Charles VII of France: The Well-Served King
Charles VII (1403–1461) was King of France from 1422 to 1461 and the ruler who completed the reconquest of France. He came to the throne as the disinherited Dauphin, a position made desperate by the victories of Henry V and the Treaty of Troyes. The intervention of Joan of Arc in 1429, the lifting of the siege of Orléans, the coronation at Reims, and the long patient work of reconquest from 1429 to 1453 transformed Charles’s position from that of a dispossessed prince to that of the most powerful monarch in Western Europe. Charles built the centralised fiscal-military state that would be the bones of the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV. His French epithet is le roi bien servi (the well-served king), referring to his ability to choose and keep capable servants; he is also known as le Victorieux (the Victorious). The legend that he was a weak and pleasure-loving monarch is largely a product of the 15th-century Burgundian propaganda that produced the Procès de Jeanne d’Arc and the Vergier d’honneur, and was demolished by modern historians from Vallet de Viriville onwards.
The standard biographical treatment is Claude de Mey’s Charles VII et son mystère, supplemented by the work of Georges Duby in the Histoire de France series (1987) and the more recent work of Bernard Chevalier, Charles VII et son pouvoir (2002). Sumption’s The Hundred Years’ War, vols. III–IV (2009–2015), is the most detailed English-language account.
Early life and the disinheritance
Charles was born on 22 February 1403 in Paris, the son of Charles VI and Isabeau of Bavaria. His father had suffered his first known bout of madness in 1392, and the royal government had been split, since the assassination of Louis, Duke of Orléans, in 1407, between the Armagnac and Burgundian factions. Charles, given the title of Dauphin as heir to the throne, was raised in a world of political chaos.
The situation worsened in 1415. Henry V’s invasion, the English victory at Agincourt, and the methodical English conquest of Normandy 1417–1419 left Charles as the head of a faction reduced to the centre and south of France. The Treaty of Troyes, signed on 21 May 1420, was the most damaging blow. The mad Charles VI, under Burgundian influence, recognised Henry V as regent and heir of France and contracted Henry to marry Catherine of Valois; the Dauphin, the future Charles VII, was disinherited.
Charles’s government was established at Bourges, in the centre of what remained of the French royal cause, and the derisive title “King of Bourges” was attached to him by his enemies. The position was desperate: the English controlled much of the north, the Burgundians dominated the north-east, and the French royal government controlled only a small portion of central France. Charles was widely regarded, in the Burgundian and English propaganda of the period, as a weak and indecisive ruler. The legend of the “well-served king” is partly a response to that propaganda.
Joan of Arc and the coronation
The arrival of Joan of Arc at Chinon in early March 1429 transformed Charles’s position. Joan persuaded the Dauphin to give her command of a small army and to send her to the relief of Orléans. The lifting of the siege on 8 May 1429, the French victories on the Loire in June, and the coronation at Reims on 17 July 1429 made Charles the legitimate, anointed, and crowned King of France in the eyes of the political nation.
The coronation was the decisive moment. The English claim to France, based on the Treaty of Troyes, was now contradicted by the existence of a crowned and consecrated French king. The duchy of Burgundy was still allied with the English, but the political ground had shifted. The Duke of Bedford, the English regent, was forced to recognise that the Lancastrian settlement depended on the capture of the new king, and that the new king was not going to be easily captured.
The reconquest of Normandy and the loss of Burgundy
The years after the coronation saw a steady French recovery. The death of the Earl of Salisbury at the siege of Orléans (1428) and the death of Henry V (31 August 1422, of dysentery contracted at the siege of Meaux) had already weakened the English position. Joan’s capture at Compiègne on 23 May 1430 and her execution at Rouen on 30 May 1431 were propaganda disasters for the English, but did not stop the recovery. The Congress of Arras in September 1435 ended the war between France and Burgundy. Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, abandoned the English alliance; in exchange, Charles recognised Burgundian control of the county of Flanders and a number of other territorial concessions.
The French reconquest of Normandy, completed in 1449, was the work of a new generation of French commanders: Arthur de Richemont, the Constable; Jean Bureau, the architect of the French artillery train; and the Duke of Bourbon. The reconquest of Gascony, completed in 1451–1453, ended with the destruction of the English army at Castillon on 17 July 1453. The death of John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, in the battle, and the surrender of Bordeaux on 19 October 1453, marked the end of English dominion in France.
The centralised state
The years from 1439 to 1453 saw the construction of the centralised French state. The institutions Charles built were the bones of the absolute monarchy.
- The permanent taille, the direct tax on the peasantry, was granted by the Estates of Orléans in 1439. The taille remained a principal source of French royal revenue until 1789.
- The compagnies d’ordonnance, the first permanent professional field army in Western Europe, were created in 1445, organised into 15 companies of 100 lances each, under the command of the great French nobles.
- The standing artillery train under the Bureau brothers became the most powerful in Europe by 1450.
- The Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438) limited the authority of the pope in France and gave the crown control of the French church.
These institutions outlived Charles. The Valois kings of the 16th century, and eventually Louis XIV, inherited the centralised state the war had produced. The reputation of Charles as a “well-served” king refers to the fact that he made all of this work: he chose Richemont, he chose the Bureaus, he chose Jacques Coeur, the great financier, and he gave them the political space to operate.
The last years
Charles’s last years were marked by political reaction. The reconquest had been carried out by great French nobles who expected to be paid in authority, and the centralisation of the state required a reduction of their independence. The Praguerie of 1440, a revolt of the French princes against Charles’s centralising policies, was suppressed; the revolt of the Duke of Bourbon in the 1460s would be Charles’s son’s problem.
The mistress Agnes Sorel, who had been given the title of maîtresse-en-titre — the first official royal mistress in French history — died in 1450. The English propaganda of the period made much of the relationship; modern historians are inclined to treat the propaganda as the dominant source for any view of the relationship.
Charles died on 22 July 1461 at Mehun-sur-Yèvre, age 58. He was succeeded by his son Louis XI, who would prove to be one of the most capable French kings of the Middle Ages and who would inherit the centralised state Charles had built. Charles’s legacy, in short, is the modern French state.