It is in this year that Louis XI. begins to show his real astuteness.  Very clever are his methods of freeing himself from the distasteful obligations assumed towards his brother.  They had been easy to make when a hostile army was encamped at the gates of Paris.  Then Normandy weighed lightly when balanced by the desire to separate the allies.  That separation accomplished, the point of view changed.  Relinquish Normandy, restored by the hand of heaven to its natural liege lord after its long retention by the English kings?  Louis’s intention gradually became plain and he proved that he was no longer in the isolated position in which the War for Public Weal had found him.  He had won to himself many adherents, while the general tone towards Charles of Burgundy had changed.[1]

In April, 1468, the States-General of France assembled at Tours in response to royal writs issued in the preceding February.[2] The chancellor, Jouvencal, opened the session with a tedious, long-winded harangue calculated to weary rather than to illuminate the assembly.  Then the king took the floor and delivered a telling speech.  With trenchant and well chosen phrases he set forth the reasons why Normandy ought to be an intrinsic part of the French realm.  The advantages of centralisation, the weakness of decentralisation, were skilfully drawn.  The matter was one affecting the kingdom as a whole, in perpetuity; it was not for the temporal interests of the present incumbent of regal authority, who had only part therein for the brief space of his mortal journey.  Louis’s words are pathetic indeed, as he calls himself a sojourner in France, en voyage through life, as though the fact itself of his likeness to the rest of ephemeral mankind was novel to his audience.  He reiterated the statement that the interests involved were theirs, not his.

It was a goodly body which listened to Louis.  The greatest feudal lords, indeed, were not present, but many of the lesser nobility were, while sixty-four towns sent, all told, about 128 deputies.  These hearers gave willing attention to the thesis that it was a burning shame for the French people to pay heavy taxes simply to restrain the insolent peers from rebelling against their sovereign—­those noble scions of the royal stock whose bounden duty it was to protect the state and the head of the royal house.

What was the reason for their selfish insubordination?  The root of the evil lay in the past, when extensive territories had been carelessly alienated, and their petty over-lords permitted to acquire too much independence of the crown, so that the monarchy was threatened with disruption.  There was more to the same purpose and then the deputies deliberated on the answer to make to this speech from the throne.  It was an answer to Louis’s mind, an answer that showed the value of suggestion.  Charles the Wise had thought that an estate yielding an income of twelve thousand livres was all-sufficient for a prince of the blood.  Louis XI. was more generous.  He was ready to allow his brother Charles a pension of sixty thousand livres.  But as to the government of Normandy—­why! no king, either from fraternal affection or from fear of war, was justified in committing that province to other hands than his own.