CHAPTER FOUR
Isabeau’s Contemporary Reputation
Durant toutes ces années, en effet, les maîtres parisiens se déchaînent contre elle, s’en prenant pêle-mêle à son train de vie, à son entourage féminin, aux moeurs dissolues de sa cour (la décadence des moeurs, c’est à cause d’elle), à sa rapacité (les levées d’impôts, c’est pour elle), au peu de cas qu’elle fait des ses enfants (leur mort prematurée, c’est toujours elle), à son indifférence face à la maladie du roi (l’aspect déplorable de ce dernier—il refuse de s’habiller et de se laver pendant ses crises—, c’est encore elle). A quoi s’ajoute, après l’assassinat de Louis d’Orléans, une accusation d’adultère avec le nouveau duc de Bourgogne.
[During these years, the Parisian masters raged against her, ranting about her lifestyle, her female entourage, the dissolute morals of her court (the decadence of morals was her fault), her rapacity (taxes were her fault), her lack of interest in her children (their premature death was always her fault), her indifference regarding the king’s illness (the deplorable appearance of the latter—he refused to dress himself or wash during his crises—her fault again). Add to all this the accusation of adultery with the new Duke of Burgundy after the assassination of Louis of Orleans.]
Pierre Cochon, né dans le pays de Caux, qui a très peu voyagé, répétant dans sa chronique ce qu’il a entendu dire dans sa jeunesse, est plein de rancunes à l’égard du duc d’Orléans, de la reine, de la duchesse d’Orléans: il leur reproche d’avoir voulu renverser le roi, d’avoir été les auteurs de sa maladie, car, “disoit le peupple qu’il estoit sain ou malade quant monsieur d’orlyens voulloit; “ d’avoir désiré enfin “à avoir taillez et à destruire le royaume et en avoir par devers eux toute la finance.”
[Pierre Cochon, who was born in the region of Caux and traveled very little, repeating in his chronicle what he had heard in his youth, is filled with resentment toward the Duke of Orleans, the queen, and the Duchess of Orleans: he reproaches them for wanting to dethrone the king, for being the authors of the king’s illness, for, “the people said that he was healthy or sick when Monsieur of Orleans so wished;” for wanting finally to tax the kingdom into destruction and in one year to have taken all of the money.]
THE ASSUMPTION THAT ISABEAU was detested by her contemporaries, especially the Parisians, is so firmly established that even her recent champions assume that long before her involvement in the Treaty of Troyes she was intensely disliked by the “people,” or at least that around 1405 her good name was seriously impugned because of her association with Louis of Orleans.1 This assumption has hindered our ability to perceive her accomplishments as a mediator queen. Even sympathetic readings of the queen’s career must view it as unsuccessful to the extent that her contemporaries despised her. But there are sound reasons to believe that her unpopularity is simply part of her black legend. In this chapter, I argue that a careful examination of contemporary evidence turns up nothing to support the common belief that the queen was a target of vicious rumors or mala fama. When one checks the sources of scholars who claim Isabeau to have been widely slandered, one discovers that many give none at all. The first introductory passage to this chapter provides one such example. Other sources turn out not to support Isabeau’s unpopularity when one follows the footnotes. This is the case with the second introductory passage. Although Alfred Coville, the author of the passage, asserts that chronicler Pierre Cochon was filled with resentment for the queen, when one reads the pages of the Beaurepaire edition of Cochon that Coville cites in his note, that is, pages 191, 192, 204, 214, 220, and 244, one discovers only one reference to Isabeau, on page 204. The story recounted there tells how Louis, the queen, and the Duke of Berry imposed a taille which was disavowed by the Duke of Burgundy. If one continues on to page 205, one discovers that the taille was subsequently withdrawn. But there is no mention of Isabeau’s popularity or lack thereof; nor is there any mention at all of popular reaction to the taille.
As I noted in the introduction, the notion that Isabeau was uniquely disliked derives from two primary sources of roughly the same period. The first is the chronicle of Pintoin for the year 1405. The second is the anonymous pamphlet in verse known as the “Songe véritable,” composed circa 1406, possibly by a member of the University of Paris and certainly by a supporter of Jean sans Peur.2 The “Songe veritable” deplores excessive spending by a number of figures closely associated with the royal family. While these two sources do seem, on the surface, to suggest that Isabeau lost her popularity with the public in 1405, each yields a different story when it is contextualized. Rather than evidence of widespread of contemporary infamy, I argue that these two sources should be regarded as attacks of one faction upon the other. Such attacks as these two, only to be expected in the midst of a feud, say much about the strategies of the small group of attackers but nothing about the attitudes of the wider population. The proper conclusion to draw from the attacks, I suggest, is that they actually indicate that the queen was highly regarded. That the Burgundians, the faction waging the attacks, target her along with men holding real power indicates that they considered her influence to be comparable to that of the king’s closest advisors. Given her proximity to power and the medieval propensity to cast women as lightning rods for social problems, one would expect her to be criticized regularly and violently. Thus the minimal criticism directed at her in fact bespeaks the high esteem in which she was held rather than the contrary. Finally, I argue that the while the “Songe véritable” is undoubtedly intended to demoralize the queen, the work’s referencing of itself as a vehicle for destroying her reputation suggests that it must be considered as evidence for her popularity rather than the contrary. Why would the Burgundians need to destroy the good name of a queen who was already unpopular?
The Theme of Financial Reform
But before examining the criticisms of Pintoin and the “Songe véritable,” it is important to create a context for the type of complaint they represent. Here two points are important. First, my initial point, that modern scholarship has a tendency to draw without adequate evidence the conclusion that Isabeau was a particular target of criticism, requires further substantiation. A series of examples will make the point.
According to one historian writing on the Cabochian revolt, on May 22, 1413, crowds invaded the gardens of the Hôtel Saint Pol as Eustache Pavilly approached the recently recovered king on behalf of the prévôt des mar-chands and the échevins to inform him that certain of his officers and servants had been arrested and removed from his household. Pavilly explains why this had been done. The king must not consider these acts an attack on his royal majesty, Pavilly insists. Rather, the acts have been deemed necessary to eradicate the “mauvais herbes” (bad weeds) crowding the royal garden. The historian then moves on to a discussion of the dauphin, Louis of Guyenne. On that same day the dauphin was badly handled by the crowds. This was because the young man had become the “bête noire” of the Ca-bochians, the historian explains. Finally, the historian turns to the queen. A list of bad weeds was read before the queen, the historian continues. Then a group from her entourage, including her brother, was plucked from the garden, so speak. Just like the king, the queen was deprived of some of her servants and household. The historian thus demonstrates that the queen was treated in precisely the same manner as the king. Neither was deemed personally responsible for the realm’s financial disaster. In both instances, “bad weeds” are plucked from the royal gardens and thrown into prison.
And yet, far from pointing out this similarity of treatment, the historian encourages the reader to assume that the queen was a special target of the crowd’s wrath. Isabeau, asserts the historian, “aussi est impopulaire et la foule en veut à son frère.” ([The queen] is also unpopular [a reference to the unpopularity of the dauphin Louis of Guyenne] and the crowd is angry with her brother.)3 As we have just seen, the evidence that the historian presents in support of these conclusions suggests nothing of the sort. Clearly if the evidence offered can be said to prove Isabeau’s unpopularity, so must it prove the king’s, but the historian does not forward this. There is never any question of the king’s being disliked by the “people” in any of the contemporary chronicles. And of course he was not, or at least historical records do not indicate this to have been the case. Indeed, he was nicknamed “Le bien aimé,” the well loved.4
Other examples of this tendency to treat Isabeau as uniquely disliked abound. Immediately before the Cabochian revolt, the university and city of Paris jointly produced a series of remonstrances on the government of the realm. There we find complaints against the households, first, of the king’s, followed by the dauphin’s, and the queen’s.5 And yet, modern historians routinely describe Isabeau as the target of the remonstrances without mentioning that the document deals with her household exactly as it deals with the king’s. The same is true of the Cabochian ordinance itself. The mandates dealing with the expenses of the hotel of the king are followed by “et pour les hostelz de la Royne et du daulphin.”6 There is no justification for seeing the ordinances as targeting the queen.
In a similar vein, a scholar claims of the “Songe véritable” that the poem “peut écrire, sous la fiction du songe, une très violente diatribe contre Isabeau de Bavière et ses conseillers, et même imaginer de quels horribles châtiments ils seront frappés” (writes under the cover of the fiction of a dream vision a violent diatribe against Isabeau of Bavaria and her counselors and even imagines the terrible chastisements awaiting them).7 The comment leaves the impression that Isabeau is the main object of the poem’s fury. However, this is not true. First, the other characters who figure in the poem—Louis of Orleans, the king’s brother, Jean of Berry, his uncle, and Jean de Montaigu, his maître d’hôtel—cannot be construed as Isabeau’s counselors. They were, rather, in the first two instances, princes of the blood, who sat on the Royal Council: their position might be understood as one of counselor to the king, but not of counselor to Isabeau. It is also important to note that in the poem, Isabeau follows the three other main characters in order of appearance, suggesting that her function, like theirs, is one of counselor to the king. Furthermore, she is not even included in the vivid verse description of the infernal pains awaiting these three principal characters, contrary to what the article asserts. The queen seems a bit of an afterthought, included almost reluctantly and spared the invective heaped on the others.
