HISTORY OF FRANCE
BY M. GUIZOT
VOLUME IV.
CONTENTS
[ CHAPTER XXVIII.] FRANCIS I. AND CHARLES V.
[ CHAPTER XXIX.] FRANCIS I. AND THE RENAISSANCE.
[ CHAPTER XXX.] FRANCIS I. AND THE REFORMATION.
[ CHAPTER XXXI.] HENRY II. (1547-1559.)
[ CHAPTER XXXII.] FRANCIS II., JULY 10, 1559—DECEMBER 5, 1560.
[ CHAPTER XXXIII.] CHARLES IX. AND THE RELIGIOUS WARS. (1560-1574.)
[ CHAPTER XXXIV.] HENRY III. AND THE RELIGIOUS WARS. (1574-1589.)ILLUSTRATIONS
[ Bayard Knighting Francis I——19 ]
[ Francis I. Surprises Henry Viii.——44 ]
[ The Field of the Cloth Of Gold——45 ]
[ The Constable de Bourbon——53 ]
[ Louise of Savoy and Marguerite de Valois——102 ]
[ The Duke of Orleans and Charles V.——128 ]
[ Claude de Lorraine, Duke of Guise——130 ]
[ St. Thomas Aquinas and Abelard——140 ]
[ Francis I. Waits for Robert Estienne——168 ]
[ The First Protestants——178 ]
[ Burning of Reformers at Meaux——188 ]
[ Berquin Released by John de La Barre——198 ]
[ Massacre of the Vaudians——218 ]
[ Francis Ii. And Mary Stuart Love Making——251 ]
[ Catherine De’ Medici (in Her Young Days)——255 ]
[ Joust Between Henri Ii. And Count de Montgomery——268 ]
[ Louis de Bourbon, Prince of Condo——285 ]
[ Coligny at the Death-bed of Francis Ii.——295 ]
[ Francis de Lorraine, Duke of Aumale and Of Guise——302 ]
[ Massacre of Protestants—-305 ]
[ The Duke of Guise Waylaid—-315 ]
[ Henry of Lorraine (duke Of Guise)——332 ]
[ Parley Before the Battle of Moncontour——337 ]
[ Admiral Gaspard de Coligny——346 ]
[ Charles Ix. And Catherine De’ Medici——354 ]
[ Henry de Guise and the Corpse of Coligny——369 ]
[ The Queen of Navarre and the Huguenot——372 ]
[ Chancellor Michael de L’hospital——376 ]
[ Indolence of Henry Iii—-390 ]
A POPULAR HISTORY OF FRANCE
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
FRANCIS I. AND CHARLES V.
The closer the study and the wider the contemplation a Frenchman bestows upon his country’s history, the deeper will be his feelings of patriotic pride, dashed with a tinge of sadness. France, in respect of her national unity, is the most ancient amongst the states of Christian Europe. During her long existence she has passed through very different regimens, the chaos of barbarism, the feudal system, absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, and republicanism. Under all these regimens she has had no lack of greatness and glory, material power and intellectual lustre, moral virtues and the charms of social life. Her barbarism had its Charlemagne; her feudal system St. Louis, Joan of Arc, and Bayard; her absolute monarchy Henry IV. and Louis XIV. Of our own times we say nothing. France has shone in war and in peace, through the sword and through the intellect: she has by turns conquered and beguiled, enlightened and troubled Europe; she has always offered to the foreigner a spectacle or an abode full of the curious and the attractive, of noble pleasures and of mundane amusements. And still, after so many centuries of such a grand and brilliant career, France has not yet attained the end to which she ever aspired, to which all civilized communities aspire, and that is, order in the midst of movement, security and liberty united and lasting. She has had shortcomings which have prevented her from reaping the full advantage of her merits; she has committed faults which have involved her in reverses. Two things, essential to political prosperity amongst communities of men, have hitherto been to seek in her; predominance of public spirit over the spirit of caste or of profession, and moderation and fixity in respect of national ambition both at home and abroad. France has been a victim to the personal passions of her chiefs and to her own reckless changeability.
We are entering upon the history of a period and a reign during which this intermixture of merits and demerits, of virtues and vices, of progress and backsliding, was powerfully and attractively exhibited amongst the French. Francis I., his government and his times commence the era of modern France, and bring clearly to view the causes of her greatnesses and her weaknesses.
Francis I. had received from God all the gifts that can adorn a man: he was handsome and tall and strong; his armor, preserved in the Louvre, is that of a man six feet high; his eyes were brilliant and soft, his smile was gracious, his manners were winning. From his very childhood he showed that he had wits, enterprise, skill, and boldness. He was but seven years old when, “on the day of the conversion of St. Paul, January 25, 1501, about two P. M., my king, my lord, my Caesar, and my son, was run away with, near Amboise, by a hackney which had been given him by Marshal de Gye; and so great was the danger that those who were present thought it was all over; howbeit God, the protector of widowed women and the defender of orphans, foreseeing things to come, was pleased not to forsake me, knowing that, if accident had so suddenly deprived me of my love, I should have been too utter a wretch.” Such is the account given of this little incident by his mother, Louise of Savoy, who was at that time habitually kept, by Anne of Brittany’s jealousy, at a distance from Paris and the court. [Journal de Louise de Savoie in the Petitot collection of Memoires sur l’Histoire de France, Series I. t. xvi. p. 390.] Some years later the young prince, who had become an ardent huntsman, took the fancy into his head one day to let loose in the courtyard of the castle of Amboise a wild boar which he had just caught in the forest. The animal came to a door, burst it open with a blow of his snout, and walked up into the apartments. Those who were there took to their heels; but Francis went after the boar, came up with him, killed him with a swordthrust, and sent him rolling down the staircase into the courtyard. When, in 1513, Louis XII. sent for the young Duke of Angouleme and bade him go and defend Picardy against the English, Francis had scarcely done anything beyond so employing his natural gifts as to delight the little court of which he was the centre; an estimable trait, but very insufficient for the government of a people.
When, two years afterwards, on the 1st of January, 1515, he ascended the throne before he had attained his one and twentieth year, it was a brilliant and brave but spoiled child that became king. He had been under the governance of Artus Gouffier, Sire de Boisy, a nobleman of Poitou, who had exerted himself to make his royal pupil a loyal knight, well trained in the moral code and all the graces of knighthood, but without drawing his attention to more serious studies or preparing him for the task of government. The young Francis d’Angouleme lived and was moulded under the influence of two women, his mother, Louise of Savoy, and his eldest sister, Marguerite, who both of them loved and adored him with passionate idolatry. It has just been shown in what terms Louise of Savoy, in her daily collection of private memoranda, used to speak to herself of her son, “My king, my lord, my Caesar, and my son!” She was proud, ambitious, audacious, or pliant at need, able and steadfast in mind, violent and dissolute in her habits, greedy of pleasure and of money as well as of power, so that she gave her son neither moral principles nor a moral example: for him the supreme kingship, for herself the rank, influence, and wealth of a queen-mother, and, for both, greatness that might subserve the gratification of their passions—this was all her dream and all her aim as a mother. Of quite another sort were the character and sentiments of Marguerite de Valois. She was born on the 11th of April, 1492, and was, therefore, only two years older than her brother Francis; but her more delicate nature was sooner and more richly cultivated and developed. She was brought up with strictness by a most excellent and most venerable dame, in whom all the virtues, at rivalry one with another, existed together. [Madame de Chatillon, whose deceased husband had been governor to King Charles VIII.] As she was discovered to have rare intellectual gifts and a very keen relish for learning, she was provided with every kind of preceptors, who made her proficient in profane letters, as they were then called. Marguerite learned Latin, Greek, philosophy, and especially theology. “At fifteen years of age,” says a contemporary, “the spirit of God began to manifest itself in her eyes, in her face, in her walk, in her speech, and. generally in all her actions.” “She had a heart,” says Brantome, “mighty devoted to God, and she loved mightily to compose spiritual songs. . . . She also devoted herself to letters in her young days, and continued them as long as she lived, loving and conversing with, in the time of her greatness, the most learned folks of her brother’s kingdom, who honored her so that they called her their Maecenas.” Learning, however, was far from absorbing the whole of this young soul. “She,” says a contemporary, “had an agreeable voice of touching tone, which roused the tender inclinations that there are in the heart.” Tenderness, a passionate tenderness, very early assumed the chief place in Marguerite’s soul, and the first object of it was her brother Francis. When mother, son, and sister were spoken of, they were called a Trinity, and to this Marguerite herself bore witness when she said, with charming modesty,—
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“Such boon is mine, to feel the amity That God hath putten in our trinity, Wherein to make a third, I, all unfitted To be that number’s shadow, am admitted.” |
Marguerite it was for whom this close communion of three persons had the most dolorous consequences: we shall fall in with her more than once in the course of this history; but, whether or no, she was assuredly the best of this princely trio, and Francis I. was the most spoiled by it. There is nothing more demoralizing than to be an idol.
The first acts of his government were sensible and of good omen. He confirmed or renewed the treaties or truces which Louis XII., at the close of his reign, had concluded with the Venetians, the Swiss, the pope, the King of England, the Archduke Charles, and the Emperor Maximilian, in order to restore peace to his kingdom. At home Francis I. maintained at his council the principal and most tried servants of his predecessor, amongst others the finance-minister, Florimond Robertet; and he raised to four the number of the marshals of France, in order to confer that dignity on Bayard’s valiant friend, James of Chabannes, Lord of La Palice, who even under Louis XII. had been entitled by the Spaniards “the great marshal of France.” At the same time he exalted to the highest offices in the state two new men, Charles, Duke of Bourbon, who was still a mere youth, but already a warrior of renown, and Anthony Duprat, the able premier president of the Parliament of Paris; the former he made constable, and the latter chancellor of France. His mother, Louise of Savoy, was not unconcerned, it is said, in both promotions; she was supposed to feel for the young constable something more than friendship, and she regarded the veteran magistrate, not without reason, as the man most calculated to unreservedly subserve the interests of the kingly power and her own.
These measures, together with the language and the behavior of Francis I., and the care he took to conciliate all who approached him, made a favorable impression on France and on Europe. In Italy, especially, princes as well as people, and Pope Leo X. before all, flattered themselves, or were pleased to appear as if they flattered themselves, that war would not come near them again, and that the young king had his heart set only on making Burgundy secure against sudden and outrageous attacks from the Swiss. The aged King of Spain, Ferdinand the Catholic, adopting the views of his able minister, Cardinal Ximenes, alone showed distrust and anxiety. “Go not to sleep,” said he to his former allies; “a single instant is enough to bring the French in the wake of their master whithersoever he pleases to lead them; is it merely to defend Burgundy that the King of France is adding fifteen hundred lances to his men-at-arms, and that a huge train of artillery is defiling into Lyonness, and little by little approaching the mountains?”
Ferdinand urged the pope, the Emperor Maximilian, the Swiss, and Maximilian Sforza, Duke of Milan, to form a league for the defence of Italy; but Leo X. persisted in his desire of remaining or appearing neutral, as the common father of the faithful. Meanwhile the French ambassador at Rome, William Bude, “a man,” says Guicciardini, “of probably unique erudition amongst the men of our day,” and, besides, a man of keen and sagacious intellect, was unfolding the secret working of Italian diplomacy, and sending to Paris demands for his recall, saying, “Withdraw me from this court full of falsehoods; this is a residence too much out of my element.” The answer was, that he should have patience, and still negotiate; for France, meeting ruse by ruse, was willing to be considered hoodwinked, whilst the eyes of the pope, diverted by a hollow negotiation, were prevented from seeing the peril which was gathering round the Italian league and its declared or secret champions. [Gaillard, Histoire de Francois 1er, t. i. p. 208.]
Neither the king nor the pope had for long to take the trouble of practising mutual deception. It was announced at Rome that Francis I., having arrived at Lyons in July, 1515, had just committed to his mother, Louise, the regency of the kingdom, and was pushing forward towards the Alps an army of sixty thousand men and a powerful artillery. He had won over to his service Octavian Fregoso, Doge of Genoa; and Barthelemy d’Alviano, the veteran general of his allies the Venetians, was encamped with his troops within hail of Verona, ready to support the French in the struggle he foresaw. Francis I., on his side, was informed that twenty thousand Swiss, commanded by the Roman, Prosper Colonna, were guarding the passes of the Alps in order to shut him out from Milaness. At the same time he received the news that the Cardinal of Sion, his most zealous enemy in connection with the Roman Church, was devotedly employing, with the secret support of the Emperor Maximilian, his influence and his preaching for the purpose of raising in Switzerland a second army of from twenty to five and twenty thousand men, to be launched against him, if necessary, in Italy. A Spanish and Roman army, under the orders of Don Raymond of Cardone, rested motionless at some distance from the Po, waiting for events and for orders prescribing the part they were to take. It was clear that Francis I., though he had been but six months king, was resolved and impatient to resume in Italy, and first of all in Milaness, the war of invasion and conquest which had been engaged in by Charles VIII. and Louis XII.; and the league of all the states of Italy save Venice and Genoa, with the pope for their half-hearted patron, and the Swiss for their fighting men, were collecting their forces to repel the invader.
It was the month of August; the snow was diminishing and melting away among the Alps; and the king, with the main body of the army, joined at Embrun the Constable de Bourbon, who commanded the advance-guard. But the two passes of Mount Cenis and Mount Ginevra were strongly guarded by the Swiss, and others were sought for a little more to the south. A shepherd, a chamois-hunter, pointed out one whereby, he said, the mountains might be crossed, and a descent made upon the plains of the marquisate of Saluzzo. The young constable went in person to examine the spots pointed out by the shepherd; and, the statement having been verified, it did not seem impossible to get the whole army over, even the heavy artillery; and they essayed this unknown road. At several points, abysses had to be filled up, temporary bridges built, and enormous rocks pierced; the men-at-arms marched on foot, with great difficulty dragging their horses; with still greater difficulty the infantry hauled the cannon over holes incompletely stopped and fragments of yawning rock. Captains and soldiers set to work together; no labor seems too hard to eager hope; and in five days the mountain was overcome, and the army caught sight of the plain where the enemy might be encountered. A small body of four hundred men-at-arms, led by Marshal de Chabannes, were the first to descend into it; and among them was Bayard. “Marshal,” said he to Chabannes, “we are told that over the Po yonder is Sir Prosper Colonna, with two thousand horse, in a town called Villafranca, apprehending nought and thinking of nought but gaudies. We must wake up his wits a little, and this moment get into the saddle with all our troops, that he be not warned by any.” “Sir Bayard,” said the marshal, “it is right well said; but how shall we cross the River Po, which is so impetuous and broad?” “Sir,” said Bayard, “here is my Lord de Morette’s brother, who knows the ford; he shall cross first, and I after him.” So they mounted their horses, crossed the Po, and “were soon there, where Sir Prosper Colonna was at table and was dining, as likewise were all his folk.” Bayard, who marched first, found the archers on guard in front of the Italian leader’s quarters. “Yield you and utter no sound,” cried he, “else you are dead men.” Some set about defending themselves; the rest ran to warn Colonna, saying, “Up, sir; for, here are the French in a great troop already at this door.” “Lads,” said Colonna to them, “keep this door a little till we get some armor on to defend ourselves.” But whilst the fight was going on at the door Bayard had the windows scaled, and, entering first, cried out, “Where are you, Sir Prosper? Yield you; else you are a dead man.” “Sir Frenchman, who is your captain?” asked Colonna. “I am, sir.” “Your name, captain?” “Sir, I am one Bayard of France, and here are the Lord of La Palice, and the Lords d’Aubigny and d’Himbercourt, the flower of the captains of France.” Colonna surrendered, cursing Fortune, “the mother of all sorrow and affliction, who had taken away his wits, and because he had not been warned of their coming, for he would at least have made his capture a dear one;” and he added, “It seems a thing divinely done; four noble knights at once, with their comrades at their backs, to take one Roman noble!”
Francis I. and the main body of his army had also arrived at the eastern foot of the Alps, and were advancing into the plains of the country of Saluzzo and Piedmont. The Swiss, dumbfounded at so unexpected an apparition, fell back to Novara, the scene of that victory which two years previously had made them so proud. A rumor spread that negotiation was possible, and that the question of Milaness might be settled without fighting. The majority of the French captains repudiated the idea, but the king entertained it. His first impulses were sympathetic and generous. “I would not purchase,” said he to Marshal de Lautrec, “with the blood of my subjects, or even with that of my enemies, what I can pay for with money.” Parleys were commenced; and an agreement was hit upon with conditions on which the Swiss would withdraw from Italy and resume alliance with the French. A sum of seven hundred thousand crowns, it was said, was the chief condition; and the king and the captains of his army gave all they had, even to their plate, for the first instalment which Lautrec was ordered to convey to Bufalora, where the Swiss were to receive it. But it was suddenly announced that the second army of twenty thousand Swiss, which the Cardinal of Sion had succeeded in raising, had entered Italy by the valley of the Ticino. They formed a junction with their countrymen; the cardinal recommenced his zealous preaching against the French; the newcomers rejected the stipulated arrangements; and, confident in their united strength, all the Swiss made common accord. Lautrec, warned in time, took with all speed his way back to the French army, carrying away with him the money he had been charged to pay over; the Venetian general, D’Alviano, went to the French camp to concert with the king measures for the movements of his troops; and on both sides nothing was thought of but the delivery of a battle.
