Quotation from: A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 3

Written by: Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot


All the efforts of Louis XI., his winning speeches, and his ruinous
deeds, did not succeed in averting the serious check he dreaded. On the
18th of August, 1477, seven months after the battle of Nancy and the
death of Charles the Rash, Arch-duke Maximilian, son of the Emperor
Frederick III., arrived at Ghent to wed Mary of Burgundy. "The moment he
caught sight of his betrothed," say the Flemish chroniclers, "they both
bent down to the ground and turned as pale as death--a sign of mutual
love according to some, an omen of unhappiness according to others."
Next day, August 19, the marriage was celebrated with great simplicity in
the chapel of the Hotel de Ville; and Maximilian swore to respect the
privileges of Ghent. A few days afterwards he renewed the same oath at
Bruges, in the midst of decorations bearing the modest device, "Most
glorious prince, defend us lest we perish" (Gloriosissime princeps,
defende nos ne pereamus). Not only did Louis XI. thus fail in his first
wise design of incorporating with France, by means of a marriage between
his son the _dauphin_ and Princess Mary, the heritage of the Dukes of
Burgundy, but he suffered the heiress and a great part of the heritage
to pass into the hands of the son of the German emperor; and thereby he
paved the way for that determined rivalry between the houses of France
and Austria, which was a source of so many dangers and woes to both
states during three centuries. It is said that in 1745, when Louis XV.,
after the battle of Fontenoy, entered Bruges cathedral, he remarked, as
he gazed on the tombs of the Austro-Burgundian princes, "There is the
origin of all our wars." In vain, when the marriage of Maximilian and
Mary was completed, did Louis XI. attempt to struggle against his new and
dangerous neighbor; his campaigns in the Flemish provinces, in 1478 and
1479, had no great result; he lost, on the 7th of August, 1479, the
battle of Guinegate, between St. Omer and Therouanne; and before long,
tired of war, which was not his favorite theatre for the display of his
abilities, he ended by concluding with Maximilian a truce at first, and
then a peace, which in spite of some conditionals favorable to France,
left the principal and the fatal consequences of the Austro-Burgundian
marriage to take full effect. This event marked the stoppage of that
great, national policy which had prevailed during the first part of Louis
XI.'s reign. Joan of Arc and Charles VII. had driven the English from
France; and for sixteen years Louis XI. had, by fighting and gradually
destroying the great vassals who made alliance with them, prevented them
from regaining a footing there. That was work as salutary as it was
glorious for the nation and the French kingship. At the death of Charles
the Rash, the work was accomplished; Louis XI. was the only power left in
France, without any great peril from without, and without any great rival
within; but he then fell under the sway of mistaken ideas and a vicious
spirit. The infinite resources of his mind, the agreeableness of his
conversation, his perseverance combined with the pliancy of his will, the
services he was rendering France, the successes he in the long ruin
frequently obtained, and his ready apparent resignation under his
reverses, for a while made up for or palliated his faults, his
falsehoods, his perfidies, his iniquities; but when evil is predominant
at the bottom of a man's soul, he cannot do without youth and success;
he cannot make head against age and decay, reverse of fortune and the
approach of death; and so Louis XI. when old in years, master-power still
though beaten in his last game of policy, appeared to all as he really
was and as he had been prediscerned to be by only such eminent observers
as Commynes, that is, a crooked, swindling, utterly selfish, vindictive,
cruel man. Not only did he hunt down implacably the men who, after
having served him, had betrayed or deserted him; he revelled in the
vengeance he took and the sufferings he inflicted on them. He had raised
to the highest rank both in state and church the son of a cobbler, or,
according to others, of a tailor, one John de Balue, born in 1421, at the
market-town of Angles, in Poitou. After having chosen him, as an
intelligent and a clever young priest, for his secretary and almoner,
Louis made him successively clerical councillor in the parliament of
Paris, then Bishop of Evreux, and afterwards cardinal; and he employed
him in his most private affairs. It was a hobby of his thus to make the
fortunes of men born in the lowest stations, hoping that, since they
would owe everything to him, they would never depend on any but him. It
is scarcely credible that so keen and contemptuous a judge of human
nature could have reckoned on dependence as a pledge of fidelity. And in
this case Louis was, at any rate, mistaken; Balue was a traitor to him,
and in 1468, at the very time of the incident at Peronne, he was secretly
in the service of Duke Charles of Burgundy, and betrayed to him the
interests and secrets of his master and benefactor. In 1469 Louis
obtained material proof of the treachery; and he immediately had Balue
arrested and put on his trial. The cardinal confessed everything, asking
only to see the king. Louis gave him an interview on the way from
Amboise to Notre-Dame de Clery; and they were observed, it is said,
conversing for two hours, as they walked together on the road. The trial
and condemnation of a cardinal by a civil tribunal was a serious business
with the court of Rome. The king sent commissioners to Pope Paul II.:
the pope complained of the procedure, but amicably and without
persistence. The cardinal was in prison at Loches; and Louis resolved to
leave him there forever, without any more fuss. But at the same time
that, out of regard for the dignity of cardinal, which he had himself
requested of the pope for the culprit, he dispensed with the legal
condemnation to capital punishment, he was bent upon satisfying his
vengeance, and upon making Balue suffer in person for his crime. He
therefore had him confined in a cage, "eight feet broad," says Commynes,
"and only one foot higher than a man's stature, covered with iron plates
outside and inside, and fitted with terrible bars." There is still to be
seen in Loches castle, under the name of the Balue cage, that instrument
of prison-torture which the cardinal, it is said, himself invented. In
it he passed eleven years, and it was not until 1480 that he was let out,
at the solicitation of Pope Sixtus IV., to whom Louis XI., being old and
ill, thought he could not possibly refuse this favor. He remembered,
perhaps, at that time how that, sixteen years before, in writing to his
lieutenant-general in Poitou to hand over to Balue, Bishop of Evreux, the
property of a certain abbey, he said, "He is a devilish good bishop just
now; I know not what he will be here-after."

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