We might also cite Yann Grandeau’s assessment that “Isabeau de Bavière devient la cible privilégiée de toutes les attaques. On murmure contre les nobles, on crie des insultes à l’Etrangère. La rumeur publique dénonce ses for-faits, lui prête des amants, l’accuse de négliger son époux, ses fils.” (Isabeau of Bavaria becomes the special target of all attacks. There was grumbling about the nobility and loud insults shouted at the Foreigner. Public rumor denounced her expenses, attributed her lovers, accused her of neglecting her husband and her sons.)8 The only evidence Grandeau cites, however, is the “Songe veritable” and the sections from Pintoin, which I discuss in this chapter. Once again, the same two sources, uncritically accepted as evidence of widespread dislike, are woven into a modern historical narrative of popular hatred.
The second important point for contextualizing a discussion of Isabeau’s reputation is that complaints of financial mismanagement are ubiquitous throughout the Middle Ages and almost entirely unrelated to actual levels of spending. To understand the significance of these criticisms, it is necessary to recall that the theme of “purifying” the realm by cracking down on corrupt officials first became common during the time of Louis IX in the thirteenth century. Outraged at the corruption of the officers assigned to collect revenues for the king, the people voiced their discontent, and Louis IX responded: he “carefully articulated the standards of administrative culture at court and in the government and kingdom at large.”9 In the process, he also established a rhetoric that would henceforth be associated with reform. “Afin de maîtriser le zèle de ses officiers, et pour répondre aux plaintes,” writes Jacques Krynen, “Saint Louis avait entrepris la correction des abus provoqués par l’administration bailliagère. Le vocable de réforme, reformatio, d’un usage ancien, s’identifie alors à la nécessité de discipliner les agissements d’agents royaux par trop envahissants. (To overcome the zeal of his officers and respond to complaints, Saint Louis had attempted to correct the abuses arising from the administration of the baillis. The word for reform, reformatio, of ancient usage, became identified with the necessity of keeping the tooinvasive royal agents in line.)10 Under Philip the Fair, Krynen continues, ordinances for reformation of the finances became regular. The Magna statuta of 1303 was so popular that it was renewed twenty-four times before the reign of Charles V.11
But Raymond Cazelles contrasts the early usage of the reform theme, when it arose in response to a genuine need to restrain abusive royal agents, with that of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, when it was trotted out and applied indiscriminately during any and all discussion of taxes.12 By the mid-fourteenth century, it had become impossible to deny that taxation was vital to the functioning of the kingdom. C. D. Fletcher observes that “the plea of common necessity had been established as an irresistible argument.”13 Warfare had become more complex and costly to wage from the mid-fourteenth century on than it had been during the time of Saint Louis. The wars against England strained the royal treasury and had to be augmented by “extraordinary” taxes, called military aides. These military aides then created a source of money on which the increasingly bureaucratized government came to rely and that continued to be collected, even in times of peace.
However, the fact that taxes were necessary to sustain the militaristic and bureaucratic needs of fourteenth-century government could not be accommodated within traditional notions of kingship. The medieval king, a powerful lord, existed to protect the rights of his subjects and, when these were violated, to wage war against the perpetrators. “In the middle ages the ideal prince was an armed judge—a force useful to society primarily as an arbiter and as a protector of feudal, natural, and divine law,” writes Martin Wolfe.14 This meant, as Wolfe continues, that people of the Middle Ages “did not regard royal revenues as contributions by participants in a commonwealth to expenditures that would increase the well-being of the people. They thought of the fisc as a householding operation, intended to support the royal family in proper style and to provide a small surplus which, when husbanded as it should be, would provide funds for emergency military affairs.”15 A rift had developed between the traditional notion of taxation as extraordinary help granted to a king in need of money for military purposes and the real uses to which taxes were put. But the traditional notion remained, mystifying the actual situation, because no one imagined taxation as a potentially positive means of building the economy.
This gap in the mental representation of taxation and the reality of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century French economy meant that resistance to taxation continued to be waged under the form of complaints that the actions of royal governments were not directed toward the common good, explains Fletcher.16 Furthermore, charges of corruption were raised opportunistically to create anger that could be directed against a political rival whenever taxes were imposed. Compounding the problem was royal collusion: kings felt guilty about levying taxes. Regarding them as vaguely shameful, kings periodically abolished various sorts to arouse public approval or to appease their own consciences.17 His guilt over taxing his subjects got the better of Charles V on his deathbed: he abolished the fouage, which accounted for 30 to 40 percent of his revenues. This was despite the fact that these revenues had enabled Charles V “to make substantial gifts to his brothers, important nobles, and high officials” and “to subsidize a luxurious standard of living for his brothers.”18 By revoking the fouage, the king created serious difficulties for the early years of the reign of Charles VI; Charles M. Radding writes that “scholars have not been sufficiently aware of the sharp drop in royal income that followed the death of Charles V.”19
Also insufficiently noted is that revolts against taxation were not unique to Charles VI’s reign, but occurred under the watch of the wise Charles V, as well. A major popular revolt took place in 1357. A reaction to the debacle of the Battle of Poitiers, involving Amiens, Toulouse, and Lavaur in 1357, followed by Paris, Ile-de-France, Laon, Rouen, Normandy, Villefranche-sur-Saône, Belleville, and others in 1358, it was eventually subdued by Charles, who was then the dauphin. A second major revolt occurred in the same areas starting in 1379, breaking out just before the death of Charles V and continuing on into the reign of the uncles, during Charles VI’s minority.20 Thus the Cabochian revolt of 1413 had precedents in the reign of Charles V. Krynen notes that the three revolts
ont surtout en commun d’avoir été suscités par l’action d’un Etat contraint, parce que pressé par la guerre et desservi par une déplorable gestion fiscale, de lever de nouveaux impôts. En outre, particulièrement en 1356–1358 et en 1412–1418, le refus des populations et la révolte s’accompagnent d’une profonde aspiration à la “réformation” du royaume, encouragée par la propagande des meneurs du mouvement.
[have above all in common that they were incited by the action of a State forced, because pressed by war and badly served by deplorable fiscal management, to levy new taxes. Moreover, particularly in 1356–1358 and in 1412–1418, the refusal of the people and the revolt were accompanied by the profound aspiration of reform of the kingdom, encouraged by the leaders of the movement.]21
The theme of reform reached its apogee during the reign of Charles VI and then vanished during the 1420s, when it was discredited, too closely linked with the Burgundians who had abused it by employing it opportunistically. As Philippe Contamine writes: “Etroitement associée aux tristes souvenirs que l’on conservait du temps de ‘divisions,’ le thème connut par la suite une éclipse prolongée, au moins auprès des milieux officiels.” (Tightly associated with the sad memories of the time of the “divisions,” the theme underwent a prolonged eclipse afterward, at least among official milieux.)22
Taxation, then, although necessary to the functioning of the kingdom as it existed, was deeply resented. It was all the more resented because it burdened those who could least afford it, while the wealthy paid no taxes at all under the principle that they were required in any case to aid the king by joining him in battle. But resentment was not targeted at the social structures responsible for the inequities of the system. The inequities were the result of the distribution of power, which was concentrated in the hands of the king and a small group of nobles, which is to say, those responsible for waging war and for the kingdom’s bureaucratization. Instead, blame was turned on various scapegoats, in particular, the king’s officers. Claude Gauvard describes the process:
Les officiers royaux canalisent sur leur personnes les stéréotypes de la persécution: violence contre les faibles, fortune trop vite amassée, et même, dans les cas extrêmes, crimes sexuels. Ces accusations ont un effet de terreur dans l’opinion publique qui voit ses valeurs culturelles bafouées. Alors, rassemblée en foule, par-delà les éléments de différenciation sociale, la communauté perturbée réclame la mort de ceux qui la dérangent.
[Royal officers attract stereotypes of persecution: violence against the weak, fortune too quickly won, and, even, in extreme cases, sexual crimes. These accusations arouse terror in public opinion, which sees its cultural values upset. Then assembling in a crowd that brought together different social elements, the angry community demands the death of those that disturb it.]23
“Des prévôts sont accusés d’avoir traité de louches compositions au lieu de percevoir des amendes au profit du roi,” writes Françoise Autrand. (The provosts are accused of shady dealing instead of collecting fines on behalf of the king.)24 But the kingdom’s financial woes could not be resolved by routing out dishonest officers. Frequently targets of reform, their pursuit did not bring about the desired results. As Autrand demonstrates, dishonest “fermiers”—or tax collectors—were vigorously pursued at certain times under Charles VI but to no effect.25 The reason for the lack of progress was, as Autrand observes, the failure to question the real problem: while the outcry against tax “fermiers” was intense during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the system of tax farming itself was not questioned.26 This “très puissant système de patronage” rendered real reform impossible.27 Indeed, the deflection of blame away from its proper object toward what were mere cogs in the system hindered the likelihood of any real reform. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century systems of taxation were unjust on every level: it was true, as reformers complained, that taxes were unfairly assessed and that their collection was executed by corrupt officers. But the realm’s financial difficulties were not curable through the sort of reform envisioned by those calling for it.
The only solution lay in reforming the kingdom’s distribution of power. This was not possible as long as the king and the nobility were locked into a symbiotic relationship. The king depended on the service of his nobles for his militaristic activity and for his government administration, services he was required to purchase with offices and pensions. Thus, Werner Paravicini remarks, even if the king was the source of all legality, he was helpless before the requests for favors from his courtiers. Indeed, the king was “pratiquement désarmé face à l’insistence qui vient de l’intérieur,” as Paravicini describes it (practically disarmed in the face of the insistence that came from inside).28 He was imagined as the supreme a gift-giver. The Songe du vergier (1378) makes explicit the centrality of this kingly function. Kings give gifts, and this is why they are lords (seigneurs).29 The king is by definition a gift-giver.30
The system of gift-giving practiced by Charles VI and his entourage allowed a group of elites to maintain and reproduce itself. As Annette Weiner has written, reciprocity “is only the superficial aspect of exchange, which overlays much more politically powerful strategies of “keeping-while-giving.”31 One advertised one’s elite status by giving glorious gifts, all the while retaining certain “inalienable” possessions for one’s own family. And membership in the system meant influence. As Brigitte Buettner notes, “Gifts were used as political weapons to make and unmake alliances, to forge diplomatic ties, to signal dominance.”32 Jan Hirschbiegel makes dramatically clear how small the group of gift-givers was and how elaborate the gifts they exchanged were.33 Within the system, one reproduced the status of one’s ancestors and created the differences on which a divinely ordained dynasty depended. Small groups amassed goods, whether physical or cultural, to pass their status down to future generations.
