The official world failed to raise a force. The leaders of the
merchants, the greater lawyers coming into the street and shouting
for King Henry, the bishops themselves, two of whom had begun to
harangue, all failed; and the mob, growing greater street by street,
shut off the issues with chains and ran back to attack Willoughby’s
men-at-arms with anything that came to hand. That soldier kept his
small troop well together, and through the increasing flood made
eastward down St. Anthony’s Street to the Bastille. He had hardly
twelve hundred men with him, counting both the French and the
English-speaking sort, all told. He shut himself up in the Bastille,
having saved his command. There he awaited terms.
The Constable at once organized the city: put garrisons to all the
gates, had convoys of wheat brought in, and a market opened at once;
put men of his own at the town hall and over the city companies,
strongly holding all that merchant class which was the foundation
of the Plantagenet power; he proclaimed the decree of his master,
the French king, Charles--a decree of general amnesty--and all the
Saturday organized the city and brought it to order. On Sunday, the
15th, he prepared to establish his lines round the Bastille with
troops whom he had sent for from the neighbouring garrisons outside
the town. Willoughby asked for terms, and generous terms were
granted. The council round the Constable demanded that the Bastille
be handed over to Ternaut; as for Willoughby himself and his men and
his civilian notables, they should be convoyed safely, not through
the now hostile streets, but round by the north, outside the new city
wall.
As they passed, the men from the wall insulted them, and particularly
that Bishop of Therouenne, who had been chancellor for the late
government, to whom they called out, “_Ah, the fox! The fox!_” But he
grumbled, not at the insult but at the loss of his jewels, and no man
heeded him. Just behind the Louvre, where the city wall ended at the
water, and where the footbridge runs to-day across the river, they
embarked that little force to go down the Seine to Rouen, honourably
enough. And so ended the rule of the Plantagenets in Paris.
LOUIS XI AND CHARLES THE BOLD
(_January 5, 1477_)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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