CHAPTER THREE
Isabeau Mediatrix
Defining the Mediator Queen
Haply a woman’s voice may do some good When articles too nicely urged be stood upon.
SHAKESPEARE, HENRY V, V: II, WORDS OF QUEEN ISABEL
HISTORIANS READING the same documents have drawn widely differing conclusions about the nature of Isabeau’s queenship. For some she is a powerful figure, while for others she is essentially superfluous. But the documents only appear to offer conflicting information, I argue in this chapter, becoming coherent when we reassess how the queen’s role was understood by the queen herself and by her contemporaries. However, such a reassessment cannot be straightforward. Although treatises dealing directly with female regency or indirectly with the subject through discussions of sovereignty and kingship would proliferate in the sixteenth century, during Isabeau’s lifetime the phenomenon had not yet been systematically analyzed, and therefore it is difficult to reconstruct how the institution was understood. In researching Isabeau’s role, we are forced to rely on more indirect evidence than is the case for later female regents.
The interdisciplinary study of medieval and early modern queenship offers a framework for considering Isabeau’s role. Rereading primary sources in the light of perspectives derived from a number of disciplines, including literary criticism, history, anthropology, art history, and feminist studies, scholars have developed one concept in particular that helps to order the conflicting views over the extent and nature of Isabeau’s power: that of the mediator queen. The mediator queen’s activity has been characterized by Louise Olga Fra-denburg as “interstitial,” meaning that it is carried out between groups or factions.1 The French word for mediator, moyeneresse, used by Isabeau’s contemporary Christine de Pizan (1365–ca. 1431) to refer to the role of the princess, was current during Isabeau’s lifetime. The moyeneresse is a facilitator, both central and marginal to institutionalized authority, both powerful and dependent.2 The Latin term for mediator, mediatrix, of course, was common as well, and referred principally to the role of the Virgin as an advocate on behalf of the people before God.
Understood as a mediator queen, Isabeau emerges from the primary sources as an astute and discreet occupant of an “interstitial position” who worked primarily behind the scenes to safeguard the throne against the factions vying for power. In the first part of this chapter, I define the mediator queen in its general outlines. I then consider more specifically how the role was realized during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, drawing on the theories offered by Christine de Pizan in her Livre des trois vertus and testing her notions against examples of real women who acted as mediators. In the second half of the chapter, I explore Isabeau’s career within the framework of the mediator queen. As I noted in chapter two, Isabeau is never treated as part of the contingent of female regents in early modern treatises on the subject, nor has her queenship been handled in this context in modern scholarship. True, her office was more restricted than that of any of the later female regents because Charles VI reassumed power whenever he was sane. Yet, given that the role of mediator queen would be given a juridical basis by the Salic Law, which regarded women as the safest regents because they were legally excluded from the throne, Isabeau’s career should be seen as part of that longer history.
The Mediator Queen
A discussion of the mediator queen must begin with Marion Facinger’s 1968 article “A Study of Medieval Queenship,” which famously posits a diminution of the French queen’s power after Adelaide of Maurienne (1092–1154). For Facinger, Adelaide’s reign “marks the high and turning point” of the concept of queen as consocia. Subsequent queens are progressively separated from power. The three queens of Philip Augustus (1165–1223), writes Facinger, were ancillae rather than consociae, a conclusion based on an examination of how often queens are mentioned in royal charters.3 The transformation occurred, Facinger contends, because as “the kingdom was consolidated and its organization became more complex, as royal authority was fortified and extended, so political power came to be centered more and more in the person of the king.”4 In the same way that “other rivals to the prime authority of the king had been skillfully atrophied by bureaucratic manipulation,” the queen’s office declined from “definition as partnership into a status which was largely honorific.”5 Not that the role was insignificant. A queen who “could make her will felt only through behind-the-scene machination,” as Facinger describes it, could nonetheless lobby effectively on behalf of supplicants.6 Paul Strohm argues that it is difficult to see the role of mediator queen as a source of power because it required “female subordination and self-marginalization,” but it is also true that the role occupied a prominent spot in the medieval imaginary, and it is therefore worth investigating the type of authority it implied.7
While it is generally agreed that by the end of the twelfth century the queen served what was primarily a mediatory function, as opposed to participating directly in the politics of the kingdom, Facinger’s work has been challenged and refined by scholars raising the example of such active queens as Blanche of Castile (1188–1253), whose reign followed that of Philip Augustus.8 Blanche does indeed appear to be an anomaly when plugged into a paradigm of diminishing power. But I believe that her role in fact was prepared by the reorganization of government under Philip Augustus if we look more generally at the results of that process. The growing complexity of royal authority was accompanied by the augmentation of the personal power of the king, as Facinger writes. The great magnates of the realm lost power relative to Philip, excluded from his inner circle. However, the king assembled a new sort of advisor around himself, as John W. Baldwin explains, instigating the shift on his return from the crusade in 1191. The greatest barons of Philip’s realm remained in the Holy Land when he returned, ill, to France, and, free of them, he gathered around him a crew of familiars of modest station.9 “Being dependant on royal favor for their positions,” writes Baldwin, “these new men were more congenial, reliable, and effective than the former barons.”10
This change in perspective on close advisors, I suggest, created a new space for the queen. I am not suggesting that Philip himself viewed his queens as anything like “new men.” Philip’s problematic attitudes toward his queens are well-known: he tried unsuccessfully to divorce his first wife, Isabelle of Hainaut, after falling out with her family, the Counts of Flanders; after rejecting his second wife, Ingeborg, on their wedding night for reasons unknown, he had her removed from court where she remained while he took his third wife, Agnès de Méran, in a marriage that was not sanctioned by the church.11 There is no evidence to suggest that Philip treated Agnès as a political advisor. After she died in 1201, he never married again.
However, I would suggest that in the decision to create a small close circle of advisors that excluded magnates in favor of loyal dependents, that is, men without power of their own who therefore were not rivals, Philip also opened up a way of envisioning the queen’s role for subsequent rulers. Philip’s son, Louis VIII, regarded his wife, Blanche of Castile, as a close and utterly loyal advisor. Fully engaged in politics, she played an integral role in Louis VIII’s attempt to assume the throne of England with the aid of a cohort of rebellious English barons in 1216, an operation that his father, reigning King Philip, did not support. Just before his premature demise in 1226, Louis chose Blanche as guardian for his children and administrator of the kingdom, in preference to his half-brother, Philip Hurepel, until his son Louis IX was of an age to rule alone.12 On his deathbed Louis VIII ordered “quod filius eius, qui ei in regno succederet, cum ipso regno et pueris ipsius aliis es-sent sub ballo sive tutela karissime domine nostre B[iancae] regine genitoris eorum, donec ad etatem legitimam pervenirent” (that his son, who would succeed him in the realm, with that realm and his other sons, would be under the care and guardianship of our dearest Lady Queen Blanche, their mother, until they came to the age of majority).13
Yet, as Miriam Shadis notes, royal charters from Louis’ reign (1223–26) make no mention of Blanche.14 If one read only these, one would be left with the inaccurate impression that she was inactive.15 Thus this case suggests that a queen’s activity or passivity cannot be measured by how frequently she appears in the royal documents. Like Philip Augustus’s new men, the queen, entirely dependent on the king, was potentially his most trusted advisor because her welfare was inextricably tied to his. Of course, dependent roles were subject to the whims of the king, and he could abolish them if he wished. Philip III (1245–85) named not his wife but his brother, Pierre Count of Alençon, tutor and defender of the realm should he die before his son reached majority.16 But as we saw in chapter two, Philip III’s son, Philip IV the Fair, named his queen, Jeanne of Navarre, administrator of the realm and tutor of the children should he die before his oldest son was of age. Philip VI’s queen, Jeanne of Burgundy, assumed regency of the realm for him while he was at war.17 Charles V gave his wife precedence over all others as guardian should he die before his son reached majority.18 It is not surprising, then, that Charles VI should have called on Isabeau to represent him during his “absences.”
The notion of the king’s consort as his most reliable advisor because of her very dependence, I believe, is an important step in the development of the mediator queen. But to this must be added the effects of the burgeoning Mariology of the twelfth century.19 John Carmi Parsons observes that the “rapid expansion of royal bureaucracy that distanced the king from his subjects and his consort from the conduct of routine official” took place simultaneously with “the full flowering of devotion to the Queen of Heaven as intercessor.”20 Association with the Virgin allowed a crucial element of the queen’s role to be articulated and reinforced: that of intercessor between the king and the people, and, moreover, the earthly queen was glorified by her association with her divine prototype.21
Still, even if the queen was associated with the Virgin, the ultimate mediator, she was subject to the same limits that constrained all women. She was responsible for negotiating peace but not endowed with the power to enforce the agreements she negotiated. Her role was therefore paradoxical, perpetually arousing expectations whose fulfillment she was unable to guarantee. She needed to be extremely clever, capable of convincing those with real power to accord her requests. The biblical Queen Esther seems to have served real-life queens as a model of intelligent mediation. At the same time, Esther taught the people how to imagine their queen. The coronation ordo of the queens of France features Esther’s name prominently, first in a prayer intoned at the entrance to the Church, where biblical heroines, including Judith, along with the Virgin Mary are invoked. Second, she appears in a prayer, uttered at the moment of the coronation:
Ineffabilem misericordiam tuam supplices exoramus, ut sicut Hester reginam Israelis causa salutis de captivitatis sue compede solutam ad Regis Assueri thalamum regnique sui consortium transire fecisti. Ita hanc famulam tuam N. humilitatis nostre benedictione christiane plebis gracia salutis ad dignam, sublimemque copulam Regis nostri misericorditer transire concedas.
[We humbly beseech your ineffable mercy, as you made Queen Esther go toward the bed of the King Ahasuerus and partnership of his reign in order to loosen the chains of the Israelites for the sake of their salvation from captivity, in your mercy let this little woman of yours, with the blessing of our humility and the grace of salvation of the Christian people, enter into worthy and sublime union with our king.]22
Christian Mérindol has pointed out that in one pane of the Sainte-Chapelle, Esther is depicted just above Blanche of Castile and Marguerite of Provence.23 Lois L. Huneycutt writes that Durand of Champagne promoted Esther as an exemplum for Jeanne of Champagne, queen of Philip the Fair, assuring the queen that “Esther’s beauty of form was overshadowed by the beauty of her virtues.” Huneycutt also notes that Jeanne was proclaimed a “second Esther” by partisans against the thirteenth-century Languedocian Inquisition in an attempt to garner her sympathy.24 Christine de Pizan devotes chapter II.32.I of the Cité de dames to Esther, presenting her as a model of a queen who saved her people.
