Isabeau must have been estranged from the son who had been so separated from her; for we find that when she came to Senlis with her youngest son Charles, who had been made Duc de Touraine, Governor of Paris, and Duc de Berry (the old Duke having just died), although the Dauphine was taken there to pay her homage, and spent some hours with her “_en grande léeses_,” Isabeau returned to Paris with the Comte de Hainault without seeing the Dauphin. Possibly she may have been irritated against him, for he still refused to come to Paris, now in the hands of the Armagnacs, and demanded the regency during the King’s malady.
But amongst the schemes, disputes, and rivalry of the two parties, one of which put its trust in the Dauphin, and the other fixed its hopes on his brother, the Duc de Touraine, then between fourteen and fifteen years old--a sudden change raised the spirits of the one and filled the other with dismay. The Dauphin began to be ill. Doctors were sent for; we read of “_chevaucheurs_” sent to ride “_haste hastivement_” to fetch fruit and medicines from Paris; and prayers and masses said and sung in chapels and convents for his recovery.
Early in April the Comte de Hainault, secretly warned that he would be arrested by the Armagnacs, escaped early in the morning from Paris on pretence of a pilgrimage to St. Maur-des-fossés, in the forest of Vincennes, from whence he rode in haste to Compiègne. But he found the Dauphin ill in bed “with a swollen body and other symptoms of poison,” according to some historians, or, as others say, with an abscess in the ear. At any rate he died in a few days,[265] and there was an outcry of poison, perhaps with more probability than usual, for he had not ruined his health like his brother, and though it could be nothing but an outrageous calumny that the Queen had done it by means of a gold chain she sent him, it was more likely that if there had been foul play at all it came from the Armagnacs who had everything to gain by the death of the Burgundian Jean and the succession of the Armagnac Charles, the son-in-law of the King of Sicily and bitter enemy of Burgundy.
Isabeau was certainly most unlucky in her relations with her sons. Three of them died in early childhood, with Louis she latterly had frequent quarrels, Jean was estranged from her; but the unnatural strife and hatred between her and her remaining son Charles was the crown of all the calamities of her reign. It seems to have been caused in the first place by Armagnac, who, in consequence of the death soon after each other of the King’s two elder sons, the Duc de Berry, the King of Sicily, and the Comte de Hainault, had become exceedingly powerful and, the only person whose power and influence might stand in his way being the Queen, proceeded to make mischief between her, the Dauphin, a weak, characterless boy, and the King, whose mind was now more clouded and his intellect feebler during the intervals between the attacks of his terrible malady.