On the 13th of September, 1515, about midday, the Constable de Bourbon gave notice to the king, encamped at Melegnano (a town about three leagues from Milan), that the Swiss, sallying in large masses from Milan, at the noisy summons of the bull of Uri and the cow of Unterwalden, were advancing to attack. “The king, who was purposing to sit down to supper, left it on the spot, and went off straight towards the enemy, who were already engaged in skirmishing, which lasted a long while before they were at the great game. The king had great numbers of lanzknechts, the which would fain have done a bold deed in crossing a ditch to go after the Swiss; but these latter let seven or eight ranks cross, and then thrust you them back in such sort that all that had crossed got hurled into the ditch. The said lanzknechts were mighty frightened; and but for the aid of a troop of men-at-arms, amongst the which was the good knight Bayard, who bore down right through the Swiss, there had been a sad disaster there, for it was now night, and night knows no shame. A band of Swiss came passing in front of the king, who charged them gallantly. There was heavy fighting there and much danger to the king’s person, for his great buffe [the top of the visor of his helmet] was pierced, so as to let in daylight, by the thrust of a pike. It was now so late that they could not see one another; and the Swiss were, for this evening, forced to retire on the one side, and the French on the other. They lodged as they could; but well I trow that none did rest at ease. The King of France put as good a face on matters as the least of all his soldiers did, for he remained all night a-horseback like the rest (according to other accounts he had a little sleep, lying on a gun-carriage).
On the morrow at daybreak the Swiss were for beginning again, and they came straight towards the French artillery, from which they had a good peppering. Howbeit, never did men fight better, and the affair lasted three or four good hours. At last they were broken and beaten, and there were left on the field ten or twelve thousand of them. The remainder, in pretty good order along a high road, withdrew to Milan, whither they were pursued sword-in-hand.” [Histoire du bon Chevalier sans Peur et sans Reproehe, t. ii. pp. 99-102.]
The very day after the battle Francis I. wrote to his mother the regent a long account, alternately ingenuous and eloquent, in which the details are set forth with all the complacency of a brave young man who is speaking of the first great affair in which he has been engaged and in which he did himself honor. The victory of Melegnano was the most brilliant day in the annals of this reign. Old Marshal Trivulzio, who had taken part in seventeen battles, said that this was a strife of giants, beside which all the rest were but child’s play. On the very battle-field, “before making and creating knights of those who had done him good service, Francis I. was pleased to have himself made knight by the hand of Bayard. ‘Sir,’ said Bayard, ‘the king of so noble a realm, he who has been crowned, consecrated and anointed with oil sent down from heaven, he who is the eldest son of the church, is knight over all other knights.’ ‘Bayard, my friend,’ said the king, ‘make haste; we must have no laws or canons quoted here; do my bidding.’ ‘Assuredly, sir,’ said Bayard, ‘I will do it, since it is your pleasure;’ and, taking his sword, ‘Avail it as much,’ said he, ‘as if I were Roland or Oliver, Godfrey or his brother Baldwin; please God, sir, that in war you may never take flight!’ and, holding up his sword in the air, he cried, ‘Assuredly, my good sword, thou shalt be well guarded as a relic and honored above all others for having this day conferred upon so handsome and puissant a king the order of chivalry; and never will I wear thee more if it be not against Turks, Moors, and Saracens!’ Whereupon he gave two bounds and thrust his sword into the sheath.” [Les testes et la Vie du Chevalier Bayard, by Champier, in the Archives curieuses de l’Histoire de France, Series I. t. ii. p. 160.]
The effect of the victory of Melegnano was great, in Italy primarily, but also throughout Europe. It was, at the commencement of a new reign and under the impulse communicated by a young king, an event which seemed to be decisive and likely to remain so for a long while. Of all the sovereigns engaged in the Italian league against Francis I., he who was most anxious to appear temperate and almost neutral, namely, Leo X., was precisely he who was most surprised and most troubled by it. When he knew that a battle was on the eve of being fought between the French and the Swiss, he could not conceal his anxiety and his desire that the Swiss might be victorious. The Venetian ambassador at Rome, Marino Giorgi, whose feelings were quite the other way, took, in his diplomatic capacity, a malicious pleasure in disquieting him. “Holy father,” said he, “the Most Christian King is there in person with the most warlike and best appointed of armies; the Swiss are afoot and ill armed, and I am doubtful of their gaining the day.” “But the Swiss are valiant soldiers, are they not?” said the pope. “Were it not better, holy father,” rejoined the ambassador, “that they should show their valor against the infidel?” When the news of the battle arrived, the ambassador, in grand array, repaired to the pope’s; and the people who saw him passing by in such state said, “The news is certainly true.” On reaching the pope’s apartment the ambassador met the chamberlain, who told him that the holy father was still asleep. “Wake him,” said he; but the other refused. “Do as I tell you,” insisted the ambassador. The chamberlain went in; and the pope, only half dressed, soon sallied from his room. “Holy father,” said the Venetian, “your Holiness yesterday gave me some bad news which was false; to-day I have to give you some good news which is true: the Swiss are beaten.” The pope read the letters brought by the ambassador, and some other letters also. “What will come of it for us and for you?” asked the pope. “For us,” was the answer, “nothing but good, since we are with the Most Christian king; and your Holiness will not have aught of evil to suffer.” “Sir Ambassador,” rejoined the pope, “we will see what the Most Christian king will do; we will place ourselves in his hands, demanding mercy of him.” “Holy father, your Holiness will not come to the least harm, any more than the holy See: is not the Most Christian king the church’s own son?” And in the account given of this interview to the Senate of Venice the ambassador added, “The holy father is a good sort of man, a man of great liberality and of a happy disposition; but he would not like the idea of having to give himself much trouble.”
Leo X. made up his mind without much trouble to accept accomplished facts. When he had been elected pope, he had said to his brother, Julian de’ Medici, “Enjoy we the papacy, since God hath given it us” [Godiamoci il papato, poiche Dio ci l’ ha dato]. He appeared to have no further thought than how to pluck from the event the advantages he could discover in it. His allies all set him an example of resignation. On the 15th of September, the day after the battle, the Swiss took the road back to their mountains. Francis I. entered Milan in triumph. Maximilian Sforza took refuge in the castle, and twenty days afterwards, on the 4th of October, surrendered, consenting to retire to France with a pension of thirty thousand crowns, and the promise of being recommended for a cardinal’s hat, and almost consoled for his downfall “by the pleasure of being delivered from the insolence of the Swiss, the exactions of the Emperor Maximilian, and the rascalities of the Spaniards.” Fifteen years afterwards, in June, 1530, he died in oblivion at Paris. Francis I. regained possession of all Milaness, adding thereto, with the pope’s consent, the duchies of Parma and Piacenza, which had been detached from it in 1512. Two treaties, one of November 7, 1515, and the other of November 29, 1516, re-established not only peace, but perpetual alliance, between the King of France and the thirteen Swiss cantons, with stipulated conditions in detail. Whilst these negotiations were in progress, Francis I. and Leo X., by a treaty published at Viterbo on the 13th of October, proclaimed their hearty reconciliation. The pope guaranteed to Francis I. the duchy of Milan, restored to him those of Parma and Piacenza, and recalled his troops which were still serving against the Venetians; being careful, however, to cover his concessions by means of forms and pretexts which gave them the character of a necessity submitted to rather than that of an independent and definite engagement. Francis I., on his side, guaranteed to the pope all the possessions of the church, renounced the patronage of the petty princes of the ecclesiastical estate, and promised to uphold the family of the Medici in the position it had held at Florence since, with the King of Spain’s aid, in 1512, it had recovered the dominion there at the expense of the party of republicans and friends of France.
The King of France and the pope had to discuss together questions far more important on both sides than those which had just been thus settled by their accredited agents. When they signed the treaty of Viterbo, it was agreed that the two sovereigns should have a personal interview, at which they should come to an arrangement upon points of which they had as yet said nothing. Rome seemed the place most naturally adapted for this interview; but the pope did not wish that Francis I. should go and display his triumph there. Besides, he foresaw that the king would speak to him about the kingdom of Naples, the conquest of which was evidently premeditated by the king; and when Francis I., having arrived at Rome, had already done half the journey, Leo X. feared that it would be more difficult to divert him. He resolved to make to the king a show of deference to conceal his own disquietude; and offered to go and meet him at Bologna, the town in the Roman States which was nearest to Milaness. Francis accepted the offer. The pope arrived at Bologna on the 8th of December, 1515, and the king the next day. After the public ceremonies, at which the king showed eagerness to tender to the pope acts of homage which the pope was equally eager to curtail without repelling them, the two sovereigns conversed about the two questions which were uppermost in their minds. Francis did not attempt to hide his design of reconquering the kingdom of Naples, which Ferdinand the Catholic had wrongfully usurped, and he demanded the pope’s countenance. The pope did not care to refuse, but he pointed out to the king that everything foretold the very near death of King Ferdinand; and “Your majesty,” said he, “will then have a natural opportunity for claiming your rights; and as for me, free, as I shall then be, from my engagements with the King of Arragon in respect of the crown of Naples, I shall find it easier to respond to your majesty’s wish.” The pope merely wanted to gain time. Francis, setting aside for the moment the kingdom of Naples, spoke of Charles VII.‘s Pragmatic Sanction, and the necessity of putting an end to the difficulties which had arisen on this subject between the court of Rome and the Kings of France, his predecessors. “As to that,” said the pope, “I could not grant what your predecessors demanded; but be not uneasy; I have a compensation to propose to you which will prove to you how dear your interests are to me.” The two sovereigns had, without doubt, already come to an understanding on this point, when, after a three days’ interview with Leo X., Francis I. returned to Milan, leaving at Bologna, for the purpose of treating in detail the affair of the Pragmatic Sanction, his chancellor, Duprat, who had accompanied him during all this campaign as his adviser and negotiator.
In him the king had, under the name and guise of premier magistrate of the realm, a servant whose bold and complacent abilities he was not slow to recognize and to put in use. Being irritated “for that many, not having the privilege of sportsmen, do take beasts, both red and black, as hares, pheasants, partridges, and other game, thus frustrating us of our diversion and pastime that we take in the chase,” Francis I. issued, in March, 1516, an ordinance which decreed against poachers the most severe penalties, and even death, and which “granted to all princes, lords, and gentlemen possessing forests or warrens in the realm, the right of upholding therein by equally severe punishments the exclusive privileges of their preserves.” The Parliament made remonstrances against such excessive rigor, and refused to register the ordinance. The chancellor, Duprat, insisted, and even threatened. “To the king alone,” said he, “belongs the right of regulating the administration of his state obey, or the king will see in you only rebels, whom he will know how to chastise.” For a year the Parliament held out; but the chancellor persisted more obstinately in having his way, and, on the 11th of February, 1517, the ordinance was registered under a formal order from the king, to which the name was given of “letters of command.”
At the commencement of the war for the conquest of Milaness there was a want of money, and Francis I. hesitated to so soon impose new taxes. Duprat gave a scandalous extension to a practice which had been for a long while in use, but had always been reprobated and sometimes formally prohibited, namely, the sale of public appointments or offices: not only did he create a multitude of financial and administrative offices, the sale of which brought considerable sums into the treasury, but he introduced the abuse into the very heart of the judicial body; the tribunals were encumbered by newly-created magistrates. The estates of Languedoc complained in vain. The Parliament of Paris was in its turn attacked. In 1521, three councillors, recently nominated, were convicted of having paid, one three thousand eight hundred livres, and the two others six thousand livres. The Parliament refused to admit them. Duprat protested. The necessities of the state, he said, made borrowing obligatory; and the king was free to prefer in his selections those of his subjects who showed most zeal for his service. Parliament persisted in its refusal. Duprat resolved to strike a great blow. An edict of January 31, 1522, created within the Parliament a fourth chamber, composed of eighteen councillors and two presidents, all of fresh, and, no doubt, venal appointment, though the edict dared not avow as much. Two great personages, the Archbishop of Aix and Marshal de Montmorenci, were charged to present the edict to Parliament and require its registration. The Parliament demanded time for deliberation. It kept an absolute silence for six weeks, and at last presented an address to the queen-mother, trying to make her comprehend the harm such acts did to the importance of the magistracy and to her son’s government. Louise appeared touched by these representations, and promised to represent their full weight to the king, “if the Parliament will consent to point out to me of itself any other means of readily raising the sum of one hundred and twenty thousand livres, which the king absolutely cannot do without.” The struggle was prolonged until the Parliament declared “that it could not, without offending God and betraying its own conscience, proceed to the registration; but that if it were the king’s pleasure to be obeyed at any price, he had only to depute his chancellor or some other great personage, in whose presence and on whose requirement the registration should take place.” Chancellor Duprat did not care to undertake this commission in person. Count de St. Pol, governor of Paris, was charged with it, and the court caused to be written at the bottom of the letters of command, “Read and published in presence of Count de St. Pol, specially deputed for this purpose, who ordered viva voce, in the king’s name, that they be executed.”
Thus began to be implanted in that which should be the most respected and the most independent amongst the functions of government, namely, the administration of justice, not only the practice, but the fundamental maxim, of absolute government. “I am going to the court, and I will speak the truth; after which the king will have to be obeyed,” was said in the middle of the seventeenth century by the premier president Mold to Cardinal de Retz. Chancellor Duprat, if we are not mistaken, was, in the sixteenth century, the first chief of the French magistracy to make use of language despotic not only in fact, but also in principle. President Mole was but the head of a body invested, so far as the king was concerned, with the right of remonstrance and resistance; when once that right was exercised, he might, without servility, give himself up to resignation. Chancellor Duprat was the delegate, the organ, the representative of the king; it was in the name of the king himself that he affirmed the absolute power of the kingship and the absolute duty of submission. Francis I. could not have committed the negotiation with Leo X. in respect of Charles VII.‘s Pragmatic Sanction to a man with more inclination and better adapted for the work to be accomplished.
The Pragmatic Sanction had three principal objects:—
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1. To uphold the liberties and the influence of the faithful in the government of the church, by sanctioning their right to elect ministers of the Christian faith, especially parish priests and bishops; 2. To guarantee the liberties and rights of the church herself in her relations with her head, the pope, by proclaiming the necessity for the regular intervention of councils and their superiority in regard to the pope; 3. To prevent or reform abuses in the relations of the papacy with the state and church of France in the matter of ecclesiastical tribute, especially as to the receipt by the pope, under the name of annates, of the first year’s revenue of the different ecclesiastical offices and benefices. |
In the fifteenth century it was the general opinion in France, in state and in church, that there was in these dispositions nothing more than the primitive and traditional liberties and rights of the Christian church. There was no thought of imposing upon the papacy any new regimen, but only of defending the old and legitimate regimen, recognized and upheld by St. Louis in the thirteenth century as well as by Charles VII. in the fifteenth.
The popes, nevertheless, had all of them protested since the days of Charles VII. against the Pragmatic Sanction as an attack upon their rights, and had demanded its abolition. In 1461, Louis XI., as has already been shown, had yielded for a moment to the demand of Pope Pius II., whose countenance he desired to gain, and had abrogated the Pragmatic; but, not having obtained what he wanted thereby, and having met with strong opposition in the Parliament of Paris to his concession, he had let it drop without formally retracting it, and, instead of engaging in a conflict with Parliament upon the point, he thought it no bad plan for the magistracy to uphold in principle and enforce in fact the regulations of the Pragmatic Sanction. This important edict, then, was still vigorous in 1515, when Francis I., after his victory at Melegnano and his reconciliation with the pope, left Chancellor Duprat at Bologna to pursue the negotiation reopened on that subject. The compensation, of which Leo X., on redemanding the abolition of the Pragmatic Sanction, had given a peep to Francis I., could not fail to have charms for a prince so little scrupulous, and for his still less scrupulous chancellor. The pope proposed that the Pragmatic, once for all abolished, should be replaced by a Concordat between the two sovereigns, and that this Concordat, whilst putting a stop to the election of the clergy by the faithful, should transfer to the king the right of nomination to bishoprics and other great ecclesiastical offices and benefices, reserving to the pope the right of presentation of prelates nominated by the king. This, considering the condition of society and government in the sixteenth century, in the absence of political and religious liberty, was to take away from the church her own existence, and divide her between two masters, without giving her, as regarded either of them, any other guarantee of independence than the mere chance of their dissensions and quarrels.
