On January 8, 1354, his younger brother Phillip led a group of noblemen that broke into the Constable’s room and hacked him to death by some accounts inflicting 80 wounds upon the dead man’s body before they left. Furious for revenge against his new father-in-law, Charles II had the Constable of France brutally assassinated. Although Jean II attempted to repair the insult by giving the hand of his daughter, Jeanne, to Charles II, he withheld the dowry for the princess’s hand, only further inflaming the situation. King Jean II of France had recently granted the county of Angouleme, a holding that Charles regarded as his birthright, to Charles d’Espagne, a royal favorite and the Constable of France. Ĭharles II first emerged onto the political scene at the age of 21 years, in an episode that encapsulated his lifelong approach to the power struggles of the nobility. He spent most of the early years of his reign in France, an ever-present thorn in the Crown’s side. The ruler of the Kingdom of Navarre, a small mountain realm located along the modern border between France and Spain, he may have been little more than a historical footnote if not for his ample possessions in Normandy, possessions that, as the Hundred Year’s War between France and England reached its zenith, made him both a crucial vassal to King Jean II of France and an important player in court politics. In spite of this, even his greatest foes could not deny the “magnetic personality” he possessed, with a “charisma that impressed enemies as well as friends”. In her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, the historian Barbara Tuchman describes Charles II of Navarre as a “…small slight youth with glistening eyes and a voluble flow of words… he was a plotter, subtle, bold, absolutely without scruple, but so swerving and unfixed of purpose as to undo his own plots.
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