Now it is evident, in summing up the salient features of this failure, that a vital principle was not germinating in the inchoate mass.  Charles himself never attained the rank of a national hero.  More than that, with all his individual states, he never had any nation, great or small, at his back.  Personally he was a man without a country.  His father, Philip, was French, pure and simple, quite as French as his grandfather, Philip the Hardy, the first Duke of Burgundy out of the House of Valois, even though Philip the Good had extended his sway to many non-French-speaking peoples and was able to use the Flemish speech if it suited his whim.  But that was as a condescension and as something extraneous.  The chief of French peers remained his proudest title; his ability to influence French affairs, the task he liked best.

His son was quite different in his attitude towards France.  He minimised his degree of French blood royal.  More than once he boasted of his kinship with Portuguese, with English stock.  He had certain characteristics of an immigrant, who has abandoned family traditions and is proudly confident that his bequest to posterity is to outshine what he has inherited.  Charles was not exactly a stupid man, but he certainly was dazzled by his early surroundings into an overestimate of himself, into a conceit that was a tremendous stumbling-block in his path.  He had not the kind of intelligence that would have enabled him to take at their worth the rhetorical phrases of adulation heaped upon him on festal occasions.  Yet this same conceit, this very self-confidence, gave him a high conception of his duties.  At his accession, he showed a sense of his responsibilities, a definite theory of conduct which he fully intended to act upon.  His very belief in his own powers gave him an intrinsic honesty of purpose.  He was convinced that he could maintain law, order, justice in his domain, and he fully intended to do so in a paternal way, but he left out of consideration the rights of the people, rights older than his dynasty.  In his military career, too, at the outset, he evinced the strongest bent towards preserving the best conditions possible amid the brutalities of warfare.  He curbed the soldiers’ passions, he protected women, and was as relentless towards miscreants in his ranks as towards his foe.  In civil matters he exerted himself to secure impartial equity for all alike.  When he gave a promise, he fully intended to make his words good.  It was only in the face of repeated deceptions of the cleverer and more unscrupulous Louis XI. that Charles changed for the worse.  Exasperated by the knowledge that the king’s solemn pledges were given repeatedly with no intention of fulfilment, he attempted to adopt a similar policy and was singularly infelicitous in his imitation.  His political methods degenerated into mere barefaced lying, softened by no graces, illumined by no clever intuition of where to draw the line.  From 1472