations ended. They are a proof of Edward's determination never to make peace on the condition of again becoming the liege, or even the nominal vassal, of the French king.

The impossibility of peace or agreement with England was not the only untoward consequence of these high pretensions to supremacy which had become part of the heritage of French monarchs. These had gradually humbled and flung far beneath their feet the old noblesse of the country, whom they decapitated at pleasure, without ever deigning to assign a motive or specify a crime. The greater aristocracy, and their princely families and possessions, had been all absorbed in the Crown or the royal family. But these princes of the blood claimed, and obtained, a portion of that sacrosanctity, which was considered as a royal attribute. It was thought that their affinity to the throne would always render them attached to it. The princes of the blood were, however, above feelings of either patriotism or loyalty. They partook of the exceptional nature of the monarch living, and deemed their own rights and their dignity paramount to all others. There was this excuse

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for their selfishness and violence, that, if wronged, especially if wronged by the sovereign, they had no legal mode of redress: there was no institution, there was no law. The Court of Peers was a mockery, as was every kind and form of justice. The princes of France were thus, however elevated in dignity and power, still reduced, in one sense, to a state of nature: they had no defence or redress but that of the savage,—the use of cunning and the recourse to violence. Murder and treachery became thus their almost inevitable attributes.

The policy of the French monarchs had, moreover, not been applied to princes of the blood. They were left possessed of towns and provinces, in which they ap pointed their own seneschals or governors; so that the unity of administration, and compactness of the kingdom, boasted to be the results of the destruction of feudalism, were, on the contrary, lost as soon as won, by the privileges accorded to these royal princes. Some consider these high immunities attached to royal birth as a resuscitation of feudalism. There was, however, nothing feudal in their nature. Feudal institutions and laws would have furnished a remedy for the abuses they introduced, a check upon their violence or ambition, had the principle been observed in reality, of every man being tried by, and amenable to his peers; or had not the great application of this principle in the Court of Peers itself, been corrupted and nullified by the substitution of the arbitrary rule of the king, there would have been a tribunal before which even princes might have claimed redress, and might, at the same time, have learned obedience. But the growth of absolutism destroyed every salutary element of feudalism, and substituted nothing for it but caprice, ferocity, and craft. As to the principles of equity and equality, and civic right, vaunted to have been introduced with the Roman law, where were they? Introduced before their time, they were destructive of those various checks and con

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trols by which feudalism limited sovereign authority, CHAP. while they established nothing in return save naked absolutism.

The case of Robert d'Artois was the first example of one of the royal race driven into rebellion and resistance to the Crown. But Robert, whatever his rights, was a lack-land prince, without followers or power. A member of his family, whom John offended, became an enemy far more dangerous from his talents, his character, and his resources. The daughter of Louis Hutin, who inherited Navarre, had married the Count of Evreux. From this marriage sprung three sons, the eldest of whom, Charles, was at present King of Navarre and Count of Evreux, the hereditary rights of the family to the county of Champagne having been exchanged for certain towns and lordships in Normandy, such as those of Mantes and Meulan. These places were given, because it was supposed that the authority of the King of France could always overrule that of ever so great a feudatory in towns within a day's journey of Paris. But since the days of Philip the Long, the princely aristocracy had greatly increased their power. The war with England having broken out, and proved unfortunate, the King of France had no regular troops or officers wherewith to garrison and defend so many towns. It was necessary to entrust them to those who could keep them without demanding pay. And thus Charles of Navarre had not only his hereditary property of Evreux, as well as Meulan and Mantes upon the Seine, but he had also the custody of Caen, and was, in many respects, an independent potentate.

The check upon these princes of the royal lineage was, that they resided at the Court, under the eye of the king; where, no doubt, their words and their conduct were the objects of constant vigilance. But Charles was no rash brawler; he was as skilled in concealing resentments as prone to harbour and indulge them. A

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