Egotism, even in kings, has often narrow and short-sighted views. It was calculated that there were in France at this period ten archbishoprics, eighty-three bishoprics, and five hundred and twenty-seven abbeys. Francis I. and his chancellor saw in the proposed Concordat nothing but the great increment of influence it secured to them, by making all the dignitaries of the church suppliants at first and then clients of the kingship. After some difficulties as to points of detail, the Concordat was concluded and signed on the 18th of August, 1516. Five months afterwards, on the 5th of February, 1517, the king repaired in person to Parliament, to which he had summoned many prelates and doctors of the University. The chancellor explained the points of the Concordat, and recapitulated all the facts which, according to him, had made it necessary. The king ordered its registration, “for the good of his kingdom and for quittance of the promise he had given the pope.” Parliament on one side, and the prelates and doctors of the University on the other, deliberated upon this demand. Their first answer was that, as the matter concerned the interest of the whole Gallican church, they could not themselves decide about it, and that the church, assembled in national council, alone had the right of pronouncing judgment. “Oho! so you cannot,” said the king; “I will soon let you see that you can, or I will send you all to Rome to give the pope your reasons.” To the question of conscience the Parliament found thenceforth added the question of dignity. The magistrates raised difficulties in point of form, and asked for time to discuss the matter fundamentally; and deputies went to carry their request to the king. He admitted the propriety of delay, but with this comment: “I know that there are in my Parliament good sort of men, wise men; but I also know that there are turbulent and rash fools; I have my eye upon them; and I am informed of the language they dare to hold about my conduct. I am king as my predecessors were; and I mean to be obeyed as they were. You are constantly vaporing to me about Louis XII. and his love of justice; know ye that justice is as dear to me as it was to him; but that king, just as he was, often drove out from the kingdom rebels, though they were members of Parliament; do not force me to imitate him in his severity.” Parliament entered upon a fundamental examination of the question; their deliberations lasted from the 13th to the 24th of July, 1517; and the conclusion they came to was, that Parliament could not and ought not to register the Concordat; that, if the king persisted in his intention of making it a law of the realm, he must employ the same means as Charles VII. had employed for establishing the Pragmatic Sanction, and that, therefore, he must summon a general council. On the 14th of January, 1518, two councillors arrived at Amboise, bringing to the king the representations of the Parliament. When their arrival was announced to the king, “Before I receive them,” said he, “I will drag them about at my heels as long as they have made me wait.” He received them, however, and handed their representations over to the chancellor, bidding him reply to them. Duprat made a learned and specious reply, but one which left intact the question of right, and, at bottom, merely defended the Concordat on the ground of the king’s good pleasure and requirements of policy. On the last day of February, 1518, the king gave audience to the deputies, and handed them the chancellor’s reply. They asked to examine it. “You shall not examine it,” said the king; “this would degenerate into an endless process. A hundred of your heads, in Parliament, have been seven months and more painfully getting up these representations, which my chancellor has blown to the winds in a few days. There is but one king in France; I have done all I could to restore peace to my kingdom; and I will not allow nullification here of that which I brought about with so much difficulty in Italy. My Parliament would set up for a Venetian Senate; let it confine its meddling to the cause of justice, which is worse administered than it has been for a hundred years; I ought, perhaps, to drag it about at my heels, like the Grand Council, and watch more closely over its conduct.” The two deputies made an attempt to prolong their stay at Amboise: but, “If before six to-morrow morning,” said the king, “they be not gone, I will send some archers to take them and cast them into a dungeon for six months; and woe to whoever dares to speak to me for them!”
On returning to Paris the deputies were beginning to give their fellows an account of how harsh a reception they met with, when Louis de la Tremoille, the most respected amongst the chiefs of the army, entered the hall. He came by order of the king to affirm to the Parliament that to dismiss the Concordat was to renew the war, and that it must obey on the instant or profess open rebellion. Parliament upheld its decision of July 24, 1517, against the Concordat, at the same time begging La Tremoille to write to the king to persuade him, if he insisted upon registration, to send some person of note or to commission La Tremoille himself to be present at the act, and to see indorsed upon the Concordat, “Read, published, and registered at the king’s most express command several times repeated, in presence of . . . , specially deputed by him for that purpose.” Tremoille hesitated to write, and exhibited the letters whereby the king urged him to execute the strict orders laid upon him. “What are those orders, then?” asked the premier president. “That is the king’s secret,” answered La Tremoille: “I may not reveal it; all that I can tell you is, that I should never have peace of mind if you forced me to carry them out.” The Parliament in its excitement begged La Tremoille to withdraw, and sent for him back almost immediately. “Choose,” said the premier president to him, “between Saturday or Monday next to be present at the registration.” La Tremoille chose Monday, wishing to allow himself time for an answer even yet from the king. But no new instructions came to him; and on the 22d of March, 1518, Parliament proceeded to registration of the Concordat, with the forms and reservations which they had announced, and which were evidence of compulsion. The other Parliaments of France followed with more or less zeal, according to their own particular dispositions, the example shown by that of Paris. The University was heartily disposed to push resistance farther than had been done by Parliament: its rector caused to be placarded on the 27th of March, 1518, in the streets of Paris, an order forbidding all printers and booksellers to print the Concordat on pain of losing their connection with the University. The king commanded informations to be filed against the authors and placarders of the order, and, on the 27th of April, sent to the Parliament an edict, which forbade the University to meddle in any matter of public police, or to hold any assembly touching such matters, under pain, as to the whole body, of having its privileges revoked, and, as to individuals, of banishment and confiscation. The king’s party demanded of Parliament registration of this edict. Parliament confined itself to writing to the king, agreeing that the University had no right to meddle in affairs of government, but adding that there were strong reasons, of which it would give an account whenever the king should please to order, why it, the Parliament, should refuse registration of the edict. It does not appear that the king ever asked for such account, or that his wrath against the University was more obstinately manifested. The Concordat was registered, and Francis I., after having achieved an official victory over the magistrates, had small stomach for pursuing extreme measures against the men of letters.
We have seen that in the course of the fifteenth century, there were made in France two able and patriotic attempts; the Pragmatic Sanction, in 1458, under Charles VII., and the States General of 1484, under Charles VIII. We do not care to discuss here all the dispositions of those acts; some of them were, indeed, questionable; but they both of them, one in respect of the church and the other of the state, aimed at causing France to make a great stride towards a national, free and legalized regimen, to which French feudal society had never known how or been willing to adjust itself. These two attempts failed. It would be unjust to lay the blame on the contemporary governments. Charles VII. was in earnest about the Pragmatic Sanction which he submitted to the deliberations and votes of a national council; and Louis XI., after having for a while given it up to the pope, retraced his steps and left it in force. As to the States General of 1484, neither the regent, Anne de Beaujeu, nor Charles VIII., offered the slightest hinderance to their deliberations and their votes; and if Louis XII. did not convoke the States afresh, he constantly strove in the government of his kingdom to render them homage and give them satisfaction. We may feel convinced that, considering the social and intellectual condition of France at this time, these two patriotic attempts were premature; but a good policy, being premature, is not on that account alone condemned to failure; what it wants is time to get itself comprehended, appreciated, and practised gradually and consistently. If the successors of Louis XII. had acted in the same spirit and with the same view as their predecessor, France would probably have made progress in this salutary path. But exactly the contrary took place. Instead of continuing a more and more free and legal regimen, Francis I. and his chancellor, Duprat, loudly proclaimed and practised the maxims of absolute power; in the church, the Pragmatic Sanction was abolished; and in the state, Francis I., during a reign of thirty-two years, did not once convoke the States General, and labored only to set up the sovereign right of his own sole will. The church was despoiled of her electoral autonomy; and the magistracy, treated with haughty and silly impertinence, was vanquished and humiliated in the exercise of its right of remonstrance. The Concordat of 1516 was not the only, but it was the gravest pact of alliance concluded between the papacy and the French kingship for the promotion mutually of absolute power.
Whilst this question formed the subject of disputes in France between the great public authorities, there was springing up, outside of France, between the great European powers another not more grave in regard to a distant future, but more threatening in regard to the present peace of nations. King Ferdinand the Catholic had died on the 23d of January, 1516; and his grandson and successor, Archduke Charles, anxious to go and take possession of the throne of Spain, had hastily concluded with Francis I., on the 13th of August, 1516, at Noyon, a treaty intended to settle differences between the two crowns as to the kingdoms of Naples and Navarre. The French and Spanish plenipotentiaries, Sires de Boisy and de Chievres, were still holding meetings at Montpellier, trying to come to an understanding about the execution of this treaty, when the death of Emperor Maximilian at Wels, in Austria, on the 12th of January, 1519, occurred to add the vacant throne of a great power to the two second-rate thrones already in dispute between two powerful princes. Three claimants, Charles of Austria, who was the new King of Spain, Francis I., and Henry VIII., King of England, aspired to this splendid heritage. In 1517, Maximilian himself, in one of his fits of temper and impecuniosity, had offered to abdicate and give up the imperial dignity to Henry VIII. for a good round sum; but the King of England’s envoy, Dr. Cuthbert Tunstall, a stanch and clearsighted servant, who had been sent to Germany to deal with this singular proposal, opened his master’s eyes to its hollowness and falsehood, and Henry VIII. held himself aloof. Francis I. remained the only rival of Charles of Austria; Maximilian labored eagerly to pave the way for his grandson’s success; and at his death the struggle between the two claimants had already become so keen that Francis I., on hearing the news, exclaimed, “I will spend three millions to be elected emperor, and I swear that, three years after the election, I will be either at Constantinople or dead.”
The Turks, who had been since 1453 settled at Constantinople, were the terror of Christian Europe; and Germany especially had need of a puissant and valiant defender against them. Francis I. calculated that the Christians of Germany and Hungary would see in him, the King of France and the victor of Melegnano, their most imposing and most effectual champion.
Having a superficial mind and being full of vain confidence, Francis I. was mistaken about the forces and chances on his side, as well as about the real and natural interests of France, and also his own. There was no call for him to compromise himself in this electoral struggle of kings, and in a distant war against triumphant Islamry. He miscalculated the strong position and personal valor of the rival with whom he would have to measure swords. Charles of Austria was but nineteen, and Francis I. was twenty-three, when they entered, as antagonists, into the arena of European politics. Charles had as yet gained no battle and won no renown; while Francis I. was already a victorious king and a famous knight. But the young archduke’s able governor, William de Croy, Lord of Chievres, “had early trained him,” says M. Mignet, “to the understanding and management of his various interests; from the time that he was fifteen, Charles presided every day at his council; there he himself read out the contents of despatches which were delivered to him the moment they arrived, were it even in the dead of night; his council had become his school, and business served him for books. . . . Being naturally endowed with superior parts, a penetrating intellect and rare firmness of character, he schooled himself to look Fortune in the face without being intoxicated by her smiles or troubled at her frowns, to be astonished by nothing that happened, and to make up his mind in any danger. He had even now the will of an emperor and an overawing manner. ‘His dignity and loftiness of soul are such,’ says a contemporary writer, ‘that he seems to hold the universe under his feet.’” Charles’s position in Germany was as strong as the man himself; he was a German, a duke of Austria, of the imperial line, as natural a successor of his grandfather Maximilian at Frankfort as of his grandfather Ferdinand at Madrid. Such was the adversary, with such advantages of nationality and of person, against whom Francis I., without any political necessity, and for the sole purpose of indulging an ambitious vision and his own kingly self-esteem, was about to engage in a struggle which was to entail a heavy burden on his whole life, and bring him not in triumph to Constantinople, but in captivity to Madrid.
Before the death of Maximilian, and when neither party had done more than foresee the struggle and get ready for it, Francis I. was for some time able to hope for some success. Seven German princes, three ecclesiastical and four laic, the Archbishops of Mayence, Cologne, and Troves, and the Duke of Saxony, the Margrave of Brandenburg, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, and the King of Bohemia, had the sole power of electing the emperor. Four of them, the Archbishops of Troves and of Cologne, the Count Palatine of the Rhine and the Margrave of Brandenburg, had favorably received the overtures of Francis I., and had promised him their suffrages. His devoted servant, Robert de la Marck, Lord of Fleuranges, had brought to him at Amboise a German gentleman from the Palatinate, Franz von Sickingen, “of very petty family, but a very gentle companion,” says Fleuranges, “the most beautiful talker that I think I ever saw in my life, and in so much that there was no gentleman in Germany, prince or man of war, who would not have been glad to do him pleasure.” Francis I. had received him with very chivalrous grace, and had given him a pension of three thousand livres and handsome presents for his comrades in adventure; and Sickingen was so charmed that he said to Fleuranges on leaving Amboise, “The king did not open his heart to me on the subject of the empire; however, I know all about it, and I beg you to tell him that I will do his service and keep the oath I gave him.” A more important personage than Sickingen, Leo X., would have been very glad to have for emperor in Germany neither the King of France nor the King of Spain, both of them being far too powerful in Europe and far too emulous in Italy not to be dangerous enemies or inconvenient allies for him; and he tried to dissuade Francis I. from making any claim to the empire, and to induce him to employ his influence in bringing about the election of a second-rate German prince, Frederick the Wise, Duke of Saxony, who was justly popular in Germany, and who would never be in a condition to do France any harm. It was judicious advice and a policy good for France as well as for Europe in general; but Francis I., infatuated by his desire and his hope, did not relish it at all; and Leo X., being obliged to choose between the two great claimants, declared for Francis I., without any pleasure or confidence, but also without any great perplexity, for he had but little faith in the success which he made a show of desiring. Francis, deceived by these appearances and promises, on the part both of ecclesiastics and laics, held language breathing a gallant and almost careless confidence. “We are not enemies, your master and I,” he said to the ambassadors of Spain; “we are two lovers courting the same mistress: whichever of the two she may prefer, the other will have to submit, and harbor no resentment.” But when, shortly after Maximilian’s death, the struggle became closer and the issue nearer, the inequality between the forces and chances of the two rivals became quite manifest, and Francis I. could no longer affect the same serenity. He had intrusted the management of his affairs in Germany to a favorite comrade of his early youth, Admiral de Bonnivet, a soldier and a courtier, witty, rash, sumptuous, eager to display his master’s power and magnificence. Charles of Austria’s agents, and at their head his aunt Margaret, who had the government of the Low Countries in his absence, were experienced, deliberate, discreet, more eager to succeed in their purpose than to make a brilliant appearance, and resolved to do quietly whatever was necessary for success. And to do so they were before long as fully authorized as they were resolved. They discovered that Francis I. had given Bonnivet four hundred thousand crowns in gold that he might endeavor to bribe the electors; it was, according to report, double the sum Charles of Austria had promised for the same object; and his agents sent him information of it, and received this answer: “We are wholly determined to spare nothing and to stake all for all upon it, as the matter we most desire and have most at heart in this world. . . . The election must be secured, whatever it may cost me.” The question before the seven elective princes who were to dispose of the empire was thenceforth merely which of the two claimants would be the higher and the safer bidder. Francis I. engaged in a tussle of wealth and liberality with Charles of Austria. One of his agents wrote to him, “All will go well if we can fill the maw of the Margrave Joachim of Brandenburg; he and his brother the elector from Mayence fall every day into deeper depths of avarice; we must hasten to satisfy them with speed, speed, speed.” Francis I. replied, “I will have Marquis Joachim gorged at any price;” and he accordingly made over to him in ready money and bills of short dates all that was asked for by the margrave, who on the 8th of April, 1519, gave a written undertaking to support the candidature “of the most invincible and Most Christian prince, Francis, by the grace of God King of the French, Duke of Milan, and Lord of Genoa, who, what with his vigorous age, his ability, his justice, his military experience, the brilliant fortune of his arms, and all other qualities required for war and the management of the commonwealth, surpasses, in the judgment of every one, all other Christian princes.” But Charles of Austria did not consider himself beaten because two of the seven electors displayed avarice and venality. His aunt Margaret and his principal agent in Germany, the Chamberlain Armerstoff, resumed financial negotiations with the Archbishop of Mayence, for his brother the margrave as well as for himself, and the archbishop, without any formal engagement, accepted the Austrian over-bid. “I am ashamed at his shamelessness,” wrote Armerstorff to Charles. Alternate and antagonistic bargaining went on thus for more than two months. The Archbishop of Cologne, Hermann von Wied, kept wavering between the two claimants; but he was careful to tell John d’Albret, Francis I.‘s agent, that “he sincerely hoped that his Majesty would follow the doctrine of God, who gave as much to those who went to work in His vineyard towards the middle of the day as to those who had been at it all the morning.” Duke Frederick of Saxony was the only one of the seven electors who absolutely refused to make any promise, as well as to accept any offer, and preserved his independence, as well as his dignity. The rumor of all these traffickings and these uncertainties rekindled in Henry VIII., King of England, a fancy for placing himself once more in the ranks; but his agent, Richard Pace, found the negotiations too far advanced and the prices too high for him to back up this vain whim of his master’s; and Henry VIII. abandoned it. The diet had been convoked for the 17th of June at Frankfort. The day was drawing near; and which of the two parties had the majority was still regarded as, uncertain. Franz von Sickingen appeared in the outskirts of Frankfort with more than twenty thousand men of the German army, “whereat marvellously astonished,” says Fleuranges, “were they who wished well to the King of France and very mightily rejoiced they who wished well to the Catholic king.” The gentleman-adventurer had not been less accessible than the prince-electors to bribery. The diet opened on the 18th of June. The Archbishop of Mayence made a great speech in favor of Charles of Austria; and the Archbishop of Troves spoke in favor of Francis I., to whom he had remained faithful. Rival intrigues were kept up; Sickingen and his troops were a clog upon deliberation; the electors were embarrassed and weary of their dissensions; and the Archbishop of Troves proposed by way of compromise the election of the Duke of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, who, at this crisis so shameful for his peers, had just given fresh proofs of his sound judgment, his honesty, and his patriotic independence. But Frederick declined the honor it was intended to do him, and which he considered beyond his powers to support; and he voted for Archduke Charles, “a real German prince,” said he, “the choice of whom seemed to him most natural in point of right and most suitable in point of fact under the present circumstances of Europe.” The six other electors gave in to his opinion, and that same day, June 18, 1519, unanimously elected the King of Spain, Charles, King of the Romans and Emperor of Germany, with the title of Charles V.
