Birth of Louis XII, King of France

Early in the afternoon of April 7th, 1498, Charles VIII of France escorted his queen, Anne of Brittany, to an antiquated gallery at his chateau of Amboise, to watch a game of tennis. Entering the gallery through a low doorway, the king stumbled on a rotten floorboard and hit his head against the lintel. Shortly afterwards he collapsed. He was carried to a seedy chamber close at hand and laid upon a mattress where he mumbled prayers and drifted in and out of consciousness for some seven hours, and then died. His physicians diagnosed as the cause of death what would nowadays be termed a stroke or a seizure brought on by the accident. Rumours of poison circulated none the less: how could a trifling blow to the head have been enough to kill a man still in his twenty-eighth year? And who stood to profit by his premature demise?

One answer was obvious enough. The heir to the throne, as long as Charles remained without surviving male offspring, was Louis d'Orleans, first prince of the blood royal – a notorious trouble-maker throughout his cousin's reign and, according to scandal-mongers, of questionable parentage, given that his avowed father, the poet Charles d'Orleans, was a sexagenarian at the time of his conception and a most unlikely begetter of sons after twenty largely infertile years of marriage.

Such insinuations notwithstanding, the succession passed off smoothly. This was owing partly to the strength of the dynasty. After the travails of Valois France during the Hundred Years War and the kingdom's subsequent recovery under Charles VII and Louis XI, few magnates any longer felt inclined to contest the title of a mature heir apparent. In any case, Louis acted promptly to gratify potential challengers, taking particular care to assure his cousin and previous antagonist, Pierre de Bourbon, that the latter's daughter should in due course inherit her father's duchy, pace earlier rulings to the contrary by Louis XI. Yet such actions were hostages to fortune and possible indicators to the character of the new reign. Louis XII, as he now became, was after all a scion of the great nobility and could be seen as heir to its aspirations as well as to the throne. His grandfather, the factious Louis I d'Orleans, had lost no opportunity to accumulate lands and privileges, nor to promote his clients' interests, and had even cultivated ambitions in Italy where his wife, Valentina Visconti, was heiress presumptive to the duchy of Milan.

Louis himself had been brought up in relatively impecunious circumstances, thanks partly to the antipathy of the late Louis XI towards him and his house. There were nobles who had felt that the ruler's treatment of them and their kind as well as his alleged general misgovernment warranted conspiracy and even revolt against him. Although Louis d'Orleans had been far too young to engage in that reign's most concerted expression of magnate resentment, the War of the Public Weal, he had rationalised in comparable terms his own behaviour under Charles VIII. He claimed to have been instrumental in summoning the Estates-General of Tours within months of Charles' accession as a minor in 1483. Outflanked at that assembly by the Bourbons, into whose charge Louis XI had consigned his son to the explicit exclusion of d'Orleans, Louis had proceeded to press his case before the Parlement of Paris. Disappointed once more, he had joined other dukes and noblemen in warlike opposition to the regime. And in all this he had invoked a version of medieval constitutionalism rooted in feudal law: that, regardless of the will of Louis XI, it was his right with his fellow princes to control the royal council and to exercise powers of regency during Charles VIII's minority, and that, involvement in overseeing the affairs of the kingdom was in any case the magnates' proper concern.

These postures came to nothing. Charles VIII and his protectors repeatedly brought Louis to heel and with him his principal confederate, the Duke of Brittany, whose daughter and heiress Charles himself married in a coup that effectively ended the quasi-independence of that great feudal duchy. But Louis had persisted in his wilful ways, even during the major exploit of his predecessor's reign: Charles VIII's march down the length of Italy and capture of Naples in 1494-95. The king's return from that sensational expedition was almost wrecked when Louis moved unilaterally upon Milan in pursuit of his own dynastic claim, got himself trapped in Novara, and so involved Charles in hazardous military and diplomatic efforts to procure his release.

