Free The Maid and the Queen by Nancy Goldstone

duke of Orléans spread rapidly through Paris. Repulsed by the horrific crime, members of the royal council convened a meeting two days later, on November 25, to arrange for a thorough investigation. Present among these councillors was Yolande of Aragon’s husband, Louis II, king of Sicily.
    Since his marriage, Louis II had been active in French politics. Possibly because his territorial aspirations were tied to Italy and not France, the king of Sicily had managed to maintain cordial relations with each of the various warring factions within the kingdom. He had been of invaluable aid to Isabeau in her effort to quell the hostility between Philip the Bold and the duke of Orléans, and was treated as a beloved member of the family by Charles VI. Two months before the duke of Orléans’s murder, John the Fearless, on the lookout for allies, had affianced his daughter Catherine to Louis’s eldest son, four-year-old Louis III. John had provided Catherine with a sizable dowry of 150,000 écus, 30,000 of which had already been paid. The money had made an extremely welcome addition to Louis II’s war chest for his upcoming expedition to Naples.
    It therefore came as something of a shock to Louis when, during the meeting of the royal council, John the Fearless abruptly took him and the duke of Berry aside and confessed to having ordered the assassination himself. The duke’s sudden candor might have been prompted partly byconscience but was mostly of necessity. The royal councillors had just agreed to conduct a house-by-house search for the killers, beginning with their own apartments. Apparently quite a few of the assassins, including their leader, had taken shelter at the Hôtel d’Artois, John the Fearless’s primary Parisian residence.
    Louis II was a pragmatic man, but not a particularly quick-witted one. The duke of Burgundy’s admission, to which he is reported to have responded, “Ah, cousin, you have committed a dastardly act!” left him flailing around in search of the appropriate posture to take. The others, however, roundly condemned John the Fearless and began pressing for his arrest. (The king was indisposed—the duke of Burgundy, no fool, had chosen to murder his rival at a time when Charles had again taken leave of his senses.) Under the circumstances, John the Fearless decided that Paris was perhaps not the optimal location from which to discuss the matter, and the next day he escaped to Flanders, where he proceeded to raise a large army.
    The prospect of new violence prompted Louis II and the duke of Berry to adopt a policy of appeasement. They arranged to meet John in Amiens, where they promised to intervene with the king if the duke of Burgundy would only show some remorse by apologizing to the duke of Orléans’s widow and children. But John’s guilt had hardened him, and he chose to pursue a course of justification rather than admit to error. To the dismay of the two ambassadors, he appeared at the meeting in Amiens accompanied by a force of some three thousand men, rejected all of their proposals, and then proceeded to march on Paris, arriving at the beginning of March 1408.
    Here the duke of Burgundy was the beneficiary of a piece of good luck. Just as he and his army had settled into the capital (no one being in a position to stop them), the king was slowly returning to rationality. It was simply a question of who got in to see him first. On March 9, even before Charles had time to make a full recovery, the Burgundian army made sure that John the Fearless was that person.
    The interview was held at night in the king’s chamber. Although Louis II and the duke of Berry were also present, as were several other prominent noblemen, John and his lawyer did all the talking. The duke of Burgundy stood by Charles’s bedside and informed the king of France with a straight face that he had been forced to kill Louis because he had discovered that the duke of Orléans was plotting to murder the king and all