Still, if gift-giving as a system of exchange had a venerable history, under Charles VI “un état bureaucratique (judiciaire et financier)” (a bureaucratic state [judiciary and financial]) was being put in place, a system capable of sustaining itself while the king was mad.34 Gift-giving was an inefficient means of running a bureaucracy. But for efficiency to be recognized as a goal, that is, for any serious financial reform to take place, significant power would have had to be taken out of the hands of the small group of those close to the king and placed in the hands of members of other levels of society. However, a redistribution of power was never a serious component of any reform proposed during the early fifteenth century. Krynen explains that Nicole Oresme (1323–82), popularizer of Aristotle, associated the concept of reform with limits on the king’s power. This would have been necessary for bringing about the rationalization of offices, understood as part of the system of gift-giving, and for taxing the nobility, who were exempt by virtue of the fact that it was expensive to serve the king.35 But the idea of limiting the king’s power received no further development during the early fifteenth century. Krynen notes that even Jean Gerson, who might have been expected to propose such an idea remained silent. Although Gerson supported conciliar rule at the Council of Constance, the theologian did not maintain a similar discourse regarding the French monarchy in Paris.36 Krynen explains that even the Cabochian ordinance of 1413 made no suggestions for limiting the king’s power but relied solely on the notion of purification, of reforming officers. It was thus incapable of effecting any serious reform:
C’est l’épuration administrative qui est réclamée, non un réaménagement des rapports de pouvoir. Tout va mal par la faute des officiers, trop nombreux, trop puissants, et tous concessionnaires. La très prolixe ordonnance cabochienne brille par l’absence de dispositions politiques, comme si les réformateurs n’avaient plus d’autre vision de l’Etat qu’une monarchie légèrement et honnêtement administrée.
[Administrative purification is demanded, not a reworking of power relations. All problems were attributed to the officers, who were supposedly too numerous, too powerful, and too venal. The highly prolix Cabochian ordinance was notable for the absence of a political agenda, as if the reformers had no further vision of the State than a sparely and honestly administered monarchy.]37
As Gauvard writes, if Jean sans Peur gathered popular support by demanding financial reform in 1405, he quickly abandoned the discourse when pressed for fear of losing the very revenue he required to carry out his political agenda.38 In fact, Jean undoubtedly profited from the discontent focused on officers to deflect attention from the real problem, which was, of course, the system itself, in which he was integrally implicated.
To sum up: taxes were necessary to the kingdom’s continued function. Thus the abolition of taxes could not seriously be forwarded as a general proposition. Taxes were deeply resented, for good reasons. And yet, instead of questioning the system of kingship and gift-giving responsible for the abuses, protesters raised charges of mismanagement against officers, who, even if corrupt, were not the cause of the kingdom’s financial distress.
It is also interesting to note that charges of mismanagement were not related to the actual level of expenditure. Fletcher observes of Richard II that “the complaints about Richard’s reign came thickest during the 1380s, when expenditure was restrained, and then faded away even as costs increased.”39 In the French case, the most instructive counterargument to the notion that Isabeau was uniquely avaricious is that Charles V collected substantially more in tax money than did Charles VI, as we have just noted.40 And yet modern audiences assume the court of Charles VI to have been more extravagant than that of his father.
To return to Isabeau, given the prevalence of the corruption theme during the hundred years leading up to her reign and during the years of her activity, it is surprising that she was not more often condemned by her contemporaries. The reason may be that she tended to be regarded as the king’s representative, and the king himself was largely immune from criticism; this was deflected instead upon his evil counselors, the “bad weeds.” As for modern attitudes toward the queen, Isabeau has long been and continues to be excoriated as cupidinous in secondary literature. It is necessary, however, to consider her within her own culture. Certainly a comparative study of economic systems would fault a system that concentrated fabulous wealth within a small group. But the consumption of this individual queen can only reasonably be understood with reference to the norms of the economy within which she was required to act, and within this circle, her expenditures were simply normal for a queen and seem to have been considered as such in general. She cannot be expected to have done something that all the philosophers of her day were unable to do, that is, discern and deconstruct the formations of power that her culture presented to her as natural. Whatever the evils of this system, they were inextricable from the political life of the French Middle Ages. In this particular context, gorgeous objects conferred the power and prestige necessary to maintaining the mystique of kingship. The queen’s material wealth allowed her to maintain the prestige she needed to defend the monarchy during her husband’s absences against the challenges of the kingdom’s most powerful dukes and to offer the gifts she needed to create alliances.
The Chronicle of the Religieux of Saint Denis as Record of Public Opinion?
The perception that Isabeau’s reputation was blackened sometime during 1405 derives, as we have seen, from two primary sources. The first is the chronicle of Michel Pintoin, who reports anger against her and the Duke of Orleans for excessive spending and poor administration of the kingdom during that one year. A second chronicle, attributed to Juvénal des Ursins, also features one negative passage about Louis and the queen, but up until the year 1411, according to Peter Lewis, or 1413, according to René Planche-nault, this chronicle is an abridged translation of that of Pintoin. The passage reproduces in abbreviated form Pintoin’s story of Jacques Legrand’s sermon, remarking that people were speaking out publicly against the queen and Louis of Orleans because of taxation.41 A comparison of the passage in question in the two sources makes clear that the former is a short variation of the latter. Juvénal des Ursins, therefore, cannot be used for corroboration.42 No other contemporary chronicle reports that the queen was disliked by the people. The Burgundian-leaning Enguerrand Monstrelet, born ca. 1390–95, has nothing negative to report about her.43 Nor do other chroniclers of Burgundian inclination, including Jean Le Fèvre de Saint-Rémy, the anonymous author of the Chronique des Cordeliers, or Pierre Cochon, reproach the queen.44 Even the rabidly pro-Burgundian Bourgeois of Paris offers nothing nastier than the observation that after the queen’s retirement in the 1420s, the people of Paris did not know or much care what had become of her. And certainly Froissart reports only positively on the queen.
Given the lack of corroborating evidence, then, it makes more sense to reexamine the monk’s report of complaints against the queen and Louis closely than to accept it at face value. Pintoin’s pro-Burgundian and anti-Orleanist bias in his early years is well-known.45 A point of departure might be to forward and test the hypothesis that the monk was not reporting widespread negative discourse so much as the propaganda of a small group of Burgundian informers intent on damaging the queen in the year 1405. The Orleanist chronicle attributed to Cousinot lends credence to this interpretation for it mentions that the Duke of Burgundy spread lies about Louis and Isabeau among vagabonds and taverns.46 But more important for the history of the queen’s reputation, it is noteworthy that Cousinot does not report that the lies were taken seriously or that they damaged the queen’s reputation. He simply states rather that the lies further strained relations between the two dukes. It is one thing to spread rumors among vagabonds and taverngoers and another for them to take root.
The chronicle of Pintoin, who was born ca. 1356 and served as cantor at the cathedral of Saint Denis from shortly after 1400 until his death in 1420, is indispensible for understanding the reign of Charles VI and for following Isabeau’s career.47 The chronicler is given a good deal of credit for accuracy, and, because of his meticulousness in other areas, the nineteenth-century historians who devoted studies to Isabeau accepted the monk’s assertions about the queen’s unpopularity uncritically, assuming that he had personally witnessed the public’s disenchantment with her. Moreover, Pintoin’s trustworthiness as a source on medieval public opinion was promoted in Bernard Guenée’s 2002 monograph, L’Opinion publique à la fin du Moyen Age d’après la “Chronique de Charles VI” du Religieux de Saint-Denis. Guenée’s thesis is that Pintoin’s chronicle represents a systematic analysis of the public opinion of the time: that “conscient du poids de l’opinion publique dans la vie politique du royaume au temps de Charles VI, Michel Pintoin s’est attaché à en donner des analyses systématiques” (conscious of the weight of public opinion in political life during the time of Charles VI, Michel Pintoin made it a point to include systematic analyses of it).48
A number of actions seem to indicate that the leaders of the kingdom heeded their publics—at least, they were careful to inform the public about their deeds. Louis of Orleans—and later the Armagnacs—and the Burgundians sent letters justifying what they were doing out to various towns of the kingdom to be read in public.49 Peace accords were ritualistically presented before the public, heralded by trumpets, and announced by town criers. Entries were staged to theatricalize relationships between the royalty and the people.
Bernard Guenée observes that Pintoin shows a greater attention to crowd reaction than earlier chroniclers, attributing this fact to the monk’s sense of the importance of public opinion to the royalty, claiming that the puissant feared public opinion above all things.50 But did the monk truly believe that public opinion was important to the royalty? True, Pintoin describes public reaction. But his tendency to describe public reaction can be explained as part of a larger trend in chronicle writing. It does not necessarily indicate that he believed the royalty to fear public opinion or that he observed the public in action. As Zrinka Stahuljak has explained, toward the end of the fourteenth century, chronicle narrators begin to refer to themselves in the first person. The effect of this is to conflate two textual personae previously kept separate: the narrator of the chronicle and its author.51 The narrator and the author were of course the same person, but earlier chronicle narrators had typically referred to themselves in their authorial persona in the third person, and, on the rare occasion when they intruded as narrator into the text, to that persona in the first-person plural. When chroniclers begin to enter into their own texts, referring to themselves in the first person, they seem to a modern audience to be eyewitnesses to the events they recount. They heighten the effect by describing the situation around them, the reactions of the crowds, for example. And yet, this is often no more than a rhetorical effect. Whereas earlier chroniclers had authorized their texts by adhering to historical patterns—salvation history, for example—these chroniclers draw their authority from their proximity to events.