No more easily deterred than his grandfather, Louis was to make Milan the prime object of France's foreign policy as soon as the kingship was his. And yet, it is precisely these Italian campaigns and the reigns in which they occurred that historians have traditionally identified as marking a turning- point in the development of west European political affairs in general and those of France in particular. Such judgements spring partly from the impact of French incursions upon Italy itself, closely followed as they were by interventions from a Spain newly unified under its Catholic kings. Even the larger states of the divided peninsula found themselves no longer able to resist the powers that sought to master them from beyond the Alps or the western Mediterranean. But this in turn testifies to the augmented capability of the French as well as the Spanish monarchy: a capability manifest not only in the military sphere, but also in the sphere of domestic government and politics writ large. 'For France', according to Henri Lapeyre, 'a new destiny opened with the expedition of Charles VIII'. And according to Roger Doucet, although 'neither Charles VIII nor Louis Xll had any great gifts of government', during their reigns 'a great change took place, a change which may be regarded as a transformation of the monarchical system itself'.

What was this alleged transformation? In Doucet's view it involved a virtual abandonment of the Estates- General, the body which Louis had tried in 1483-84 to manipulate in the magnates' interest. It also involved the consolidation of a government frame- work centred upon the royal council, but more and more reliant upon professional administrators of bourgeois extraction. Whilst noblemen languished in rural penury or occupied themselves with court intrigues, the monarch held sway through the agency of his new men over a territory which, thanks not least to the acquisition of Brittany, was more unified under the Crown than ever before.

Further indications of the monarch's tightening grip on power lay in his use of Gallicanism, the doctrine of the virtual self-sufficiency of the Church in France, as a means partly to confound popes who obstructed his designs abroad, but also to fill ecclesiastical offices with his own nominees. Secular offices too loomed large in royal calculations. Although French monarchs enjoyed exceptional powers of taxation and had at their disposal an elaborate fiscal system, expenditure upon warfare continually drained their re- sources. Hence their resort to expedients which included selling official posts, thereby opening the door of advancement more widely still to possessors of bourgeois fortunes. In so far as offices were created for the purpose, the device reinforced the monarch's consciousness of himself as the fountainhead of authority. That consciousness was also manifest in his legislative activity which included general ordinances for the reformation of justice and creations of new provincial courts as well as efforts to bring about codification of the kingdom's multifarious customary laws.

Customs were no doubt made by the people in their own communities; but law as such found its motive force in the monarch's will and therefore overrode custom, just as royal courts and judges took precedence over those of local lords where local customs were administered. So some jurists and humanists were ready to avow; and in propagating the ideology of monarchy, scholars were joined by artists who gave it visual expression through images pregnant with symbolism.

This, it seems, was the French Re- naissance monarchy: centralising and bureaucratic, legislative and dispendious, evolving away from earlier kings' reliance upon consultative and feudal or neo-feudal mechanisms, and towards the 'absolutism' of the following centuries. Its formation, we are assured, was at least in some degree the achievement of Louis XII, for all that ruler's personal deficiencies and youthful waywardness. But such an account of the monarchical system is hard to reconcile with what is now known of the distribution and exercise of power in the France of Louis' reign. True, that reign remains in many respects obscure – a 'no man's land', shunned by medievalists and modernists alike, as the distinguished historian Bernard Chevalier has observed.

Yet enough has emerged from recent studies to warrant the view that the seemingly portentous advance of royal power in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century France, and the corresponding emasculation of the nobility's role to the advantage of new men, are in important respects illusory. The reappraisal rests upon revised assessments of the nobility's capacity not merely to survive the disasters that befell them during the period of the Hundred Years War, but to adapt to changed economic and political circumstances in ways that ensured their continuing ascendancy. Feudal independence might be long since gone; royal policy might no longer be susceptible to the dictates of magnate coalitions, as Louis d'Orleans had discovered to his cost. But royal resources and royal government remained very much the preserve of oligarchs amongst whom the nobility more than held their own.

The Hundred Years War had occurred at a time of economic recession and demographic collapse associated with the Black Death. The combination of public disorder, falling prices and a decimated rural populace wreaked havoc with the incomes that nobles derived from their landed estates, especially in so far as those incomes sprang from fixed dues and services rendered by the peasantry. When economic recovery eventually got under way, hard on the heels of military revival under Charles VII, the conditions for reconstituting noble fortunes were not automatically restored. Labour being scarce, wages were correspondingly high while prices for agricultural products remained stagnant. Better, therefore, for landlords to refurbish their incomes through attracting tenants to farm demesne lands than for them to seek to exploit those lands directly by means of peasant labour. But prospective tenants were thin on the ground; and so holdings must be offered on beneficial terms, often in perpetuity, and to incoming migrants as well as to local men.

