1294, at the beginning of the hostilities against England, he invaded Guienne and took La Réole and Saint-Sever. During the war Flanders (1300), he took Douai, Béthune and Dam, received the submission of Guy of Dampierre, and aided King Philip IV., the Fair, to gain the battle of Mons-en-Pévèle, on the 18th of August 1304. Asked by Boniface VIII. for his aid against the Ghibellines, he crossed the Alps in June 1301, entered Florence, and helped Charles II., the Lame, king of Sicily, to reconquer Calabria and Apulia from the house of Aragon, but was defeated in Sicily. As after the death of his first wife Charles had married Catherine de Courtenay, a granddaughter of Baldwin II., the last Latin emperor of Constantinople, he tried to assert his rights to that throne. Philip the Fair also wished to get him elected emperor; but Clement V. quashed his candidature in favour of Henry of Luxemburg, afterwards the emperor Henry VII. Under Louis X. Charles headed the party of feudal reaction, and was among those who compassed the ruin of Enguerrand de Marigny. In the reign of Charles IV., the Fair, he fought yet again in Guienne (1324), and died at Perray (Seine-et-Oise) on the 16th of December 1325. His second wife had died in 1307, and in July 1308 he had married a third wife, Mahaut de Châtillon, countess of Saint-Pol. Philip, his eldest son, ascended the French throne in 1328, and from him sprang the royal house of Valois.
See Joseph Petit, Charles de Valois (Paris, 1900).
CHARLES (1421–1461), prince of Viana, sometimes called Charles IV. king of Navarre, was the son of John, afterwards John II., king of Aragon, by his marriage with Blanche, daughter and heiress of Charles III., king of Navarre. Both his grandfather Charles and his mother, who ruled over Navarre from 1425 to 1441, had bequeathed this kingdom to Charles, whose right had also been recognized by the Cortes; but when Blanche died in 1441 her husband John seized the government to the exclusion of his son. The ill-feeling between father and son was increased when in 1447 John took for his second wife Joanna Henriquez, a Castilian princess, who soon bore him a son, afterwards Ferdinand I. king of Spain, and who regarded her stepson as an interloper. When Joanna began to interfere in the internal affairs of Navarre civil war broke out; and in 1452 Charles, although aided by John II., king of Castile, was defeated and taken prisoner. Released upon promising not to take the kingly title until after his father’s death, the prince, again unsuccessful in an appeal to arms, took refuge in Italy with Alphonso V., king of Aragon, Naples and Sicily. In 1458 Alphonso died and John became king of Aragon, while Charles was offered the crowns of Naples and Sicily. He declined these proposals, and having been reconciled with his father returned to Navarre in 1459. Aspiring to marry a Castilian princess, he was then thrown into prison by his father, and the Catalans rose in his favour. This insurrection soon became general and John was obliged to yield. He released his son, and recognized him as perpetual governor of Catalonia, and heir to the kingdom. Soon afterwards, however, on the 23rd of September 1461, the prince died at Barcelona, not without a suspicion that he had been poisoned by his stepmother. Charles was a cultured and amiable prince, fond of music and literature. He translated the Ethics of Aristotle into Spanish, a work first published at Saragossa in 1509, and wrote a chronicle of the kings of Navarre, Crónica de los reyes de Navarra, an edition which, edited by J. Yangues y Miranda, was published at Pampeluna in 1843.
See J. de Moret and F. de Aleson, Anales del reyno de Navarra, tome iv. (Pampeluna, 1866); M. J. Quintana, Vidas de españoles célebres (Paris, 1827); and G. Desdevises du Dézert, Carlos d’Aragon (Paris, 1889).
