rondeaux, especially the ubiquitous Le temps a laissié
son manteau. Many literary historians refer patroniz-
ingly to the charm and superfi ciality of his poetry and
the seeming ineffectiveness of his life, echoing Gaston
Paris’s assessment that Charles was merely a child with
a gift for polished verse, who never understood his role
in life. Scholars long considered Charles the last courtly
poet, using outmoded medieval conventions to express
traditional clichés, while they lionized Villon as a fresh
and original forerunner of modern poetry. In addition,
because so much biographical information is available,
scholarship has often been stifl ed by the attempt to tie
Charles’s creative work to his life. Recently, however,
scholars have taken a closer look at his poetry, have
become aware of the libraries to which he had access in
both England and France, and consequently have begun
to discover in many of his poems a new depth and com-
plexity never before suspected. He is now often classed
as a precursor of some of the 19th-century romantic and
symbolist poets, especially Baudelaire. His nonchaloir
has been likened to the “spleen” of later times.
Charles’s poems have been translated into English,
Dutch, Italian, and Romanian. In addition, scholarly
books about his life and works have been published in
Japanese, Polish, and Russian.
See also Charles VI; Chartier, Alain;
Villon, François
Further Reading
Charles d’Orléans. Charles d’Orléans, Poésies, ed. Pierre Cham-
pion. 2 vols. Paris: Champion, 1923–27, Vol. 1: La retenue
d’amours, ballades, chansons, complaintes et caroles; Vol.
2: Rondeaux.
——. Le manuscrit autographe des poésies de Charles d’Orléans,
ed. Pierre Champion. Paris: Champion, 1907.
——. The French Chansons of Charles d’Orléans with the Cor-
responding Middle English Chansons, ed. and trans. Sarah
Spence. New York: Garland, 1986.
Champion, Pierre. La vie de Charles d’Orléans. Paris: Cham-
pion, 1911.
Fox, John. The Lyric Poetry of Charles d’Orléans. Oxford:
Clarendon, 1969.
Nelson, Deborah H. Charles d’Orléans: An Analytical Bibliog-
raphy. London: Grant and Cutler, 1990.
Planche, Alice. Charles d’Orléans, ou la recherche d’un langage.
Paris: Champion, 1975.
Steele, Robert, and Mabel Day. The English Poems of Charles
d’Orléans. London: Oxford University Press, 1941.
Yenal, Edith. Charles d’Orléans: A Bibliography of Primary and
Secondary Sources. New York: AMS, 1984.
Deborah H. Nelson
CHARLES II THE BAD (1332–1387)
King of Navarre. The son of Philippe d’Évreux and
Jeanne, daughter of Louis X of France, Charles suc-
ceeded his father as count of Évreux in 1343 and became
king of Navarre (as Charles II) when his mother died in
October 1349. Although he became a bitter enemy of
the royal house of Valois, whose propagandists accused
him of many nefarious deeds and plots, Charles was a
popular young man who commanded a considerable
political following in the 1350s. Not until the 16th
century did he appear as “El Malo” in Navarrese his-
toriography, but this sobriquet gained wide acceptance
among subsequent generations of royalist or nationalist
historians in France.
The Évreux family had serious grievances against
the Valois monarchy, which kept possession of Jeanne’s
inheritance of Champagne and Brie, never relinquished
to her the promised compensation, Angoulême, and re-
mained dilatory in providing the revenues that were to
have replaced these territories. The northwestern nobles,
disaffected for much of Philip VI’s reign, had many con-
nections to the house of Évreux, which had cultivated
clients among them. Other critics of the monarchy were
genuine reformers whose intellectual wing was based
in the Collège de Navarre in Paris, a longtime recipient
of Évreux patronage.
The Valois rulers made efforts to cultivate their
Évreux cousins. Philip VI, as an aging widower, married
Charles’s teenaged sister Blanche in 1349, and Charles
himself married Jeanne, the eldest daughter of John II, a
few years later. These overtures, however, did not defuse
the grievances, and the delays in paying his wife’s large
dowry embittered Charles further. John II aggravated
the bad royal relations with the northwestern nobility
by summarily executing the constable Raoul de Brienne
in 1350. The new constable, John’s inexperienced young
favorite Charles of Spain, received lavish royal gifts,
including the county of Angoulême, which Charles the
Bad considered to be rightfully his own. With consider-
able sympathy from critics of the regime, Charles had
the constable murdered in January 1354, thus beginning
a decade of rebellion against his father-in-law.
To shield himself from royal wrath, Charles called on
the English for aid, and John II had to conclude the Trea-
ty of Mantes (February 1354), which pardoned Charles
and his followers and granted him substantial new lands
in lower Normandy in return for his defi nitive renuncia-
tion of Champagne and Brie. Charles then proceeded
to disrupt Anglo-French negotiations at Avignon and
bring troops to Normandy, where he hoped to cooper-
ate with an English invasion. When contrary winds kept
Edward III from coming, Charles had to conclude a less
advantageous treaty with John II at Valognes (September
10, 1355). The king of Navarre remained a magnet for
discontented elements in northwestern France and ap-
parently tried to subvert the dauphin, John’s eldest son,
into rebelling against his father.
Increasingly bitter toward his son-in-law, John II
suddenly arrested Charles at Rouen in April 1356,CHARLES II THE BAD