This was as a jewel in the hair of Queen Yolande, and as nectar in the cup of Cardinal Louis. Their plans had succeeded splendidly.
Shortly after his marriage, René returned to Bar-le-Duc with his child-bride, and they were received in royal state by the Cardinal, who had renovated and decorated the castle specially in their honour and for their use. The town of Ligny was causing trouble in Barrois by refusing to pay the accustomed tribute. The Prince de Ligny claimed that portion of the duchy of Bar as his, by the marriage contract of his wife, the Cardinal’s sister. He attacked the Castle of Pierrepoint and the town of Briey, whose garrison he caused to be put to the sword. The Cardinal took arms, and, accompanied by René and companies of Lorraine soldiers from Longwy, defeated his relative and took him prisoner. The young Prince received the rebel’s sword and personally conducted him to Nancy, where, after two years’ confinement in the fortress, he signed an act of renunciation of his pretensions in Barrois.
René, only twelve years old, the following year accompanied Charles II. of Lorraine to the siege of Toul,--for many years a turbulent element in his dominions,--where there was a hot dispute concerning certain laws and customs oppositive to the claims of the crown of Lorraine. Toul was captured, and mulcted in an annual tribute of a thousand livres.
Directly the proclamation of Isabelle of Lorraine with René as the sharer of her throne was made, Antoine de Vaudémont, Duke Charles’s eldest nephew, entered a protest and claimed the succession. He based his action upon the three conditions--(1) The Salic Law ruled the succession of Lorraine; (2) the male line had not been broken since the creation of the duchy; and (3) the realm had never gone out of the family. Charles scouted all these positions, affirmed his own sovereign right to name his successor, and refused to alter the terms of the proclamation so far as regarded the succession of his daughter and Duke René.
All the church-bells in Barrois and Lorraine were again set jingling joyously when, in the ducal castle of Toul, on the morning of January 17, 1437, a young mother,--very young indeed, barely seventeen,--brought forth her first-born--a beauteous boy, the image, as the midwives said, of the boy-father, not yet nineteen. Church-bells, too, rang merrily all over Anjou and Provence when the glad tidings reached their borders that a male heir was born to the honours of Sicily-Anjou-Provence. Perhaps René and Isabelle were too young to realize what it all meant for France at large, but Queen Yolande understood well enough its tenor, and with her congratulations she greeted her first son’s grandchild with the title of “Prince of Gerona,” linking him ostentatiously with her hereditary rights in Aragon. Duke Charles, too, and Duchess Margaret were the happiest of grandparents, and baby Jean was created Comte de Nancy as future Duke.