This biblical queen’s aptness as a model for medieval queens is explained by Susan Zaeske, who assesses Esther’s rhetorical success:
Esther is the only speaker in the book who achieves unqualified success, and her speech is given the greatest attention. She does not confront the king directly; rather, her tone is ingratiating, her stance is supplicatory, and her preferred rhetorical form is that of petition. She speaks only at the invitation of the king, and on each occasion gains power by submitting to his authority. When the king offers a grandiose invitation to the queen to make a petition, an invitation that flaunts his power (“What troubles you, Queen Esther, and what is your request? Be it as great as half the kingdom, it shall be granted to you”
[Esther 5:1–2]), Esther responds with contrasting humility. Her deferential rejoinders feature conditional subjunctive phrases such as “should it so please the king” (5:3) and “if I have found favor in the king’s eyes, and should it please the king to grant my wish and to fulfill my request” (5:8).25
Esther’s humility paradoxically redounded to her advantage. Clever manipulator of her own image, the queen achieved her desired effect while remaining within the model of inferiority demanded of her. Zaeske concludes that the book of Esther “teaches that direct, resistant rhetoric is ineffective, even dangerous, while clever, indirect, nonconfrontational methods will succeed in gaining the desired end—power.”26 As Strohm rightly stresses, the role of the queen was in fact more complex than thirteenth- and fourteenth-century commentaries in praise of the ideal indicate. Both the Virgin Mary and Esther embody “undeniable trappings of regality, not only symbolic power as epitomized through ceremony and splendid array, but access to practical wisdom and the worldly authority to enforce its dictates” in addition to compassion and docility.27
The clever queen, then, was an important force for peace and unity. In his history of Louis IX, Joinville explains that it was on his wife’s behalf that Saint Louis made peace with Henry III of England against the wishes of his Royal Council. Louis observed that although he was perfectly well aware that the King of England had no right to any land in France, he, Louis, would nonetheless yield to him because the wives of the two kings were sisters: “Car nous avons dous serours à femmes et sont nostre enfant germain, par quoy il affiert bien que paiz y soit” (because we have two sisters for wives and our children are cousins, for which reasons it is fitting that there be peace).28
It is important, however, to remember that the queen might come up against obstacles that even the cleverest of women could not master. Besides serving as a mediator between the king and the people in a literal sense, the mediator queen united two families in her own person. Personifying an alliance was a tricky proposition, because if in the eyes of the family from which a princess issued, she represented the inside contact in the midst of new allies, she also represented the “outsider” for her married family. Describing the hazards of incarnating an alliance, Fradenburg has written, “queens embody the unity of nation or people or land, or they embody the forces that might tear that unity to pieces.”29
A queen faced danger from all sides, including her own family. A princess’ parents did not send her to a different land to be absorbed without a trace into a foreign culture; they expected something in return for their investment. The princess was to represent her family’s interests in her new home. But this was not an easy charge for what was often a very young stranger in a strange land, especially one in an inherently dependent position. Bethany Aram’s study of Juana of Castile describes the reaction of the young woman’s family when she failed to carry out her responsibilities to her own people after she left her native Spain for the Burgundian court: “The household that Archduke Philippe appointed for his bride governed her so successfully that Juana’s parents soon began to question her piety and loyalty to their interests.”30
The princess also served as the focus for any hostility that her married family might eventually bear toward her birth family. Philip Augustus married Isabelle of Hainaut specifically to create a counterbalance to the dominance at court of his mother’s Champenois relatives. But when Isabelle’s father, Baldwin V of Hainaut, became a problem for Philip, he attacked Baldwin by threatening to divorce his young wife.31 Another stark example of the princess as target of aggression aimed at her birth family can be seen in the fate of two of the daughters of Jean sans Peur when he fell from royal favor after having caused the Cabochian revolt. In 1415, Jean sent ambassadors to request that banishments of his followers handed down in response to the duke’s role in the Cabochian revolt be revoked and also that his daughter, Marguerite, married to dauphin, Louis of Guyenne, be allowed to return to the dauphin’s side. The young man, furious at his father-in-law, had banished Marguerite and taken a mistress from the Cassinel family, strong Orleans-Armagnac allies.32 Another of Jean sans Peur’s daughters, Catherine, bore the brunt of the anger directed against her father. Married to the son of Duke of Anjou in 1410 (although the marriage was never consummated), the girl was returned to her birth family as an insult to Jean after the Cabochian revolt.33
Theorizing the Role: Christine de Pizan
Information about how the mediator queen was imagined during the fifteenth century must for the most part be gleaned here and there from texts that offer limited clues for sustained discussion of the role dates only from the sixteenth century. Christine de Pizan’s “handbook” for female behavior, the Trois vertus, however, offers rare insight into the role, as many scholars have noted. The liminal position of the princess described in the Trois vertus highlights the constraints faced by women as they negotiated their positions. The book also defines very clearly the different facets of the role.
The primary task that Christine assigns women in the political world is that of intercession; the people will come to the princess asking her to right her husband’s wrongs.
Si avendra aucunes fois par aventure que le dit prince par mauvais conseil ou pour aucune cause vouldra grever son peuple d’aucune charge, par quoy les subgiéz, qui sentiront leur dame pleine de bonté, de pitié et de charité, venront vers elle et tres humblement la supplieront que il lui plaise estre pour eulx vers le prince, car ilz sont povres et ne pourroient sans trop grant grief ou estre desers, souffire a tel finance.
[Thus it will happen sometimes that the prince, heeding bad advice, or for some other reason will want to burden his people with a tax. For this reason, the subjects, who feel their lady to be full of goodness, pity, and charity, will go to her and beg her humbly, if it pleases her, to go to the prince on their behalf, because they are poor and could not bear the burden of such a tax without great trouble or ruin.]34
In these cases, the mediating princess will tell the people that she will be their good friend “en la peticion que ilz demandent et en toutes aultres choses de son pouoir” (in the petition that they are requesting and in all other things in her power), but she will also remind them that they “soyent loyaulx et bons obeissans a son dit seigneur” (should be loyal and obedient to their lord).35
In addition to this role, the princess, force for peace, works to temper impulsive male reactions. When war threatens her country, writes Christine, the task of the princess is “d’estre moyenne de paix et de concorde, et de travailler que guerre soit eschivee pour les inconveniens qui avenir en peuent” (to be the means of peace and harmony, and to work to avoid war because of the trouble that can arise from it).36 Women are by nature peacemakers, while men, strong and hastily aroused to battle, fail to think of the consequences of their actions: “Mais nature de femme est plus paoureuse et aussi de plus doulce condicion, et pour ce, se elle veult et elle est saige, estre peut le meilleur moyen a pacifier l’omme, qui soit.” (But women are by nature more fearful and also of sweeter disposition, and for this reason, if they so wish and if they are wise, they can be the best means there is of pacifying men.)37 Thus when violence threatens, the princess will mediate between the prince and warring lords,
disant que le mesfait est moult grant et que a bonne cause en est le prince indignéz, et que s’entente est de s’en vengier si comme il est raison, mais nonpourtant elle, qui vouldroit tousjours le bien de paix, ou cas que ilz se vouldroient amender ou en faire amande convenable, mettroit voulen-tiers peine d’essaier, se pacifier les pourroit vers son seigneur.
[saying that the misdeed was very serious and that with good cause the prince is angry about it, and that he intends to avenge himself for it as is right; nonetheless she, who would always want the good of peace, if they would like to make amends or make suitable reparations, would happily make an effort to try to find a way to pacify her husband.]38
But how will the princess wield influence? Here Christine treats the contradiction Strohm addresses in his discussion of the figures of Mary and Esther in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century literature of how the compassionate, maternal, and peace-loving mediator forces compliance. The scenarios that Christine describes in the Trois vertus reflect Isabeau’s position on the governing council as of 1402. The problem for the queen was that she could not force the rivals to maintain peaceful relations. Christine acknowledges that the mediatory role assigned to women is mapped onto a hierarchy of the genders that allows men to ignore their advice if they choose. To overcome this problem, the poet coaches her readers to act carefully and cleverly, with diplomatically expressed recommendations. The primary quality of the successful mediating princess is cleverness. Despite the traditional association of women with the body and men with rationality, women according to Christine represent measure and intelligence as opposed to unthinkingly emotional men. She writes that “les hommes sont par nature plus courageux et plus chaulx, et le grant desir que ilz ont d’eulx vengier ne leur laisse aviser les perilz ne les maulx qui avenir en peuent” (men are by nature hardier and hotter, and the great desire they have to avenge themselves does not allow them to think in advance about the dangers and evils that might come from this).39 The mediating princess will attempt
par bel et par doulceur de l’attraire a soy, et s’elle cognoist que ce soit le meilleur de lui en dire quelque chose, elle lui en touchera a part, doul-cement et benignement. Une fois l’amonnestera par devocion, autres foiz part pitié qu’il doit avoir d’elle, autres foiz en riant comme se elle jouast.
