ary testimony, that at the
same time that he established an all but arbitrary rule in military and
financial matters, Charles VII. took care that "practical justice, in the
case of every individual, was promptly rendered to poor as well as rich,
to small as well as great; he forbade all trafficking in the offices of
the magistracy, and every time that a place became vacant in a parliament
he made no nomination to it, save on the presentations of the court."

Questions of military, financial, and judicial organization were not the
only ones which occupied the government of Charles VII. He attacked also
ecclesiastical questions, which were at that period a subject of
passionate discussion in Christian Europe amongst the councils of the
Church and in the closets of princes. The celebrated ordinance, known by
the name of Pragmatic Sanction, which Charles VII. issued at Bourges on
the 7th of July, 1438, with the concurrence of a grand national council,
laic and ecclesiastical, was directed towards the carrying out, in the
internal regulations of the French Church, and in the relations either of
the State with the Church in France, or of the Church of France with the
papacy, of reforms long since desired or dreaded by the different powers
and interests. It would be impossible to touch here upon these difficult
and delicate questions without going far beyond the limits imposed upon
the writer of this history. All that can be said is, that there was no
lack of a religious spirit, or of a liberal spirit, in the Pragmatic
Sanction of Charles VII., and that the majority of the measures contained
in it were adopted with the approbation of the greater part of the French
clergy, as well as of educated laymen in France.

In whatever light it is regarded, the government of Charles VII. in the
latter part of his reign brought him not only in France, but throughout
Europe, a great deal of fame and power. When he had driven the English
out of his kingdom, he was called Charles the Victorious; and when he had
introduced into the internal regulations of the state so many important
and effective reforms, he was called Charles the Well-served. "The sense
he had by nature," says his historian Chastellain, "had been increased to
twice as much again, in his straitened fortunes, by long constraint and
perilous dangers, which sharpened his wits perforce." "He is the king of
kings," was said of him by the Doge of Venice, Francis Foscari, a go