Editing Charles VII of France (section)

==Close of reign==
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 |image1=Karel VII 1444.png
 |caption1=Charles VII depicted in 1444
 |image2=Antoine-Louis Barye - Charles VII, the Victorious - Walters 27164 - Profile.jpg
 |caption2=Charles VII the Victorious by [[Antoine-Louis Barye]], held in the [[Walters Art Museum]], [[Baltimore]]
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 |image1=Charles VII Royal d Or.jpg
 |caption1=Charles VII ''Royal d'or''.
 |image2=Charles VII Ecu neuf 1436.jpg
 |caption2=Charles VII ''Ecu neuf'', 1436
 |image3=Charles VII Franc a cheval 1422 1423.jpg
 |caption3=Charles VII on a [[Franc|''Franc à cheval'']] from 1422 or 1423
}}

Charles's later years were marked by hostile relations with his heir, [[Louis XI|Louis]], who demanded real power to accompany his position as the Dauphin. Charles consistently refused him. Accordingly, Louis stirred up dissent and fomented plots in attempts to destabilise his father's reign. He quarrelled with his father's mistress, Agnès Sorel, and on one occasion drove her with a bared sword into Charles' bed, according to one source. Eventually, in 1446, after Charles's last son, also named Charles, was born, the king banished the Dauphin to the [[Dauphiné]]. The two never met again. Louis thereafter refused the king's demands to return to court, and he eventually fled to the protection of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, in 1456.

In 1458, Charles became ill. A sore on his leg (an early symptom, perhaps, of [[diabetes]] or another condition) refused to heal, and the infection in it caused a serious fever. The king summoned Louis to him from his exile in Burgundy, but the Dauphin refused to come. He employed astrologers to foretell the exact hour of his father's death. The king lingered on for the next two and a half years, increasingly ill, but unwilling to die. During this time he also had to deal with the case of his rebellious vassal [[John V of Armagnac]].

Finally, however, there came a point in July 1461 when the king's physicians concluded that Charles would not live past August. Ill and weary, the king became delirious, convinced that he was surrounded by traitors loyal only to his son. Under the pressure of sickness and fever, he went mad. By now another infection in his jaw had caused an abscess in his mouth. The swelling caused by this became so large that, for the last week of his life, Charles was unable to swallow food or water. Although he asked the Dauphin to come to his deathbed, Louis refused, instead waiting at [[Avesnes]], in Burgundy, for his father to die. At [[Mehun-sur-Yèvre]], attended by his younger son, Charles, and aware of his elder son's final betrayal, the King starved to death. He died on 22 July 1461, and was buried, at his request, beside his parents in [[Basilica of Saint-Denis|Saint-Denis]].