Whatever pains were taken by Francis I. to keep up a good appearance after this heavy reverse, his mortification was profound, and he thought of nothing but getting his revenge. He flattered himself he would find something of the sort in a solemn interview and an appearance of alliance with Henry VIII., King of England, who had, like himself, just undergone in the election to the empire a less flagrant but an analogous reverse. It had already, in the previous year and on the occasion of a treaty concluded between the two kings for the restitution of Tournai to France, been settled that they should meet before long in token of reconciliation. Allusion had even been made, at that period, to a much more important restitution, of Calais in fact, for which Francis I., at what price we know not, had obtained the advocacy of Cardinal Wolsey, who was then all-powerful with Henry VIII. “Of what use to Us,” Wolsey had said, “is this town of Calais, where in time of peace as well as of war we have to keep up such numerous garrisons, which costs us so much money, and which so often forces us to measures contrary to the real interests of England?” But this idea was vehemently scouted by the English, and the coming interview between the two kings remained the sole accessory of the treaty of 1518. After Charles V.‘s election to the empire, Francis I. was eager to claim this interview, which was sure to cause in Europe the impression of a close understanding between the two kings before the very eyes of their common rival. A convention, signed on the 26th of March, 1520, regulated its details. It was stipulated that the two kings should meet in Picardy between Guines, an English possession in the neighborhood of Calais, and Ardres, which belonged to France. But, so soon as Charles V., at that time in Spain, was informed of this design, he used all his efforts to make it abortive. Henry, however, stood firm; not that he had resolved to knit himself closely with Francis I. against the new emperor, whom, a few months previously, he had shown alacrity in felicitating upon his accession to the empire, but he was unwilling to fail in his promise to the King of France, and he liked to assume in respect of the two rivals the part of an arbiter equally courted by both. Charles V., still actively working against the interview, entered into secret negotiation with Cardinal Wolsey to obtain for himself also an interview with Henry VIII., which would destroy the effect of that in course of arrangement between the Kings of France and England. In writing to Wolsey he called him his “very dear friend,” and guaranteed him a pension of seven thousand ducats, secured upon two Spanish bishoprics; and on the 26th of May, 1520, Henry VIII. received at Canterbury, as he was passing by on his way to embark at Dover for the interview in France, the as it were unexpected information that Charles V. had just arrived with his fleet at the port of Hythe. The king immediately sent Wolsey to meet the emperor, who disembarked at Dover, whither Henry went to visit him; and the two sovereigns repaired together to Canterbury, where they went in state to the cathedral, “resplendent,” says Erasmus, “with all the precious gifts it had received for so many centuries, especially with the most precious of all, the chest containing the remains of Thomas a-Becket, so magnificent that gold was the least of its ornaments.” There they passed three days, treating of their affairs in the midst of galas, during which Charles V. completely won over Wolsey by promising to help him to become pope. On the 31st of May, 1520, Charles, quite easy about the interview in France, embarked at Sandwich for his Flemish possessions, and Henry VIII. made sail for Calais, his point of departure to the place agreed upon for Francis to meet him, and where they had made up their minds, both of them, to display all the splendors of their two courts.
This meeting has remained celebrated in history far more for its royal pomp, and for the personal incidents which were connected with it, than for its political results. It was called The Field of Cloth of Gold; and the courtiers who attended the two sovereigns felt bound to almost rival them in sumptuousness, “insomuch,” says the contemporary Martin du Bellay, “that many bore thither their mills, their forests, and their meadows on their backs.” Henry VIII. had employed eleven hundred workmen, the most skilful of Flanders and Holland, in building a quadrangular palace of wood, one hundred and twenty-eight feet long every way; on one side of the entrance-gate was a fountain, covered with gilding, and surmounted by a statue of Bacchus, round which there flowed through subterranean pipes all sorts of wines, and which bore in letters of gold the inscription, “Make good cheer, who will;” and on the other side a column, supported by four lions, was surmounted by a statue of Cupid armed with bow and arrows. Opposite the palace was erected a huge figure of a savage wearing the arms of his race, with this inscription, chosen by Henry VIII.: “He whom I back wins.” The frontage was covered outside with canvas painted to represent freestone; and the inside was hung with rich tapestries. Francis I., emulous of equalling his royal neighbor in magnificence, had ordered to be erected close to Ardres an immense tent, upheld in the middle by a colossal pole firmly fixed in the ground and with pegs and cordage all around it. Outside, the tent, in the shape of a dome, was covered with cloth of gold; and, inside, it represented a sphere with a ground of blue velvet and studded with stars, like the firmament. At each angle of the large tent there was a small one equally richly decorated. But before the two sovereigns exchanged visits, in the midst of all these magnificent preparations, there arose a violent hurricane, which tore up the pegs and split the cordage of the French tent, scattered them over the ground, and forced Francis I. to take up his quarters in an old castle near Ardres. When the two kings’ two chief councillors, Cardinal Wolsey on one side and Admiral Bonnivet on the other, had regulated the formalities, on the 7th of June, 1520, Francis I. and Henry VIII. set out on their way, at the same hour and the same pace, for their meeting in the valley of Ardres, where a tent had been prepared for them. As they drew near, some slight anxiety was manifested by the escort of the King of England, amongst whom a belief prevailed that that of the King of France was more numerous; but it was soon perceived to be nothing of the sort. The two kings, mounted upon fine horses and superbly dressed, advanced towards one another; and Henry VIII.‘s horse stumbled, which his servants did not like. The two kings saluted each other with easy grace, exchanged embraces without getting off their horses, dismounted, and proceeded arm-in-arm to the tent where Wolsey and De Bonnivet were awaiting them. “My dear brother and cousin,” immediately said Francis with his easy grace, “I am come a long way, and not without trouble, to see you in person. I hope that you hold me for such as I am, ready to give you aid with the kingdoms and lordships that are in my power.” Henry, with a somewhat cold reserve, replied, “It is not your kingdoms or your divers possessions that I regard, but the soundness and loyal observance of the promises set down in the treaties between you and me. My eyes never beheld a prince who could be dearer to my heart, and I have crossed the seas at the extreme boundary of my kingdom to come and see you.” The two kings entered the tent and signed a treaty whereby the Dauphin of France was to marry Princess Mary, only daughter at that time of Henry VIII., to whom Francis I. undertook to pay annually a sum of one hundred thousand livres [two million eight hundred thousand francs, or one hundred and twelve thousand pounds in the money of our day], until the marriage was celebrated, which would not be for some time yet, as the English princess was only four years old. The two kings took wine together, according to custom, and reciprocally presented the members of their courts. “King Francis,” says Henry VIII.‘s favorite chronicler, Edward Hall, who was there, “is an amiable prince, proud in bearing and gay in manner, with a brown complexion, large eyes, long nose, thick lips, broad chest and shoulders, short legs, and big feet.” Titian’s portrait gives a loftier and more agreeable idea of Francis I.
When the two kings proceeded to sign, in their tent, the treaty they had just concluded, “the King of England,” according to Fleuranges’ Memoires, “himself took up the articles and began to read them. When he had read those relating to the King of France, who was to have the priority, and came to speak of himself, he got as far as, ‘I, Henry, King’ . . . (he would have said of France and England), but he left out the title as far as France was concerned, and said to King Francis, ‘I will not put it in as you are here, for I should lie;’ and he said only, ‘I Henry, King of England.’” But, as M. Mignet very properly says, “if he omitted the title in his reading, he left it in the treaty itself, and, shortly afterwards, was ambitious to render it a reality, when he invaded France and wished to reign over it.”
After the diplomatic stipulations were concluded, the royal meeting was prolonged for sixteen days, which were employed in tourneys, jousts, and all manner of festivals. The personal communication of the two kings was regulated with all the precautions of official mistrust and restraint; and when the King of England went to Ardres to see the Queen of France, the King of France had to go to Guines to see the Queen of England, for the two kings were hostages for one another. “The King of France, who was not a suspicious man,” says Fleuranges, “was mighty vexed at there being so little confidence in one another. He got up one morning very early, which is not his habit, took two gentlemen and a page, the first three he could find, mounted his horse, and went to visit the King of England at the castle of Guines. When he came on to the castle-bridge, all the English were mighty astonished. As he rode amongst them, the king gayly called upon them to surrender to him, and asked them the way to the chamber of the king his brother, the which was pointed out to him by the governor of Guines, who said to him, ‘Sir, he is not awake.’ But King Francis passed on all the same, went up to the said chamber, knocked at the door, awoke the King of England, and walked in.
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When Maillart, officer of hell, escorted To Montfaucon Semblancay, doomed to die, Which, to your thinking, of the twain supported The better havior? I will make reply: Maillart was like the man to death proceeding; And Semblancay so stout an ancient looked, It seemed, forsooth, as if himself were leading Lieutenant Maillard—to the gallows booked! |
It is said that, at the very moment of execution, Semblancay, waiting on the scaffold for at least a commutation of the penalty, said, “Had I served God as I have served the king, He would not have made me wait so long.” Nearly two centuries later, in 1683, a more celebrated minister than Semblancay, Colbert, in fact, as he was dying tranquilly in his bed, after having for twenty years served Louis XIV., and in that service made the fortune of his family as well as his own, said also, “Had I done for God what I have done for yonder man, I had been twice saved; and now I know not what will become of me.” A striking similarity in language and sentiment, in spite of such different ends, between two great councillors of kings, both devoted during their lives to the affairs of the world, and both passing, at their last hour, this severe judgment, as Christians, upon the masters of the world and upon themselves.
About the same time the government of Francis I. was involved, through his mother’s evil passions, not in an act more morally shameful, but in an event more politically serious, than the execution of Semblancay. There remained in France one puissant prince, the last of the feudal semi-sovereigns, and the head of that only one of the provincial dynasties sprung from the dynasty of the Capetians which still held its own against the kingly house. There were no more Dukes of Burgundy, Dukes of Anjou, Counts of Provence, and Dukes of Brittany; by good fortune or by dexterous management the French kingship had absorbed all those kindred and rival states. Charles II., Duke of Bourbon, alone was invested with such power and independence as could lead to rivalry. He was in possession of Bourbonness, of Auvergne, of Le Forez, of La Marche, of Beaujolais, and a large number of domains and castles in different parts of France. Throughout all these possessions he levied taxes and troops, convoked the local estates, appointed the officers of justice, and regulated almost the whole social organism. He was born on the 10th of February, 1490, four years before Francis I.; he was the head of the younger branch of the Bourbons-Montpensier; and he had married, in 1515, his cousin, Suzanne of Bourbon, only daughter of Peter II., head of the elder branch, and Anne of France, the able and for a long while puissant daughter of Louis XI. Louis XII. had taken great interest in this marriage, and it had been stipulated in the contract “that the pair should make a mutual and general settlement of all their possessions in favor of the survivor.” Thus the young duke, Charles, had united all the possessions of the house of Bourbon; and he held at Moulins a brilliant princely court, of which he was himself the most brilliant ornament. Having been trained from his boyhood in all chivalrous qualities, he was an accomplished knight before becoming a tried warrior; and he no sooner appeared upon the field of battle than he won renown not only as a valiant prince, but as an eminent soldier. In 1509, at the battle of Agnadello, under the eye of Louis XII. himself, he showed that he was a worthy pupil of La Tremoille, of La Palice, and of Bayard; and in 1512, at that of Ravenna, his reputation was already so well established in the army that, when Gaston de Foix was killed, they clamored for Duke Charles of Bourbon, then twenty-two years old, as his successor. Louis XII. gave him full credit for his bravery and his warlike abilities; but the young prince’s unexpansive character, haughty independence, and momentary flashes of audacity, caused the veteran king some disquietude. “I wish,” said he, “he had a more open, more gay, less taciturn spirit; stagnant water affrights me.” In 1516, the year after Louis XII.‘s death, Andrew Trevisani, Venetian ambassador at Milan, wrote to the Venetian council, “This Duke of Bourbon handles a sword most gallantly and successfully; he fears God, he is devout, humane, and very generous; he has a revenue of one hundred and twenty thousand crowns, twenty thousand from his mother-in-law, Anne of France, and two thousand a month as constable of France; and, according to what is said by M. de Longueville, governor of Paris, he might dispose of half the king’s army for any enterprise he pleased, even if the king did not please.”
Scarcely had Francis I. ascended the throne, on the 12th of January, 1515, when he made the Duke of Bourbon’s great position still greater by creating him constable of France. Was it solely to attach to himself the greatest lord and one of the most distinguished soldiers of the kingdom, or had, perhaps, as has already been hinted, the favor of the queen-mother something to do with the duke’s speedy elevation? The whole history of Charles of Bourbon tends to a belief that the feelings of Louise of Savoy towards him, her love or her hate, had great influence upon the decisive incidents of his life. However that may be, the young constable, from the moment of entering upon his office, fully justified the king’s choice.
He it was who, during the first campaign in Italy, examined in person, with the shepherd who had pointed it out, an unknown passage across the Alps; and, on the 13th and 14th of September, he contributed greatly to the victory of Melegnano. “I can assure you,” wrote Francis I. to his mother, the regent, “that my brother the constable and M. de St. Pol splintered as many lances as any gentlemen of the company whosoever; and I speak of this as one who saw; they spared themselves as little as if they had been wild boars at bay.” On returning to France the king appointed the constable governor of conquered Milaness; and to give him a further mark of favor, “he granted him the noble privilege of founding trades in all the towns of the kingdom. This, when the Parliament enregistered the king’s letters patent, was expressly stated to be in consideration of Bourbon’s extraordinary worth, combined with his quality as a prince of the blood, and not because of his office of constable.” [Histoire de la Maison de Bourbon, by M. Desormeaux, t. ii. p. 437.] The constable showed that he was as capable of governing as of conquering. He foiled all Emperor Maximilian’s attempts to recover Milaness; and, not receiving from the king money for the maintenance and pay of his troops, he himself advanced one hundred thousand livres, opened a loan-account in his own name, raised an army-working-corps of six thousand men to repair the fortifications of Milan, and obtained from the Swiss cantons permission to enlist twelve thousand recruits amongst them. His exercise of authority over the Lombard population was sometimes harsh, but always judicious and efficient. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1516, eight months after the victory of Melegnano and but two months after he had driven Emperor Maximilian from Milaness, the Duke of Bourbon was suddenly recalled, and Marshal de Lautrec was appointed governor in his place. When the constable arrived at Lyons, where the court then happened to be, “the king,” says Fleuranges in his Memoires, “gave him marvellously good welcome;” but kings are too ready to imagine that their gracious words suffice to hide or make up for their acts of real disfavor; and the Duke of Bourbon was too proud to delude himself. If he had any desire to do so, the way in which the king’s government treated him soon revealed to him his real position: the advances he had made and the debts he had contracted for the service of the crown in Milaness, nay, his salary as constable and his personal pensions, were unpaid. Was this the effect of secret wrath on the part of the queen-mother, hurt because he seemed to disdain her good graces, or an act arising may be from mistrust and may be from carelessness on the king’s part, or merely a result of the financial disorder into which the affairs of Francis I. were always falling? These questions cannot be solved with certainty. Anyhow the constable, though thus maltreated, did not cry out; but his royal patroness and mother-in-law, Anne of France, daughter of Louis XI., dowager-duchess of the house of Bourbon, complained of these proceedings to the king’s mother, and uttered the word ingratitude. The dispute between the two princesses grew rancorous; the king intervened to reconcile them; speedy payment was promised of all that was due to the constable, but the promise was not kept. The constable did not consider it seemly to wait about; so he quitted the court and withdrew into his own duchy, to Moulins, not openly disgraced, but resolved to set himself, by his proud independence, above the reach of ill-will, whether on the king’s part or his mother’s.
Moulins was an almost kingly residence. “The dukes,” said the Venetian traveller Andrew Navagero, in 1528, “have built there fortress-wise a magnificent palace, with beautiful gardens, groves, fountains, and all the sumptuous appliances of a prince’s dwelling.” No sooner did the constable go to reside there than numbers of the nobility flocked thither around him. The feudal splendor of this abode was shortly afterwards enhanced by an auspicious domestic incident. In 1517 the Duchess of Bourbon was confined there of a son, a blessing for some time past unhoped for. The delighted constable determined to make of the child’s baptism a great and striking event; and he begged the king to come and be godfather, with the dowager Duchess of Bourbon as godmother. Francis I. consented and repaired to Moulins with his mother and nearly all his court. The constable’s magnificence astonished even the magnificent king “five hundred gentlemen, all clad in velvet, and all wearing a chain of gold going three times round the neck,” were in habitual attendance upon the duke; “the throng of the invited was so great that neither the castle of Moulins nor the town itself sufficed to lodge them; tents had to be pitched in the public places, in the streets, in the park.” Francis I. could not refrain from saying that a King of France would have much difficulty in making such a show; the queen-mother did not hide her jealousy; regal temper came into collision with feudal pride. Admiral Bonnivet, a vassal of the constable and a favorite of the king, was having built, hard by Chatellerault, a castle so vast and so magnificent, “that he seemed,” says Brantome, “to be minded to ride the high horse over the house of M. de Bourbon, in such wise that it should appear only a nest beside his own.” Francis I., during a royal promenade, took the constable one day to see the edifice the admiral was building, and asked him what he thought of it. “I think,” said Bourbon, “that the cage is too big and too fine for the bird.” “Ah!” said the king, “do you not speak with somewhat of envy?” “I!” cried the constable; “I feel envy of a gentleman whose ancestors thought themselves right happy to be squires to mine!” In their casual and familiar conversations the least pretext would lead to sharp words between the Duke of Bourbon and his kingly guest. The king was rallying him one day on the attachment he was suspected of having felt for a lady of the court. “Sir,” said the constable, “what you have just said has no point for me, but a good deal for those who were not so forward as I was in the lady’s good graces.” [At this period princes of the blood, when speaking to the king, said Monsieur; when they wrote to him, they called him Monseigneur.] Francis I., to whom this scarcely veiled allusion referred, was content to reply, “Ah! my dear cousin, you fly out at everything, and you are mighty short-tempered.” The nickname of short-tempered stuck to the constable from that day, and not without reason. With anybody but the king the constable was a good deal more than short-tempered the chancellor, Duprat, who happened to be at Moulins, and who had a wish to become possessed of two estates belonging to the constable, tried to worm himself into his good graces; but Bourbon gave him sternly to understand with what contempt he regarded him, and Duprat, who had hitherto been merely the instrument of Louise of Savoy’s passions, so far as the duke was concerned, became henceforth his personal enemy, and did not wait long for an opportunity of making the full weight of his enmity felt. The king’s visit to Moulins came to an end without any settlement of the debts due from the royal treasury to the constable. Three years afterwards, in 1520, he appeared with not a whit the less magnificence at the Field of Cloth of Gold, where he was one of the two great lords chosen by Francis I. to accompany him at his interview with Henry VIII.; but the constable had to put up with the disagreeableness of having for his associate upon that state occasion Admiral Bonnivet, whom he had but lately treated with so much hauteur, and his relations towards the court were by no means improved by the honor which the king conferred upon him in summoning him to his side that day. Henry VIII., who was struck by this vassal’s haughty bearing and looks, said to Francis I., “If I had a subject like that in my kingdom, I would not leave his head very long on his shoulders.”