[through cheer and sweetness to attract him to her point of view, and if she recognizes that she needs to tell him something, she will bring it up when they are alone, sweetly and gently. Sometimes she will urge him because of the devotion he owes her, sometimes by his pity for her, other times laughing as if she is playing.]40
She will maintain her cheerful demeanor and dignity even when she fails to achieve the result she seeks; when she is abused by those in power, she will remain impassive. When
elle aperçoive et sache que aucun ou aucunes personnes poissans ne lui vueillent point de bien et l’ai en male grace, et qui lui nuiroient s’ilz pouoient et l’esloigneroit de l’amour et de la grace de son seigneur …ou la mettroient par leurs faux rapors mal des barons, des subgiéz ou du peuple, elle ne fera de ce nul semblant que s’en aperçoive, ne que les repute ne tiengne ses anemis
[she realizes that some powerful person or persons do not wish her well and hold her in bad grace, and that if they could they would hurt her and damage her relationship with her husband…or who would through false reports put her in a bad light with the barons, the subjects, or the people, she will not show that she notices, nor that she considers them her enemies.]41
Beyond acting as an intercessor, the mediating princess must also be ready to step in for her husband in the event that he predecease her. In the Trois vertus, Christine explains that the job of keeping the barons in line will fall to the widowed princess if her son is too young to do so. She will depend upon her wisdom to do this: “le convient il qu’elle employe sa prudence et son savoir pour les mettre et tenir en paix” (she needs to use her prudence and knowledge to bring about and maintain peace).42 Christine had earlier proposed that woman could take on roles normally fulfilled by men when a man was lacking through her own example. In the Mutacion de la fortune, she describes herself metamorphosing into a man to take care of her family when her own husband dies.43
To justify the assumption of power in the case of the death of a husband, Christine refers to the Virgin, whom she regards not only as an intercessor but also as a coruler with her son.44 In the Cité des dames, the poet depicts the allegorical figure Justice welcoming the Virgin as ruler of the City of Ladies by pronouncing her second only to her son, as “celle qui est non pas seulement leur royne, mais qui a dominacion et seigneurie sur toutes puissances creés apres un seul filz que elle porta et conceut du Saint Esperit qui est Filz de Dieu le Pere” (she who is not only their queen, but who has dominion and administration, after her only son whom she carried and conceived through the Holy Spirit, and who is the son of God the Father).45 Earl Jeffrey Richards has observed that Christine presents
implicitement la Vierge comme un modèle de pouvoir féminin en mettant en parallèle la regalitas de la Reine des Cieux avec la regalitas de la reine de France, précisément au moment où les questions de la régence et de la succession féminines au trône arrivent au premier plan de l’actualité politique.
[the Virgin implicitly as a model of feminine power, by drawing a parallel between the regalitas of the queen of Heavens and the regalitas of the queen of France, exactly at the time when questions of feminine regency and succession to the throne were in the forefront of political activity.]46
Historical Examples of Mediating Princesses
Christine’s theory of the princess as moyeneresse de paix was grounded in practical reality. Powerful women took part in negotiating peace, just as she describes. A corps of professional mediators developed during the Middle Ages who carried out detailed negotiations between adversaries.47 Still, the process of creating peace retained significant ritualistic and personal elements.
Perhaps the most renowned image of queenly intercession is that of Philippa, Queen of England, kneeling before Edward III to entreat him to spare the bourgeois of Calais in 1347.48 Shortly after this episode, in 1355, Jeanne of Evreux and Blanche of Navarre, aunt and sister of Charles le Mauvais, helped the French and English avoid war by procuring a pardon for their rebellious relative.49 Charles had just struck an alliance with Edward III of England, who was ready to invade France. Jeanne and Blanche hurried to Paris, where they successfully pleaded with King Jean le Bon to forgive Charles if he would allow his lands to be confiscated. Another example of mediation is recorded by Pintoin, who writes that in 1391, Duchess of Brittany, Jeanne of Navarre, daughter of Charles le Mauvais and future wife of Henry IV of England (but at the time married to Duke Jean of Brittany), saved from certain imprisonment a group of French ambassadors sent by the king of France to deal with her husband. Getting wind of the Duke of Brittany’s plans to lock up the ambassadors, the Duchess of Brittany’s brother begged her to intervene with her husband on behalf of the ambassadors. The venerable duchess agreed to intervene for the sake of peace and concord (pro pace et concordia).50 Although pregnant and nearing delivery (or perhaps deliberately using the maternal impression created by pregnancy to her advantage), the duchess took her children in her arms and supplicated her husband not to alienate the King of France. Her prayers were efficacious (“Preces vallide fuerent efficaces”). Strohm compares Jeanne to Philippa, writing: “As in the paradigmatic precedent of Philippa’s plea before Edward III for the burghers of Calais, she appears adventitiously…. She intervenes at a time when all hope of conciliation seems to have evaporated, and her fragile femininity and maternal self-abnegation are emphasized.”51 Likewise, as in Philippa’s intervention, Strohm continues, “she has the merit of recommending a course of action the duke probably wishes upon sober consideration to adopt, but could not adopt without running the risk of seeming changeable and hence unmanly.”
Another example is offered by Froissart. In 1392, when the royal uncles reasserted control of the government at the onset of Charles’s mental illness, they threatened one of the marmousets, Bureau de la Rivière, with death. Fortunately for him, his aunt, the young Duchess of Berry, intervened, imploring her husband, Jean of Berry, to save his life. Froissart concocts a long plea for the duchess, replete with exclamations of sorrow and “vous prie humblement.”52 He then reports that the Duke of Berry was affected: before the pleas of his wife “amolioit grandement son cuer qu’il avoit dur et auster sur le seigneur de la Rivière” (his heart, which had been hard and unyielding toward the Seigneur de la Rivière, softened greatly).53
Le Fèvre de Rémy describes another act of mediation, this time by the Duchess of Bourbon. “Au mois de mars [1411], à la prière et requête de la duchesse de Bourbon, fille du duc de Berry, fut, par le duc d’Orléans, le seigneur de Croy mis à plaine deliverance de la prison où il avoit longement esté.” (In the month of March [1411], at the prayer and request of the Duchess of Bourbon, daughter of the Duke of Berry, the Seigneur de Croy was released from the prison where he had been long held by the Duke of Orleans.)54
Another royal female intercessor is described by the chronicler the Bourgeois of Paris. In April 1435, just after Easter, he depicts “les demoiselles et les bourgeoises of Paris” accosting the Duchess of Bedford to beg her to restore peace in the kingdom. According to the Bourgeois, the result of their request was the Congress of Arras.55
Still another example is offered by Isabelle of Portugal, who intervened in a dispute between an “ecuyer de cuisine du comte de Charolais, Jean d’Ostende,” and the city of Lille. He had just been elected the roi de l’Epinette, which mean that he was obligated to offer banquets and jousts during that fifteen-day festival. Those elected roi de l’Epinette often fled, for fear of being ruined by the exorbitant cost of the banquets. For this reason the town elders forbade Jean’s leaving the city. He was then imprisoned, until Isabelle intervened on his behalf.56
In a final example, Philip of Cleves, angered by Charles VIII’s Peace of Frankfurt, sent his wife to the king to beg the king’s support: “Le dit Messire Philippe de Clèves envoya Madame sa femme qui lors estoit fort belle, jeune et tendre, devers le roy de France, pour avoir secours de gens et d’argent.” (The said Monsieur Philip of Cleves sent Madame his wife who then was very beautiful, young, and tender, to the King of France to ask for help for the people and money.) The reaction of Charles VIII serves as a final comment on the efficaciousness as well as hazards of female meditation: although the king promised much, he broke his promise (“il faillit à sa promesse”).57
The process of negotiating peace involved, as Catherine Bell has written of ritual more generally, “restricted codes of communication to heighten the formality of movement and speech; distinct and specialized personnel; objects, texts, and dress designated for use in these activities alone; verbal and gestural combinations that evoke or purport to be the ways things have always been done.”58 Although the restoration of harmony is always accompanied by ritual to some degree, these aspects of the peace process become especially important, writes Paul Hyams, during periods when violence is frequent. Truces must be acted out and peace restored through performance. “Durable peace, like good justice,” he explains, “must be made manifest.
The exchange of very visible symbols through ritual acts engaged the local community as spectators and witnesses. Peer pressure remained an important incentive for the keeping of promises. The minimum ritual act was probably the classic kiss of peace, whose meaning must have been universally recognized and so probably formed part even of settlements that do not mention it. Among much else, the kiss is, of course, a marvelous emblem of shared vulnerability and hence an earnest sign of a positive, mutually supportive relationship. This kiss on its own takes us beyond the merely negative function that provides for a simple cessation of hostilities toward a renewal of love and friendship. But the form peace settlements take is worth record and remembrance only toward the creation of a new more positive relation between the parties.59
To a certain extent, the queen’s association with peacemaking arose from the medieval tendency to consider females the more pacific sex. Socially prominent women often acted as mediators in disputes, arbitrating between two adversarial parties, in both unofficial and official capacities. Nicolas Offenstadt describes the mixture of practical negotiation and rite that characterized female interventions. Women helped to reestablish harmony “par des gestes et des paroles bien spécifiés; modes façonnés par la propension de leur sexe—de leur genre— à faire la paix mieux que les hommes” (with carefully specified gestures and words; modes fashioned by the propensity of their sex—of their gender—to make peace better than men). Still, he continues, “actes, rites et discours s’entremêlent sans cesse sans qu’il soit possible—ni qu’il faille—faire la part des choses” (acts, rites, and discourse weave themselves together endlessly without the possibility or necessity of separating them from one another).60
Anthropological discussion of the importance of the marginal in certain rituals suggests a further reason that queens might have been important to reestablishing peace. In particular, Victor Turner’s discussion of “liminal” beings with their peculiar aptness for reflecting—and causing reflection on—social structures sheds light on the inverse relationship between the medieval queen’s actual power and her significance as mediator. Liminal beings fall both inside and outside of a given system. “Neither here nor there,” Turner writes, “they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.”61 Because they straddle different worlds, liminal figures efface social divisions and are thus capable of generating social unity, summoning a mythological past, or as Turner describes it, reaffirming “a generalized social bond that has ceased to be and has simultaneously yet to be fragmented into a multiplicity of structural ties.” Cultural forms arising in connection with liminal beings thus permit “periodical reclassifications of reality and man’s relationship to society, nature, and culture.”62 Physically close to the king, but occupying a different universe, the queen served as nexus between him and others, and she often symbolized the possibility of social cohesion.63
The example of Isabelle of Portugal, politically active duchess of Duke Philip the Good, demonstrates that highly placed women were involved in peacemaking at the level of negotiating the terms of treaties, while also serving a ritualistic function. The duchess was involved in negotiations in a congress of 1439.64 However, it is interesting to note that she was also given credit for helping to insure peace in a situation where she served a purely honorary function. Martin Le Franc credits her in the Champion de Dames with bringing about the end of the war between the French and the English at the Congress of Arras. Isabelle did indeed attend the congress, but she played no role in those particular peace negotiations.65 As Monique Sommé points out, Charles VII likewise credits the duchess with effecting peace in a letter of December 1435, in which he assigns her a pension of 4,000 livres tournois, “en faveur de ce qu’elle a tenu la main a la paix et reunion de nostredit frere et cousin avecques nous et s’i est grandement emploiee” (because she extended her hand to the peace and reunion between our brother and cousin and us and worked very hard at it). That she was so lauded by Le Franc and Charles VII suggests that her very presence was regarded as important to the peace process. The ritualistic element of the queen’s involvement in peacemaking, thus, does not deny the practicality or the seriousness of the role she might play. As Offenstadt writes, “La ritualité de l’intercession pacificatrice décrite à loisir par les chroniqueurs ne s’oppose en rien à une action déterminée, en profondeur. L’engagement des femmes pour la paix se caractérise en effet par la persévérance et le labeur, s’inscrivant par là dans une règle plus générale de l’intervention diplomatique.” (The ritual of pacifying intercession described by the chroniclers is not incompatible with determined and profound action. Women’s engagement for peace is characterized by perseverance and hard work, in line with more general diplomatic intervention.)66
Beyond the crucial roles of restoring peace and interceding on behalf of others, the mediating queen might substitute herself for her husband, acting as coruler, when he was absent. This is the situation that Christine de Pizan describes. That a woman might fill in when a male is lacking is an old and venerable concept, existing in customary law. For example, in a letter of 1164 to Louis VII, a knight refuses to appear before the Viscountess of Narbonne, basing his case on Roman Law, which specifies that a woman cannot act as a judge. However, Louis replies that “lorsque le sexe fort fait défaut, il est permis à une femme d’administrer l’héritage” (when there is no member of the strong sex, it is permissible that a woman administer the heritage).67 Blanche of Castile was the most revered example of a coruler of the Middle Ages, but Jeanne of Burgundy also substituted for King Philip VI while he was occupied with war. Other prominent rulers in their husband’s stead were Jean sans Peur’s wife, Marguerite of Bavaria, who looked after his Flemish territories when he was absent, and Philip the Good’s wife, Isabelle of Portugal.
