Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/680

 624 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE VII. Later he went off to his appanage of Dauphine, where he ruled for some ten years without regard to his father, against whose wishes, too, he married the daugh- ter of the Duke of Savoy. . Finally he fled to the Burgundian court of Philip the Good and came very near being disinherited by his angry parent. He was already thirty-eight years old when he became King of France, full of political experience, of knowledge and mistrust of men, trained both in plausible talk and in cunning scheming, con- fident in his own cleverness and ability to outwit others. Able as he was intellectually, he was very superstitious in his religion, and is well known for his wooden beads, the leaden image of the Virgin on his disreputable hat, and for the fact that he could be depended upon to keep his word only when he had sworn by one particular saint. His face and figure were as unattractive as were his cheap clothes, and there was something cruel and malicious and stealthy about him. His great merit as king was that he attended to everything himself. He traveled about his realm and dined with burghers to learn public opinion; he was always seek- ing information, he even put his person in peril in crises for the sake of a personal interview with some adversary; and in his spider's webs at Plessis and Loches he made periodical visits to the remotest dungeons to make sure that the prisoners were still there — and to leer at them. Since Louis had opposed the Crown for twenty years be- fore he became king, the great lords with whom he had con- The League s P^ rec l in the P ast > and especially the Duke of w *f Ublic Burgundy with whom he had found a refuge, looked for a restoration of their influence and power at his accession. The holders of great fiefs in France at this time were for the most part descended from younger sons of the royal family, to whom since the thirteenth century the kings had been granting appanages, thereby nullifying many of the territorial gains of the monarchy and creating a new feudal nobility. These dukes and counts soon dis- covered that the rule of Louis was even less to their liking than that of Charles VII, and in 1465 they formed the