Charles VI of France

Overview

Charles VI is the French king whose weakened government and divided kingdom became the constitutional center of the Treaty of Troyes.

Current Profile

The source depicts Charles less as an active strategist than as the monarch around whom competing Armagnac, Burgundian, Dauphinist, and English claims operated. After Paris became unsafe, he, Queen Isabeau, and Catherine withdrew to Troyes.

The 1420 treaty kept Charles as king while making Henry V regent and heir, thereby preserving formal continuity while disinheriting Charles’s surviving son.

Key Characteristics

• French king presiding over a collapse of coherent royal authority.
• Dynastic focus of rival factional and English programs.
• Monarch retained by the Treaty of Troyes rather than immediately deposed.
• Father whose son Charles was displaced in favor of an English son-in-law.

Evidence

• Political weakness: 490. Hundred Years’ War: England Triumphant (Part 4) places repeated dauphin deaths and factional violence around Charles’s court.
• Flight and settlement: 490. Hundred Years’ War: England Triumphant (Part 4) records the royal family’s move to Troyes and Charles’s retention as king under the treaty.
• Succession rupture: 490. Hundred Years’ War: England Triumphant (Part 4) says Henry became heir while the Dauphin was effectively disinherited.

Qualifications

The episode centers Henry’s strategy and French factional collapse, so it supplies little independent analysis of Charles’s illness, agency, or personal view of the settlement.

What Changed

• Created Charles VI as the continuity point through which the Troyes regime attempted to transfer the French succession.

Relationships

• France - kingdom whose fractured authority remained formally vested in Charles.
• Catherine of Valois - daughter used to anchor the Anglo-French settlement.
• Charles VII of France - surviving son excluded by the treaty.
• Henry V of England - regent, son-in-law, and designated heir.
• Treaty of Troyes - settlement preserving Charles’s reign while redirecting succession.