More serious causes of resentment came to aggravate a situation already so uncomfortable. The war, which had been a-hatching ever since the imperial election at Frankfort, burst out in 1521, between Francis I. and Charles V. Francis raised four armies in order to face it on all his frontiers, in Guienne, in Burgundy, in Champagne, and in Picardy, “where there was no army,” says Du Bellai, “however small.” None of these great commands was given to the Duke of Bourbon; and when the king summoned him to the army of Picardy, whither he repaired in all haste with six thousand foot and three hundred men-at-arms raised in his own states, the command of the advance-guard, which belonged to him by right of his constableship, was given to the Duke of Alencon, who had nothing to recommend him beyond the fact that he was the husband of Marguerite de Valois and brother-in-law of the king. Bourbon deeply resented this slight; and it was remarked that he frequently quoted with peculiar meaning a reply made by a Gascon gentleman to King Charles VII., who had asked him if anything could shake his fidelity, “Nothing, sir, nothing; not even an offer of three such kingdoms as yours; but an affront might.” The constable did not serve a whit the less valiantly and brilliantly in this campaign of Picardy; he surprised and carried the town of Hesdin, which was defended by a strong garrison; but after the victory he treated with a generosity which was not perhaps free from calculation the imperialist nobility shut up in the castle; he set all his prisoners at large, and paid particular attention to the Countess de Roeux, of the house of Croy, whom he knew to have influence with Charles V. He was certainly not preparing just then to abandon the King of France and go over to the camp of the emperor; but he was sufficiently irritated against Francis I. to gladly seize an opportunity of making new friends on the rival side.
Meanwhile there occurred the event which was to decide his conduct and his destiny. His wife, Suzanne of Bourbon, died at Chatellerault, in April, 1521, after having lost the son whose birth had been celebrated with such brilliancy at Moulins, and having confirmed by her will the settlement upon her husband of all her possessions, which had already been conferred upon him by their marriage contract. From whom came the first idea of the proposal to which this death was ere long to lead? Was it the chancellor, Duprat, who told the mother of Francis I. that the will and the settlement might be disputed at law, and that she would then enter into possession of a great part of what belonged to the House of Bourbon? Was it Louise of Savoy herself who conceived the hope of satisfying at one and the same time her cupidity and the passion she felt for the constable, by having an offer made to him of her hand, with the retention secured to him of those great possessions which, otherwise, would be disputed, and which a decree of Parliament might take away from him? Between these two explanations of what occurred at that time, there is no certain choice afforded by historical documents; but the more reasonable conviction is, that the passion of Louise of Savoy was the first and the decisive cause of the proposal made to the constable. He was then thirty years old; Louise of Savoy was forty-five, but she was still beautiful, attractive, and puissant; she had given the constable unmistakable proofs of her inclination for him and of the influence which his inclinations exercised over her: she might well flatter herself that he would be attracted by the prospect of becoming the king’s step-father and almost a sharer in the kingly power, whilst retaining that of the great feudal lord. The chancellor, Duprat, full of ability and servility, put all his knowledge, all his subtlety in argument, and all his influence in the Parliament at the disposal of Madame Louise, who, as a nearer relative than the constable, claimed the possessions left by his wife, Suzanne of Bourbon. Francis I., in the name of the crown, and in respect of the constable’s other possessions, joined his claims to those of his mother. Thus the lawsuit with which the duke was threatened affected him in every part of his fortune. It was in vain that more or less direct overtures, on behalf of Madame Louise and of the king himself, were made to induce him to accept the bargain offered: his refusal was expressed and given with an open contempt that verged upon coarseness. “I will never,” said he, “marry a woman devoid of modesty.”
The lawsuit was begun and prosecuted with all the hatred of a great lady treated with contempt, and with all the knowingness of an unscrupulous lawyer eager to serve, in point of fact, his patroness, and to demonstrate, in point of law, the thesis he had advanced. Francis I., volatile, reckless, and ever helpless as he was against the passions of his mother, who whilst she adored, beguiled him, readily lent himself to the humiliation of a vassal who was almost his rival in puissance, and certainly was in glory. Three lawyers of renown entered upon the struggle. Poyet maintained the pretensions of the queen-mother; Lizet developed Duprat’s argument in favor of the king’s claims; Montholon defended the constable. The Parliament granted several adjournments, and the question was in suspense for eleven months. At last, in August, 1523, the court interest was triumphant; Parliament, to get rid of direct responsibility, referred the parties, as to the basis of the question, to the king’s council; but it placed all the constable’s possessions under sequestration, withdrawing the enjoyment of them wholly from him. A few years afterwards Poyet became chancellor, and Lizet premier-president of Parliament. “Worth alone,” say the historians, “carved out for Montholon at a later period the road to the office of keeper of the seals.”
The constable’s fall and ruin were complete. He at an early stage had a presentiment that such would be the issue of his lawsuit, and sought for safeguards away from France. The affair was causing great stir in Europe. Was it, however, Charles V. who made the first overtures as the most efficient supporter the constable could have? Or was it the constable himself who, profiting by the relations he had established after the capture of Hesdin with the Croys, persons of influence with the emperor, made use of them for getting into direct communication with Charles V., and made offer of his services in exchange for protection against his own king and his own country? In such circumstances and in the case of such men the sources of crime are always surrounded with obscurity. One is inclined to believe that Charles V., vigilant and active as he was, put out the first feelers. As soon as he heard that Bourbon was a widower, he gave instructions to Philibert Naturelli, his ambassador in France, who said, “Sir, you are now in a position to marry, and the emperor, my master, who is very fond of you, has a sister touching whom I have orders to speak to you if you will be pleased to hearken.” It was to Charles V.‘s eldest sister, Eleanor, widow of Manuel the Fortunate, King of Portugal, that allusion was made. This overture led to nothing at the time; but the next year, in 1522, war was declared between Francis I. and Charles V.; the rupture between Francis I. and the Duke of Bourbon took place; the Bourbon lawsuit was begun; and the duke’s mother-in-law, Anne of France, daughter of Louis XI., more concerned for the fate of her House than for that of her country, and feeling herself near her end, said one day to her son-in-law, “My son, reflect that the House of Bourbon made alliance with the House of Burgundy, and that during that alliance it always prospered. You see at the present moment what is the state of our affairs, and the lawsuit in which you are involved is proceeded with only for want of alliances. I do beg and command you to accept the emperor’s alliance. Promise me to use thereto all the diligence you can, and I shall die more easy.” She died on the 14th of November, 1522, bequeathing all her possessions to the constable, who was day by day more disposed to follow her counsels. In the summer of 1522, he had, through the agency of Adrian de Croy, Lord of Beaurain, entered into negotiations not only with Charles V., but also with Henry VIII., King of England, deploring the ill behavior of Francis I. and the enormity of existing abuses, and proposing to set on foot in his own possessions a powerful movement for the reformation of the kingdom and the relief of the poor people, if the two sovereigns would send “persons of trust and authority into the vicinity of his principality of Dombes, to Bourg-en-Bresse, whither he on his side would send his chancellor to come to an agreement with them and act in common.” In the month of March, 1523, whilst the foreign negotiations thus commenced and the home-process against the constable were pursuing a parallel course, Bourbon one day paid a visit to Queen Claude of France at the hour when she was dining alone. She was favorably disposed towards him, and would have liked to get him married to her sister Renee, who subsequently became Duchess of Ferrara. She made him sit down. Francis I., who was at dinner in an adjacent room, came in. Bourbon rose to take leave. “Nay, keep your seat,” said the king; “and so it is true that you are going to be married?” “Not at all, sir.” “O, but I know it; I am sure of it; I know of your dealings with the emperor. And bear well in mind what I have to say to you on the subject.” “Sir! is this a threat, pray? I have not deserved such treatment.” After dinner he departed and went back to his hotel hard by the Louvre; and many gentlemen who happened to be at court accompanied him by way of escort. He was as yet a powerful vassal, who was considered to be unjustly persecuted.
Charles V. accepted eagerly the overtures made to him by Bourbon in response to his own; but, before engaging in action, he wished to be certified about the disposition of Henry VIII., King of England, and he sent Beaurain to England to take accurate soundings. Henry at first showed hesitation. When, Beaurain set before him all the advantages that would accrue to their coalition from the Duke of Bourbon’s alliance: “And I,” said the king, brusquely, “what, pray, shall I get?” “Sir,” answered Beaurain, “you will be King of France.” “Ah!” rejoined Henry, “it will take a great deal to make M. de Bourbon obey me.” Henry remembered the cold and proud bearing which the constable had maintained towards him at the Field of Cloth of Gold. He, nevertheless, engaged to supply half the expenses and a body of troops for the projected invasion of France. Charles V. immediately despatched Beaurain to the Duke of Bourbon, who had removed to Montbrison, in the most mountainous part of his domains, on pretext of a pilgrimage to Notre-Dame du Puy. Beaurain was conducted thither, in great secrecy, on the 17th July, 1523, by two of the duke’s gentlemen, and passed two days there shut up in a room adjoining the constable’s apartment, never emerging save at night to transact business with him. On the 18th of July, in the evening, he put into Bourbon’s hands his letters of credit, running thus: “My dear cousin, I send to you Sieur de Beaurain, my second chamberlain. I pray you to consider him as myself, and, so doing, you will find me ever your good cousin and friend.” The negotiation was speedy. Many historians have said that it was confined to verbal conventions, and that there was nothing in writing between the two contracting parties. That is a mistake. A treaty was drawn up in brief terms by Beaurain’s secretary, and two copies were made, of which one was to be taken to Charles V. and the other to be left with the Duke of Bourbon. It stipulated the mutual obligations of the three contracting parties in their offensive and defensive league. Bourbon engaged to attack Francis I. but he would not promise to acknowledge Henry VIII. as King of France. “I am quite willing to be his ally,” he said, “but his subject, his vassal, no! All I can do is to leave myself, as to my relations towards him, in the emperor’s hands.” A strange and noble relic of patriotism in that violent and haughty soul, more concerned for its rights than its duties, and driven to extremity by the acts of ungrateful and unthoughtful injustice, to which the great lord and the valiant warrior had been subjected. The treaty having been signed with this reservation, Bourbon sent, about midnight, for Saint-Bonnet, Lord of Branon, whom he intended to despatch to Charles V., and, after having sworn him, “I send you,” said he, “to the emperor, to whom you will say that I commend myself humbly to his good graces, that I beg him to give me his sister in marriage, and that, doing me this honor, he will find me his servant, his good brother, and friend.”
The fatal step was taken. Bourbon was now engaged in revolt against his king and his country, as well as in falsehood and treason—preliminary conditions of such a course. He needed tools and accomplices; and though he had a numerous and devoted following, he could not feel sure of them all for such a purpose. The very day after the conclusion of his treaty with Charles V., one of his most intimate and important confidants, John of Poitiers, Lord of St. Vallier, who was present at Montbrison during the negotiation of the treaty, said to him in the morning, “Sir, it was your wish; I heard all; and I spent the whole night thinking about it; tell me, I pray you, do you feel sure of your friend?” “I was not more fond of the brother I lost at Melegnano,” said the constable; “I should not have felt more sure of him.” “Well, then,” rejoined St. Vallier, “fancy that it is that brother who is speaking to you, and take in good part what he is about to say to you. This alliance which is offered to you will bring upon France the Germans, the Spaniards, and the English; think of the great mischief which will ensue—human bloodshed, destruction of towns, of good families and of churches, violation of women, and other calamities that come of war. Reflect also on the great treason you are committing; when the king has started for Italy and left you in France, putting his trust in you, you will go and stab him in the back, and destroy him as well as his kingdom. You belong to the House of France, and are one of the chief princes of the country, so beloved and esteemed by all that everybody is gladdened at the very sight of you. If you should come to be the cause of so great ruin, you will be the most accursed creature that ever was, accursed for a thousand years after your death. For the love of God consider all this; and if you have no regard for the king and Madame his mother, who, you say, are treating you wrongfully, at least have some regard for the queen and the princes her children, and do not wilfully cause the perdition of this kingdom, whose enemies, when you have let them into it, will drive you out of it yourself.” “But, cousin,” said the constable, quite overcome, “what would you have me to do? The king and Madame mean to destroy me; they have already taken away a part of my possessions.” “Sir,” replied Saint-Vallier, “give up, I pray you, all these wicked enterprises; commend yourself to God, and speak frankly to the king.” If we are to believe Saint-Vallier’s deposition, when, six months afterwards, he was put on his trial and convicted for his participation in the plot and treason, the constable was sufficiently affected by his representations to promise that he would abandon his design and make his peace with the king: but facts refute this assertion. In the latter months of 1523, the stipulations of the treaty concluded at Montbrison on the 18th of July were put into execution by all the contracting parties; letters of exchange from Henry VIII. were sent to Bale for the German lanzknechts he was to pay; the lanzknechts crossed the Rhine on the 26th of August, and marched through Franche-Comte in spite of its neutrality; the English landed at Calais between the 23d and 30th of August, to co-operate with the Flemings; the Spaniards began the campaign, on the 6th of September, in the direction of the Pyrenees; and the Duke, of Bourbon on his side took all the necessary measures for forming a junction with his allies, and playing that part in the coalition which had been assigned to him.
According to what appears, he had harbored a design of commencing his enterprise with a very bold stroke. Being informed that Francis I. was preparing to go in person and wage war upon Italy, he had resolved to carry him off on the road to Lyons, and, when once he had the king in his hands, he flattered himself he would do as he pleased with the kingdom. If his attempt were unsuccessful, be would bide his time until Francis I. was engaged in Milaness, Charles V. had entered Guienne, and Henry VIII. was in Picardy: he would then assemble a thousand men-at-arms, six thousand foot and twelve thousand lanzknechts, and would make for the Alps to cut the king off from any communication with France. This plan rested upon the assumption that the king would, as he had announced, leave the constable in France with an honorable title and an apparent share in the government of the kingdom, though really isolated and debarred from action. But Francis had full cognizance of the details of the conspiracy through two Norman gentlemen whom the constable had imprudently tried to get to join in it, and who, not content with refusing, had revealed the matter at confession to the Bishop of Lisieux, who had lost no time in giving information to Sire de Breze, grand seneschal of Normandy. Breze at once reported it to the king, and his letter ran: “Sir, there is need also to take care of yourself, for there has been talk of an attempt to carry you off between here and Lyons, and conduct you to a strong place in the Bourbon district or on the borders of Auvergne.” Being at last seriously disquieted for the consequences of his behavior towards the constable, Francis took two resolutions: one was, not to leave him in France during his own absence; the other was, to go and see him at Moulins, at the same time taking all necessary precautions for his own safety, and win him over once more by announcing an intention of taking him off to Italy and sharing with him the command of the army. On approaching Moulins the king recalled the lanzknechts who had already passed the town, entered it himself surrounded by his guards, and took up his quarters in the castle, of which he seized the keys. At his first interview with the constable, who was slightly indisposed and pretended to be very much so, “I know,” said he, “that you are keeping up a connection with the emperor, and that he is trying to turn your discontent to advantage, so as to beguile you; but I have faith in you; you are of the House of France and of the line of Bourbon, which has never produced a traitor.” “It is true, sir,” said the constable, without any confusion; “the emperor, informed by public rumor of the position to which I am reduced, sent Beaurain to offer me an asylum in his dominions and a fortune suitable to my birth and my rank; but I know the value of empty compliments. Hearing that your Majesty was to pass by Moulins, I thought it my duty to wait and disclose this secret to you myself rather than intrust it to a letter.” The king showed signs of being touched. “I have an idea of taking you away with me to Italy,” said he: “would you come with me willingly?” “Not only to Italy,” was the answer, “but to the end of the world. The doctors assure me that I shall soon be in a condition to bear the motion of a litter; I already feel better; your Majesty’s kindnesses will soon complete my cure.” Francis testified his satisfaction. Some of his advisers, with more distrust and more prevision, pressed him to order the arrest of so dangerous a man, notwithstanding his protestations; but Francis refused. According to what some historians say, if he had taken off the sequestration laid upon the constable’s possessions, actually restored them to him, as well as discharged the debts due to him and paid his pensions, and carried him off to Italy, if, in a word, he had shown a bold confidence and given back to him at once and forever the whole of his position, he would, perhaps, have weaned him from his plot, and would have won back to himself and to France that brave and powerful servant. But Francis wavered between distrust and hope; he confined himself to promising the constable restitution of his possessions if the decree of Parliament was unfavorable to him; he demanded of him a written engagement to remain always faithful to him and to join him in Italy as soon as his illness would allow him; and, on taking leave of him, left with him one of his own gentlemen, Peter de Brentonniere, Lord of Warthy, with orders to report to the king as to his health. In this officer Bourbon saw nothing more or less than a spy, and in the king’s promises nothing but vain words dependent as they were upon the issue of a lawsuit which still remained an incubus upon him. He had no answer for words but words; he undertook the engagements demanded of him by the king without considering them binding; and he remained ill at Moulins, waiting till events should summon him to take action with his foreign allies.