These conditions, it has been argued, signified a 'golden age' for the French peasantry in conjunction with a 'crisis' for their social superiors. But the crisis of the fifteenth-century nobility was less devastating than has often been supposed. A remarkable feature of the period is the resilience of noble landed estates and of the families that possessed thern. A notable instance is the house of La Tremoille, based mainly in western France, whose income from all sources fell by two-thirds between the end of the fourteenth century and the death of Louis XI, only to rise within two generations beyond its former level, owing not least to the efforts and system of estate-management developed by Louis II de La Tremoille, head of his house under Louis XII.

The La Tremoilles were not alone. The 'remarkable vitality of the seigneurie' is now considered to have been widely the case in Renaissance France. Where earlier scholars wrote confidently of the bankruptcy and displacement of rural noblemen at the hands of bourgeois creditors who gained possession of their lands and proceeded to manage these more efficiently along commercial lines, it is the capacity of the nobility to adapt and to survive that now strikes historians most forcibly. But the process of adaptation was not a matter simply of attending more closely to potential revenues from land. Although such revenues might be improved through exploitation of timber, of water, of milling rights, of disinterred claims in various forms to a proportion of peasant produce, more than these mundane means were needed to support noble lifestyles and so to vindicate noble status.

Louis II de La Tremoille took care to cultivate royal favour. His distinguished service to Charles VIII in the wars of the 1480s which Louis d'Orleans helped to precipitate did not prevent his enjoying the patronage of the latter, once king; and royal gifts, pensions and salaries constituted vital elements of his income throughout his career. Once more, the case is not untypical. For it is precisely through their participation in royal government and direct or indirect access to royal benevolence that the nobility at once weathered their 'crisis' and left their hallmark indelibly upon the monarchical system itself.

The phenomenon is obscured by the prominence in public affairs of some of Louis XII's best-known servants. His leading minister from his accession until 1510 was Georges d'Amboise, a man of sufficiently modest origins among the minor nobility of the Loire who had attached himself loyally to the future king from an early date and otherwise made his way via ecclesiastical offices. Upon d'Amboise's death in 1510 his main successor was Florimond Robertet, a descendant of clerks and secretaries in the service of the dukes of Bourbon. Personal secretary in due course to Louis XII, Robertet held numerous fiscal offices and married into the circle of Tours-based financiers upon whom successive monarchs relied to find them funds.

The conspicuousness of men from the Loire valley in the former Louis d'Orleans' entourage has tended to foster impressions that as monarch he staffed his government with new and hand-picked personnel. Such impressions are misleading. Study of the composition of the royal council has revealed that its membership exhibited a marked continuity from the accession of Charles VIII to the death of his successor. On Louis XII's council nobles continued, as they had under his immediate predecessors, to rub shoulders with members of commoner extraction. Yet the relationship between them was one neither of equals nor of rivals, but of distinct contributors to the service of the Crown. On the one hand they provided qualities of social and military leadership; on the other, expertise on financial and legal matters. Taken together, they constituted an oligarchy the members of which accumulated offices and sinecures, secular and ecclesiastical alike, either for themselves or for their kinsfolk and protégés.

Nevertheless, the lion's share of the perquisites of the monarchical system in court and country was reserved for noblemen. According to the astute observer, Claude de Seyssel, scholar, administrator and diplomat under Louis XII, 'There are an unbelievable number of offices and charges in this realm to distribute among the nobility' who therefore were 'better sustained' than any other social group, not only 'because of their own merits and services, but also because of their ancestors'. To that key quality of egregious ancestry the d'Amboises, the Robertets and the rest of their kind could never lay convincing claim, no matter how influential, upon events they might prove for a time nor how eagerly they might embellish their chateaux and compete for landed estates.

Confronted with economic difficulties, the nobles of Renaissance France rallied to the service of the Crown and were rewarded accordingly. What the kingdom experienced, in Bernard Chevalier's view, was 'not the rise of the bourgeoisie, but the triumph of the nobility'. Of course, this did not mean a revival of feudal politics with monarch and realm dancing to magnates' discordant tunes. Thanks as much to genealogical accidents as to royal calculations, the ranks of great feudatories were now thinner than ever before. Apanage after apanage had reverted to the Crown while, under Louis XII, the princes of the blood happened to be unusually young and the heads of other major dynasties to be preoccupied with affairs in their lands on the fringes of the kingdom.