Isabeau Mediatrix
It is now time to consider Isabeau’s career against the paradigm of the mediator queen. The role was a flexible one, its contours dependent on its embodiment in a real situation. Isabeau’s queenship has long been deemed a failure. She was often required to serve as a mediator, literally, between warring factions, and, because she was unable to halt the feuding, she has been judged to have been incompetent in politics, ineffectual in her role. Besides incompetent, she has been perceived as fickle, opportunistically changing sides. Although Alfred Coville published his work on the Cabochian revolt in 1888, the assessment of Isabeau that he presents therein influenced and continues to influence the queen’s reputation.
Isabelle était incapable de guérir le royaume. Elle tenta à plusieurs reprises de rétablir l’accord entre les ducs; mais, au fond, elle eut longtemps une préférence marquée pour le parti des Orléanais. En janvier 1403, elle réussit à faire signer aux deux ducs Philippe de Bourgogne et Louis d’Orléans un traité de réconciliation; au début de 1405, elle acceptait l’amitié de Jean sans Peur; ces démonstrations ne pouvaient être sincères.
[Isabeau was incapable of healing the kingdom. She tried several times to re-establish peace between the dukes, but, at heart, she long bore a marked preference for the Orleanist party. In January 1403, she managed to get the two dukes, Philip of Burgundy and Louis of Orleans, to sign a treaty of reconciliation; at the beginning of 1405, she accepted a friendship with Jean sans Peur; these demonstrations could not have been sincere.]68
Because the image of the queen as incompetent and divisive has been so enduring, I begin this half of the chapter by demonstrating that recent scholarship on feuding requires that we revise this anachronistic perception. I then examine the royal ordinances defining Isabeau’s role to define the role she was assigned as closely as possible and consider some of the iconography and symbolism through which Isabeau and her contemporaries articulated her role as mediator. I hope to insert Isabeau’s career into the tradition of queenly regents.
Coville’s negative evaluation of the queen presupposes that the Armagnac-Burgundian conflict—which began about 1398 with the territorial rivalry between Philip of Burgundy and his nephew Louis of Orleans, assumed the shape of a vendetta with the assassination of Louis of Orleans followed by the revenge assassination of Jean sans Peur in 1419, and dissipated in 1435 when the Treaty of Arras made allies of the Burgundians and Charles VII against the English—was in some way an aberrant phenomenon susceptible of being halted by a competent arbitrator. More specifically, it presupposes that this conflict was limited primarily to two individuals, whose agreement to an accord would actually end the fighting. Furthermore, it assumes that switching sides—the symptom that motivates Coville’s negative assessment—was not the norm among the fifteenth-century French aristocrats involved in dispute. However, none of these assumptions can be applied to feuding in general or to the Armagnac-Burgundian feud in particular.
Regarding the first assumption, that feuding was an aberration easily controlled by competent mediation, recent scholarship suggests that the process was not only endemic to but in fact inseparable from medieval political life: indeed, fifteenth-century French society was structured by feuding. The practice, Stuart Carroll has observed, was “integral to the conduct of politics in early modern France because it was one of the key forms of competition for power, a mechanism by which the struggle for dominance was played out.”69 Feuding aims to settle specific conflicts that cannot be resolved through legal channels. Guy Halsall explains that it occurs “between groups of roughly equal socio-political power, where there is no ‘higher’ political authority which is capable of ending the dispute, either through the participants’ mutual acceptance of its right to arbitrate, or through its ability to stamp out the dispute forcibly.”70 A claimant challenged, so to speak, with an act of violence. The victim of the violence responded to prevent the result sought by the instigator. But although a feud was composed of a series of violent acts, when it finally came to an end, the reconciliation was intended to settle the issue that had provoked the initial attack. Explaining the dynamic of the process, Halsall writes: “Killings create a ‘debt’ paid off by retaliatory violence, only to place the other side in the position of debtors. Although a group is justified in exacting revenge for a previous attack, their retaliation does not end the conflict; it merely justifies the other side’s next blow. Thus a ‘true’ feud is terminated with difficulty, and never through violence (unless one group exterminates the other).”71
It has been suggested that feuding did not exist in fifteenth-century France. Recent criticism, however, disputes this view. Howard Kaminksy has observed that, because of the French king’s eventual monopolization of the right to violence, France traditionally has been considered to have followed a different path from that of feud-prone Germany on the way to political consolidation.72 However, he suggests that the difference between late medieval France and Germany is not as great as has long been believed. In Germany, he notes, the “governance of a king or territorial prince, like that of lesser lordships, had the primary function of preserving its subjects’ property rights; should it exceed these bounds, its armigerous noble subjects had not only the right but also the power to keep it in line. The medieval constitution of lordship, then, was manifest in feuds of noble subjects with each other and, in extreme cases, feuds of the subjects against the prince.”73 But the model applies to France, as well, Kaminsky states. “The key point here,” he writes, “passed over by statist historians, is that in medieval France (or indeed medieval anywhere) only a fraction of administrative, judicial and coercive authority over the people lay with a central government, what the historians call the Etat. For the overwhelming majority of people this authority was exercised by individuals or corporations holding lordship over them or otherwise possessing low, middle or high justice.”74 A lord who saw the property rights of his people violated had the duty to protect them; he attacked to provoke a change.
Seigneurial justice and royal justice were brought into “mutual accommodation” during the early modern period, but if the late medieval right to feud was “engaged” with, it was not “liquidated.”75 That the Armagnac-Burgundian conflict might have been resolved once and for all by a competent arbitrator receives further challenge from recent scholarship on “integrative factionalism,” that is, the tendency of individuals to group their own disputes around a central quarrel to bring about resolutions. Malcolm Vale notes that old injuries “could be and frequently were paid off by men sheltering beneath the Anglo-French conflict to justify their warlike behaviour towards their neighbours.”76 As Timur Pollack-Lagushenko writes of the particular configuration of the Armagnac-Burgundian conflict: “Two of the most powerful figures [Louis of Orleans and Jean sans Peur] in the kingdom refused to be reconciled and this animosity served as a constant around which individuals could arrange their own private interests.”77
This research disputes Coville’s notion that Isabeau could have brought an end to the Armagnac-Burgundian conflict had she been a competent mediator. Although this conflict was useful for structuring private disputes, the French nobility would have chosen another conflict around which to structure its individual quarrels had this one not existed. Isabeau staunched the feud at different points, but it re-emerged and continued under different forms, always carrying a set of other related quarrels within its penumbra. Isabeau could not have “healed the kingdom” because the malady was not a private dispute between two men. Rather, the malady was the way the kingdom resolved disputes related to property. Stephen D. White has written of feuding in twelfth-century France that “it is far from certain that these interlocking conflicts and struggles ever came to a truly definitive end.”78 The same must be said of early fifteenth-century France.
Finally, the charge that Isabeau worsened the conflict with her side-switching simply cannot be maintained. It has been well-documented that the French aristocracy supported whoever had the most to offer at any given time.79 If one looks at the loyalties of the major lords involved in the Armagnac-Burgundian conflict, it becomes clear that many of them changed sides at some point over the years: Charles d’Albret, Louis II Duke of Anjou, the Duke of Bar, the Duke of Berry, and Jean and Louis of Bourbon take their places alongside Isabeau for fickleness.80 The only true “loyalists” were those responsible for the feud in the first place. But even those most closely related to the faction leaders wavered. Antoine of Brabant faltered in his support of his brother, Jean sans Peur.81 Pollack-Lagushenko notes one might “interpret this data as a sign of the general treachery, inconstancy, and perpetual intrigue among the French aristocracy.” The problem with such an interpretation, however, is that “intrigue was itself the norm.”82
Had Isabeau clung to one or the other of the factions, by definition she would have been part of the feud. Her role, however, required her to rise above the factions, in an attempt to broker reconciliation. The situation changed during the second decade of the fifteenth century. As the factions grew larger and more warlike, she moved from attempting to reconcile the groups to encouraging one to crush the other.83 Thus she began to ally herself with a faction when such a move seemed likely to bring an end to the feud. But the notion of oscillating as an evil is quite simply an anachronism.