This state of things lasted far nearly three weeks. The king remained stationary at Lyons waiting for the constable to join him; and the constable, saying he was ready to set out and going so far as to actually begin his march, was doing his three leagues a day by litter, being always worse one day than he was the day before. Peter de Warthy, the officer whom the king had left with him, kept going and coming from Lyons to Moulins and from Moulins to Lyons, conveying to the constable the king’s complaints and to the king the constable’s excuses, without bringing the constable to decide upon joining the king at Lyons and accompanying him into Italy, or the king upon setting out for Italy without the constable. “I would give a hundred thousand crowns,” the king sent word to Bourbon, “to be in Lombardy.” “The king will do well,” answered Bourbon, “to get there as soon as possible, for despatch is needful beyond everything.” When Warthy insisted strongly, the constable had him called up to his bedside; and “I feel myself,” said he, “the most unlucky man in the world not to be able to serve the king; but if I were to be obstinate, the doctors who are attending me would not answer for my life, and I am even worse than the doctors think. I shall never be in a condition to do the king service any more. I am going back to my native air, and, if I recover a day’s health, I will go to the king.” “The king will be terribly put out,” said Warthy; and he returned to Lyons to report these remarks of the real or pretended invalid. While he was away, the constable received from England and Spain news which made him enter actively upon his preparations; he heard at the same time that the king was having troops marched towards Bourbonness so as to lay violent hands on him if he did not obey; he, therefore, decided to go and place himself in security in his strong castle of Chantelle, where he could await the movements of his allies; he mounted his horse, did six leagues at one stretch, and did not draw bridle until he had entered Chantelle. Warthy speedily came and rejoined him. He found the constable sitting on his bed, dressed like an invalid and with his head enveloped in a night-cap. “M. de Warthy,” said Bourbon, “you bring your spurs pretty close after mine.” “My lord,” was the reply, “you have better ones than I thought.” “Think you,” said Bourbon, “that I did not well, having but a finger’s breadth of life, to put it as far out of the way as I could to avoid the king’s fury?” “The king,” said Warthy, “was never furious towards any man; far less would he be so in your case.” “Nay, nay,” rejoined the constable, “I know that the grand master and Marshal de Chabannes set out from Lyons with the archers of the guard and four or five thousand lanzknechts to seize me; and that is what made me come to this house whilst biding my time until the king shall be pleased to hear me.” He demanded that the troops sent against him should be ordered to halt till the morrow, promising not to stir from Chantelle without a vindication of himself. “Whither would you go, my lord?” said Warthy: “if you wished to leave the kingdom, you could not; the king has provided against that everywhere.”
“Nay,” said Bourbon, “I have no wish to leave the kingdom; I have friends and servants there.” Warthy went away from Chantelle in company with the Bishop of Autun, Chiverny, who was one of the constable’s most trusted friends, and who was bearer to the king of a letter which ran thus: “Provided it please the king to restore to him his possessions, my lord of Bourbon promises to serve him well and heartily, in all places and at all times at which it shall seem good to him. In witness whereof, he has signed these presents, and begs the king to be pleased to pardon those towards whom he is ill disposed on account of this business. CHARLES.” In writing this letter the constable had no other object than to gain a little time, for, on bidding good by to the Bishop of Autun, he said to him, “Farewell, my dear bishop; I am off to Carlat, and from Carlat I shall slip away with five or six horses on my road to Spain.” On the next day but one, indeed, the 8th of September, 1523, whilst the Bishop of Autun was kept prisoner by the troops sent forward to Chantelle, the constable sallied from it about one in the morning, taking with him five-and-twenty or thirty thousand crowns of gold sewn up in from twelve to fifteen jackets, each of which was intrusted to a man in his train. For a month he wandered about Bourbonness, Auvergne, Burgundy, Beaujolais, Vienness, Languedoc, and Dauphiny, incessantly changing his road, his comrades, his costume, and his asylum, occasionally falling in with soldiers of the king who were repairing to Italy, and seeking for some place whence he might safely concert with and act with his allies. At last, in the beginning of October, he arrived at Saint-Claude, in Franche-Comte, imperial territory, and on the 9th of October he made his entry into Besancon, where there came to join him some of his partisans who from necessity or accident had got separated from him, without his having been able anywhere in his progress to excite any popular movement, form any collection of troops, or intrench himself strongly in his own states. To judge from appearances, he was now but a fugitive conspirator, without domains and without an army.
Such, however, were his fame and importance as a great lord and great warrior, that Francis I., as soon as he knew him to be beyond his reach and in a fair way to co-operate actively with his enemies, put off his departure for Italy, and “offered the redoubtable fugitive immediate restitution of his possessions, reimbursement from the royal treasury of what was due to him, renewal of his pensions and security that they would be paid him with punctuality.” Bourbon refused everything. “It is too late,” he replied. Francis I.‘s envoy then asked him to give up the sword of constable and the collar of the order of St. Michael. “You will tell the king,” rejoined Bourbon, “that he took from me the sword of constable on the day that he took from me the command of the advance-guard to give it to M. d’Alencon. As for the collar of his order, you will find it at Chantelle under the pillow of my bed.” Francis I., in order to win back Bourbon, had recourse to his sister, the Duchess of Lorraine [Renee de Bourbon, who had married, in 1515, Antony, called the Good, Duke of Lorraine, son of Duke Rend II. and his second wife, Philippine of Gueldres]: but she was not more successful. After sounding him, she wrote to Francis I. that the duke her brother “was determined to go through with his enterprise, and that he proposed to draw off towards Flanders by way of Lorraine with eighteen hundred horse and ten thousand foot, and form a junction with the King of England.” [M. Mignet, Etude sur le Connetable de Bourbon, in the Revue des Deux Mondes of January 15, 1854, and March 15 and April 1, 1858.]
Under such grave and urgent circumstances, Francis I. behaved on the one hand with more prudence and efficiency than he had yet displayed, and on the other with his usual levity and indulgence towards his favorites. Abandoning his expedition in person into Italy, he first concerned himself for that internal security of his kingdom, which was threatened on the east and north by the Imperialists and the English, and on the south by the Spaniards, all united in considerable force and already in motion. Francis opposed to them in the east and north the young Count Claude of Guise, the first celebrity amongst his celebrated race, the veteran Louis de La Tremoille, the most tried of all his warriors, and the Duke of Vendome, head of the younger branch of the House of Bourbon. Into the south he sent Marshal de Lautrec, who was more brave than successful, but of proved fidelity. All these captains acquitted themselves honorably. Claude of Guise defeated a body of twelve thousand lanzknechts who had already penetrated into Champagne; he hurled them back into Lorraine, and dispersed them beneath the walls of the little town of Neufchateau, where the princesses and ladies of Lorraine, showing themselves at the windows, looked on and applauded their discomfiture. La Tremoille’s only forces were very inferior to the thirty-five thousand Imperialists or English who had entered Picardy; but he managed to make of his small garrisons such prompt and skilful use that the invaders were unable to get hold of a single place, and advanced somewhat heedlessly to the very banks of the Oise, whence the alarm spread rapidly to Paris. The Duke of Vendome, whom the king at once despatched thither with a small body of men-at-arms, marched night and day to the assistance of the Parisians, harangued the Parliament and Hotel de Ville vehemently on the conspiracy of the Constable de Bourbon, and succeeded so well in reassuring them that companies of the city militia eagerly joined his troops, and the foreigners, in dread of finding themselves hemmed in, judged it prudent to fall back, leaving Picardy in a state of equal irritation and devastation. In the south, Lautrec, after having made head for three days and three nights against the attacks of a Spanish army which had crossed the Pyrenees under the orders of the Constable of Castille, forced it to raise the siege and beat a retreat. Everywhere, in the provinces as well as at the court, the feudal nobility, chieftains and simple gentlemen, remained faithful to the king; the magistrates and the people supported the military; it was the whole nation that rose against the great lord, who, for his own purposes, was making alliance with foreigners against the king and the country.
In respect of Italy, Francis I. was less wise and less successful. Not only did he persist in the stereotyped madness of the conquest of Milaness and the kingdom of Naples, but abandoning for the moment the prosecution of it in person, he intrusted it to his favorite, Admiral Bonnivet, a brave soldier, alternately rash and backward, presumptuous and irresolute, who had already lost credit by the mistakes he had committed and the reverses he had experienced in that arena. At the very juncture when Francis I. confided this difficult charge to Bonnivet, the Constable de Bourbon, having at last got out of France, crossed Germany, repaired to Italy, and halted at Mantua, Piacenza, and Genoa; and, whilst waiting for a reply from Charles V., whom he had informed of his arrival, he associated with the leaders of the imperial armies, lived amongst the troops, inoculated them with his own ardor as well as warlike views, and by his natural superiority regained, amongst the European coalition, the consideration and authority which had been somewhat diminished by his ill-success in his own country and his flight from it. Charles V. was some time about sending an answer; for, in his eyes also, Bourbon had fallen somewhat. “Was it prudent,” says the historian of Bourbon himself, “to trust a prince who, though born near the throne, had betrayed his own blood and forsworn his own country? Charles V. might no doubt have insured his fidelity, had he given him in marriage Eleanor of Austria, who was already affianced to him; but he could not make up his mind to unite the destiny of a princess, his own sister, with that of a prince whose position was equally pitiable and criminal. At last, however, he decided to name him his lieutenant-general in Italy; but he surrounded him with so many colleagues and so much surveillance that he had nothing to fear from his remorse and repentance.” [Histoire de la Maison de Bourbon, t. ii. p. 531.] Bourbon, however, though thus placed in a position of perplexity and difficulty, was none the less an adversary with whom Bonnivet was not in a condition to cope.
It was not long before this was proved by facts. The campaign of 1524 in Italy, brilliant as was its beginning, what with the number and the fine appearance of the troops under Bonnivet’s orders, was, as it went on, nothing but a series of hesitations, contradictory movements, blunders, and checks, which the army itself set down to its general’s account. Bonnivet, during his investment of Milan, had posted Bayard with a small corps in the village of Rebec. “The good knight, who was never wont to murmur at any commission given him, said, ‘Sir Admiral, you would send me to a village hard by the enemy, the which is without any fortress, and would need four times so many men as I have, for to be in safety and to hold it.’ ‘Sir Bayard,’ said the admiral, ‘go in peace; on my faith I promise you that within three days I will send you plenty of men with you for to hold Rebec, since I well know that it is not to be held with so few men; but never you mind; there shall not a mouse get out of Milan without you have notice of it.’ And so much did he say of one sort and another that the good knight, with great disgust, went away with the men told off to him to his post in Rebec. He wrote many times to the admiral that he was in very dangerous plight, and that, if he would have them hold out long, he should send him aid; but he got no answer. The enemies who were inside Milan were warned that the good knight was in Rebec with very little company; so they decided on a night to go and surprise and defeat him. And the good knight, who was ever on his guard, set nearly every night half his men to watch and to listen, and himself passed two or three nights at it, in such sort that he fell ill, as much from melancholy as from cold, and far more than he let it appear; howbeit he was forced to keep his room that day. When it came on towards night, he ordered some captains who were with him to go on the watch. They went, or made show of going; but, because it rained a little, back went all those who were on the watch, save three or four poor archers, the which, when the Spaniards approached within bow-shot of the village, made no resistance, but took to flight, shouting, ‘Alarm alarm!’ The good knight, who in such jeopardy never slept but with his clothes on, rose at once, had the bridle put on a charger that was already saddled, and went off with five or six men-at-arms of his, straight to the barrier whither incontinently came up Captain Lorges and a certain number of his foot, who bore themselves mighty well. The uproar was great and the alarm was hot. Then said the good knight to Captain Lorges, ‘Lorges, my friend, this is an unequal sort of game; if they pass this barrier we are cooked. I pray you, retire your men, keep the best order you can, and march straight to the camp at Abbiate-Grasso; I, with the horse I have, will remain in the rear. We must leave our baggage to the enemy; there is no help for it. Save we the lives if possible.’ . . . The enemy sought on all sides for the good knight, but he had already arrived at Abbiate-Grasso, where he had some unpleasant words with the admiral; howbeit, I will not make any mention of them; but if they had both lived longer than they did live, they would probably have gone a little farther. The good knight was like to die of grief at the mishap that had befallen him, even though it was not his fault; but in war there is hap and mishap more than in all other things.” [Histoire du bon Chevalier sans Peur et sans Reproche, t. ii. pp. 120-123. Les Gestes et la Vie du Chevalier Bayard, by Champier, pp. 171-174.]
The situation of the French army before Milan was now becoming more and more, not insecure only, but critical. Bonnivet considered it his duty to abandon it and fall back towards Piedmont, where he reckoned upon finding a corps of five thousand Swiss who were coming to support their compatriots engaged in the service of France. Near Romagnano, on the banks of the Sesia, the retreat was hotly pressed by the imperial army, the command of which had been ultimately given by Charles V. to the Constable de Bourbon, with whom were associated the Viceroy of Naples, Charles de Lannoy, and Ferdinand d’Avalos, Marquis of Pescara, the most able amongst the Neapolitan officers. On the 30th of April, 1524, some disorder took place in the retreat of the French; and Bonnivet, being severely wounded, had to give up the command to the Count of St. Pol and to Chevalier Bayard. Bayard, last as well as first in the fight, according to his custom, charged at the head of some men-at-arms upon the Imperialists, who were pressing the French too closely, when he was himself struck by a shot from an arquebuse, which shattered his reins. “Jesus, my God,” he cried, “I am dead!” He then took his sword by the handle, and kissed the cross-hilt of it as the sign of the cross, saying aloud as he did so, “Have pity on me, O God, according to Thy great mercy” (Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam); thereupon he became incontinently quite pale, and all but fell; but he still had heart enough to grasp the pommel of the saddle, and remained in that condition until a young gentleman, his own house-steward, helped him to dismount and set him down under a tree, with his face to the enemy. The poor gentleman burst into tears, seeing his good master so mortally hurt that remedy there was none; but the good knight consoled him gently, saying, “Jacques, my friend, leave off thy mourning; it is God’s will to take me out of this world; by His grace I have lived long therein, and have received therein blessings and honors more than my due. All the regret I feel at dying is that I have not done my duty so well as I ought. I pray you, Jacques, my friend, let them not take me up from this spot, for, when I move, I feel all the pains that one can feel, short of death, which will seize me soon.” The Constable de Bourbon, being informed of his wound, came to him, saying, “Bayard, my friend, I am sore distressed at your mishap; there is nothing for it but patience; give not way to melancholy; I will send in quest of the best surgeons in this country, and, by God’s help, you will soon be healed.” “My lord,” answered Bayard, “there is no pity for me; I die having done my duty; but I have pity for you, to see you serving against your king, your country, and your oath.” Bourbon withdrew without a word. The Marquis of Pescara came passing by. “Would to God, gentle Sir Bayard,” said he, “that it had cost me a quart of my blood, without meeting my death, that I had been doomed not to taste meat for two years, and that I held you safe and sound my prisoner, for by the treatment I showed you, you should have understanding of how much I esteemed the high prowess that was in you.” He ordered his people to rig up a tent over Bayard, and to forbid any noise near him, so that he might die in peace. Bayard’s own gentlemen would not, at any price, leave him. “I do beseech you,” he said to them, “to get you gone; else you might fall into the enemy’s hands, and that would profit me nothing, for all is over with me. To God I commend ye, my good friends; and I recommend to you my poor soul; and salute, I pray you, the king our master, and tell him that I am distressed at being no longer able to do him service, for I had good will thereto. And to my lords the princes of France, and all my lords my comrades, and generally to all gentlemen of the most honored realm of France when ye see them.”
“He lived for two or three hours yet. There was brought to him a priest, to whom he confessed, and then he yielded up his soul to God; whereat all the enemy had mourning incredible. Five days after his death, on the 5th of May, 1524, Beaurain wrote to Charles V., ‘Sir, albeit Sir Bayard was your enemy’s servant, yet was it pity of his death, for ‘twas a gentle knight, well beloved of every one, and one that lived as good a life as ever any man of his condition. And in truth he fully showed it by his end, for it was the most beautiful that I ever heard tell of.’ By the chiefs of the Spanish army certain gentlemen were commissioned to bear him to the church, where solemn service was done for him during two days. Then, by his own servitors was he carried into Dauphiny, and, on passing through the territory of the Duke of Savoy, where the body was rested, he did it as many honors as if it had been his own brother’s. When the news of his death was known in Dauphiny, I trow that never for a thousand years died there gentleman of the country mourned in such sort. He was borne from church to church, at first near Grenoble, where all my lords of the parliament court of Dauphiny, my lords of the Exchequer, pretty well all the nobles of the country and the greater part of all the burgesses, townsfolk, and villagers came half a league to meet the body: then into the church of Notre-Dame, in the aforesaid Grenoble, where a solemn service was done for him; then to a house of Minimes, which had been founded aforetime by his good uncle the bishop of Grenoble, Laurens Alment; and there he was honorably interred. Then every one withdrew to his own house; but for a month there was a stop put to festivals dances, banquets, and all other pastimes. ‘Las! they had good reason; for greater loss could not have come upon the country.” [Histoire du bon Chevalier sans Peur et sans Reproche, t. ii. pp. 125-132.]