These circumstances did not prevent the emergence of factional groupings capable of disturbing the even tenor of politics at court. A focal point of such groupings was Louis' queen, Anne of Brittany, his predecessor's widow, far less devoted to her second husband than to her first, and regretful of her duchy's absorption into his realm. The most sensational domestic episode of Louis XII’s reign was the fall of one of his principal councillors and commanders, the notoriously grasping Marshal de Gie, accused in 1504 of crimes amounting to treason, owing in good measure to the machinations of the queen and her associates against him. Yet such incidents were exceptional.

In a sense, the Renaissance monarchy flourished in a vacuum left by the quiescence of rival powers. Even so, it flourished less through bureaucratic mechanisms antithetical to feudal values, than through a new synthesis of noble preponderance and commoner expertise. In relation to these and the communities from which the men who supplied them sprang, the monarch acted rather as patron and arbiter than as would-be autocrat surging towards 'absolutist' forms of rule. So much is evident from the legislative record of Louis XII's reign.

Far from the fruit of purposeful policy-making at the centre, that record was largely the product of consultative processes and of initiatives emanating from elsewhere. Not surprisingly, measures enacted in favour of particular individuals, groups or localities bore frequently the stamp of intercession by a dignitary with an interest in the case. Despite his advocacy of the role of the Estates-General under his predecessor, only once, in 1506, did Louis XII convene that assembly, and on that occasion as a device to extricate himself from a dilemma in his foreign affairs. But other forms of consultation accompanied by special pleading preceded even the major measures of the reign, most notably in the field of law itself.

Louis XII issued his most ambitious legislative act within his first regnal year: the ordinance of Blois on the 'justice and police' of the realm. Devoted mainly to matters of judicial procedure, the ordinance pronounced at length against dilatory and extortionate conduct by the officers of the parlement and lower courts. It resulted, as its preamble made plain, from the deliberations of an assembly of notables. A similar assembly including representatives from Provence preceded the creation of the parlement of Aix in 1501. The erection in 1499 of the Exchequer of Normandy into an appeal court with status and functions tantamount to those of a parlement sprang from the insistence of the province's assembly of Estates that local litigants should not have to appeal their cases to Paris. Most notable of all was the importance attached to consultation in the process of codifying local customs. Shortly before his death Charles VIII had declared 'that there is no more clear and evident proof of custom than that which is made by the common agreement and consent of the Estates' of the relevant communities. Louis XII proceeded in a similar spirit, dispatching commissioners from his sovereign courts to consult with such Estates and so to record their customs in written form.

Later in the sixteenth century, France's most distinguished jurist of the age, Charles Du Moulin, contested opinions that that monarch had presumed to modify customs by ordinance and so to make law the creature of his will. In Du Moulin's considered view, the customs at issue had been:

not only ratified in perpetuity by the three Estates and Orders of the province, but also standardised by the Parlement of Paris; for the good king Louis XII was neither able nor willing to derogate from these authorities and did not think of doing so, but left every province to decide soberly for itself on the basis of its own judgement.

The Renaissance monarchy as exemplified by Louis XII was aristocratic in its complexion, consultative in its methods and also, in a sense, popular. The reputation for benignity with which Du Moulin credited him echoed the appellation which the Estates-General of 1506 plucked from classical precedent to confer upon this monarch. Louis was the 'father of the people'; much later, the citizens of eighteenth-century Paris would remember him aw such when trying to rouse their king Louis XVI to a livelier sense of monarchical duty. The conditions of relative economic prosperity amid which the earlier Louis reigned go far to account for that reputation. Yet his record in fiscal affairs affords it some support. Time and again Louis XII expressed concern for 'our poor people' who laboured under heavy 'charges, burdens and oppressions', and a preference for indirect over direct taxes 'because people of all Estates pay'. So far as the extant evidence will allow historians to judge, the average annual yield of direct taxation in his reign was significantly less than in Charles VIII's, and Iess than one half of Louis XI's demands in the early 1480s. To offset the shortfall of revenue, he resorted to expedients which included extracting tenths from the clergy and forced loans from affluent individuals and groups, as well as selling in return for immediate funds the profits of indirect taxes already farmed to other parties. But tapping additional sources of income was not all. As if to set his nobility an example, Louis took sustained steps to tighten up his financial administration, especially in relation to the resources of the royal domain. The series of acts which he promulgated to this end reveal on the part of those who drafted them an impressive familiarity with the forms of corruption as well as a desire to weed it out. They culminated in a lengthy ordinance of 1508 which strengthened the hands of the royal trésoriers , headed by Robertet, and laid upon them stricter duties to oversee other revenue officials and beneficiaries as well as to inspect municipal authorities' accounts. These were the policies of parsimony, modifying hopes of royal largesse – just as Louis' frugal lifestyle and addiction to a monotonous diet of boiled beef ran counter to expectations of royal dispendiousness.