The Royal Ordinances
In what follows, I attempt to reconstruct the role that the king created for Isabeau in response to this conflict. The chronicles contribute little to our understanding of the queen’s role except to verify that she was perceived as a force for peace through their occasional mentions of her mediating activity. However, a close examination of the royal ordinances related to her role in the government illustrates how it developed. I argue that although it evolved through several phases, her role was always predicated on her possession of qualities perceived to be crucial to a mediator: she is motivated not by ambition for herself but by her desire to protect her family and the kingdom; she is peaceful; she is just. The queen’s first assignment is guardianship of the royal children. However, her role is later expanded to include the job of managing the feud between Louis of Orleans and Philip of Burgundy; she is imagined in the relevant ordinances as moyenne de paix et de concorde, as Christine de Pizan expresses it in the Trois vertus.84 From 1403, the queen begins to occupy the role of caretaker of the throne—coregent—during the king’s “absences.” Although I mention certain of the regency ordinances published after this date, I argue that they are not as significant as these early examples, for by 1403, her role had been established, and, for the rest of her career, until she proclaimed her right to govern in place of her mad husband in 1417, she adhered to the outlines set forth in these early ordinances.
The institution of regency inherited by Charles VI possessed few firm guidelines, for, despite a number of documents clearly intended to create precedent, his predecessors had always formed regencies to respond to the demands of the situations they faced.85 Still, in the first of his regency ordinances, Charles VI follows a model established by his father, Charles V. In ordinances of August and October 1374, Charles V had separated regency of the realm from tutelle, or guardianship of the dauphin, and assigned the tasks to different people. Regency went to Charles V’s brother Louis of Anjou, while tutelle of the dauphin was given to a college of guardians that included his queen (although in fact she predeceased him) and the king’s other brothers, Jean of Berry and Philip of Burgundy.86
At first glance, tutelle may seem far removed from politics. However, the physical possession of the dauphin potentially represented a strong claim to power. To make this point, in his ordinance of August 1374 Charles V tells the story of how an heir was once used to rouse the people to action (and Charles VI recounts the same story in his own ordinance of 1392). In the seventh century, four-month-old Chilperic, held aloft in the arms of his mother the queen, inspired the nobility to win a great victory. Having seen the child, Charles V’s ordinance concludes, the nobles were excited and moved to obedience and prompt service. Control of the dauphin was tantamount to control of the kingdom.87 Charles V, then, divides the equally important powers between two parties.
The reason for this division of power was that regents did not like to step aside when a minor king came of age, as history had shown, and, furthermore, Charles V seems to have assumed that his brothers would engage in interfamilial power struggles if they were not restrained by a system of checks and balances. However, the capacity of this dispersion of power to prevent strife was never tested. When the twelve-year-old Charles VI ascended the throne after his father’s death in 1380, Philip of Burgundy pushed Louis of Anjou from the regency. And yet, no conflict followed because the Duke of Burgundy was manifestly more adept at wielding power than his two brothers, who did not challenge his ascendancy.88 Louis of Anjou decamped to pursue his own interests in Naples, where he died in 1384, while Jean of Berry, occupied with his royal lieutenancy in Languedoc, left governance of the kingdom to Philip. Philip thus served as effective king of France until Charles VI finally declared his independence in 1388, at the age of twenty, requesting that his uncles leave his Royal Council.89
The situation was different in 1392. As we saw in chapter one, Louis of Orleans began his ascent when Charles VI unseated the royal uncles in 1388, activating rivalry between his brother and his uncle Philip of Burgundy, which became potentially dangerous when the king began to suffer from periodic episodes of madness. To prevent the realm from descending into end-less feuding in case of his death, Charles VI initially created regency ordinances that, like his father’s, divided power. He named a college of guardians for the royal children, headed by Isabeau and aided by the royal uncles.90 He left regency of the realm to Louis of Orleans.91 The ordinance of 1393 assigning Louis regency makes no mention of the intermittent regency necessitated by the king’s madness. Nonetheless, the duke claimed the right to rule when the king was indisposed on the basis of that ordinance.92 Although Philip attempted to push Louis aside, he failed to halt the young man’s rise to power.93 During the course of the 1390s, the power of the two rivals became evenly balanced, precisely the condition for feuding.
Thus the division of power did not prove effective, and the perilous situation that Charles had unwittingly created required him to reconceive regency. As Marie-Luise Heckmann has pointed out, three European models were available to the king. To summarize Heckmann, he could cede power intermittently to a college of counselors. Or he could renounce his office altogether, turning it over to a new ruler. Finally, he could retain his office, but create a Koadjutorium, a coregency, to aid him during his periods of madness. Charles chose the third solution. However, the very concept of core-gency suggested differing theoretical levels of power. At one extreme was full power of governance during the king’s absence. At the other was simply standing in, as a cipher, so to speak, making no real decisions.94 The first example of coregency as described by Heckmann is represented by the earliest arrangements designating Louis as regent with real power. But besides the obvious threat of warfare caused by the rivalry between Louis and Philip, Charles VI came to fear over the years that one or the other would reduce him to the status of ward, an intent of which his brother and the Burgundian dukes regularly accused each other.95 The king attempted to remedy the situation by creating a different type of coregency, one in which Isabeau would be key.
I believe that an examination of Charles’s regency ordinances of the first years of the fifteenth century leads to this conclusion. Two ordinances were passed in 1402, one of which designated the queen mediator between Louis and Philip, a role occupied by Charles when he was well, and the other of which, promulgated a few months later, named her Charles’s substitute on the Royal Council. With these the king gives Isabeau the authority necessary to protect his throne from his relatives, at least in theory.96 An ordinance of 1403 takes the process further, abolishing regency altogether. This ordinance proclaims that the heir to the throne, whatever his age, will take power immediately upon the king’s death. Regency as an institution vanishes; however, absent a regent, the queen mother would play a crucial role. Charles thus redistributes power in Isabeau’s favor, creating what amounts to a coregency for her.
To comprehend the nature of this coregency, it is important to notice that the ordinances creating it all emphasize the qualities compatible with the notion of a coregent as a representative of royal power, as opposed to a powerful regent ruling in his or her own name. The ordinance of 1393 had already justified Isabeau’s primacy in the tutelle of the dauphin with reference to her positive maternal qualities: “La mere a greigneur 97
That Isabeau was believed to possess the peaceful qualities foregrounded in this ordinance receives corroboration from Pintoin. He writes that when trouble brewed between Louis and Philip of Burgundy, the people called on Isabeau and the king’s uncle, Jean of Berry, to intercede. Months before the dispute that nearly came to blows in December 1401, the threat of armed conflict between Louis of Orleans and Philip of Burgundy frightened the people to the point that they requested intervention: “Regni principes videntes intestina hec odia amborum ducum nimis esse periculos … ducem Biturie et reginam reiteratis vicibus oraverunt, ut pro bono pacis medios se constituerent inter partes.” (The princes of the realm, seeing the hatred of the two dukes to be excessively dangerous … prayed the Duke of Berry and the queen several times to intervene between the parties in the interests of peace.)98 Isabeau mediated successfully upon that occasion.
Isabeau’s ability to appease is further emphasized by the ordinance of March 1402, which designated her official mediator between the king’s brother and uncle. An ordinance of July 1, 1402, reiterated her role as mediator but assigns her guardianship of the government during the king’s absences. Scholars have often regarded this ordinance as assigning real power to the queen. However, I believe that a serious transformation in her role occurs only with the ordinance abolishing regency of 1403.99 The ordinance of July 1, 1402, continues to envision the queen as an arbitrator, not a leader.
Several factors point to this conclusion. The ordinance assigns the queen power in the following terms: “Elle pourverra bien, tant de l’apaisement de nozdiz oncle de Bourgoingne et frère d’Orleans, comme au gouvernement de noz dictes finances et aux autres grans besoingnes de nostredit royaume jusques à ce que nous y pourrons entendre en nostre personne.” (She will provide for both the appeasing of our uncle of Burgundy and our brother of Orleans and the management of finances and other difficulties of the realm, until we can take care of them ourselves.)100 The wording of the document (tant de l’apaisement … comme au gouvernement) specifies that the two tasks to which the queen is assigned are of equal weight. Mediating quarrels and presiding over a Royal Council that is already functioning can reasonably be seen as similar tasks; regency over the kingdom would imply a much higher level of authority than mediation.
Second, the dukes’ combativeness during sessions of the Council and Isabeau’s new attempts to deal with it are verified by a comment of Pintoin. The monk remarks that after the July 1 ordinance was passed, Isabeau and the Dukes of Berry and Bourbon forced Philip and Louis to abstain from coming to meetings of the council until the king regained his senses, because their quarreling prevented business from being accomplished.101
Third, in contrast with other documents granting regency to different queens during the absence of the king, the ordinance of July 1 is not concerned with the details of Isabeau’s responsibilities. The lack of attention to the areas over which she will exercise authority suggests that she was viewed as a representative of the king rather than as a figure of authority with her own set of duties. One need only compare the ordinance of 1392 assigning Louis regency with that of 1402 outlining Isabeau’s task. In contrast to the former, which enumerates very precisely the items over which Louis will possess jurisdiction, the latter simply notes that Isabeau will watch over things until Charles returns.102 Also instructive is comparison of the ordinance of July 1, 1402, with one that clearly awarded specific regency powers to a queen. Called to war, Philip VI left his wife, Jeanne of Burgundy, in control of the kingdom.