Pintoin relied upon the testimony of others for most parts of his chronicle. Guenée notes: “Michel Pintoin a multiplié dans sa chronique la transcription ou la traduction de documents de toutes natures parvenus jusqu’à Saint-Denis.” (Michel Pintoin fills his chronicle with transcriptions and translations of all varieties.)52 And yet, even when he was not present at an event he records, he often claims that he was, letting the reader believe that he was an “eyewitness.” In a number of cases, this has little bearing on the accuracy of his narration. Already in 1902 Noël Valois demonstrated that the monk gives the impression of having been part of a group of ambassadors sent to Avignon in 1395 and part of another sent to Rome in 1407, when in fact he was not.53 The information he records appears to be accurate, so in this case, whether Pintoin personally accompanied the ambassadors is of little importance.
But it is important to note this habit, because it means that we cannot take for granted that Pintoin was present at the events he describes, and therefore we cannot assume that he actually observed the reactions he describes. We do not know whether he ever had firsthand experience of the “murmurings” he reports hearing against Louis and the queen. If he did not personally witness popular discontent, from whom did he get his information about dissatisfaction with the administration of Louis and the queen and why did he describe it in his chronicle? Guenée writes that much of the public opinion recorded by Pintoin seems to issue from a small group of sages, wise political thinkers, to whom the monk refers on numerous occasions as circumspecti. The circumspecti, horrified by the disaster they perceive to be imminent, transmit warnings about the state of the realm. According to Guenée, Pintoin conceives of himself as the spokesperson for this elite group of thinkers.54
To return to the question of whether the monk believed in the importance of public opinion, I suggest that Pintoin does not so much scrupulously record what he observes of the crowds around him as report the comments of this group to reinforce his own interpretation of the events of 1405. If Pintoin’s circumspecti could in fact be identified as intelligent and impartial observers dedicated to averting the impending doom, it would be safe to assume that Isabeau did something in 1405 that caused them to murmur their disapproval. But the Council in 1405 was dominated by Louis of Orleans and challenged by Jean sans Peur. The members of the Council were divided on the basis of their loyalties. Given this situation, it is certain that Pintoin would have been the spokesperson for a group with a clearly defined political bias. In the case of Isabeau, his reports of discontent would not issue from objective men who sought to report wrongdoing in hopes of forcing remedies for the good of the kingdom but from men who wished to promote their version of events to further their own political goals. Guenée has shown in different contexts that Pintoin’s history creates a moral narrative to which he makes the events he describes conform, which means that he sometimes invents characters to act as mouthpieces for certain points of view.55 The shadowy regnicole, plebs, decuriones insignes, and circumspecti who murmured against Isabeau, I would suggest, are the inventions of interested parties reporting to Pintoin with the goal of justifying the attempts of their leaders—first Philip of Burgundy and then Jean sans Peur—to control the government.
It will now be necessary to support my argument about the identity of the monk’s circumspecti in some detail.
Pintoin’s Louis of Orleans
However, first we must make a quick detour. Any analysis of the representation of the queen and her detractors in Pintoin’s chronicle has to begin by emphasizing that she is only described as the target of criticism when she is associated with Louis of Orleans, and that Pintoin is very clearly biased against Louis in favor of the Burgundians. In the polarized atmosphere of France of 1405, the Duke of Orleans was a powerful patron who also had powerful enemies. Like Philip III’s despised Pierre de la Broce or Philip the Fair’s Enguerran de Marigny, Louis, the king’s favorite advisor, received the brunt of the rival faction’s jealousy. Furthermore, during the period for which Pintoin reports dissatisfaction with Louis, the Duke of Orleans had involved the kingdom in military activity against England, and this was not going well for the French. The Burgundians, opposed to any military activity that threatened their relations with the English because of the Flemish cities’ commerce with England, complained loudly against taxes levied to fund that war. I will address this point in detail in the next section, because it involves Isabeau.
Why has the Burgundian perspective so thoroughly dominated historiography of the period? As Elizabeth Gonzalez notes, “Autant les études portant sur la Bourgogne, ses ducs et le personnel à leur service abondent, autant celles consacrées aux princes d’Orléans de la fin du Moyen Age sont quasi inexistantes, souvent incomplètes, voire très contestables.” (Whereas the studies relative to Burgundy, its dukes and their personnel are abundant, those consecrated to the princes of Orleans at the end of the Middle Ages are almost inexistent, often incomplete, indeed, of dubious accuracy.)56 To a large extent, the phenomenon is a function of the relative power of the two houses. Gonzalez points to “le fait que la principauté orléanaise est loin d’avoir connu le sort de ce que d’aucuns qualifient de ‘royaume’ ou ‘d’Etat’ bourguignon” (the fact that the principality of Orleans was nothing like what is often called the Burgundian ‘kingdom’ or ‘state’”).57 She offers further explanation for the success of the Burgundian propaganda machine in blackening the name of Louis of Orleans, writing:
Longtemps, l’histoire s’est faite à partir des sources bourguignonnes, naturellement hostiles aux Orléans, et il a fallu attendre le XIXe siècle et Michelet pour que le premier prince de cette dynastie, Louis Ier d’Orléans, fût réhabilité.
[The historiographical tradition must also be taken into account. For a long time, histories were written from Burgundian sources, which were naturally hostile toward the House of Orleans, and it was not until the nineteenth century and Michelet that the first prince of the dynasty, Louis of Orleans, was rehabilitated.]58
The result has been that any history treating Louis tends to be “dépourvue de tout regard critique envers les sources” (devoid of any critical perspective on the sources).59 Although histories written under Charles VII cast the House of Orleans in a positive light, these are not the sources that modern histories have mined for information on the reign of Charles VI. They have relied on sources contemporary with the period.
To make the case that Pintoin’s information about Louis issued from Burgundian sources, I would begin with the observation that the monk’s sources for details on the Duke of Orleans are sometimes incorrect in ways that show Louis in an unflattering light while flattering the Duke of Burgundy. Pintoin’s information about the growing conflict between the Duke of Orleans and his Burgundian relatives during the first years of the fifteenth century is based necessarily on “des bruits de la cour” (rumors of the court), as Guenée notes, because deliberations in the Royal Council were private.60 And regarding these deliberations, it is clear that Pintoin is often misinformed. For example, in July 1402, he claims that one day when the Duke of Orleans was otherwise occupied, the king summoned his Council and asked them whom they would like to see in charge during his “absences.” Their reply: “The Duke of Burgundy.”61 After soliciting the opinion of his Council, the king supposedly transferred power from his brother to his uncle by letters patent. The relevant documents tell a very different story. Louis had been named président des généraux-counseilleurs sur le fait des finances provenant des aides établies dans le Languedoil pour la guerre (that is, given authority to levy taxes for the continuing war against England) on April 18.62 On June 26, Philip had been given exactly the same appointment, which meant that the men were meant to share authority. On the first day of July, Isabeau had been designated president of the Council by royal ordinance.63 It is simply not true that Philip was promoted at Louis’s expense. Because the story is both false and unflattering to Louis, it can only have come from Burgundian informants who offered Pintoin their own version of the rivalry to justify their position for posterity.
Other incidents reported in the chronicle make clear that Pintoin’s knowledge of what transpired at court was based on reports from Burgundian sources. Indeed, one of his major sources on Louis seems to have been the 1408 justification by University of Paris theologian Jean Petit of Jean of Burgundy’s having committed murder, as Michael Nordberg has demonstrated.64 After having the Duke of Orleans assassinated in November of 1407, Jean attempted to exonerate himself in March of the following year through this public justification presented by Jean Petit. The justification claimed that because he had been a tyrant, Louis deserved to die and that it had thus been Jean’s obligation to see to his assassination. Louis’s two main sins, according to the justification, were that he had tried to murder the king for years with magical spells and that he was greedy: he had tried to take over Normandy and he helped himself to the taxes raised for the war.
Pintoin’s 1392 entry describing the reasons for which Louis banished courtier Pierre de Craon from his court draws upon the justification. Like the justification, Pintoin’s chronicle asserts that Louis chased Craon from court for spreading the story that the duke cast spells with bones.65 Only Pintoin’s chronicle and the justification make this claim. Although the material appears in Pintoin’s chronicle in a year anterior to the justification, he must have borrowed the information from the later source rather than the other way around, as Nordberg explains, for Jean Petit’s version is the more detailed and because the chronicle would not yet have been available to the public in 1408—and therefore not to Jean Petit, either.
Pintoin finishes the story of Craon’s being banished from Louis’s court by remarking that the nobles grumbled (inter se murmuraverunt) about the action, but that they were afraid to counter the duke. Guenée, asserting that the grumbling does not appear in Petit, cites this as evidence of the monk’s attention to public opinion: “Mais les précisions qu’il ajoute à la fin prouvent bien que lui-même était parfaitement informé de cet incident qui l’avait vivement frappé, et montrent surtout l’attention qu’il portait toujours à l’opi-nion publique.” (But the refinements that he adds at the end prove that he himself was perfectly well-informed about the incident, which had struck him acutely, and show the attention that he always lent public opinion.)66 It is not known which of the manuscripts of the justification Pintoin used for his chronicle. However, it is not accurate that the grumbling appears only in Pintoin. For as Nordberg points out, the same observation about grumbling against Louis for banishing Craon from his court appears in the chronicle of the violently anti-Orleanist chronicle of Pierre Cochon, a chronicle completely independent of Pintoin’s, and which reproduces its own copy of Petit’s justification. The only explanation for the appearance of the comment about grumbling in both chronicles can be that Pintoin and Cochon drew on a common source for the line. This common source must have been a version of the justification that included the grumbling.67 The grumbling nobles of Pintoin’s chronicle, thus, are Burgundians.