It is a duty and an honor for history to give to such lives and such deaths, as remarkable for modesty as for manly worth, the full place which they ought to occupy in the memory of mankind.
The French army continued its retreat under the orders of the Count of St. Pol, and re-entered France by way of Suza and Briancon. It was Francis I.‘s third time of losing Milaness. Charles V., enchanted at the news, wrote on the 24th of May to Henry VIII., “I keep you advertised of the good opportunity it has pleased God to offer us of giving a full account of our common enemy. I pray you to carry into effect on your side that which you and I have for a long while desired, wherein I for my part will exert myself with all my might.” Bourbon proposed to the two sovereigns a plan well calculated to allure them. He made them an offer to enter France by way of Provence with his victorious army, to concentrate there all the re-enforcements promised him, to advance up the Rhone, making himself master as he went of the only two strong places, Monaco and Marseilles, he would have to encounter, to march on Lyons from the side on which that city was defenceless, and be in four months at Paris, whether or no he had a great battle to deliver on the march. “If the king wishes to enter France without delay,” said he to Henry VIII.‘s ambassador, “I give his Grace leave to pluck out my two-eyes if I am not master of Paris before All Saints. Paris taken, all the kingdom of France is in my power. Paris in France is like Milan in Lombardy; if Milan is taken, the duchy is lost; in the same way, Paris taken, the whole of France is lost.” By this plan Bourbon calculated on arriving victorious at the centre of France, in his own domains, and there obtaining, from both nobles and people, the co-operation that had failed him at the outset of his enterprise. The two sovereigns were eager to close with the proposal of the Frenchman, who was for thus handing over to them his country; a new treaty was concluded between them on the 25th of May, 1524, regulating the conditions and means of carrying out this grand campaign; and it was further agreed that Provence and Dauphiny should be added to the constable’s old possessions, and should form a state, which Charles V. promised to raise to a kingdom. There was yet a difficulty looming ahead. Bourbon still hesitated to formally acknowledge Henry VIII. as King of France, and promise him allegiance. But at last his resistance was overcome. At the moment of crossing the frontier into France, and after having taken the communion, he said to the English ambassador, Sir Richard Pace, in the presence of four of his gentlemen, “I promise you, on my faith, to place the crown, with the help of my friends, on the head of our common master.” But, employing a ruse of the old feudal times, the last gasp of a troubled conscience, Bourbon, whilst promising allegiance to Henry VIII., persisted in refusing to do him homage. Sir Richard Pace none the less regarded the question as decided; and, whilst urging Cardinal Wolsey to act swiftly and resolutely in the interests of their master, he added, “If you do not pay regard to these matters, I shall set down to your Grace’s account the loss of the crown of France.”
Bourbon entered Provence on the 7th of July, 1524, with an army of eighteen thousand men, which was to be joined before long by six or seven thousand more. He had no difficulty in occupying Antibes, Frejus, Draguignan, Brignoles, and even Aix; and he already began to assume the title of Count of Provence, whilst preparing for a rapid march along by the Rhone and a rush upon Lyons, the chief aim of the campaign; but the Spanish generals whom Charles V. had associated with him, and amongst others the most eminent of them, the Marquis of Pescara, peremptorily insisted that, according to their master’s order, he should besiege and take Marseilles. Charles V. cared more for the coasts of the Mediterranean than for those of the Channel; he flattered himself that he would make of Marseilles a southern Calais, which should connect Germany with Spain, and secure their communications, political and commercial. Bourbon objected and resisted; it was the abandonment of his general plan for this war and a painful proof how powerless he was against the wishes of the two sovereigns, of whom he was only the tool, although they called him their ally. Being forced to yield, he began the siege of Marseilles on the 19th of August. The place, though but slightly fortified and ill supplied, made an energetic resistance; the name and the presence of Bourbon at the head of the besiegers excited patriotism; the burgesses turned soldiers; the cannon of the besiegers laid open their walls, but they threw up a second line, an earthen rampart, called the ladies’ rampart, because all the women in the city had worked at it. The siege was protracted; the re-enforcements expected by Bourbon did not arrive; a shot from Marseilles penetrated into Pescara’s tent, and killed his almoner and two of his gentlemen. Bourbon rushed up. “Don’t you see?” said Pescara to him, ironically, “here are the keys sent to you by the timid consuls of Marseilles.” Bourbon resolved to attempt an assault; the lanzknechts and the Italians refused; Bourbon asked Pescara for his Spaniards, but Pescara would only consent on condition that the breach was reconnoitered afresh. Seven soldiers were told off for this duty; four were killed and the other three returned wounded, reporting that between the open breach and the intrenchment extended a large ditch filled with fireworks and defended by several batteries. The assembled general officers looked at one another in silence. “Well, gentlemen,” said Pescara, “you see that the folks of Marseilles keep a table well spread for our reception; if you like to go and sup in paradise, you are your own masters so far; as for me, who have no desire to go thither just yet, I am off. But believe me,” he added seriously, “we had best return to Milaness; we have left that country without a soldier; we might possibly find our return cut off.” Whereupon Pescara got up and went out; and the majority of the officers followed him. Bourbon remained almost alone, divided between anger and shame. Almost as he quitted this scene he heard that Francis I. was advancing towards Provence with an army. The king had suddenly decided to go to the succor of Marseilles, which was making so good a defence. Nothing could be a bitterer pill for Bourbon than to retire before Francis I., whom he had but lately promised to dethrone; but his position condemned him to suffer everything, without allowing him the least hesitation; and on the 28th of September, 1524, he raised the siege of Marseilles and resumed the road to Italy, harassed even beyond Toulon by the French advance-guard, eager in its pursuit of the traitor even more than of the enemy.
In the course of this year, 1524, whilst Bourbon was wandering as a fugitive, trying to escape from his country, then returning to it, after a few months, as a conqueror, and then leaving it again at the end of a few weeks of prospective triumph, pursued by the king he had betrayed, his case and that of his accomplices had been inquired into and disposed of by the Parliament of Paris, dispassionately and almost coldly, probably because of the small esteem in which the magistrates held the court of Francis I., and of the wrong which they found had been done to the constable. The Parliament was not excited by a feeling of any great danger to the king and the country; it was clear that, at the core, the conspiracy and rebellion were very circumscribed and impotent; and the accusations brought by the court party or their servants against the conspirators were laughable from their very outrageousness and unlikelihood; according to them, the accomplices of the constable meant not only to dethrone, and, if need were, kill the king, but “to make pies of the children of France.” Parliament saw no occasion to proceed against more than a half score of persons in confinement, and, except nineteen defaulters who were condemned to death together with confiscation of their property, only one capital sentence was pronounced, against John of Poitiers, Lord of Saint-Vallier, the same who had exerted himself to divert the constable from his plot, but who had nevertheless not refrained from joining it, and was the most guilty of all the accomplices in consequence of the confidential post he occupied near the king’s person. The decree was not executed, however; Saint-Vallier received his reprieve on the scaffold itself. Francis I. was neither rancorous nor cruel; and the entreaties, or, according to some evil-speakers of the day, the kind favors, of the Lady de Brew, Saint-Vallier’s daughter and subsequently the celebrated Diana of Poitiers, obtained from the king her father’s life.
Francis I., greatly vexed, it is said, at the lenity of the Parliament of Paris, summoned commissions chosen amongst the Parliaments of Rouen, Dijon, Toulouse, and Bordeaux, and made them reconsider the case. The provincial Parliaments decided as that of Paris had. The procedure against the principal culprit was several times suspended and resumed according to the course of events, and the decree was not pronounced so long as the Duke of Bourbon lived. It was abroad and in his alliance with foreign sovereigns that all his importance lay.
After Bourbon’s precipitate retreat, the position of Francis I. was a good one. He had triumphed over conspiracy and invasion; the conspiracy had not been catching, and the invasion had failed on all the frontiers. If the king, in security within his kingdom, had confined himself to it, whilst applying himself to the task of governing it well, he would have obtained all the strength he required to make himself feared and deferred to abroad. For a while he seemed to have entertained this design: on the 25th of September, 1523, he published an important ordinance for the repression of disorderliness and outrages on the part of the soldiery in France itself; and, on the 28th of December following, a regulation as to the administration of finances established a control over the various exchequer-officers, and announced the king’s intention of putting some limits to his personal expenses, “not including, however,” said he, “the ordinary run of our little necessities and pleasures.” This singular reservation was the faithful exponent of his character; he was licentious at home and adventurous abroad, being swayed by his coarse passions and his warlike fancies. Even far away from Paris, in the heart of the provinces, the king’s irregularities were known and dreaded. In 1524, some few weeks after the death [at Blois, July 20, 1524] of his wife, Queen Claude, daughter of Louis XII., a virtuous and modest princess more regretted by the people than by her husband, Francis made his entry into Manosque, in Provence. The burgesses had the keys of their town presented to him by the most beautiful creature they could find within their walls; it was the daughter of Antony Voland, one of themselves. The virtuous young girl was so frightened at the king’s glances and the signs he made to his gentry, evidently alluding to her, that, on returning home, she got some burning sulphur and placed herself for a long while under the influence of its vapor, in order to destroy the beauty which made her run the risk of being only too pleasing to the king. Francis, who was no great or able captain, could not resist the temptations of war any more than those of the flesh. When Bourbon and the imperial army had evacuated Provence, the king loudly proclaimed his purpose of pursuing them into Italy, and of once more going forth to the conquest of Milaness, and perhaps also of the kingdom of Naples, that incurable craze of French kings in the sixteenth century. In vain did his most experienced warriors, La Tremoille and Chabannes, exert themselves to divert him from such a campaign, for which he was not prepared; in vain did his mother herself write to him, begging him to wait and see her, for that she had important matters to impart to him. He answered by sending her the ordinance which conferred upon her the regency during his absence; and, at the end of October, 1524, he had crossed the Alps, anxious to go and risk in Milaness the stake he had just won in Provence against Charles V.
Arriving speedily in front of Milan, he there found the imperial army which had retired before him; there was a fight in one of the outskirts; but Bourbon recognized the impossibility of maintaining a siege in a town of which the fortifications were in ruins, and with disheartened troops. On the line of march which they had pursued, from Lodi to Milan, there was nothing to be seen but cuirasses, arquebuses tossed hither and thither, dead horses, and men dying of fatigue and scarcely able to drag themselves along. Bourbon evacuated Milan, and, taking a resolution as bold as it was singular, abruptly abandoned, so far as he was personally concerned, that defeated and disorganized army, to go and seek for and reorganize another at a distance. Being informed that Charles III., Duke of Savoy, hitherto favorable to France, was secretly inclining towards the emperor, he went to Turin, made a great impression by his confidence and his grand spirit in the midst of misfortune upon both the duke and his wife, Beatrix of Portugal, and obtained from them not only a flattering reception, but a secret gift of their money and their jewelry; and, equipped with these resources, he passed into Germany to recruit soldiers there. The lanzknechts, who had formerly served under him in France, rushed to him in shoals; he had received from nature the gifts most calculated to gain the hearts of campaigners: kind, accessible, affable and even familiar with the common soldier, he entered into the details of his wants and alleviated them. His famous bravery, his frankness, and his generosity gained over those adventurers who were weary of remaining idle; their affection consoled Bourbon and stood him in stead of all: his army became his family and his camp his country. Proscribed and condemned in France, without any position secured to him in the dominions of Charles V., envied and crossed by that prince’s generals, he had found full need of all the strong tempering of his character and of his warlike genius to keep him from giving way under so many trials. He was beginning to feel himself near recovery: he had an army, an army of his own; he had chosen for it men inured to labor and fatigue, accustomed to strict discipline; and thereto he added five hundred horsemen from Franche-Comte for whose devotion and courage he could answer: and he gave the second command in this army to George of Freundsberg, an old captain of lanzknechts and commandant of the emperor’s guard, the same who, three years before, on seeing Luther boldly enter Worms, said to him, with a slap on the shoulder, “Little monk, this is a daring step thou art going to take! Nor I, nor any captain of us, ever did the like. If thy cause is good, and if thou have faith in thy cause, forward! little monk, in God’s name forward!” With such comrades about him, Bourbon re-entered Milaness at the head of twelve or thirteen thousand fighting men, three months after having left it, alone and moneyless. His rivals about the person of Charles V., Lannoy, Viceroy of Naples, and the Marquis of Pescara, could not help admiring him, and he regained in the imperial camp an ascendency which had but lately been very much shaken.
He found the fresh campaign begun in earnest. Francis I.‘s veteran generals, Marshals La Tremoille and Chabannes, had advised him to pursue without pause the beaten and disorganized imperial army, which was in such plight that there was placarded on the statue of Pasquin at Rome, “Lost—an army—in the mountains of Genoa; if anybody knows what has become of it, let him come forward and say: he shall be well rewarded.” If the King of France, it was said, drove back northward and forced into the Venetian dominions the remnants of this army, the Spaniards would not be able to hold their own in Milaness, and would have to retire within the kingdom of Naples. But Admiral Bonnivet, “whose counsel the king made use of more than of any other,” says Du Bellay, pressed Francis I. to make himself master, before everything, of the principal strong places in Lombardy, especially of Pavia, the second city in the duchy of Milan. Francis followed this counsel, and on the 26th of August, 1524, twenty days after setting out from Aix in Provence, he appeared with his army in front of Pavia. On learning this resolution, Pescara joyously exclaimed, “We were vanquished; a little while and we shall be vanquishers.” Pavia had for governor a Spanish veteran, Antony de Leyva, who had distinguished himself at the battle of Ravenna, in 1512, by his vigilance and indomitable tenacity: and he held out for nearly four months, first against assaults, and then against investment by the French army. Francis I. and his generals occasionally proceeded during this siege to severities condemned by the laws and usages of war. A small Spanish garrison had obstinately defended a tower situated at the entrance of a stone bridge which led from an island on the Ticino into Pavia. Marshal de Montmorency at last carried the tower, and had all the defenders hanged “for having dared,” he said, “to offer resistance to an army of the king’s in such a pigeon-hole.” Antony de Leyva had the bridge forthwith broken down, and De Montmorency was stopped on the borders of the Ticino. In spite of the losses of its garrison in assaults and sorties, and in spite of the sufferings of the inhabitants from famine and from lack of resources of all sorts, Pavia continued to hold out. There was a want of wood as well as of bread; and they knocked the houses to pieces for fuel. Antony de Leyva caused to be melted down the vessels of the churches and the silvern chandeliers of the university, and even a magnificent chain of gold which he habitually wore round his neck. He feared he would have to give in at last, for want of victuals and ammunition, when, towards the end of January, 1525, he saw appearing, on the northern side, the flags of the imperial army: it was Bourbon, Lannoy, and Pescara, who were coming up with twenty thousand foot, seven hundred men-at-arms, a troop of Spanish arquebusiers, and several pieces of cannon. Bourbon, whilst on the march, had written, on the 5th of January, to Henry VIII., and, after telling him what he meant to do, had added, “I know through one of my servants that the French have said that I retired from Provence shamefully. I remained there a space of three months and eight days, waiting for battle. I hope to give the world to know that I have no fear of King Francis, for, please God, we shall place ourselves so close together that we shall have great trouble to get disentangled without battle, and I shall so do that neither he nor they who have held such talk about me shall say that I was afraid of being there.” The situation was from that moment changed. The French army found themselves squeezed between the fortress which would not surrender and the imperial army which was coming to relieve it. Things, however, remained stationary for three weeks. Francis I. intrenched himself strongly in his camp, which the Imperialists could not attack without great risk of unsuccess. “Pavia is doomed to fall,” wrote Francis to his mother the regent on the 3d of February, “if they do not reenforce it somehow; and they are beating about to make it hold on to the last gasp, which, I think, will not be long now, for it is more than a month since those inside have had no wine to drink and neither meat nor cheese to eat; they are short of powder even.” Antony de Leyva gave notice to the Imperialists that the town was not in a condition for further resistance. On the other hand, if the imperial army put off fighting, they could not help breaking up; they had exhausted their victuals, and the leaders their money; they were keeping the field without receiving pay, and were subsisting, so to speak, without resources. The prudent Marquis of Pescara himself was for bringing on a battle, which was indispensable. “A hundred years in the field,” said he, in the words of an old Italian proverb, “are better than one day of fighting, for one may lose in a doubtful melley what one was certain of winning by skilful manoeuvres; but when one can no longer keep the field, one must risk a battle, so as not to give the enemy the victory without a fight.” The same question was being discussed in the French camp. The veteran captains, La Tremoille and Chabannes, were of opinion that by remaining in the strong position in which they were encamped they would conquer without fighting. Bonnivet and De Montmorency were of the contrary opinion. “We French,” said Bonnivet, “have not been wont to make war by means of military artifices, but handsomely and openly, especially when we have at our head a valiant king, who is enough to make the veriest dastards fight. Our kings bring victory with them, as our little king Charles VIII. did at the Taro, our king Louis XII. at Agnadello, and our king who is here present at Melegnano.” Francis I. was not the man to hold out against such sentiments and such precedents; and he decided to accept battle as soon as it should be offered him. The imperial leaders, at a council held on the 23d of February, determined to offer it next day. Bourbon vigorously supported the opinion of Pescara.
