Agenais into treason, and then he prepared a plot to seize the king and
his minister Pierre de Brézé. Antoine de Chabannes, who was to be the
instrument of the plot, revealed it to Charles, and Louis was mildly
punished by being sent off to Dauphiné (1447). He never saw his father
again.
Louis set out to govern his principality as though it were an
independent state. He dismissed the governor; he determined
advantageously to himself the boundaries between his state and the
territories of the duke of Savoy and of the papacy; and he enforced his
authority over perhaps the most unruly nobility in western Europe, both
lay and ecclesiastical. The right of private warfare was abolished; the
bishops were obliged to give up most of their temporal jurisdiction, the
scope of their courts was limited, and appeals to Rome were curtailed.
On the other hand, Louis granted privileges to the towns and
consistently used their alliance to overthrow the nobility. He watched
the roads, built new ones, opened markets, protected the only bankers of
the country, the Jews, and reorganized the administration so as to draw
the utmost revenue possible from the prosperity thus secured. His
ambition led him into foreign entanglements; he made a secret treaty
with the duke of Savoy which was to give him right of way to Genoa, and
made arrangements for a partition of the duchy of Milan. The alliance
with Savoy was sealed by the marriage of Louis with Charlotte, daughter
of Duke Lodovico, in 1452, in spite of the formal prohibition of Charles
VII. The king marched south, but withdrew again leaving his son
unsubdued. Four years later, as Charles came to the Bourbonnais, Louis,
fearing for his life, fled to Flanders to the court of Philip the Good,
duke of Burgundy, leaving Dauphiné to be definitely annexed to the crown
of France. The policy of the dauphin was reversed, his ten years' work
was undone. Meanwhile he was installed in the castle of Genappe, in
Brabant, where he remained until the death of his father. For this he
waited impatiently five years, keeping himself posted by spies of every
stage of the king's last illness, and thus laying himself open to the
accusation, believed in by Charles himself, that he had hastened the end
by poison, a charge which modern historians deny.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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