ORLEANS, CHARLES, OF (1391-1465), commonly called Charles d'Orleans, French poet, was the eldest son of Louis, duke of Orleans (brother of Charles VI. of France), and of Valen tina Visconti, daughter of Gian Galeazzo, duke of Milan. He was born on May 26, 1391. He married (June 29, 1406), Isa bella, his cousin, widow of Richard II. of England. She died three years later. He was already duke of Orleans, for Louis had been assassinated by the Burgundians two years before (1407). He was now the most important person in France, except the dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, the king being a cipher. He was, however, only nominally one of the leaders of the civil war; the real guidance of his party resting with Bernard VII., the great count of Armagnac, whose daughter, Bonne, he married, or at least formally espoused, in 141o. Five years of confused nego tiations, plots and fightings passed before the English invasion and the battle of Agincourt, where Charles was joint commander in-chief. He was taken prisoner and carried to England, where he remained for a full quarter of a century. He hunted and hawked and enjoyed society amply, though the very dignities which secured him these privileges made his ransom great, and his release difficult to arrange. Above all, he had leisure, however, for literary work which consisted of short poems in the artificial metres, then fashionable in France. Besides these a number of English poems have been attributed to him, but without certainty.
For practical purposes his work consists of some hundreds of short French poems, a few in various metres, but the majority either ballades or rondels. Charles d'Orleans is the last representa tive of the poetry of the middle ages, in which the form was almost everything, and the personality of the poet, save in rare instances, nothing. He has the urbanity of the 18th century without its vicious and prosaic frivolity. His best-known rondels —those on Spring, on the Harbingers of Summer, and others— rank second to nothing of their kind.
The agreement for his release from captivity was concluded on July 2, 144o. He was actually released on Nov. 3, and then mar ried Mary of Cleves, who brought him a considerable dowry to assist the payment of his ransom. After his return to France he maintained at Blois a miniature court, at which the best-known French men-of-letters at the time—Villon, Olivier de la Marche, Chastelain, Jean Meschinot and others—were residents or visitors or correspondents. His son, afterwards Louis XII., was born in 1462. Charles died on Jan. 4, 1465, at Amboise.
The best edition of Charles d'Orleans's poems, with a brief but suf ficient account of his life, is that of C. d'Hericault in the Nouvelle col lection Jannet (Paris, 1874). For the English poems see the edition by Watson Taylor for the Roxburghe Club (1827). See also C. Bruneau, Charles d'Orleans et la poesie aristocratique (Lyons, 1924).