Biography Charles D Orleans

Poet Biography

As a member of the royal house of France, as a vitally important pawn in the Hundred Years War as it was played out by the various French and English factions, each of whom seemed to vie with the other for distinction in greed, bad judgment, and vindictiveness.

An important poet of the French Middle Ages, Charles of Orleans (Named for his uncle Charles VI) (b. 1394) was a prince of the house of Valois, son of Louis of Orleans and Valentina Visconti of Milan (cousin-german to Louis, thus herself half French). He was a vitally important pawn in the hundred year war between France and England, spending some time in an English jail during his life time.

Charles's childhood was one of extreme wealth and culture. Surrounded by fabulous luxury, he was exposed to learning and learned people from an early age. His mother was intelligent and supportive of the learning of her children as well as Louis's son by Mariette d'Enghien, the wife of one of his officers).

Charles spent his early years at a number of Valois castles in the Loire region, where he and his brothers were tutored in Latin by Nicole Garbet, bachelor of theology and secretary to Louis. Louis, though more distant than Valentina, provided his sons with a model of princely ambition, charm, largesse, and cunning.

It was not unusual for the children of royal households to miss out on what we now call childhood and by his fifteenth birthday Charles was both orphaned and widowed. His father was assassinated by the Burgundian faction; his mother died, possibly of grief and his wife died in childbirth.

It was in 1415, at the age of twenty-one, that he was captured at the battle of Agincourt. Pulled from under a heap of bodies on the battlefield, he was taken, together with other noble prisoners, to England, a land he had never seen but to which he had already consigned his younger brother, Jean of Angouleme, at the age of twelve, as a hostage. Charles spent twenty-five years in captivity, shuttled from one English castle to another.

At the approach of his release in 1440, it was clear that not only the French but also many of the English felt that a horrible injustice had been done to the duke of Orleans. To hold a nobleman captive for decades, to prevent him from effectively administering his lands and exercising the social, legal, and governmental duties of his own culture, bordered on the inhuman. Charles himself spoke in retrospect of his feelings of despair and his desire for death while in captivity. It is no surprise that when he shook the English dust from his feet he cut off all but a very few contacts with the land of his captivity. In spite of talk in the earlier poetry of his narrator's retirement to the Castle of No Care, Charles did not withdraw from the world around him on his return to France. He campaigned in Italy, rebuilt his domains, had a family, and, above all, wrote and shared poetry with a wide circle of friends and acquaintances.

While in England, Charles had "missed" many of the momentous events of fifteenth-century French history including the entire career of his great champion, Joan of Arc. He had been excluded from much of the peace process between France and England that he longed so deeply to hasten and nurture. He had not as yet met Philip of Burgundy (son of and successor to his father's murderer, but a future friend and ally) and Burgundy's gracious but shrewd wife, Isabelle.

With his second wife dieing during his captivity in England Charles took up a third wife with who he sired three children, of which one of would grow to be the Future Louis the XII. Also during his captivity he became anglicise and very fluent in the language of his captors.

His time in England was not imprisonment, but rather a limitation of his activities and movements. He became the captured "property" of Henry V, Charles was considered a royal ?guest" in the households of a number of English noblemen.

While some of his accommodations were more congenial than others, he was still plagued by the ever-present need to raise ransom money for both himself and his brother.

While at Pontefract he went on outings to the country with his "host," Robert Waterton, and his family; the earl of Suffolk, Charles's "host" at Wingfield, was fond of evenings of musical and literary entertainment; some of Charles's English roundels show clear evidence of having been offered to one or another lady, probably as a compliment in some social setting or other; and Charles took part in lavish entertainments in London on a number of occasions, including the visit of Sigismund, king of the Romans, in 1416.

