Terre Rouge might almost have been anticipating how events would
shortly turn out. The killing of Duke John the Fearless in 1419 at a
meeting with the dauphin on the bridge over the Seine at Montereau,
though probably unpremeditated when it happened, had been approved
by the lawyer in advance, as the tyrannicide of a usurper of royal
authority and cruel enemy to the rem publicamand bonum commune.^74
But it only drove the Burgundians into an alliance with the English and
opened the way to the Treaty of Troyes, by which Charles VI disin-
herited the dauphin, gave Henry V his daughter Katharine in marriage,
and made his new ‘dear son’ the heir to his kingdom. The English and
French crowns were to be forever united, and because the French king
was ‘hindered much of the time’ from attending to the needs of his
realm, Henry was to have the government of the chose publiqueof
France straight away, upon agreeing to allow Charles the fiscal ‘sus-
tenances of his state’, to rule by the counsel of the nobility and wise
men, to uphold the authority of parlement, and to maintain Frenchmen
in their rights. Henry was also to work to obtain the consent of the three
estates of both realms to the treaty, so that their peoples might converse
and trade together in real peace, and the English parliament roll duly
records the summoning of the ‘three estates, that is the prelates and
clergy, nobles and magnates, and also the commons’, to Westminster
in May 1421 to approve the peace as the treaty required, and as they
were told the French estates had approved it in Paris the previous
December.^75
But Terre Rouge argued that Charles VI could not ‘alter those things
that are ordained for the public state of the realm (ea, quae ad statum
publicum regni sunt ordinata)’. Terre Rouge imported the organic
metaphor to argue for a total obedience by subjects to their king: but he
goes back to the notion of the status regnito imply (as J. H. Burns has
argued) that this was nevertheless a ‘constitutional’ rather than an
‘absolute’ monarchy. The ‘state of the realm’ resurfaces in a clearly
constitutional sense. What Gerson had called ‘royal lordship’ or estat
souverainwas subject to no political restraint, but it was subordinate to
a ‘state of the realm’ according to which the king for the time being
simply administered a Crown he might not trade, and which carried an
282 Monarchical State of the Later Middle Ages
appended to the 2nd edn. of F. Hotman’s Disputatio de controversia successionis regiae
(Frankfurt, 1586): I have used the copy in the Advocates Library, Edinburgh, by kind per-
mission of the Librarian; see fos. 23, 28, 31, 34, for the special character of succession to a
kingdom.
(^74) Hotman, Disputatio, fos. 49, 60–2, for Terre Rouge’s condemnation of Burgundy as a
tyrant.
(^75) C. T. Allmand, Henry V(London, 1992), 135–54; EHDiv. 223–9; Les grands traités de
la guerre de cent ans, ed. E. Cosneau (Paris, 1889); RPiv. 135.