How, then, are we to account for beliefs that Renaissance monarchy as exemplified in this reign paved the way for the authoritarianism and splendour associated with 'absolute' monarchy in the following centuries? The answer scarcely lies in the personal attributes of Louis XII. Some observers found him good-humoured and approachable, while to others he seemed morose, coarse in manner and in speech. His were the characteristics of an ordinary man, subject, in common with all men, to physical decline. Robustly healthy in his youth, he was, in the years of his kingship, often ill. For this at least the explanation was obvious: too much indulgence in the pleasures by day of field-sports with their attendant accidents, by night of bedchambers other than his wife's. Despite – or because of – his excesses, he failed to beget a legitimate heir. His ultimate attempts to do so provoked ribaldry a good deal more overt than the rumours and suspicions that had accompanied his succession to the throne. Nine months after the death of Anne of Brittany in January 1514, Louis, in his fifty-third year, married Mary Tudor, teenage sister of Henry VIII of England. Purveyors of salacious gossip revelled in the king's efforts to satisfy his bride, in how 'he had taken and rode a young hackney that would soon carry him off to paradise'. Their predictions were accurate enough. Exactly twelve weeks after his wedding, Louis XII died.

But the impact of monarchy and interpretations of its nature did not depend upon the physical capabilities of its incumbent. The king had two bodies. Whatever the frailty of his body natural, his body mystical, epitome of the realm itself, existed before him and did not perish with his death. The idea was long since canvassed by medieval political theologians and propagated in royal ceremonial: the king's coronation, his formal entries into his kingdom's major towns, the royal funeral ritual. Under Louis XII, however, such propaganda reached fresh heights, with some infusion of new themes often of Italian inspiration, but above all through intensified and diversified use of traditional symbolism whereby artists and scholars cultivated portentous images of monarchy.

One illustration must suffice. In 1505 Claude de Seyssel presented to the king his translation of Xenophon's Anabasis. The manuscript contains a dedication miniature which shows Louis enthroned, Seyssel being depicted kneeling before him. In an arc descending from the monarch's right hand six ecclesiastics are seated in order from cardinal to friar, while nobles and men of law form a similar arc to his left. Thanks not least in respect of the former to doctrines of royal Gallicanism, these were the instruments through whom the king ruled. At Louis' feet lie a lion and a dragon: the inscription on the steps of the throne is a quotation from the ninety-first psalm which promises that he who abides 'under the shadow of the Almighty... conculcabit leonem et draconem [shall trample the lion and the dragon underfoot]'. And in this miniature the monarch is indeed under the shadow of God who appears above the canopy over the throne with a red heart in His left hand, the heart of kings. From the deity there emanate rays as from the sun, four of them inscribed with names reminiscent of the four Cardinal Virtues. The canopy itself features the legend, 'Implevit eum Dominus spiritus [the Lord has filled him with the (divine) spirit]' – a quotation from the book of Exodus where Moses calls Israel to witness how God had endowed Bezaleel, the son of Uri, with all the skills of art and craftsmanship. The monarch is a patron: hut, more than that, he is party with God Himself, by whose grace he rules, in distributing all worthwhile attributes to his people.

Replete with time-honoured allusions, such images proliferated to an exceptional degree in the reign of Louis XII. They obliterated all impressions of the questionable character of Louis d'Orleans and his suspect biological antecedents. They elevated royal power to divine status. And they contributed significantly to clear the ground for the growth of the ideology of absolutism to full flower in the era of the Sun King.