Louis put perfect trust in no one but turned now to one counsellor, now to another, and used such fragments of advice as pleased his whim and paid no further heed to the giver.

Not long after Louis’s coronation there occurred that change in Philip’s bodily constitution that comes to all active men sooner or later.  His health began to give way, his energies relaxed, and matters that had been of paramount importance throughout his career were allowed to slip into the background of his desires.  In the famous treaty of 1435, no article was rated at greater importance than that which placed the towns on the Somme in Philip’s hands, subject to a redemption of two hundred thousand gold crowns.  Whether Charles VII. had actually pledged himself that the mortgage should hold at least during Philip’s life does not seem assured, but that any sum would be insufficient to induce the duke to release them unless his intellect were somewhat deadened, is clear.

In 1462, when he recovered from a sharp attack, possibly the result of his indulgence in the pleasures of the table during the prolonged festivities at Paris, he did not regain his previous vigour.  This was the time, by the way, when opportunity was afforded his courtiers to prove that devotion to their seigneur outweighed personal vanity.  When his head was shaved by order of the court physician, more than five hundred nobles sacrificed their own locks so that their becoming curls might not remind their chief of his own bald head.  The sacrifice was not always voluntary, adds an informant.[1] Philip forced compliance with this new fashion upon all who seemed reluctant to be unnecessarily shorn of what beauty was theirs by nature’s gift.  This servility may have consoled Philip for the deprivation of his hair.  In his depressed condition any solace was acceptable.

It was just when the duke was in this enfeebled state that Louis, through the mediation of the Croys, pushed forward his proposition to redeem the towns and Philip agreed, possibly relying upon the chance that it would be no easy matter for the French king to wring the required sum from his impoverished land.  Philip’s assent was, however, promptly clinched by a cash payment of half the amount[2]; the remainder followed.

Amiens, Abbeville, and the other towns, valuable bulwarks for the Netherland provinces, fine nurseries for the human material requisite for Burgundian armies, rich tax payers as they were, all tumbled into the outstretched hands of the duke’s wily rival.

The transaction was hurried through and completed before a rumour of its progress came to the ear of the interested heir.  Charles was in Holland sulking and indignant.  He had expected good results from his tender devotion during his father’s acute illness, a devotion shared by Isabella of Portugal who hastened to her husband’s bedside from her convent seclusion when Philip was in need of her ministrations.  But, in his convalescence, Philip renewed his friendship for the Croys whom Charles continued to distrust with bitterness that varied in its intensity, but which never vanished from his consciousness.  The young man felt misjudged, misused, and ever suspicious that personal danger to himself lurked in the air of his father’s court.