The various rumours of plots against his life may not all have been baseless.  At last, one of own cousins, the Count of Nevers, was accused of having recourse to diabolic means of doing away with the duke’s legitimate heir.[2] Three little waxen images were found in his house, and it was alleged that he practised various magic arts withal in order to win the favour of the duke and of the French king, and still worse to cause Charles to waste away with a mysterious sickness.  The accusations were sufficient to make Nevers resign all his offices in his kinsman’s court and retire, post-haste, to France.  Had he been wholly innocent he would have demanded trial at the hands of his peers of the Golden Fleece as behooved one of the order.  But he withdrew undefended, and left his tattered reputation fluttering raggedly in the breeze of gossip.

Charles stayed in Holland aloof from the ducal court until a fresh incident drove him thither to give vent to his indignation.  Only three days had Philip de Commines been page to Duke Philip, then resident at Lille, when an embassy headed by Morvilliers, Chancellor of France, was given audience in the presence of the Burgundian court, including the Count of Charolais.  The future historian,[4] then nineteen years old, was keenly alive to all that passed on that November fifth, 1464.  Morvilliers used very bitter terms in his assertion that Charles had illegally stopped a little French ship of war and arrested a certain bastard of Rubempre on the false charge that his errand in Holland, where the incident occurred, was to seize and carry off Charles himself.  Moreover, one knight of Burgundy, Sir Olivier de La Marche had caused this tale to be bruited everywhere,

“especially at Bruges whither strangers of all nations resort.  This had hurt Louis deeply, and he now demanded through his chancellor that Duke Philip should send this same Sir Olivier de La Marche prisoner to Paris, there to be punished as the case required.  Whereupon, Duke Philip answered that the said Sir Olivier was steward of his house, born in the County of Burgundy and in no respect subject to the Crown of France.”

Philip added that if his servant had wrought ill to the king’s honour he, the duke, would see to his punishment.  As to the bastard of Rubempre, true it was that he had been apprehended in Holland,[5] but there was adequate ground for his arrest as his behaviour had been strange, at least so thought the Count of Charolais.  Philip added that if his son were suspicious

“he took it not of him for he was never so, but of his mother who had been the most jealous lady that ever lived.  But notwithstanding” [quoth he] “that myself never were supicious, yet if I had been in my son’s place at the same time that this bastard of Rubempre haunted those coasts I would surely have caused him to be apprehended as my son did.”

In conclusion, Philip promised to deliver up Rubempre to the king were his innocence satisfactorily proven.