incessantly attempting to exalt himself
above his condition of vassal, and to raise his duchy into a sovereignty,
and when his pretensions were rejected he entered, at one time with the
King of England and at another with the Duke of Burgundy and the
malcontents of France, upon intrigues which amounted very nearly to
treason against the king his suzerain. Charles, Louis's younger brother,
was a soft and mediocre but jealous and timidly ambitious prince; he
remembered, moreover, the preference and the wishes manifested on his
account by Charles VII., their common father, on his death-bed, and he
considered his position as Duke of Berry very inferior to the hopes he
believed himself entitled to nourish. Duke John of Bourbon, on espousing
a sister of Louis XI., had flattered himself that this marriage and the
remembrance of the valor he had displayed, in 1450, at the battle of
Formigny, would be worth to him at least the sword of constable; but
Louis had refused to give it him. When all these great malcontents saw
Louis's popularity on the decline, and the king engaged abroad in divers
political designs full of onerousness or embarrassment, they considered
the moment to have come, and, at the end of 1464, formed together an
alliance "for to remonstrate with the king," says Commynes, "upon the bad
order and injustice he kept up in his kingdom, considering themselves
strong enough to force him if he would not mend his ways; and this war
was called the common weal, because it was undertaken under color of
being for the _common weal_ of the kingdom, the which was soon converted
into private weal." The aged Duke of Burgundy, sensible and weary as he
was, gave only a hesitating and slack adherence to the league; but his
son Charles, Count of Charolais, entered into it passionately, and the
father was no more in a condition to resist his son than he was inclined
to follow him. The number of the declared malcontents increased rapidly;
and the chiefs received at Paris itself, in the church of Notre Dame, the
adhesion and the signatures of those who wished to join them. They all
wore, for recognition's sake, a band of red silk round their waists, and,
"there were more than five hundred," says Oliver de la Marche, a
confidential servant of the Count of Charolais, "princes as well as
knights, dames, damsels, and esquires, who were well acquainted with this
alliance without the king's knowing anything as yet about it."

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