Nordberg cites Pintoin’s story that in 1405 Louis took it into his head to assume authority over Normandy as further evidence for the monk’s reliance on Petit.68 The charge that Louis tried to take over Normandy is corroborated in two other sources: the second justification of Petit, written after the Orleanists had responded to his first justification, and, once again, Cochon, who, as Nordberg shows, derives his information on this subject from the second justification.69 Given that the attempted takeover is recorded only in two anti-Orleanist sources and nowhere else, it is likely to be a Burgundian invention. Far from attempting to impose himself on Normandy, Louis was probably visiting the duchy in his capacity as lieutenant et capitaine général pour le fait de la guerre en Picardie et Normandie, a position awarded him in 1404.70 But among the Burgundians, his visit was turned into a bid to attach Normandy to his own domain.
Finally, Nordberg explains that Pintoin reports that Louis was accused of diverting funds from tailles that had been collected to support the war against England.71 Once again, the information seems to have come from Petit’s justification. One detail adduced by Pintoin, that Louis had taken 200,000 écus from the royal treasure, is found only in the justification.72 As to the validity of the charge, an examination of financial records does not support it. Maurice Rey scrutinizes the accusation in his volume on royal finances under Charles VI, concluding that it is baseless: “Rien, dans les grandes Tailles des années 1404 et 1405, ne fut l’objet de don au seigneur chez qui on la percevait; le frère du roi, alors au sommet de sa toute-puissance, n’osa pas en profiter pour se servir directement, comme en témoigne sa comptabilité.” (Nothing in the great Tailles of the years 1404 and 1405 was made a gift to the lord who collected it; the brother of the king, at the height of his power, did not dare profit from it directly, as his accounts verify.)73 Rey dismisses the charge as accusations “astucieusement lancées dans les cercles bourguignons pour dresser l’opinion publique contre l’homme qu’on voulait abattre” (astutely launched in Burgundian circles to push public opinion against the man they wanted to kill).74
Pintoin’s Isabeau
The Louis of Orleans described in Pintoin’s chronicle is derived at least in part from the most biased source imaginable: the self-justification of his assassin. It is clear, then, why Pintoin’s Louis appears in a negative light. The four negative references to the queen in Pintoin’s chronicle all tie her to Louis. Thus it seems reasonable to conclude that the criticisms reported about Isabeau, like those reported about Louis, reflect the attacks of a small group of Burgundian detractors.
Two other points are important: first, all the attacks all take place in 1405, and, second, the alleged complaints implicitly attribute an enormous amount of power to the queen. Accusations of mismanagement of the realm would only be aimed at a queen with serious clout. And yet until this moment in the chronicle, Isabeau’s role had been strictly ceremonial. According to Pintoin, as we have seen, Charles VI had put Philip of Burgundy in charge of the realm in July 1402, while the Dukes of Berry, Burgundy, and Orleans ruled jointly in 1404, and with Philip’s death, Louis had taken the reins. Until 1405, Pintoin had limited Isabeau’s role to bearing children and attempting to persuade Charles to revoke burdensome taxes.75 How does she suddenly become a powerful and unpopular queen in 1405? And why does she disappear from a central role at the end of 1405 just as suddenly as she had appeared?
Isabeau, I suggest, pops into the monk’s chronicle as an unpopular and inexplicably powerful figure when she does because in 1405, for the first time, she was understood as a serious obstacle by the Burgundians. Philip of Burgundy, uncle to Charles VI, brother to the former king, Charles V, and therefore entitled to power and prestige, died in April 1404.76 What this meant in practical terms was that Burgundian access to royal funds dried up. Philip’s son, Jean sans Peur, quickly made a bid to take up his father’s position in the government. However, Jean, a mere cousin to the king, was rebuffed not only by Louis, whose own power had increased with the death of Philip, but by Isabeau, who saw Jean, with good reason from the perspective of the royal family, as a dangerous usurper. Throughout the remainder of 1404 and 1405, Jean tried by various means to assert himself, without success. Isabeau’s “troublesomeness” came to a head in August 1405, when she attempted to preserve the dauphin from the clutches of Jean, in an episode that has come to be known as the enlèvement du dauphin. When Jean marched on Paris in August of 1405, Isabeau fled to Melun, leaving orders for the royal children to follow, fearing that Jean would assert power over the mad king and that having the dauphin in his care would validate his claim to power. Pintoin’s story of the enlèvement du dauphin, like that of the other major chroniclers of the period, Monstrelet and Juvénal des Ursins, derives from the self-serving report of Jean, himself, and, in this account, the queen is cast as a recalcitrant, refusing to reform the realm according to the proposal laid out by the Burgundians.77 The Isabeau whom Pintoin meets in Jean’s account of the enlèvement was easily adaptable to the overall narrative of corruption and waste that shapes much of the early years of his chronicle. One of the favorite strategies of Jean sans Peur to garner popularity in Paris was to pose as a proponent of financial reform. It was inevitable in the version of events that his men reported that Louis and his ally, Isabeau, would be cast as villains.
But hard as the monk tries to tell a story of “public” dissension against a cupidinous queen, the fact that her detractors were the Burgundians can be read through the chronicle, and the real stakes of the events he reports sometimes erupt through the text’s surface. Had a strong anti-Isabeau current existed, surely it would have surfaced during the Cabochian revolt of 1413 when the Parisians were more vocal about royal spendthrift than at any other time during Isabeau’s reign, and, had he been committed to recording public opinion, surely Pintoin would have mentioned this. And yet, Isabeau appears as an honored figure in Pintoin’s version of the Cabochian revolt.78
The spot where one would most expect to see complaints against Isabeau, the entries describing the Cabochian revolt, then, turn up nothing. Let us now examine the spots in Pintoin’s chronicle where reports of the queen’s unpopularity do turn up. First, as I noted above, it is important to consider 1405 as reported in Pintoin’s chronicle in the context of the continuing war against the English, which was not going well in that year. After a period of peace sealed by the marriage between Isabelle, daughter of Charles VI and Isabeau, and the English king, Richard II, war had gradually broken out again after Richard was deposed by Henry IV in 1400. In April 1404, the Counts of Foix and Armagnac had threatened the English in Guyenne and Bordeaux. In June of that year, Louis, eager to continue the fight, got himself appointed lieutenant et capitaine général for war in Picardy and Normandy. As we have seen, soon afterward, the Royal Council ordered the Count de la Marche to negotiate an alliance with Owen Glendower, inciting him to revolt against Henry IV. Beginning in 1405, connétable Charles d’Albret and the Count of Armagnac led French offensives in Guyenne and Saintonge. At the same time, the Count de la Marche led a disastrous naval expedition to Wales to aid Owen Glendower in his revolt. Heading an expedition in Calais, the Count of Saint Pol was defeated at Marck, on May 20, 1405. The Boulonnais and Flanders were threatened. As Coville describes the situation, the kingdom was the target of “perpétuels ravages, des expéditions de pillage et de désolation, guerre permanente et ruineuse, plus funeste qu’une défaite pour le pays qui la subit” (perpetual ravaging, pillaging and destruction, permanent and ruinous warfare, worse than defeat for the country subjected to it).79
The immediate context of the monk’s criticism of Isabeau, then, was a war that was going very badly for the French. The first of four examples of criticism of the queen emerges as part of Pintoin’s announcement that the French expeditions of the year had not stopped the English, who kept on attacking on all sides of the kingdom and ravishing without obstacle, nearly always winning. The monk reports that the inhabitants of the realm resented the absence of peace and cursed the taxes imposed on them for the war.
Expediciones bellice, quas ad qualemcunque regni gloriam anno isto memini me scripsisse, Anglicorum arcere non potuerunt superbiam, quin longe lateque per regnum littora maritima viribus inquietantes libere grassarentur, et cum vires exercebant, sepius meliorem calculum reportabant. Cum cordis amaritudine inde cum clero nobiles et ignobiles dolentes, jugum intollerabile plebis, sub titulo subsidii guerrarum levatum, execrabile reputabant, cum sic manere non posset in pulcritudine pacis et requie temporalium opulenta. In regine et ducis Aurelianis culpam malum hoc regnicole retorquebant, qui sic regnum tepide gubernabant.
