He was also Duke of Valois, Count of Beaumont-sur-Oise and of Blois, Lord of Coucy, and the inheritor of Asti in Italy via his mother Valentina Visconti.

He is now remembered as an accomplished medieval poet, owing to the more than five hundred extant poems he produced, written in both French and English, during his 25 years spent as a prisoner of war and after his return to France.

It was during these twenty-four years that Charles would write most of his poetry, including melancholy works which seem to be commenting on the captivity itself, such as En la forêt de longue attente.

A. E. B. Coldiron has argued that the problem relates to his "approach to the erotic, his use of puns, wordplay, and rhetorical devices, his formal complexity and experimentation, his stance or voice: all these place him well outside the fifteenth-century literary milieu in which he found himself in England.

Claude Debussy set three of his poems to music in his Trois Chansons de Charles d'Orléans, L.92, for unaccompanied mixed choir.

Reynaldo Hahn set six of them: Les Fourriers d'été, Comment se peut-il faire ainsi, Un loyal cœur (in Chansons et Madrigaux, 1907), Quand je fus pris au pavillon, Je me mets en votre mercy, and Gardez le trait de la fenêtre (in Rondels, 1899).

[citation needed] Marie brought a considerable dowry, which helped to pay part of his ransom, although he had difficulty making up the balance, and that of his brother Jean d'Angoulême, also a prisoner.

In Blois, he kept a miniature court at which many of the French men of letters at the time—François Villon, Olivier de la Marche, Georges Chastellain, Jean Meschinot and others—were residents or visitors or correspondents.

His first marriage, in 1406 at Compiègne, was with his first cousin Isabella of Valois, daughter of Charles VI of France and widow of Richard II of England.