overriding responsibility for the public good. The king, Terre Rouge
repeats, exercises administrationes publicae, regimina publica.^76
Jean Jouvenal des Ursins, historian of Charles VI’s reign and arch-
bishop of Rheims under Charles VII’s, best expressed this ‘moral con-
stitution’ of the French monarchy, which Jacques Krynen discovers first
in the writings of Philippe de Mézières. The terrible devastation of the
war with England and with themselves had made the French people seek
security in submission to a king who was ‘God on earth’, but who might
nevertheless be fiercely criticized for neglecting his duties to the com-
munity.^77 The support of most Frenchmen for the dauphin in his rejec-
tion of his father’s transfer of the kingdom as an impossibility led
eventually to Charles VII’s recovery of both the Crown and English terri-
torial conquests. But the Hundred Years War was won, and France was
started on a century of growing prosperity and power with little contri-
bution from a rarely convened and largely passive estates general. As the
English were expelled it was with the estate of princes and nobles that
the Valois kings found themselves in confrontation. Led by the great
houses of Burgundy, Bourbon, Berry, Alençon, and Brittany, in 1465
the nobles took up arms against the much-hated Louis XI. Thomas
Basin, the bishop of Oresme’s old diocese of Lisieux, like Jean Jouvenal
a lawyer by training but unlike him prepared to justify political resis-
tance to a king of ‘barbarous and inhuman character’, gives a first-hand
account of this self-styled ‘League of the Public Weal’ (De conjuratione
dicta ‘du bien public’) in which he was himself involved. ‘Necessity and
utility demanded that the state and order of the commonwealth be
reformed for the better’ (reformari in melius reipublice statum atque
ordinem evidentissima exposceret necessitas atque utilitas). Opponents
of the league say that it is not for subjects and vassals to take arms
against their king and lord, or ‘to wish to read him lessons’, but ‘we
reply to them with a question: if they found themselves on a ship [the
ship again!] and the captain, by incapacity or malice, was going to let
his ship founder on Scylla or Charybdis, ought they to let him, or rather
ought they (even if they were the captain’s slaves) to exhort him to stop
and, if he took no notice, act vigorously to stop him?’^78
France as l’état monarchique 283(^76) Hotman, Disputatio, fos. 34, 40, 46; Burns, The Idea of Monarchy, 46–7, 158–9; Lewis,
Late Medieval France, 88; Krynen, Idéal du prince et pouvoir royal, 298 ff.
(^77) Krynen, ibid.311, 326 ff.; EHDiv. 228; P. S. Lewis, ‘Jean Juvenal des Ursins’, in his
Essays in Later Medieval French History, 169–87, and Late Medieval France, 64, 94–6.
(^78) Thomas Basin, Histoire de Louis XI, ed. C. Samaran (Paris, 1963), i. 164–85; Philippe
de Commynes, Mémoires, ed. Joseph Calmette, 3 vols. (Paris, 1924–5), i. 9 ff., 49 ff.; Lewis,
Later Medieval France, 96, 342–4; Essays in Later Medieval French History, 108–9; J. R.
Major, Representative Institutions in Renaissance France, 1421–1559(Madison: Wisconsin
UP, 1960), 54–9; E. Le Roy Ladurie, The Royal French State 1460–1610, tr. J. Vale (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1994): 63–6; The New Cambridge Medieval History, vii, ed. C. T. Allmand
(Cambridge UP, 1998), 398–412.