CHARLES, ELIZABETH (1828–1896), English author, was born at Tavistock on the 2nd of January 1828, the daughter of John Rundle, M.P. Some of her youthful poems won the praise of Tennyson, who read them in manuscript. In 1851 she married Andrew Paton Charles. Her best known book, written to order for an editor who wished for a story about Martin Luther, The Chronicles of the Schönberg-Cotta Family, was published in 1862, and was translated into most of the European languages, into Arabic, and into many Indian dialects. Mrs Charles wrote in all some fifty books, the majority of a semi-religious character. She took an active part in the work of various charitable institutions, and among her friends and correspondents were Dean Stanley, Archbishop Tait, Charles Kingsley, Jowett and Pusey. She died at Hampstead on the 28th of March 1896.
CHARLES, JACQUES ALEXANDRE CÉSAR (1746–1823),
French mathematician and physicist, was born in Beaugency, Loiret, on the 12th of November 1746. After spending some years as a clerk in the ministry of finance, he turned to scintific pursuits, and attracted considerable attention by his skilful and elaborate demonstrations of physical experiments. He was the first, in spring 1783, to employ hydrogen for the inflation of balloons (See Aeronautics), and about 1787 he anticipated Gay Lussac's law of the dilatation of gases with heat, which on that account is sometimes known by his name. In 1785 he was elected to the Academy of Sciences, and subsequently he became professor of physics at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. He died in Paris on the 7th of April 1823. His published papers are chiefly concerned with mathematical topics
CHARLES, THOMAS (1755–1814), Welsh Nonconformist divine, was born of humble parentage at Longmoor, in the parish of Llanfihangel Abercywyn, near St Clears, Carmarthenshire, on the 14th of October 1755. He was educated for the Anglican ministry at Llanddowror and Carmarthen, and at Jesus College, Oxford (1775–1778). In 1777 he studied theology under the evangelical John Newton at Olney. He was ordained deacon in 1778 on the title of the curacies of Shepton Beauchamp and Sparkford, Somerset; and took priest’s orders in 1780. He afterwards added to his charge at Sparkford, Lovington, South Barrow and North Barrow, and in September 1782 was presented to the perpetual curacy of South Barrow by the Rev. John Hughes, Coln St Denys. But he never left Sparkford, though the contrary has been maintained, until he resigned all his curacies in June 1783, and returned to Wales, marrying (on August 20th) Sarah Jones of Bala, the orphan of a flourishing shopkeeper. He had early fallen under the influence of the great revival movement in Wales, and at the age of seventeen had been “converted” by a sermon of Daniel Rowland’s. This was enough to make him unpopular with many of the Welsh clergy, and being denied the privilege of preaching for nothing at two churches, he helped his old Oxford friend John Mayor, now vicar of Shawbury, Shropshire, from October until January 11th, 1784. On the 25th of January he took charge of Llan yn Mowddwy (14 m. from Bala), but was not allowed to continue there more than three months. Three influential people, among them the rector of Bala, agitated some of the parishioners against him, and persuaded his rector to dismiss him. His preaching, his catechizing of the children after evensong, and his connexion with the Bala Methodists—his wife’s step-father being a Methodist preacher—gave great offence. After a fortnight more at Shawbury, he wrote to John Newton and another clergyman friend in London for advice. The Church of England denied him employment, and the Methodists desired his services. His friends advised him to return to England, but it was too late. By September he had crossed the Rubicon, Henry Newman (his rector at Shepton Beauchamp and Sparkford) accompanying him on a tour in Carnarvonshire. In December, he was preaching at the Bont Uchel Association; so that he joined the Methodists (see Calvinistic Methodists) in 1784.
Before taking this step, he had been wont in his enforced leisure to gather the poor children of Bala into his house for instruction, and so thickly did they come that he had to adjourn with them to the chapel. This was the origin of the Welsh Circulating Schools, which he developed on the lines adopted by Griffith Jones (d. 1761), formerly vicar of Llanddowror. First one man was trained for the work by himself, then he was sent to a district for six months, where, (for £8 a year) he taught gratis the children and young people (in fact, all comers) reading and Christian principles. Writing was added later. The expenses were met by collections made in the Calvinistic Methodist Societies, and as the funds increased masters were multiplied,