Et encores donnons en mandement par ces présentes Lettres, à noz amez 103
Charles’s ordinance demonstrates the king’s confidence that the queen will carry on just as he would; he has no fear that she will do anything of which he would not approve. Governance of the realm was already being carried out by the Royal Council in the king’s absence; the Council existed precisely to conduct business, and Isabeau was there as a moderator to allow work to be accomplished.104
A fourth reason to question whether the ordinance of July 1402 awards Isabeau real power is that the chroniclers would have noted a shift in power had they perceived one, yet they make no mention of an augmentation in the queen’s powers. Instead, they continue to attribute governance of the realm to the dukes between 1402 and 1405. Indeed, Pintoin misunderstands what happens in the July 1 ordinance, claiming that one day when the Duke of Orleans was otherwise occupied, the king summoned his Council and asked them whom they most like to see in charge during his absences. Their reply: “The Duke of Burgundy.”105 After soliciting the opinion of his Council, the king supposedly transferred power from his brother to his uncle by letters patent. The chronicle of Cousinot serves as another witness that a good portion of his contemporaries continued to regard Louis as the real head of the government during the period Isabeau supposedly held the position, assuming that the Duke of Orleans, “par la voulonté et ordonnance du roi, lui occuppé de maladie, avoit prééminence et autorité éz faiz du roi, de la royne et de leurs enffans, et représentant le roy, tenit l’éstat royal en grande haultesse” (by the will of the king, who is sick, had preeminence and authority for the deeds of the king, the queen, and their children, representing the king, and kept the royal state in great dignity).106 Describing how a dispute of 1404 between the University of Paris and the Sire de Savoisy escalated to the point that a delegation from the university went seeking justice, Pintoin writes that they first presented their case to the queen, the princes, and especially the Duke of Orleans, who at the time had principal authority of the kingdom.107 If Isabeau had been acting as regent in 1402 this would not have escaped the notice of the chroniclers so completely.
Finally, most important, Isabeau sat on the Royal Council only when the king was absent. Her power cannot have been comparable to that of Philip and Louis, who sat there permanently. Because of the king’s health, the members of the Royal Council were the men of either Louis or Philip. Attached either to the House of Orleans or Burgundy by office or pension, the men of the Council presumably were amenable to arbitration by the queen, but they were loyal to their seigneurs.108 Moreover, the system of sénéchaux and baillis that extended royal power throughout the kingdom was in the hands of the dukes of Orleans and Burgundy. Entering into a government composed of men loyal to one of two leaders, Isabeau could only oversee what was already taking place and try to manage conflicts. She was not a major player, head of her own faction, like Louis or Philip.
To sum up this discussion of the development of Isabeau’s role to this point, I am suggesting that ordinances of 1402 designate her substitute for the king during his periods of madness. To continue the discussion of how her role evolved, I would like to argue against a common understanding of the relationship between the royal ordinances of 1402 and a new set promulgated in 1403. An ordinance of April 26, 1403, required that any decision Isabeau make be supported by a majority vote. Whereas the ordinance of July 1, 1402, says only that she will make decisions with the aid of anyone she pleases to call on, that of 1403 specified that decisions will be made “par la plus grant et saine partie des voix” (the greatest part of the votes).109
Many scholars believe Isabeau’s power to have been diminished by this ordinance. But a diminution of power assumes that Isabeau had exercised powers in 1402 that were taken from her in 1403. As I hope to have shown, however, her primary task was to mediate and preside over the Council. Thus there is no striking difference in her role before and after the ordinance of April 26. An ordinance of May 15 of the same year emphasizes once again the mediatory nature of the queen’s role. In this ordinance, the king notes regretfully that he has alienated portions of his domain during his “absences.” From now on, he orders that any gifts he might be inclined to give during his periods of incapacity must first be approved by the queen. The queen, Charles explains, is the person to whom “appartient garder le bien, prouffit de Nous 110 The role of queen, in Charles’s eyes, is to protect his kingdom when he cannot do so himself.
And yet, the ordinances of April 26, 1403, are truly significant, for one of them in effect withdraws the regency powers the king had assigned to Louis in 1393 in the case of a minority kingship. If the king died, the kingdom would have no regent. Rather, the new king would succeed immediately,
sanz ce que aucun autre tant soit prouchain de nostre Sang entrepreigne le Bail, Régence ou Gouvernement de nostredit Royaume, 111
Until the new king attained the age at which he could govern in his own person, all deliberations and conclusions would be carried out by the majority (“de la plus grant et saine partie”) of the queen, the princes of the blood, and the Council.112 The king had been “absent” nearly continuously since the time of the previous ordinance, enjoying brief respites, from October 1 until October 12, 1402, and from February 18 through the beginning of April 1403.113 At the beginning of April he slipped into a madness that lasted until April 25, when he reemerged and created the ordinance. The struggle for supremacy between the dukes had a reached a point such that a new means of preventing one or the other from seizing total control had to be discovered.
It must be noted that Louis fought this ordinance, and his fight seems to have been at least partially successful, for in a letter patent of May 7, 1403, the confused king acknowledged that “certain” recent ordinances may have been damaging to his brother, and that any portion of these recent ordinances that deprived Louis of his power was to be ignored.114 The ordinance was not reinstated until immediately after Louis’s assassination in 1407, and for the rest of his short life, the Duke of Orleans continued to be perceived as the head of the government by chroniclers.
Still, its very existence marks a turning point. In the absence of a regent, someone would still need to rule, and, although Charles assigned the task to a college, he unambiguously named the queen the head of the college. The ordinance thus suggests a recognition that a woman, motivated by her family feeling, might make a safer coregent than a man, who would necessarily be motivated by his own ambition. As I have noted, Isabeau’s task would have been clearer had she been a widow and required to remain permanently in office. Nonetheless, with this ordinance, we see the for the first time an implicit example of female regency premised on the notion of the queen’s devotion to her children and her inability to succeed to the throne, an inability that guaranteed her lack of ambition for power.
Governance during Charles’s “absences,” then, went through a number of phases of coregency. The earliest arrangements envisioned Louis as regent. This led to conflicts, which the king attempted to resolve by naming Isabeau official arbitrator in 1402. But the type of unofficial regency promulgated by the ordinances of April 1403 was clearly intended to remedy these problems by setting the queen up as a type of coregent with the king. The Royal Council would continue business as usual, the only difference being that the king would be represented by the queen. He was not replaced by a regent acting for him or herself. Indeed, the king added that no decision could be made without his being informed of it, as soon as he had regained his senses, at which point he would affirm (or not affirm) the decision with his seal: “sanz que toutes-voyes que aucuns appoinctemens prins sur lesdiz grans faiz, soient mis à exécucion, sans le Nous faire premièrement savoir, 115
As Fanny Cosandey writes of the ordinance of April 1403, Charles finally decided to suppress the regency “telle qu’elle est exercée jusque-là—particulièrement au XIVe siècle—, à savoir avec un régent dont la puissance ne connaît pas de limites” (as it has been exercised until then—especially during the fourteenth century—that is, with a regent whose power had no limits) by what was in essence the elimination of minority.116 Furthermore, the coregency envisioned by the ordinances of 1403 is reminiscent of the core-gency of Blanche of Castile, with the difference that Blanche coruled with her son while Isabeau coruled with her husband. Although just before his death, Louis VIII had awarded Blanche full authority over the kingdom and her children, which means that her powers were in fact far greater than Isabeau’s, she consistently styled herself and was styled as a coruler in the manner permitted by customary law.117
Isabeau occupied this role until she began to efface herself in favor of the dauphin. A royal ordinance of January 18, 1409, specified that when the queen was busy or did not want to involve herself in the business of the government, the dauphin Louis of Guyenne would see to the execution of decisions made by the Council. The queen would be informed of these decisions.118 Less than a year later, on December 27, 1409, Isabeau had the Duke of Burgundy awarded tutelle of the dauphin, although she and the king maintained ultimate control over any decision made by Jean regarding his charge.119
In 1417, when the Armagnac-Burgundian conflict had been raging for years, Isabeau, delivered by Jean of Burgundy from her imprisonment by the Armagnacs, declared herself “aiant, pour l’occupacion de monseigneur le Roy, le gouvernement et administracion de royaume, par l’octroy irrevocable à nous sur ce fait par mondit seigneur et son grant conseil” (having, for the king, government, and administration of the kingdom, irrevocably granted to us by the king and his great Council).120 In so doing, she referred back to the ordinance passed in 1403, construing—in retrospect—the charge to care for the government during the king’s absences articulated within the document as full regency, a claim she had never pressed in the past.121 Until that moment, she had occupied an interstitial position that cannot be compared to the more straightforward regency position assumed by Louis and later by Jean sans Peur. Isabeau, like Blanche of Castile, cultivated an image of mediator, as guardian of the throne, and was never accused of usurping the king’s power, in contrast to the king’s male relatives.
Images of Mediation
In this final section, I discuss how Isabeau’s role of mediator was supported and refined through imagery, written and visual. I begin with examples that show the queen as an intercessor or arbitrator and conclude with a discussion of how she invoked the Virgin to reinforce her position.
I have suggested that contemporary chroniclers do not always understand the full significance of Isabeau’s role. Still, the figure that emerges from the chronicles tends to be that of a mediator, a producer of harmony. In 1390 a terrible storm rattled the city while the Royal Council sat deliberating the passage of new taxes, writes Pintoin. Suddenly four officers of the court were struck by lightning! Their bones were consumed; skin remained, but it was black. What could this be but a sign of God’s disapproval of the taxes? The queen, “que proxima erat partui” (on the verge of giving birth), went trembling to seek the king, insisting that “hec inordinata aeris disposicio ex hoc malo procedebat” (this chaos in the pattern of the air was caused by this evil).122
The story as Pintoin recounts it may or may not be true, but the motif of the pregnant queen attempting to soften the king’s treatment of his subjects was traditional, as we have seen. Pintoin depicts Isabeau mediating in the same way in 1401. On this occasion she has also been frightened by terrible thunder, presumably sent once again by an irate God. Suddenly, lightning consumed the curtains of her bed and exited via the chimney. Imagining that God was pouring anger down upon the people of France, she sent offerings to several churches in the kingdom to appease divine fury.123
Before turning to chronicle passages that depict the queen in the midst of diplomatic negotiation, that is, quite literally mediating, let us mention a final example of her symbolic value as arbitrator, one which I will discuss in detail in chapter five. This is her involvement in the poetic society known as the Cour amoureuse. The purpose of this organization, as stated in its founding charter, was “l’honneur, loenge, recommandacion et service de toutes dames et damoiselles (honor, praise, recommendation, and service toward all ladies), manifested in the love poetry that the members (who had to be male) would present in contests.124 Although ladies could not be members of the Cour amoureuse, they would evaluate the entries and choose a winner. The institution, created in the beginning years of what was shaping up to be a catastrophic feud, must also have been intended as a means of articulating and ordering the passions that eventually led to violence as a means of symbolically dramatizing and working out tensions. Typically, Isabeau can be found both at the center and on the margins of political activity. Her role in the Cour amoureuse followed the same pattern. She was essential—ladies are the judges—and yet she was excluded from membership—only men could compete. Thus the Cour amoureuse can be seen as an emblem for the position of women in fifteenth-century French society and for the role of the mediator queen.