[The military expeditions that I have written about this year, whatever they brought to the glory of the kingdom, they were not able to curb the pride of the English, who prowled freely through the kingdom along the maritime coasts, making trouble for people, and, when they engaged, they often came out on top. Along with the clergy, the suffering nobility and lower classes reflected angrily, their hearts filled with bitterness, on the intolerable yoke imposed on the people under the title of war subsidies, because it did not permit them to remain in the beauty of peace and luxurious repose of the world. The inhabitants put the blame on the queen and the Duke of Orleans, who were governing inefficiently.]80
Immediately after the passage above, Pintoin reports that Jean sans Peur voted against the new taxes to support the war in the Council. Proceedings at the Council being private, the monk had to get the news from someone. Surely the complaint was passed on to the monk by the men of the Duke of Burgundy, who, like his father, protested taxes levied for the war to reinforce his own image of reformer.81 The Duke of Burgundy occupied only the fifth place in the deliberations at that point, Pintoin informs his readers; claiming that the taxes were not necessary was a way of increasing his own reputation.82 The propagandistic intent of his complaints about war taxes is evidenced by his manifestly false assertion in 1406 that he had not received the portion of the taille to which he was entitled to prepare for a siege of Calais. Records clearly indicate that he did receive his portion.83
The second criticism is Pintoin’s story of the Augustinian monk, Jacques Legrand, who scolded Isabeau and her courtiers in the spring of 1405. But once again, the complaint is in fact the war. The public (plebs) voiced its unhappiness about the spending habits of Louis and Isabeau, the monk reiterates, but no one dared criticize the royalty publicly until Legrand denounced the queen. After a stirring sermon on the virtues and vices, he told her: “In tua curia domina Venus solium occupans, ipsi eciam obsequntur ebrietas et commessacio, que noctes vertunt in diem, continuantes choreas dissolutas. Hee maledicte et infernales pedissece, curiam assidue ambientes, mores viresque enervant plurium.” (Lady Venus occupies the throne in your court: certainly drunkenness and debauchery follow her, turning night into day, with continual dissolute dancing. Oh, the cursed and infernal lackeys, who constantly inhabit your court, greatly sap morals and strength.)84
According to Pintoin, the sermon delivered a stinging moral indictment of Isabeau and Louis of Orleans. The sermon has not survived except for the small bits reported in Pintoin’s chronicle, so we cannot verify his interpretation of it. Several traces of the sermon as they can be read in the chronicle, however, suggest that far from a shocking reproach to the queen and proof of a sudden downturn in her popularity, the sermon was simply a perfectly ordinary one of the type routinely preached at court and that its core complaint was in fact the unsuccessful war against the English.
First, it should be noted that the passage reported by Pintoin must be inserted into the context of sermons, where it is not nearly as audacious as it may seem. Sermons preached before the king and queen routinely criticized the morals of the court, as another sermon, preached before Isabeau in 1396, that is, nearly ten years before her supposed fall from popularity, attests.85 This sermon scolds the nobles for not being sufficiently humble and too fixed on worldly things. The preaching of the sermon of 1396, however, finds no horrified moralizing commentary in Pintoin’s chronicle. Why would it have? Preachers were expected to rail against vice: that was their job. And complaints about the frivolity of the court had been common enough since at least the twelfth century to form a literary subgenre.86
Moreover, the fact that Louis was Legrand’s patron diminishes the likelihood that the sermon was perceived as shocking by its audience. Legrand’s most important work, the incomplete Archiloge sophie, which was intended to set out in twelve books everything that was known of science, was effusively dedicated to Louis of Orleans.87 After the assassination of the Duke of Orleans, Legrand became a rabid Orleanist. It thus seems implausible that he would have waged a personal attack against the Duke of Orleans and his ally, the queen.
The real object of the sermon is strongly suggested by its textual context. Just before the Legrand episode, Pintoin refers to the May 15 expedition of the Count of St. Pol against a garrison at Marck, from which the English had been launching raids on the nearby region of the Boulonnais. The expedition met with disaster when it was attacked by English from Calais. While the count fled, many of his men were killed or taken prisoner.
Pintoin’s continuation of the Legrand story is further evidence of the sermon’s real point. When the king, who was not present for the original sermon, heard about it, he questioned the preacher face to face, asking him to repeat the fiery words. Legrand complied, says Pintoin. However, the substance of the discourse that Legrand held before the king, as Pintoin reports it, is not the greed of the queen and the Duke of Orleans but rather the badly managed war with the English.88 Legrand reminded the king of his father, Charles V. While that wise king had also imposed tailles, it had been to serve the glory of France: to build fortresses, defeat the enemies of the realm, reclaim lost cities, amass the treasures that had made him rich. In contrast, under Charles VI, there were no glorious expeditions for the kingdom, the soldiers were not even paid; the tailles were appropriated by a few. Everyone lived in vice.
Legrand’s reference to Venus reigning at the court, so long used as evidence of Isabeau’s lax moral standards, takes on a new aspect when reconsidered as a criticism of a badly managed war. This was a common insult waged against ineffective soldiers, who were called soldiers of Venus rather than Mars. A comparison with the chronicle of Thomas of Walsingham, which criticizes Richard II’s inner circle for what he condemns as their unwillingness to engage in battle and also their refusal to heed outside advice, demonstrates the popularity of the image. Thomas writes that “several of them were more soldiers of Venus than of Bellona [Goddess of War], more valorous in the bedchamber than on the field of battle, and more likely to defend themselves with their tongues than their spears, for although they slept on when the trumpet sounded for deeds of war, they were always wide awake to make speeches.”89 The Venus passage, I would suggest, can also be usefully compared with the Quadrilogue invectif of Alain Chartier (1422). In this poetic debate among the Three Estates, the people complain that they have been devastated by the nobility’s warring, but that they would not mind if only the nobility would win.90 The anger that the sermon aroused among courtiers, as recorded by Pintoin, then, would have been targeted at the preacher’s denigration of French knighthood.
A final key to the passage is Pintoin’s use of the expression in tua curia to locate the scandal.91 The curia, “court,” implies a governing body, counselors, the Royal Council, and all of the royal household. As Malcom Vale has noted, “The court was where the ruler was.”92 In the context of the war with England, Isabeau’s court would have been that of Charles VI. The charge is not being waged against Isabeau’s personal household but against the court in general, against the advisors of the king, against the Royal Council, who were levying taxes for a war that was not being successfully accomplished: against those who were knights of Venus rather than knights of Mars. Although the monk never acknowledges that Isabeau holds a position of some influence at court, Legrand’s reference to the curia as her own (in tua curia) reveals her importance there.
It seems that the story lying under Pintoin’s tale of Legrand’s moral indictment goes something like this: predisposed by his Burgundian sources to see Louis of Orleans as an immoral wastrel, the monk pushed the report he received of Legrand’s sermon through this interpretive grid, producing a story of the sermon as an attack on courtly morals. Isabeau’s role is both obscured and highlighted in the account: clearly she occupies a position of power if Legrand includes her in his critique of war spending. But, Pintoin, unaccustomed to seeing women as political figures, does not explain the queen’s importance.
The third incidence of criticism of the queen reported by Pintoin occurs shortly after the Legrand sermon where it serves as an introduction to the episode that has come to be known as the enlèvement du dauphin. Noble seigneurs asked that the kingdom be watched over, the monk asserts, because the queen and Louis were using their power to crush the kingdom and enrich themselves.93 Some people of the court, he continues after relating the story about Louis’s attempt to appropriate Normandy, even accused the pair of neglecting her children. The king demanded verification of this from the dauphin, who reported that his mother had not caressed him for three months. The king then gave the domicella who took care of the dauphin the very cup from which he was just about to drink in gratitude for her services.
It would be easy to simply dismiss the story, which finds no other corroboration, as a malevolent fiction, given the ample proof of Isabeau’s maternal devotion, which I will enumerate in chapter eight. But when this story of motherly neglect is juxtaposed with another one related by Pintoin during the enlèvement du dauphin incident, I believe that it reveals something of the mode of its own creation. Describing the scenario after Jean’s snatching of the dauphin, Pintoin reports that with discord prevailing between the Dukes of Orleans and Burgundy, nothing could be done by one without the other being informed of it immediately by the gossip of courtiers. Rumors flew back and forth, further inflaming the already dangerous situation. Pintoin then notes that Isabeau dismissed some of her own ladies from the court for spreading scandalous rumors, including Madame Minchière, close counselor and keeper of the queen’s seal.94
Madame Minchière did not exist; modern historians generally agree that the reference is to Madame de Semihier, a Bavarian by birth, dame d’honneur and sometime chancellor of the queen from 1396 to 1405.95 Madame de Semihier did indeed leave the queen’s service in 1405 for reasons unknown. But her husband and daughter continued to serve the queen after she left.96 She moved into the household of Isabeau’s brother, Louis the Duke of Bavaria, in 1407, and eventually left France with her husband for Bavaria in 1411.
In that same year, 1405, another dame d’honneur, Madame Malicorne, who was at different times responsible for the royal children, also left the service of the queen for unknown reasons. The name “Minchière” looks as if it might be a conflation of Semihier and Malicorne. Perhaps the monk’s Madame Minchière is in fact Madame Malicorne, the young woman charged with care of the dauphin. With both women leaving the queen’s service in 1405, Pintoin’s story begins to look like a garbling of different events. One of these events would be the coming to light of a rumor, which he describes as flying back and forth between the two camps. Perhaps the rumor, of Burgundian origin, accused the queen of maternal neglect—nothing could be more plausible, given Jean sans Peur’s accusation of maternal neglect in his version of the “kidnapping of the dauphin,” which I will discuss in chapter six. Perhaps Madame Malicorne, the children’s governess, targeted by gossiping courtiers for having accused the queen of failing to take care of her children, was sent away by the queen. The other event, the departure of Madame Semihier, may have been entirely noncontroversial.
The story of Madame Malicorne, however, may have given rise to the story of the king asking his son about Isabeau’s caresses. In any case, it could have been fed to Pintoin only by a Burgundian. Pintoin would not have gotten such unflattering material from an Orleanist. Given this, there is good reason to approach the charge skeptically.
The fourth criticism comes at the time of the enlèvement du dauphin episode.
