Chapter Three - The First Royal Mistress in Historical Context

Summary

ALTHOUGH THE PRIMARY sources leave many gaps, they allow us to form an outline of Agnès's life, and this skeleton can be fleshed out to some extent with evidence from other sources not directly related to Agnès. In this chapter I draw on some of these to animate Agnès's story while retaining a distinction between what the evidence says and my own conclusions.

I begin with a discussion of the young woman's move to the royal court. Then, to create the context for her activity there, I cut away from Agnès herself to focus on her environment, turning first to the royal family, whose problematic relationships represent the background against which the king formed his attachment to Agnès. What might have motivated Charles VII to enter into such an apparently intense liaison at that moment? I then broaden the scope to court factionalism, going into some detail about the conflicts that divided the court during Agnès's tenure, proposing that although to modern eyes these quarrels often seem to focus on gossip and petty jealousies, they represented deadly serious plays for power in a society where the signs of status often had material consequences.

After reconstituting this context, I bring Agnès back into the story, examining the references to her political intriguing in greater detail against their larger background. I conclude with a discussion of her mysterious death, prepared by the discussion of factionalism. Throughout I am conscious of manoeuvring between the related problems of historical timidity, given the relative dearth of sources, and unjustified ambition, given the relative abundance of them. But I hope to establish parameters for imagining what her role plausibly might have been by forming an idea of the world in which Agnès lived.

Agnès Arrives on the Scene

A long tradition held that Yolande, Duchess of Anjou (1379–1442), regent after the death of her husband in 1417 and mother of the duke's heir, Louis (1403–1434), Marie (1404–1463), René (1409–1480), and Charles (1414–1472) spotted the beautiful Agnès at the Angevin court and, hoping to influence Charles VII through her, proposed to the king that he take the young woman as his mistress.