Isabeau is described in the literal act of mediating in certain chronicles, as well. One text, the propagandistic Burgundian chronicle, Le Livre des trahisons envers la maison de Bourgogne, recounting events of September 1410, dramatizes her at the bargaining table, trying to persuade the League of Gien, led by the king’s uncle Jean of Berry, to leave Jean sans Peur alone. The chronicle is undoubtedly biased against the Orleanists, but as far as the queen in concerned, it views her positively in her role as a mediator. Although she was very unpopular with the Burgundians in 1404 and 1405, by 1410 she had reached a temporary peace with Jean sans Peur. The Count of Saint-Pol and some presidents of the Parlement, we read, left Paris “aveuc la roynne en noble, riche et puissant arroy, et chevauchièrent vers Montlhéry” (with the queen in a noble, rich, and powerful array and rode toward Montlhéry).125 When Jean sans Peur and his entourage discovered that she had arrived, they mounted their horses and went out to greet her. They feted her grandly and led her to their hostels and lodgings.
The queen is then portrayed gathering the Armagnac princes together and assuring them that she is there to hear their explanations of why they are threatening Paris:
Messigneurs, chy nous envoye devers vous, premiers le roy, monsigneur de Guienne, beau cousin de Bourgongne, le duc de Brabant et le noble conseil du roy et de la bonne ville de Paris, pour sçavoir de vous pour quelles raisons vous venés sy près de Paris à force et à puissance, et à quoy vous entendés de les enbesongnier; et s’il vous plet à le nous dire, nous le reporterons au roy et au dessus déclairiés, lesquelx sont moult désirans de sçavoir quel cause à vous meut. [Messieurs, I have been sent here to you, by the king, the Duke of Guyenne, my cousin of Burgundy, the Duke of Brabant, the Royal Council of the king, and the city of Paris, to discover your reasons for coming so close to Paris with force and power, and what you intend to do with them. If you will be so good as to tell me, I will report it to the king and those declared above, who want very much to know what cause motivates you.]126
To the Duke of Berry who informed her that the reason that he and his men have surrounded Paris is that Louis of Orleans’ death has never been avenged, Isabeau responds doucement (gently) that in fact both the king and his Council had been satisfied with Jean sans Peur’s administration and that he had put the ruined state back in order.127 Still, the Duke of Berry refuses to return peacefully to Paris as long as Jean sans Peur is there. In the face of this stubbornness, it is agreed that everyone will return to his own land and that from that point on the king and the kingdom will be governed by the Three Estates, with a truce between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians.128
This conclusion of events is of course a fantasy of Jean sans Peur, who had long preached government by the Three Estates, confident of his ability to control them. Other chroniclers recount the queen’s mediation on this same occasion, but they end the story differently. Pintoin notes that the queen tried to persuade the League to desist for five days without success.129 Monstrelet reports a similar result: that the queen was not able to establish peace, although she tried throughout September, and that she eventually abandoned the cause as futile. As Monstrelet explains, “Et pour ce ladcite Royne se parçeut qu’elle traveilloit en vain, retourna à Paris avec sa compaignie, et racompta ce qu’elle avoit trouvé” (And for this reason, the queen understood that she was working in vain and returned to Paris with her company and recounted what she had discovered).130 When Isabeau returned to Paris, she announced the lack of results to the king, who was outraged and troubled.
In the chronicles the queen is also frequently depicted riding in a procession to celebrate a newly negotiated peace. After the publication of the peace, a step Offenstadt has recognized as a ritualistic element of such proceedings, the principal actors often took to the streets in parades that invited the crowds to participate and rejoice in the event.131 The chroniclers report the reactions of the crowds, wild with joy, to such public performances. The excitement of the crowds apparently approached delirium at times. For example, Pintoin describes the procession that followed the Peace of Auxerre in1412. Louis, the dauphin, entered Paris the last week of September, accompanied by his cousin, the Count of Vertus, brother of Charles of Orleans, and behind them, the Dukes of Burgundy and Bourbon. The queen entered three days later. About her entrance Pintoin writes: “Nundum exacto triduo, plebs universa reginam venerabilem iterum ingredientem suscepit et cum tanta exuberanti leticia, ut laudes sibi regias acclamarent, ac si suscepissent regem qui de adversariis regnis triumphasset.” (Three days later, the entire people again received the entering venerable queen and acclaimed her with such exuberant joy, such royal laud, it was as if they were receiving a king returning to the realm from triumphing over enemies.)132
Yet another image, this time from the chronicle of Juvénal des Ursins, depicts the queen as mediator. Here it is Isabeau who represents herself as such. In a letter of 1411 to the queen, Jean sans Peur refers to one which he had recently received from her. The document no longer exists, but we can glean its contents from Jean’s remarks. You tell me, he writes, that “vous avez continuellement besongné sur le faict qu’il a pleu à monseigneur le Roy vous ordonner, touchant l’appaisement des divisions en ce royaume. Et aviez esperance en Dieu, que briefvement aucun bon appointement y seroit trouvé” (you have worked continually on the task that it pleased monseigneur the King to assign you, regarding the divisions in this kingdom. And that you had hope in God that soon some good solution would be found).133 Jean goes on to acknowledge that the queen has sent missives to him and his adversaries requesting them not to take up arms, because to do so would greatly anger the king and show “peu d’honneur” (little honor) to her, negotiations being in her hands.134
The Isabeau who emerges so fleetingly through the words of Jean’s letter, it seems to me, represents the epitome of the queen carrying out her role as mediator. Effaced and effacing, she works tirelessly to bring quarrelsome men to heel with only her moral authority to support her interventions. Her position is both central and marginal, for while she answers to the king and God himself, she has no army to summon to enforce her mandate that the dukes lay down their arms. All she can do is request that the adversaries not anger the king or cause her dishonor.
An important example from Pintoin demonstrates another instance of Isabeau’s being styled as mediator: in this case, he reveals that the queen’s position was compared to that of Blanche of Castile by her contemporaries. The reference occurs on September 5, 1408, when Isabeau had just returned to Paris from about twenty-five miles south of the city in Melun, where she had retreated after the justification of the assassination of Louis of Orleans read by Jean Petit on behalf of Jean sans Peur. On that day, Pintoin relates, Isabeau met with the Royal Council to determine how best to manage the Duke of Burgundy. Shaken by Jean’s recent successes, the Council deemed that it was in the best interests of the kingdom that Isabeau continue in her current position, as its head. Afterward, writes Pintoin, Juvénal des Ursins, the queen’s lawyer, reminded a gathering of the princes of the blood, prelates, and the people through a proclamation that the queen and her son had been attributed sovereign powers by the king. Pintoin then adds an important detail about this discourse: Juvénal des Ursins presented as one of the reasons for the king’s decision to accord power to the queen that Blanche of Castile had prudently ruled the kingdom with her son: “quam prudenter quamque potenter domina quondam Blancha cum parvulo filio sancta memorie Ludovico regnum Francie rexisset.” (that once Blanche had prudently and powerfully ruled the kingdom of France with her small son, Louis of holy memory).135 To make Isabeau’s case, Juvénal des Ursins implicitly evokes the lack of menace Isabeau presents as a coregent, in contrast to Jean, who, backed by his army, threatened the king.
Beyond these textual remnants of Isabeau’s status as mediator, she is explicitly associated with that ultimate model of female mediation, the Virgin Mary, through visual imagery, on several occasions. This occurs for the first time during her entrance into Paris and coronation in August 1389, four years after her marriage. As Gordon Kipling writes, during these ceremonies, the king, or, in this case, the queen, “and citizens perform their roles in a microcosmal drama of the supernatural order as they understand it. The civic drama in which they play together constitutes a kind of ‘material embodiment’ of an ideal political order, and by performing it, they shape their imperfect world into at least a rough approximation of that ideal.”136 The coronation ceremony was carefully designed to elaborate for the public the queen’s role as a mediator. Structured so as to stress her inferiority to the king, the ceremony assured the public of her accessibility, that is, of her mediatory position, between the king and the people. Cosandey explains:
A l’apogée des honneurs, la reine se voit donc signifier des restrictions par son sacre même, marquant son infériorité politique et juridique face au souverain. Parce qu’elle est une femme, parce qu’elle est sa femme, parce que, reine, elle est néanmoins sujette du roi, elle occupe une place intermédiaire entre le souverain et ses sujets, étant associée à l’un et aux autres. Cette situation ambiguë, mal définie même par les jurisconsultes, se reflète encore dans la cérémonie du sacre dont le déroulement prend soin de notifier cette ambivalence.
[At the height of her honors, the queen signifies restrictions in the very consecration ceremony, which marked her political and juridical inferiority before the sovereign. Because she is a woman, because she is his wife, because, queen, she is nonetheless subject to the king, she occupies an intermediary position between the king and his subjects, being associated with the one and the other. This ambiguous situation, badly defined even by legal advisors, is reflected again in the coronation ceremony the procedure of which is at pains to make this ambivalence noticeable.]137
The ceremony, according to Cosandey, recalls and affirms that the queen is royal (she is consecrated during the coronation ceremony). Still, she is not the king. Therefore, she does not receive his spiritual attributes: she does not receive his pontifical robes or ointment from the holy ampoule. Also, she is anointed in only two spots, on the head and chest, in contrast with the king’s nine. As for secular symbols of power, she receives a ring, sceptre, hand of justice, and crown, but not the grand sceptre with the fleur-de-lis.138 Also, as we saw above, queens were explicitly associated with the Virgin and Esther as well as with other biblical heroines during their coronation.