Isabeau’s detractors were not objective observers and given the lack of other evidence, we have no reason to assume that their views reflect a widespread opinion. The modern perception of the queen’s sudden loss of popularity is the product of Pintoin’s Burgundian sources, who in 1405 had experienced her resistance to their projects. One would expect them to spread rumors about their enemies and assert that they were being accused of avariciousness. Until other evidence that Isabeau was disliked in 1405 appears, it seems reasonable to imagine that Pintoin records not “public opinion,” or even the opinion of a group of wise men, but a trace of the Burgundian propaganda machine.97
In L’Opinion publique à la fin du Moyen Age, Guenée cautions against accepting Pintoin’s version of an event that receives no corroborating evidence in official sources. And yet, he cites the supposed attempt of Louis of Orleans to lay hold of Normandy as particularly instructive for understanding public opinion. This is despite the fact that Guenée himself notes that the story appears in no official source and remarks that the attempt came to naught (which is not surprising if it never occurred at all).98 It is prudent, I believe, to follow Guenée’s initial approach and read events recorded only by the monk with skepticism. If we follow this approach consistently, we will not be able to accept the unpopularity of the queen uncritically.99 Furthermore, Guenée observes that Pintoin is led by his moral vision to invent events. Analyzing the monk’s recounting of the Peace of Tournai, Guenée meticulously separates the facts from their representation in the chronicle. As Guenée demonstrates, the story of the reconciliation between Philip of Burgundy, new count of Flanders, and the rebellious Ghenters, is ideologically shaped by the addition of a fictive goldsmith from Ghent who speaks unrealistically in support of the king and the French. As Guenée observes, “Ce qu’il veut d’abord, c’est bien exposer une théorie” (What he wants to do, first and foremost, is expound a theory).100 It is impossible to know exactly how much confidence to attribute the chronicle in general, he explains: “C’est selon. Chaque morceau devra être examiné en lui-même.” (It depends. Each section must be examined individually.)101
Strongly influenced by nineteenth-century histories of Isabeau, modern historians have accepted accounts of her unpopularity without the necessary skepticism. The chronicle of Pintoin, carefully examined, does not offer evidence of general dislike of the queen, but of a small number of planted attacks on her.
The “Songe véritable”
The second frequently adduced source for Isabeau’s bad reputation among the people of her time is an anonymous poem known as the “Songe véritable” (“The True Dream”). The work exists in only two manuscripts, so it cannot be assumed to have circulated widely. Moreover, its bias is obvious: coming up for criticism before Isabeau are Louis of Orleans, Jean of Berry, and the king’s grand maître d’hôtel, Jean de Montaigu, whom Jean sans Peur had put to death in 1409. In short, the cast of characters are the opponents of Jean sans Peur.
In this section, I argue first that the “Songe véritable” must be read as the product of a clash between two mutually opposed economic visions, that of the nobility and that of the inhabitants of the towns, with Jean sans Peur as representative of the towns. As Kathleen Daly has written, “For some (particularly themselves), royal officers were faithful servants of the crown, rewarded for their devotion: while for their critics, they were incompetent, rapacious and self-serving! These contrasting images seem appropriate for a group whose functions and social situation were undergoing profound changes during the fifteenth century.”102 Second, I argue that the poem does not reflect the queen’s unpopularity but in fact bears witness to the writer’s anxiety that she was greatly loved. A passage devoted to describing the fall from popularity that Fortune has decided to impose upon the queen suggests that while Fortune may have planned the fall, it has not yet taken place.
In 1405, the reasons for the kingdom’s financial problems were not clearly understood by the nobility or the townspeople. From the perspective of the nobility, as loyal servants of the king who were expected not only to leave behind their own territories to help him with governing the realm, but to provide men at arms to defend the kingdom when called upon, Louis of Orleans, Jean of Berry, and many of the courtiers depicted with such disgust in the “Songe véritable” were rewarded in a manner befitting their service. The “Songe véritable” depicts these servants of the king in a very different light. The people, represented by Chascun, which means something like Everyman, were willing to pay taxes to the king. However, according to the poem, their taxes never reach the king but are appropriated by rapacious courtiers who take the money for themselves, requiring ever more taxes to be extorted from the people.
Still, by dramatizing the working of Commune Renommé, “common knowledge,” the “Songe véritable” readily admits that it does not know exactly why the king suffers under such sordid circumstances. While the poem’s analysis mirrors the popular understanding that the kingdom’s financial difficulties were being caused by bad officers and greedy courtiers, depicting the king as innocent victim of his courtiers, it simultaneously makes the point that no one really understands how money circulates in the French economy. Thelma Fenster, who has demonstrated the importance of fama, rumor, has shown that in medieval culture “knowledge” was built through the accumulation of eyewitness and hearsay reports and that such knowledge was considered valid. “It is startling for the non-specialist, therefore,” she writes, “to realize that medieval legal systems readily acknowledged the force of common opinion and even devised ground rules for it use.”103 Certainly the eagerness with which Chascun, Everyman, accepts the appearance of Commune Renommé when he cannot find the truth speaks to the aptness of Fenster’s observation. For Fenster, Commune Renommé represents the “political voice of the people.”
Fenster also argues that the poem “undoubtedly played a role in creating the negative fama of those surrounding the king, including Isabeau, whose poor reputation persists to the present.”104 I believe that this conclusion bears reexamination. Certainly the composer of this work did not wander among the gens de métier of Paris to elicit opinions and write them down but sought rather to form the opinions of those with access to an aural literary culture. Commune Renommé in this work represents that which is represented to the literate, rather than what is believed spontaneously and circulated by the people. Indeed, Commune Renommé, who is called on to draw conclusions when Verité proves impossible to find, beautifully illustrates the staging of authority. The character represents the authority of the one who desires to “rescue” the king from his avaricious courtiers, in other words, the authority of the opponent of those represented in the line-up of the greedy and ambitious. Like the propaganda letters that accompanied controversial events, the public announcements at Châtelet announcing princely opposition to or approval of recently passed measures of the Royal Council, or the public reading of royal ordinances, the “Songe véritable” is a representation of power. What we witness in it is not an outpouring of public opinion, the circulation of mala fama. Rather, it is the attempt to impose an opinion on a potential audience.
A brief summary of the poem’s plot will be necessary to make these points clearly. The story begins by presenting itself as a version of the Roman de la Rose, a dream that transmits a truth. It is a revelation rather than a reasoned argument:
Les gens qui dient que en songes
N’a se fables non et mençonges,
Sy comme ou rommant de la Rose
Est dit, en texte, non en glose,
Sy n’ont pas tout bien essayé,
Sy com je voy…. (lines 1–6)
[People who say that dreams are nothing but fables and lies, as it is said in the Roman de la Rose, in the text, not in the gloss, have not experienced many, as I see.]
The dreamer then goes on to recount a midnight vision he has recently experienced. Dream literature permits an author to state supposed truths without taking responsibility for them, truths that appear unbidden. The Rose promises to reveal the entire story of love; the “Songe véritable” reveals the story of the impoverishment of the kingdom. The dreamer’s vision begins in a palace where the king, poorly attired, sat with a poor company representing the various regions of France.
Premierement je vy un Roy
Qui n’estoit pas de grant arroy,
Mais paré fu, con m’est advis,
De menuettes fleurs de lis,
Et avoit en sa compaignie
En povre estat assez mesgnie,
Qui prestes estoient du servir
De ly amer et obeir
Par semblant de vouloir commun.
Aussy plusieurs vy du commun,
Comme bourgeois et hostelliers
Et autres gens de tous mestiers … (lines 33–44)
[First I saw a king, who was not dressed in fine array, but was decorated, it seemed to me, in small fleurs de lys, and in his company a number of followers in poor estate who were ready to serve, love, and obey him, apparently because of a common desire. I also saw some common people, such as bourgeois and hotel keepers, and other people of all trades.]
Also present are Fortune, Dampnacion, Reformacion, Chascun, and Soufe-rance. Chascun is prodded by Povreté to speak to Souferance:
Mais Povreté premierement
Fist parler Chascun vrayment
Qui là estoit… (lines 69–71)
[But Povreté first had Chascun, who was there, speak….]
Chascun agrees, explaining how he has been robbed of his daughter, Pecune or property, and has now been threatened with the loss of his second daughter. Souferance replies that it is not her fault. She cannot help the situation; she just does what she is told. Nonetheless, she advises Chascun to seek out Verité to verify that his money is at least going to the king, to whom it belongs. Chascun acquiesces and sends Povreté off to find Verité.
But Povreté quickly returns with the news that although she has searched in the homes of the courtiers, she has not discovered the truth: Verité is not to be found there. Nor does Verité reside at Châtelet, in the Parlement, with “chanoines, dyacres, chantres, doyens, arcedyacres” or with “tresoriers et generaux,” with the religious orders, with “juges, clercs seculiers,” or with “advocas, gens d’eglise ou gens qui mainnent marchandise.” No one is talking.
Unable to find the truth about where the money is going, Souferance advises that they turn to Commune Renommé, “public knowledge” or “hearsay,” to find out whether the king is receiving his due. Commune Renommé verifies Chascun’s hunch that the king’s funds are being appropriated by someone else, and calls in Excusacion as a witness that the king is not to blame; the poor monarch is just as impoverished as Chascun. To blame for the disgraceful situation is Faulx Gouvernement. Questioned, Faulx Gouvernement admits his guilt, followed by Experience, who in her mirror reveals at length and in detail the characters of the greedy culprits responsible for the situation: Louis of Orleans, Jean of Berry, Jean de Montaigu, and the queen. When questioned by Commune Renommé as to how these individuals happen to find themselves in such a favorable financial position, Experience passes the floor to Fortune. After warning the characters that she might spin her wheel, Fortune cedes to Raison, who scolds each of the guilty parties in turn. Finally Dampnacion threatens them, before the “acteur” or author-narrator of the poem issues a final warning.