One of Charles's guardians stands out from the others as important to his life and work. William de la Pole, earl (later duke) of Suffolk, with whom Charles lodged from 1432 to 1436, played a special role in Charles's captivity. Suffolk's life and political career are well documented. He was near Charles's age and newly married when he requested the custody of the French prisoner in 1432, and the two apparently became friends. He was by all accounts a Francophile, being very interested in making peace between the English and the French. Charles travelled with him to Oxfordshire, where he spent time in and around Ewelme, which came to the earl from the Chaucer family. Charles's bunny brother Jean, count of Dunois had made Suffolk's acquaintance after the battle of Jargeau, when Suffolk and his brother John were the count's prisoner; Suffolk was thus acquainted both with Charles's condition as prisoner and with his family and home. Dunois had earned the earl's friendship by releasing his brother. The friendship between the earl and the duke lasted beyond 1440 when Charles returned to France, for Suffolk visited Charles at Blois.

Though he was highly thought of in his own time (both as a man and as a poet), scholars who write literary history, after ignoring him for centuries, have often been less than kind to the duke. He has been seen as refined but ineffectual, weak-willed and self-centered. His reputation among English readers and even some French scholars was tainted (this is no overstatement) by Robert Louis Stevenson's condescending essay on his life and works. Unfortunately the editor of Charles's French poetry and a voluminous writer on both his life and work, Pierre Champion, took his cue from Stevenson. He read the duke's poetry as a biography sentimentale and viewed the poet as a kind of Hamlet. He deeply resents the fact that the duke never mentions his champion, Joan of Arc.

His poetry, too, in an age which cannot easily appreciate obsolete fixed forms, has seemed to some, artificial, superficial, and divorced from the realities of life.

It would be possible to counter these negative judgments with positive ones based on historical materials. We know, for instance, that Charles was an able administrator and a good politician who worked tirelessly from prison to free his brother, govern his lands, and protect his property, that he worked for peace between France and England, that he suffered much sorrow in his life (not least because of his long imprisonment), and that he was devout. Charles of Orleans was not a passive prisoner. In comparison with the library of his contemporary Philip the Good of Burgundy, Charles's books reveal a serious, reflective turn of mind, one more interested in philosophy, science, and theology than in chronicle and romance. The two works he wrote in Latin demonstrate his seriousness as well as his genuine interest in religion. In addition, we know from his life history that he was well-read in philosophy, medicine, theology, literature and many other subjects. It is evident from his writings as well as his diplomacy that he was always able to see more than one side of a situation and to act as reality dictated when idealism was impracticable.

While these facts of Charles's life are not irrelevant to an understanding of him as a poet, they should, at the very least, help in dissociating the poet from his persona, the foolish and ineffectual but devoted lover. His reputation in his own lifetime as "Le plus grand des amoureux" was based, not on notorious sexual exploits, nor yet on a state of continuous love-longing, but on his poetry and speech as a highly refined form of luf-talking, a discourse that displayed at once his nobility and refinement, his skill as a poet, and his ability to turn everyday life into elegant verse.

One can only wonder at the strength of a poetic tradition which made this prince of the royal blood bewail twenty-five years of captivity in a foreign land almost solely in terms of separation from his mistress, and in a manner so veiled and indirect that it is not even known for certain whether or not the lady in question was an imaginary figure [i.e., France itself], his first wife, Isabelle, his second wife, Bonne, an acquaintance in England, or sometimes the one, sometimes the other, or even an amalgam of all four!

The failure of critics to see the "play" in his English poetry has resulted in many unappreciative remarks about the duke and his work. Charles's is a mind that never lapses, a mind darting here and there, taking in information from the outside world and guarding it carefully, acting always in a state of high consciousness, manipulating the world around it. Even when his English poetry fails as poetry, it is often possible to see and appreciate the patterning force in the poet that was wrestling with the English language, attempting to force meaning to march in step with fixed form. The faults in his English poetry are faults caused by lack of skill in a foreign language and lack of time for revision--or perhaps lack of interest in it. Charles is not the confused, helpless narrator, torn by his emotions, paralysed by his compact with the God of Love, endlessly spinning out his eloquent but dolorous rhetoric because he is powerless to do anything else. It is easy to underestimate Charles of Orleans as a man and as a poet, and paradoxically it is Charles himself who has made it so easy for us to do so.