Charles, duc d’Orléans, (born November 24, 1394, Paris, France—died January 4, 1465, Amboise), last, and one of the greatest, of the courtly poets of France, who during exile in England also earned a reputation for his poems in English. He was the son of Louis, duc d’Orléans (brother of Charles VI of France).
Charles succeeded to the title in 1407, when his father was assassinated by the Burgundians in the struggle for power that followed on the king’s insanity. Aged 13, he sought vengeance with the help of the party led by Bernard VII, comte d’Armagnac. Six years of negotiations, truces, and civil war ended in 1414 with the public condemnation of Louis’s murder and the temporary eclipse of Burgundian influence. Henry V of England invaded France in 1415, and in the advance of the French army to Agincourt Charles held high command. Defeated and captured in the ensuing battle, he spent 25 years in England as a prisoner.
Charles’s release was agreed to on July 2, 1440, and on November 3 he returned to France, where he married Mary of Cleves (his first wife, Isabella, having died in 1409). He withdrew from public life to Blois, receiving there important literary figures including François Villon, Georges Chastellain, and Jean Meschinot. Many others visited or corresponded with him. His son, who became King Louis XII, was born in 1462.
Charles’s enforced idleness in England had given him leisure to pursue his literary interests; he had written some verse before his capture, and in his retirement he composed a complete love-history, mainly in ballades, besides other poems. He also wrote more than 6,000 lines in English, arranged in two love-histories linked by a miscellany. These are now generally accepted as having been written by Charles, although previously thought to be the work of an Englishman. The collection of English poems is much more of a literary unit than are the French poems, to which Charles continually added after his return to France.