Pintoin explains that because Charles VI desired that his wife’s coronation conform to tradition, he requested that the venerable Blanche, Duchess of Orleans, and the kingdom’s expert on tradition, search the tomes of Saint Denis for information on past examples.139 Therefore, we can assume that Isabeau’s celebration contained the references to Esther and the Virgin mentioned above. But in addition to the traditional elements that played an important role in the ceremony, coronations created individual ways of representing the queen’s role for the public, as Cosandey has pointed out.140 Isabeau was the first queen of France to be crowned separately from the king; he himself had already been crowned before his 1385 marriage, shortly after his accession to the throne in 1380.141 Charles had proclaimed himself free of his uncles’ tutelle just eleven months before the coronation. It looks, therefore, as if the coronation were motivated at least in part to express a message about the reign of Charles and Isabeau: to speak to the Parisians in a new language, to signal to his kingdom the dawn of a new era of concord and prosperity.142 Bernard Ribémont writes that with Isabeau’s entry and coronation, “la politique monarchique s’affiche comme politique de dialogue et d’harmonie” (monarchical politics shows its interest in dialogue and harmony).143
Through a traditional set of iconography that constructed the queen as a mediator, Isabeau was presented to the people as a presence capable of creating union among disparate elements. Central to this iconography was the queen’s association with the Virgin. Gordon Kipling suggests that Isabeau’s entry into Paris during her coronation ceremony created an array of parallels between the queen’s entry into Paris and the Virgin’s Assumption into heaven.”144 “The show,” he continues, “first of all, took place on the octave Sunday of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, a date which could only enforce the deliberate parallel between Isabella’s entry into Paris and the Virgin’s entry into heaven. Just as an octave Sunday constitutes a second commemoration of a feast, so Queen Isabella’s entry could be seen as a second commemoration of the Virgin’s Assumption.” During her entry, Isabeau followed a path that brought to life parallels with the Virgin Mary. As the queen passed through the Porte-aux-peintres, two angels descended to lay a crown upon her head, proclaiming her the queen of paradise.145 Above the gate of Saint Denis rose a Virgin with child (as Kipling points out, Isabeau was heavily pregnant during the entry), backed by the sun, heraldic device of Charles VI.
I would like to examine in more detail the pageant resting upon the Porte-aux-peintres from which descended the crown-bearing angels, because I believe that Isabeau later incorporates the symbolic language of these angels into an important image of herself as mediator. Froissart describes the queen and her procession winding their way toward this gate, which was topped by a representation of a castle surrounded by the heavens and God presiding over all in majesty. As the party passed through the gate, “le paradis s’ouvry, et deux angèles yssirent hors en eulx avalant et tenoient en leurs mains une très-riche couronne d’or garnie de pierres précieuses, et la mirent et assirent les deux angèles moult doulcement sur le chief de la royne en chantant” (paradise opened, and two angels came out descending upon them and holding in their hands a very rich crown decorated with precious stones, and the two angels set it on the head of the queen, singing).146 Later, during her coronation ceremony, which took place at the cathedral of Notre Dame, after the queen had mounted the altar, she knelt and prayed. In a lovely gesture, she then “donna et offry à la trésorie de Nostre-Dame quatre draps d’or et la belle couronne que les angèles luy avoient posé sur le chief à la porte de Paris” (gave and offered to the treasury of Notre Dame four cloths of gold and the beautiful crown that the angels had placed on her head at the gate of Paris), in recognition of her submission of her own power to a higher one.147
The important point, I believe, is the detail that Isabeau is crowned queen of paradise by two angels. The motif of the Triumph of the Virgin, that is, her crowning, became popular as of the late twelfth century.148 One finds the Virgin Mary, crowned and seated beside her son on the gable of the central portal of the Rheims Cathedral, on the tympanum of the west façade of the Senlis Cathedral, and on the central tympanum of the west façade of the Laon Cathedral. Another very well-known example of the motif decorates the north portal middle tympanum carving of the Chartres Cathedral. This particular manifestation of the motif is associated with Blanche of Castile because it is echoed in a Bible moralisée held today at the Pierpont Morgan Library. The Bible moralisée famously portrays Blanche in precisely the same position as the Virgin of Chartres, seated upon a throne adjoining that of her son, the future Saint Louis, motioning toward him, her hands in the advocate position.149 The coronation of the Virgin as depicted on the Cathedral of Chartres shows Mary already crowned; her crown rests upon her head, placed there one assumes by the angel who floats just above her. But in the design of the north portal of the western façade of Notre Dame of Paris, also known as the Porte Rouge, the angel actually places the crown on the head of the Virgin.150
I would suggest that Isabeau’s crowning by angels as she proceeded along the road that led her eventually to her coronation at Notre Dame would have created a particularly strong visual link between the physical queen of France and the Virgin crowned by an angel on the portal of that cathedral. The relationship between Isabeau and the Virgin would have been further reinforced when the procession reached the cathedral later in the day. The queen and the Dukes of Berry, Burgundy, Touraine (Louis of Orleans), and Bourbon, descended and made their way down the aisle, accompanied by the queen’s ladies and led by the archbishop and the clergy, all singing “haut et cler à la loenge de Dieu et de la Vierge Marie” (high and clearly in praise of God and the Virgin Mary).151
As Kipling demonstrates, queens who followed Isabeau were routinely associated with the Virgin during their entries. That Anne of Brittany, twice queen of France, from 1491–98, and then again from 1498–1514, was associated with the Virgin has long been recognized.152 As for Isabeau’s particular use of the imagery, I would suggest that later in her career after the serious difficulties of Charles’s reign had begun, she reactivates the symbolic language of her crowning by angels along with that gesture’s reference to the Virgin of the north portal of the western façade of Notre Dame to make a visual argument for herself as mediator. At the moment of her coronation, Isabeau certainly would have envisioned nothing more for her future than serving the king and the people as an intercessor. The king’s madness, of course, changed that. I believe that Isabeau represents herself carrying out the role with which she was charged because of Charles’s debility in the form of a New Year’s gift, an étrenne, the figure known as the Goldenes Rössl, which she commissioned for the king in 1405. The political situation at that moment was especially difficult: Jean sans Peur had recently become Duke of Burgundy and was trying to appropriate for himself a major role in the government. This étrenne, I would suggest, refers back to Isabeau’s crowning by angels, telling Charles in symbolic language of her commitment to watching over him and the kingdom.
The Goldenes Rössl is a 62-centimeter-high golden tabernacle decorated in émail en ronde bosse.153 It regroups three spaces, hierarchically arranged. At the summit, the Virgin with child sits beneath a jewel-encrusted arbor. She is about to be crowned by two angels who float over her head. Three child-saints, whose attributes identify them as John the Evangelist, John the Baptist, and Saint Catherine, but who because of their names have been associated with Isabeau and Charles’ own children, Jean and Catherine, born in 1398 and 1401, kneel before the Virgin, emphasizing her maternal qualities.154 Behind the Virgin blazes a sun, perhaps a reference to Charles’ heraldic device, as featured in that same pageant from which descended the angels during Isabeau’s coronation. Below them, on the middle tier, a kneeling Charles VI gazes up at the Virgin, his hands folded in prayer. Just across from him kneels an unidentified knight, representing perhaps the recently deceased Philip of Burgundy (his face is creased with wrinkles). Below the king and his companion, on the lowest of the three tiers, a different knight holds the bridle of Charles’s horse.
The Goldenes Rössl, I would suggest, eloquently incarnates the argument by which Isabeau and her supporters authorized the queen’s position in the government. Although Queen of Heaven, Mary was necessarily coruler with her son, never an all-powerful regent. With the incessant disputes over power during the king’s absences constantly threatening to explode into outright war, the Goldenes Rössl reminds Charles that peace can be brought about by a female mediator, a woman surrounded by children, holding the true ruler on her knee. Certainly the figure represents the Virgin Mary, not Isabeau, but in a climate where the figure of mediator so persistently partook of the earthly and the divine and in a kingdom where the problem of regency was so acute, the Goldenes Rössl with its depiction of Mary coreigning with her son could not have helped but evoke the queen. The Goldenes Rössl is a quiet reminder of the role of mediator that Isabeau assumed with her coronation, a role spelled out in the coronation ordo and rendered visual in her coronation by angels along the way to Notre Dame.
I conclude this chapter with a reference to an image without which no discussion of the iconography associated with Isabeau would be complete: that of folio 3 recto of Harley 4431 of the British Library, known as the Queen’s Manuscript, presented to the queen by Christine de Pizan in January 1414, shortly after peace had been restored following the Cabochian revolt.155 Christine had already dedicated a work to the queen a decade earlier, the collected letters of the Querelle de la Rose. These letters contained the poet’s own vigorous defense of the feminine character against the misogynistic discourse promulgated in the Roman de la Rose. In this dedication, Christine offered the work to the “Tres Noble Excellence” who delights in hearing well-expressed stories of virtuous things (“se delicte a oïr lire dittiéz de choses vertueuses et bien dictes”).156 In offering this work to Isabeau, Christine drew the queen into the group of righteous women slandered by misogynistic discourse, constructing her both as a victim of that discourse and as a defender of women, a figure both inside and outside that discourse, by virtue of her exceptional role, and therefore an ideal mediator.
As for the opening miniature of Isabeau in Harley 4431, the queen sits surrounded by her ladies, receiving the volume from the hands of the poet. This miniature, I would suggest, echoes that which illustrates the final book of Christine’s Cité des dames. The Cité des dames had originally been composed in 1405, but it was one of the works collected within this deluxe manuscript. Book three of the Cité des dames relates how the Virgin Mary is installed as the leader of the City of Ladies. On the first folio of book three, a miniature depicts the allegorical figure Justice welcoming the Virgin Mary and her entourage of haloed saints into the city. In the text of the story, Justice introduces Mary to the inhabitants of the City of Ladies with the line I referred to above, as “she who is not only their queen, but who has dominion and administration after her only son.” The miniature just above the text depicts Justice with hands outstretched toward Mary, who carries a book in her own hands. The image of Isabeau in her chamber, receiving the book offered to her by the kneeling Christine and surrounded by her ladies, takes on increased prestige as an echo of the image of Mary and her party; the parallel between the two queens and their circles makes another striking argument in support of Isabeau in her role as mediator queen, the presence behind the dauphin, who at the very moment was beginning to show himself a force to be reckoned with in the aftermath of the Cabochian revolt.
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