Le Maqon
LE MAQON (or LE MASSON), ROBERT (c. 1365-1443), chancellor of France, was born at Chateau du Loir, Sarthe. He was ennobled in March 1401 , and became six years later a councillor of Louis II., duke of Anjou and king of Sicily. A partisan of the house of Orleans, he was appointed chancellor to Isabella of Bavaria on the 2Qth of January 1414, on the 20th of July commissary of the mint, and in June 1416 chancellor to the count of Ponthieu, afterwards Charles VII. On the 16th of August he bought the barony of Treves in Anjou, and henceforward bore the title of seigneur of Treves. When Paris was surprised by the Burgundians on the night of the 2gth of May 1418 he assisted Tanguy Duchatel in saving the dauphin. His devotion to the cause of the latter having brought down on him the wrath of John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, he was excluded from the political amnesty known as the peace of Saint Maur des Fosses, though he retained his seat on the king's council. He was by the dauphin's side when John the Fearless was murdered at the bridge of Montereau on the loth of September 1419. He resigned the seals at the beginning of 1422; but he continued to exercise great influence, and in 1426 he effected a reconciliation between the king and the duke of Brittany. Having been captured by Jean de Langeac, seneschal of Auvergne, in August of the same year, he was sfiut up for three months in the chateau of Usson. When set at liberty he returned to court, where he staunchly supported Joan of Arc against all the cabals that menaced her. It was he who signed the patent of nobility for the Arc family in December 1429. In 1430 he was once more entrusted with an embassy to Brittany. Having retired from political life in 1436, he died on the 28th of January 1443, and was interred at Treves, where his epitaph may still be seen.
See C. Bourcier, " Robert le Masson," in the Revue historique de I' Anjou (1873); and the Nouvelle biographic gen6rale, vol. xxx.
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Note - this article incorporates content from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, (1910-1911)
