ended by saying, “I wish to conceal nothing from the king; I will tell him the truth as to all I know.”  “My most dread and sovereign lord,” he himself wrote to Louis, “I have been so misdoing towards you and towards God that I quite see that I am undone unless your grace and pity be extended to me; the which, accordingly, most humbly and in great bitterness and contrition of heart, I do beseech you to bestow upon me liberally;” and he put the simple signature, “Poor James.”  “He confessed that he had been cognizant of the constable’s designs; but he added that, whilst thanking him for the kind offers made to himself, and whilst testifying his desire that the lords might at last get their guarantees, he had declared what great obligations and great oaths he was under to the king, against the which he would not go; he, moreover, had told the constable he had no money at the moment to dispose of, no relative to whom he was inclined to trust himself or whom he could exert himself to win over, not even M. d’Albret, his cousin.”  In such confessions there was enough to stop upright and fair judges from the infliction of capital punishment, but not enough to reassure and move the heart of Louis XI.  On the chancellor’s representations he consented to have the business sent before the parliament; but the peers of the realm were not invited to it.  The king summoned the parliament to Noyon, to be nearer his own residence; and he ordered that the trial should be brought to a conclusion in that town, and that the original commissioners who had commenced proceedings, as well as thirteen other magistrates and officers of the king denoted by their posts, should sit with the lords of the parliament, and deliberate with them.

In spite of so many arbitrary precautions and violations of justice, the will of Louis XI. met, even in a parliament thus distorted, with some resistance.  Three of the commissioners added to the court abstained from taking any part in the proceedings; three of the councillors pronounced against the penalty of death; and the king’s own son-in-law, Sire de Beaujeu, who presided, confined himself to collecting the votes without delivering an opinion, and to announcing the decision.  It was to the effect that “James d’Armagnac, Duke of Nemours, was guilty of high treason, and, as such, deprived of all honors, dignities, and prerogatives, and sentenced to be beheaded and executed according to justice.”  Furthermore the court declared all his possessions confiscated and lapsed to the king.  The sentence, determined upon at Noyon on the 10th of July, 1477, was made known to the Duke of Nemours on the 4th of August, in the Bastille, and carried out, the same day, in front of the market-place.  A disgusting detail, reproduced by several modern writers, has almost been received into history.  Louis XI., it is said, ordered the children of the Duke of Nemours to be placed under the scaffold, and be sprinkled with their father’s blood.