Commune Renommé occupies a crucial spot in the cast of allegorical figures pursuing the answer to the question of why the people of France are so poor. The figure is called in specifically to fill in when the Truth, Verité, cannot be found. Clearly the figure represents a sort of folk wisdom, a type of information. It has long been assumed that Isabeau was dogged by rumors about her cupidity. Does the poem, with its emphasis on the circulation of information that may or may not be accurate in the form of Commune Renommé, support this assessment?
It is important to consider carefully the role of the queen in the poem in comparison with the courtiers portrayed with her. Her depiction is significantly less unflattering, less specific, and contains far fewer lines than any of the others. The others receive four to five times as many lines as the queen, and these are filled with invective, lists of their possessions, accounts of their sinfulness, and details on how they have pillaged the people. Moreover, the horrifying ends awaiting Louis, Jean of Berry, and Jean de Montaigu are recounted by Dampnacion. The fate awaiting Isabeau after death, however, is not recounted. The queen is faulted for putting all of her thought into how to “prendre ce qu’elle en peut” (get everything she can; line 1035). But she is spared the more furious attacks that the others receive.
Most significant for interpreting the position of Isabeau in the poem is the monologue of Fortune, who recounts how she lifted Louis of Orleans, Jean of Berry, and Jean de Montaigu to great heights and describes how she will now make them fall. As for the queen, Fortune’s story is different. Certainly Fortune helped the queen out by making her queen of France:
Puis je la mis sy en avance
Que je la fis Royne de France ;
Et en son jardin j’ay planté
De tous mes biens à grant planté … (lines 1727–30)
[Then I gave her a huge advance, making her queen of France, and I planted all of my good things in her garden.]
But this is not the important point, for Fortune is not getting ready to deprive Isabeau of her riches, but something quite different. Along with the great goods Fortune planted in Isabeau’s garden, the allegorical figure asserts, “Et ly fais bon renom avoir” (line 1731) (And I put good reputation there). The others are going to be deprived of their greatest gifts. The queen will also lose her dearest position. But unlike the others, for the queen this is not her riches. Rather it is her bon renom. That is to say, the fall that Fortune has in mind for the queen is not the loss of wealth she envisions for the others, but the loss of her reputation. Indeed, Fortune adds, she has already begun to erode Isabeau’s good name: over the past months, the queen’s reputation has suffered. “Si que en mains d’une année / Fu Royne mal clamée …” (In less than a year the queen has been talked about negatively) (line 1735). The timing, of course, corresponds to the chronology offered by Pintoin: his circumspecti begin to grumble for the first time in the spring of 1405.
And yet (and here the verb tense becomes a bit confusing), even as Fortune notes that she has already begun to damage the queen’s reputation, she makes it clear that she has not yet managed to destroy it. For Fortune next claims that she will, in the future, turn her wheel and cause the queen such shame that she will be deserted by all: “Je ly feray avoir tel honte, / Et tel dommage et telle perte, / Qu’en la fin en sera deserte … (lines 1736–38). In other words, Fortune has not yet turned her wheel, or, at least, she has not yet given it a full spin. Just as she is plotting to bring about the fall of Louis of Orleans, Jean of Berry, and Jean de Montaigu—falls that have yet to transpire within the chronology of the narrative—she is planning to destroy Isabeau’s reputation.
What we have in the “Songe véritable” as far as the queen in concerned, I would suggest, is not evidence of her damaged reputation, but a campaign that threatens to ruin her good name. True, Fortune has already begun, for the henchmen of Jean sans Peur have begun complaining about the queen. However, their campaign cannot have been terribly effective. Why would Fortune need to turn her wheel again if the queen’s reputation had already been destroyed? The passage, thus, must be seen as proof of the queen’s positive renown: what would be the interest if she were already detested? To state it simply, the poem indicates that the queen is perceived by its composer to be well-loved. As is the case with Pintoin’s chronicle, the poem makes clear that someone wanted to damage Isabeau’s image. But it seems equally clear that he (or they) did not succeed, given the subsequent lack of evidence of popular sentiment against the queen.
Conclusion
Although I have tried to emphasize the extent to which the story of Isabeau’s unpopularity must be seen as the work of one faction rather than a general sentiment, I have not questioned the very notion of “popularity.” And yet, the concept cannot be applied easily to a fifteenth-century figure. What would it mean to be popular or unpopular at that time? Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, published in German in 1962, argues that the medieval “public” cannot be defined as an aggregate of subjects possessing some degree of political influence along with the ability to examine and debate ideas and form opinions about policy or persons.105 Rather, the medieval public is “directly connected to the concrete existence of a ruler,” and as long as the “prince and the estates of the realm still are the ‘land,’ instead of merely functioning as deputies for it, they are able to ‘re-present;’ they represent their power ‘before’ the people rather than for the people.”106 More recently, David Zaret has written of Tudor England:
Although political communication took many forms, contemporary thinking on the topic did not accord legitimacy to anything resembling appeals to public opinion in politics. Access to a “public” space for discourse was a royal prerogative when it involved deliberation on laws, foreign policy, taxation, disputes among courtiers and aristocrats, and many other issues. Reinforcing this restricted model of political communication in prerevolutionary England were several widely shared, uncon-tested assumptions: that deference and patronage were core principles of political and social life; and that, at the hands of commoners, opinion was inherently irrational.107
Guenée reads Pintoin’s account of the crowds’ shouting “Vive le roi” and “Noël” during royal entries as evidence of the people expressing “sa joie de façon toute spontanée. Ses chants et ses danses longtemps continués après le passage du roi disent mieux encore combien cette joie est sincère et profonde.” (the people expressed their joy in a completely spontaneous way. Their song and dance, which continue long after the passage of the king, show even better the extent to which this joy was sincere and profound.)108 And yet, there was nothing spontaneous about an entry, which was accepted by townspeople as sort of pact. As Peter Arnade writes: “The entry served as a vehicle rooted in the notion of legal contract, through which both ruler and townspeople publicly confirmed their privileges and duties with an exchange of rights.”109
Habermas’s understanding of the “public sphere” has been challenged by numerous scholars, who demonstrate the variety of means of expression the public had at its disposal. In her work on the theatre of Arras, Carol Symes has shown “how frequently and cannily people without the power to assert themselves through more conventional means (violence, wealth) gained other types of power through the use of public media.”110 Clementine Oliver has shown a “politically-minded Englishman” at work in the 1380s, creating a pamphlet for “readers like himself.”111
Theoretically, Isabeau may have been disliked, and gossip about her may have circulated in public spaces. The point is that there is no evidence to suggest that this was the case. The two examples on which historians have drawn are clear-cut examples of propaganda that stage authority. Moreover, the historical situation makes the proposition of Isabeau’s unpopularity difficult to maintain. In the midst of a deadly feud between two powerful opponents who formed the core of large but shifting networks of allies around them, we cannot speak of “popularity” but only of support at any given moment. As we have seen, the nobility lent support to whoever could best promote their personal interests. Isabeau is disliked by the Burgundians only during her short association with Louis of Orleans, when she formed part of a group blocking Jean sans Peur’s access to the royal government. As for the Armagnacs, she falls out with them in 1410 when the king declares them rebellious and leads the royal army against them, and again in 1416, this time permanently, when she struggles with them for guardianship of the dauphin. Clearly at the moments that Isabeau was at odds with the factions, she was unpopular with them, but opponents in feuds do not like each other. In a more general sense, among the inhabitants of towns and villages, no “public” possessing the freedom to examine and debate ideas and form informed opinions about political leaders in Isabeau’s lifetime has left traces of ideas. Officially towns supported one or the other of the factions depending on the loyalties of the town leaders, which was sometimes divided. This is not to say that townspeople did not hold opinions about the royalty, but these opinions have left no vestige. Indeed, there is no indication from any town of the realm that Isabeau personally was liked or disliked. As for Paris, one must ask by which subculture the queen would have been disliked. Jean Juvénal des Ursins, whose devoted service to the Orleanists earned him the enmity of the Burgundians, was prévôt des marchands of Paris as of 1389. Finishing up this tenure in 1400, he became avocat général in the Parlement of Paris. He was married to Michelle de Vitry, niece of marmouset Jean le Mercier, whose wife served Isabeau until le Mercier was driven from power by Philip of Burgundy. It was Juvénal des Ursins who compared Isabeau to Blanche of Castile in 1408. Surely he and his cohort, leading citizens of the city, did not dislike the queen: nor did the bourgeois nor “des juges, des administrateurs ou des comptables qui ont besoin de leurs offices (judges, administrators, or accountants who needed their services).112 She would have been perceived as the king’s representative, and the king himself was beloved throughout his lifetime, because he was the king. As for the opinions of the Parisian menu peuple, to borrow the expression of Christine de Pizan, it is impossible to know what they thought of Isabeau to the extent that they thought of her at all. They were hard hit by the wars, blaming their difficult situation on the Armagnacs, according to the Bourgeois of Paris as of the assumption of power of that faction in 1415. But the Bourgeois has nothing negative to say about Isabeau. A likely place for complaints to surface would have been during the Cabochian revolt, and, yet, as we have seen, the queen was represented favorably during this period when she was represented at all.
The complaints registered in Pintoin and the “Songe véritable” do not tell us anything about whether Isabeau was well-liked or not. However, they do offer interesting insight into perceptions of her power by her detractors. She was considered important enough that the Burgundians wished to destroy her reputation around the years 1405–6. When we consider her as a mediator queen, this is significant; she yielded power or she would not have been a cause of anxiety. Generally invisible, she surfaces at certain moments, surrounded by the most powerful men of the Royal Council. Outside of the court, her position was not well understood. Still, it reveals itself to modern readers, from time to time, in glimpses, in the form of snapshot-like depictions that catch her in the middle of her activity.
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