King of France (1422–1461) who, rescued by Joan of Arc, recovered his kingdom, expelled the English, and ended the Hundred Years' War in 1453.
Charles VII, called "the Victorious", was king of France from 1422 to 1461, and the monarch under whom the kingdom was rescued from its lowest ebb and the Hundred Years' War at last brought to a triumphant close. Disinherited by his own mad father under the Treaty of Troyes, he began his reign as the mocked "King of Bourges", ruling only the lands south of the Loire while an English king was crowned in Paris.
His cause was transformed by Joan of Arc, whose relief of Orléans in 1429 and insistence on his coronation at Reims restored the legitimacy and momentum of the Valois monarchy. Over the following decades Charles reorganised his army and finances, reconciled with Burgundy, and drove the English from Normandy and Gascony, ending the war in 1453 with almost all of France recovered.
Charles was born in 1403, a younger son of Charles VI the Mad and Isabeau of Bavaria, and became Dauphin only through the deaths of his elder brothers. Growing up amid the Armagnac–Burgundian civil war, he was implicated in the murder of John the Fearless of Burgundy in 1419, which drove Burgundy into the arms of England. In 1420 the Treaty of Troyes disinherited him in favour of Henry V of England.
When his father and Henry V both died in 1422, Charles proclaimed himself king south of the Loire, but his position was desperate: uncrowned, short of money, doubted even in his own legitimacy, and facing the English and their Burgundian allies.
Charles VII is one of history's great late developers. In his youth he seemed feeble and irresolute — the diffident, melancholy "King of Bourges", passive in the face of disaster and easily dominated by favourites and factions. Contemporaries doubted his nerve and even, in the whispers of the day, his royal paternity.
The mature king was a different man, or at least revealed hidden qualities: patient, shrewd, and an outstanding judge of servants, he earned the alternative byname "the Well-Served" for his gift of employing able men — soldiers, financiers like Jacques Cœur, and administrators — and letting them work. If he lacked the personal heroism of Joan of Arc, whom he notably failed to save, he possessed the harder political virtues of persistence and calculation, and it was under his unglamorous, methodical direction that France was rebuilt and the long war finally won.
In 1429, with the English besieging Orléans, the last great fortress of the loyal south, the peasant visionary Joan of Arc came to Charles and persuaded him to let her lead an army to its relief. The raising of the Siege of Orléans and the victories that followed broke the spell of English invincibility, and Joan led Charles deep into enemy-held territory to be crowned and anointed king at Reims, the traditional coronation city — an act that decisively legitimised his kingship.
Charles did not save Joan when she was captured and burned in 1431, a lasting stain on his reputation. But the tide he had turned did not recede. He reconciled with Burgundy at Arras in 1435, recovered Paris, reformed his army with the ordinance companies and a regular tax to pay them, and in a final campaign expelled the English from Normandy and Gascony, winning the war at the Battle of Castillon in 1453.
Charles VII's last years were embittered by the rebellions and plots of his son and heir, the future Louis XI, with whom he was deeply estranged. He died in 1461 — by tradition refusing food for fear of poison — and was succeeded by that same son.
Charles VII is remembered as the king who saved France. Under him the kingdom passed from the brink of dissolution to victory: the English were expelled, the Hundred Years' War was ended, and the crown emerged with a standing army and a reformed system of taxation that made it far stronger than before. The reign that began with a disinherited fugitive at Bourges ended with a restored and consolidated monarchy — the foundation on which his son Louis XI would build the modern French state.