King of France (1380–1422) whose recurring madness plunged the kingdom into the Armagnac–Burgundian civil war, the English invasion, and the Treaty of Troyes that disinherited his son.
Charles VI, king of France from 1380 to 1422, is remembered by two opposite bynames that capture the tragedy of his reign: "the Beloved" of his hopeful early years and "the Mad" of the decades that followed. He succeeded as a boy under the rule of ambitious uncles, and his personal reign began with promise.
From 1392, however, he was struck by recurring fits of insanity that left him incapable of ruling for months at a time. The power vacuum at the centre of the kingdom set his relatives at each other's throats in the Armagnac–Burgundian civil war, invited the renewed English onslaught that triumphed at Agincourt, and ended with the Treaty of Troyes of 1420, by which the mad king recognised Henry V of England as his heir, disinheriting his own son.
Charles was born in 1368, the son of Charles V "the Wise", and came to the throne in 1380 as a boy of eleven. During his minority the kingdom was governed — and its recovered strength squandered — by his powerful uncles, the dukes of Anjou, Berry, and Burgundy. When Charles took power into his own hands in 1388, recalling his father's able ministers, hopes were high, and it was then that he earned the name "the Beloved".
That promise was shattered in 1392 when, on a march into Brittany, the young king suddenly went mad, killing several of his own companions before he could be subdued.
Charles VI's personality is inseparable from his illness. In his lucid periods he could be gracious, pious, and well-meaning — the amiable prince his people had loved — but from 1392 his mind repeatedly gave way, in episodes that could last for months. During these he sometimes failed to recognise his own wife and children, believed himself made of glass and liable to shatter, and had to be cared for as an invalid.
The tragedy of his reign is that of a fundamentally sympathetic man rendered incapable of the one thing his position demanded: consistent rule. His recurring incapacity created a vacuum that stronger and more ruthless figures — his brother Louis of Orléans, his cousin John the Fearless of Burgundy, his own queen Isabeau of Bavaria — rushed to fill, and it was in that vacuum, rather than through any act of the king himself, that the disasters of his reign unfolded.
The king's madness left France without a functioning head of state for thirty years. Control of the incapacitated king and his government became the prize in a savage rivalry between the houses of Orléans (the Armagnacs) and Burgundy, which erupted into open civil war after John the Fearless had Louis of Orléans murdered in 1407.
Into this divided kingdom Henry V of England struck in 1415, destroying the French nobility at the Battle of Agincourt. With Burgundy allied to the English after John the Fearless's own murder in 1419, the helpless Charles VI was brought to sign the Treaty of Troyes in 1420: he gave his daughter to Henry V, recognised the English king as heir and regent of France, and disinherited his son the Dauphin.
Charles VI died in October 1422, only weeks after Henry V. By the terms of Troyes the infant Henry VI of England was proclaimed king of France in Paris, while the disinherited Dauphin held the south as the rival "King of Bourges". The kingdom Charles left was broken in two.
Charles VI's reign was one of the great catastrophes of French history: a strong monarchy inherited from his wise father was reduced, through his madness and the strife it unleashed, to civil war, foreign conquest, and the near-extinction of the Valois claim to the throne. Yet the disinherited son he seemed to have doomed would, as Charles VII and with the aid of Joan of Arc, ultimately recover the kingdom and expel the English — so that the darkest reign gave way to the recovery that ended the Hundred Years' War.