The Brothers Orléans and their Keepers

Summary

THERE have been several detailed accounts of the many years Charles of Orléans spent in England, but a full exploration of the cultural environment In which he found himself has been circumscribed, if not stifled, by several of the commonplaces which have emerged from these studies. The first of these is that both Charles and his brother, Jean of Angoulême, found their English years troublesome, worrisome, perhaps even inhospitable. Unless one subscribes to the view that adversity and misery foster creativity or, in Jean of Angoulême's case, scholarship, it is difficult to imagine how under such circumstances Charles, for his part, could have turned out such a substantial body of first-rate poetry. A variation on this theme is the claim that Charles was at sixes and sevens until he fellin to the hands of his English friend, William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk. Thus Enid McLeod, for one, believed that Suffolk rescued him from ‘the pit of loneliness and despair’ and the ‘bonds of frustrating inactivity that had held him captive for seventeen years’, and, more recently, Nigel Wilkins suggests that Charles entered ‘a network of Anglo-French poetic exchange … especially from August 1432 when he was put into the keeping of William de la Pole’. But Charles had been in England for seventeen years at that point, and, as Wilkins himself acknowledges, wrote poetry before his capture at Agincourt and arrived in England wearing it, as it were, on his sleeve.