The League’s first aim, according to Basin, had been to compel the
king to assemble the three estates in his capital to assent to ‘laws
and decrees’ which the princes would make to restore the collapsing
respublica regni... in statum meliorem. These ideas were expressed
again at the estates general held at Tours in January 1484 after the
death of Louis XI—the last full meeting before the Wars of Religion in
the second half of the sixteenth century—which was reported in great
detail (and no doubt edited to yield a message) by Jean Masselin, a
deputy from the bailliage of Rouen who played a leading part in
the proceedings. He has a Burgundian nobleman called Philip Pot
declare that history had taught him how kings were originally set up for
the common utility, and that ‘the commonwealth belongs to the people
[rempublicam rem populi est]’. The estates general did not exist merely
to grant taxes—without its express or implicit assent no institution
could be firmly established. The estates, Pot continues, had upheld
Philip of Valois’s rights against Edward III and assumed responsibility
for the polity during King John’s captivity and Charles VI’s incapacity;
did they not see that the strength and standing of the commonwealth
[reipublicae vigor et status], or its ruin and overthrow, now depended
on their asserting the right to nominate a council of regency. As Krynen
has argued, Pot’s rhetoric was in fact just another (though particularly
vigorous) rendering of a scholastic commonplace, calculated to get the
estates’ support for a council of regency for the young Charles VIII
which would be controlled by his sister Anne of Beaujeu and her
husband in preference to the male princes of the blood, and the pre-
vailing note at Tours was the traditional one of loyalty to the Valois
monarchy. The French nation was declared to be renowned above all
others for its devotion to its kings, whereas the English were always
changing theirs: most recently Richard III had seized the throne, with
the approval of the English people, after the death of Edward IV, and
slaughtered (it must have been in the few months before the debate at
Tours) Edward’s two young sons.^79
But a new tone was becoming detectable in the meetings of the estates
general, and one which the government fostered: the deputies of the
three estates were beginning to be understood as the joint representa-
tives of territorial constituencies. In 1484 the bailiffs and seneschals
received the letters instructing them to assemble ‘the churchmen, nobles,
burgesses and inhabitants’ of their bailliagesand see to the election of
284 Monarchical State of the Later Middle Ages
(^79) Journal des États Généraux de France tenus à Tours en 1484 sous le Règne de Charles
VIII rédigé en Latin par Jehan Masselin, Député du Bailliage de Rouen, ed. A. Bernier (Paris:
Documents inédits sur l’histoire de France, 1835), 1, 36–8, 42, 139–57, 164–70, 255, 329 ff.;
J. Krynen, ‘Réflexion sur les idées politiques aux États généraux de Tours de 1484’, Revue
Historique, 4e serie, 62 (1984); id., L’Empire du Roi, 438–55; Ladurie, The Royal French
State, 73–6.