Antony de Leyva was notified the same evening of their decision, and was invited to make, as soon as he heard two cannon-shots, a sortie which would place the French army between two fires. Pescara, according to his custom, mustered the Spaniards; and, “My lads,” said he, “fortune has brought you to such extremity that on the soil of Italy you have for your own only that which is under your feet. All the emperor’s might could not procure for you to-morrow morning one morsel of bread. We know not where to get it, save in the Frenchman’s camp, which is before your eyes. There they have abundance of everything, bread, meat, trout and carp from the Lake of Garda. And so, my lads, if you are set upon having anything to eat tomorrow, march we down on the Frenchmen’s camp.” Freundsberg spoke in the same style to the German lanzknechts. And both were responded to with cheers. Eloquence is mighty powerful when it speaks in the name of necessity.
The two armies were of pretty equal strength: they had each from twenty to five and twenty thousand infantry, French, Germans, Spaniards, lanzknechts, and Swiss. Francis I. had the advantage in artillery and in heavy cavalry, called at that time the gendarmerie, that is to say, the corps of men-at-arms in heavy armor with their servants; but his troops were inferior in effectives to the Imperialists, and Charles V.‘s two generals, Bourbon and Pescara, were, as men of war, far superior to Francis I. and his favorite Bonnivet. In the night between the 23d and 24th of February they opened a breach of forty or fifty fathoms in the wall around the park of Mirabello, where the French camp was situated; a corps immediately passed through it, marching on Pavia to re-enforce the garrison, and the main body of the imperial army entered the park to offer the French battle on that ground. The king at once set his army in motion; and his well-posted artillery mowed down the corps of Germans and Spaniards who had entered the park. “You could see nothing,” says a witness of the battle, “but heads and arms flying about.” The action seemed to be going ill for the Imperialists; Pescara urged the Duke of Bourbon and Lannoy, the Viceroy of Naples, to make haste and come up; Lannoy made the sign of the cross, and said to his men, “There is no hope but in God; follow me and do every one as I do.” Francis I., on his side, advanced with the pick of his men-at-arms, burst on the advance-guard of the enemy, broke it, killed with his own hand the Marquis of Civita-San-Angelo, and dispersed the various corps he found in his way. In the confidence of his joy he thought the victory decided, and, turning to Marshal de Foix, who was with him, “M. de Lescun,” said he, “now am I fain to call myself Duke of Milan.” But Bourbon and Pescara were not the men to accept a defeat so soon; they united all their forces, and resumed the offensive at all points; the French batteries, masked by an ill-considered movement on the part of their own troops, who threw themselves between them and the enemy, lost all serviceability; and Pescara launched upon the French gendarmerie fifteen hundred Basque arquebusiers, whom he had exercised and drilled to penetrate into the midst of the horses, shoot both horses and riders, and fall back rapidly after having discharged their pieces. Being attacked by the German lanzknechts of Bourbon and Freundsberg, the Swiss in the French service did not maintain their renown, and began to give way. “My God, what is all this!” cried Francis I., seeing them waver, and he dashed towards them to lead them back into action; but neither his efforts, nor those of John of Diesbach and the Lord of Fleuranges, who were their commanders, were attended with success. The king was only the more eager for the fray; and, rallying around him all those of his men-at-arms who would neither recoil nor surrender, he charged the Imperialists furiously, throwing himself into the thickest of the melley, and seeking in excess of peril some chance of victory; but Pescara, though wounded in three places, was none the less stubbornly fighting on, and Antony de Leyva, governor of Pavia, came with the greater part of the garrison to his aid. At this very moment Francis I. heard that the first prince of the blood, his brother-in-law the Duke of Alencon, who commanded the rear-guard, had precipitately left the field of battle. The oldest and most glorious warriors of France, La Tremoille, Marshal de Chabannes, Marshal de Foix, the grand equerry San Severino, the Duke of Suffolk, Francis of Lorraine, Chaumont, Bussy d’Amboise, and Francis de Duras fell, here and there, mortally wounded. At this sight Admiral Bonnivet in despair exclaimed, “I can never survive this fearful havoc;” and raising the visor of his helmet, he rushed to meet the shots which were aimed at him, and in his turn fell beside his comrades in arms. Bourbon had expressly charged his men to search everywhere in the melley for the admiral, and bring him in a prisoner. When, as he passed along that part of the battle-field, he recognized the corpse, “Ah! wretch,” he cried, as he moved away, “it is thou who hast caused the ruin of France and of me!” Amidst these dead and dying, Francis still fought on; wounded as he was in the face, the arms, and the legs, he struck right and left with his huge sword, and cut down the nearest of his assailants; but his horse, mortally wounded, dragged him down as it fell; he was up again in an instant, and, standing beside his horse, he laid low two more Spaniards who were pressing him closely; the ruck of the soldiers crowded about him; they did not know him, but his stature, his strength, his bravery, his coat of mail studded with golden lilies, and his helmet overshadowed by a thick plume of feathers pointed him out to all as the finest capture to make; his danger was increasing every minute, when one of Bourbon’s most intimate confidants, the Lord of Pomperant, who, in 1523, had accompanied the constable in his flight through France, came up at this critical moment, recognized the king, and, beating off the soldiers with his sword, ranged himself at the king’s side, represented to-him the necessity of yielding, and pressed him to surrender to the Duke of Bourbon, who was not far off. “No,” said the king, “rather die than pledge my faith to a traitor where is the Viceroy of Naples?” It took some time to find Lannoy; but at last he arrived and put one knee on the ground before Francis I., who handed his sword to him. Lannoy took it with marks of the most profound respect, and immediately gave him another. The battle was over, and Francis I. was Charles V.‘s prisoner.
He had shown himself an imprudent and unskilful general, but at the same time a hero. His conquerors, both officers and privates, could not help, whilst they secured his person, showing their admiration for him. When he sat down to table, after having had his wounds, which were slight, attended to, Bourbon approached him respectfully and presented him with a dinner-napkin; and the king took it without embarrassment and with frigid and curt politeness. He next day granted him an interview, at which an accommodation took place with due formalities on both sides, but nothing more. All the king’s regard was for the Marquis of Pescara, who came to see him in a simple suit of black, in order, as it were, to share his distress. “He was a perfect gentleman,” said Francis I., “both in peace and in war.” He heaped upon him marks of esteem and almost of confidence. “How do you think,” he asked, “the emperor will behave to me?” “I think,” replied Pescara, “I can answer for the emperor’s moderation; I am sure that he will make a generous use of his victory. If, however, he were capable of forgetting what is due to your rank, your merits, and your misfortunes, I would never cease to remind him of it, and I would lose what little claim upon him my services may have given me, or you should be satisfied with his behavior.” The king embraced him warmly. He asked to be excused from entering Pavia, that he might not be a gazing-stock in a town that he had so nearly taken. He was, accordingly, conducted to Pizzighittone, a little fortress between Milan and Cremona. He wrote thence two letters, one to his mother the regent and the other to Charles V., which are here given word for word, because they so well depict his character and the state of his mind in his hour of calamity:—
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1. “To the Regent of France: Madame, that you may know how stands the rest of my misfortune: there is nothing in the world left to me but honor and my life, which is safe. And in order that, in your adversity, this news might bring you some little comfort, I prayed for permission to write you this letter, which was readily granted me; entreating you, in the exercise of your accustomed prudence, to be pleased not to do anything rash, for I have hope, after all, that God will not forsake me. Commending to you my children your grandchildren, and entreating you to give the bearer a free passage, going and returning, to Spain, for he is going to the emperor to learn how it is his pleasure that I should be treated.” 2. “To the Emperor Charles V.: If liberty had been sooner granted me by my cousin the viceroy, I should not have delayed so long to do my duty towards you, according as the time and the circumstances in which I am placed require; having no other comfort under my misfortune than a reliance on your goodness, which, if it so please, shall employ the results of victory with honorableness towards me; having steadfast hope that your virtue would not willingly constrain me to anything that was not honorable; entreating you to consult your own heart as to what you shall be pleased to do with me; feeling sure that the will of a prince such as you are cannot be coupled with aught but honor and magnanimity. Wherefore, if it please you to have so much honorable pity as to answer for the safety which a captive King of France deserves to find, whom there is a desire to render friendly and not desperate, you may be sure of obtaining an acquisition instead of a useless prisoner, and of making a King of France your slave forever.” |
The former of these two letters has had its native hue somewhat altered in the majority of histories, in which it has been compressed into those eloquent words, “All is lost save honor.” The second needs no comment to make apparent what it lacks of kingly pride and personal dignity. Beneath the warrior’s heroism there was in the qualities of Francis I. more of what is outwardly brilliant and winning than of real strength and solidity.
But the warrior’s heroism, in conjunction with what is outwardly brilliant and winning in the man, exercises a great influence over people. The Viceroy of Naples perceived and grew anxious at the popularity of which Francis I. was the object at Pizzighittone. The lanzknechts took an open interest in him and his fortunes; the Italians fixed their eyes on him; and Bourbon, being reconciled to him, might meditate carrying him off. Lannoy resolved to send him to Naples, where there would be more certainty of guarding him securely. Francis made no objection to this design. On the 12th of May, 1525, he wrote to his mother, “Madame, the bearer has assured me that he will bring you this letter safely; and, as I have but little time, I will tell you nothing more than I shall be off to Naples on Monday—, and so keep a lookout at sea, for we shall have only fourteen galleys to take us and eighteen hundred Spaniards to man them; but those will be all their arquebusiers. Above all, haste: for, if that is made, I am in hopes that you may soon see your most humble and most obedient son.” There was no opportunity for even attempting to carry off the king as he went by sea to Naples; instead of taking him to Naples, Lannoy transported him straight to Spain, with the full assent of the king and the regent themselves, for it was in French galleys manned by Spanish troops that the voyage was made. Instead of awaiting the result of such doubtful chances of deliverance as might occur in Italy, Francis I., his mother, and his sister Margaret, entertained the idea that what was of the utmost importance for him was to confer and treat in person with Charles V., which could not be done save in Spain itself. In vain did Bourbon and Pescara, whose whole influence and ambitious hopes lay in Italy, and who, on that stage, regarded Francis I. as their own prisoner rather than Charles V.‘s, exert themselves to combat this proposal; the Viceroy of Naples, in concert, no doubt, with Charles V. himself as well as with Francis I. and his mother, took no heed of their opposition; and Francis I., disembarking at the end of June at Barcelona first and then at Valentia, sent, on the 2d of July, to Charles V. the Duke de Montmorency, with orders to say that he had desired to approach the emperor, “not only to obtain peace and deliverance in his own person, but also to establish and confirm Italy in the state and fact of devotion to the emperor, before that the potentates and lords of Italy should have leisure to rally together in opposition.” The regent, his mother, and his sister Margaret congratulated him heartily on his arrival in Spain, and Charles V. himself wrote to him, “It was a pleasure to me to hear of your arrival over here, because that, just now, it will be the cause of a happy general peace for the great good of Christendom, which is what I most desire.”
It is difficult to understand how Francis I. and Charles V. could rely upon personal interviews and negotiations for putting an end to their contentions and establishing a general peace. Each knew the other’s pretensions, and they knew how little disposed they were, either of them, to abandon them. On the 28th of March, 1525, a month after the battle of Pavia, Charles V. had given his ambassadors instructions as to treating for the ransom and liberation of the King of France. His chief requirements were, that Francis I. should renounce all attempts at conquest in Italy, that he should give up the suzerainty of the countships of Flanders and Artois, that he should surrender to Charles V. the duchy of Burgundy with all its dependencies, as derived from Mary of Burgundy, daughter of the last duke, Charles the Rash; that the Duke of Bourbon should be reinstated in possession of all his domains, with the addition thereto of Provence and Dauphiny, which should form an independent state; and, lastly, that France should pay England all the sums of money which Austria owed her. Francis I., on hearing, at Pizzighittone, these proposals read out, suddenly drew his sword as if to stab himself, saying, “It were better for a king to end thus.” His custodian, Alancon, seized his arm, whilst recalling him to his senses. Francis recovered calmness, but without changing his resolution; he would rather, he said, bury himself in a prison forever than subscribe to conditions destructive of his kingdom, and such as the States General of France would never accept. When Francis I. was removed to Spain he had made only secondary concessions as to these requirements of Charles V., and Charles V. had not abandoned any one of his original requirements. Marshal de Montmorency, when sent by the king to the emperor on the 2d of July, 1525, did not enter at all into the actual kernel of the negotiation; after some conventional protestations of a pacific kind, he confined himself to demanding “a safe conduct for Madame Marguerite of France, the king’s only sister, Duchess of Alencon and Berry, who would bring with her such and so full powers of treating for peace, the liberation of the king, and friendly alliance to secure the said peace, that the emperor would clearly see that the king’s intentions were pure and genuine, and that he would be glad to conclude and decide in a month what might otherwise drag on for a long while to the great detriment of their subjects.” The marshal was at the same time to propose the conclusion of a truce during the course of the negotiations.
Amongst the letters at that time addressed to Francis I., a prisoner of war, is the following, dated March, 1525, when he was still in Italy:—
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“My lord, the joy we are still feeling at the kind letters which you were pleased to write yesterday to me and to your mother, makes us so happy with the assurance of your health, on which our life depends, that it seems to me that we ought to think of nothing but of praising God and desiring a continuance of your good news, which is the best meat we can have to live on. And inasmuch as the Creator bath given us grace that our trinity should be always united, the other two do entreat you that this letter, presented to you, who are the third, may be accepted with the same affection with which it is cordially offered you by your most humble and most obedient servants, your mother and sister— LOUISE, MARGUERITE.” |
This close and tender union of the three continued through all separations and all trials; the confidence of the captive king was responsive to the devotion of his mother the regent and of his sister who had become his negotiatrix. When the news came of the king’s captivity, the regency threatened for a moment to become difficult and stormy; all the ambition and the hatred that lay dormant in the court awoke; an attempt was made to excite in the Duke of Vendome, the head of the younger branch of the House of Bourbon, a desire to take the regent’s place; the Parliament of Paris attacked the chancellor, Duprat, whom they hated—not without a cause; but the Duke of Vendome was proof against the attempts which were made upon him, and frankly supported the regent, who made him the chief of her council; and the regent supported the chancellor. She displayed, in these court-contentions, an ability partaking both of firmness and pliancy. The difficulties of foreign policy found her equally active and prudent. The greatest peril which France could at that time incur arose from the maintenance of the union between the King of England and Charles V. At the first news of the battle of Pavia, Henry VIII. dreamed for a moment of the partition of France between Charles and himself, with the crown of France for his own share; demonstrations of joy took place at the court of London; and attempts were made to levy, without the concurrence of Parliament, imposts capable of sufficing for such an enterprise. But the English nation felt no inclination to put up with this burden and the king’s arbitrary power in order to begin over again the Hundred Years’ War. The primate, Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote to Cardinal Wolsey, “It is reported to me that when the people had orders to make bonfires for the capture of the King of France, many folks said that it was more reason for weeping than for rejoicing. Others openly expressed their desire that the King of France might be set at liberty, that a happy peace might be concluded, and that the king might not attempt to conquer France again, a conquest more burdensome than profitable, and more difficult to keep than to make.” Wolsey himself was cooled towards Charles V., who, instead of writing to him as of old, and signing with his own hand, “your son and cousin,” now merely put his name, Charles. The regent, Louise of Savoy, profited ably by these feelings and circumstances in England; a negotiation was opened between the two courts; Henry VIII. gained by it two millions of crowns payable by annual instalments of fifty thousand crowns each, and Wolsey received a pension of a hundred thousand crowns. At first a truce for four months, and then an alliance, offensive and defensive, were concluded on the 30th of August, 1525, between France and England; and the regent, Louise of Savoy, had no longer to trouble herself about anything except the captivity of the king her son and the departure of her daughter Margaret to go and negotiate for the liberation of the prisoner.
The negotiation had been commenced, as early as the 20th of July, at Toledo, between the ambassadors of Francis I. and the advisers of Charles V., but without any symptom of progress. Francis I., since his arrival in Spain, had been taken from strong castle to strong castle, and then removed to Madrid, everywhere strictly guarded, and leading a sad life, without Charles V.‘s coming to visit him or appointing him any meeting-place. In vain did the emperor’s confessor, the Bishop of Osma, advise him to treat Francis I. generously, and so lay upon him either the obligation of thankfulness or the burden of ingratitude; the majority of his servants gave him contrary counsel. “I know not what you mean to do,” wrote his brother, the Archduke Ferdinand; “but, if I were wise enough to know how to give you good counsel, it seems to me that such an opportunity should not be lost, but that you should follow up your good fortune and act in such wise that neither the King of France nor his successors should have power hereafter to do harm to you or yours.” That, too, was Charles V.‘s own way of thinking; but, slow and patient as he was by nature, he relied upon the discomforts and the wearisomeness of prolonged captivity and indecision for tiring out Francis I. and overcoming his resistance to the harsh conditions he would impose upon him. The regent, Louise, made him an offer to go herself and treat with him, at Perpignan, for the king’s liberation; but he did not accept that overture. The Duke of Alencon, son-in-law of Louise, had died at Lyons, unable to survive the shame of his flight at the battle of Pavia; and the regent hinted that her daughter Marguerite, three months a widow, “would be happy if she could be agreeable to his Imperial Majesty,” but Charles let the hint drop without a reply. However, at the end of August, 1525, he heard that Francis I. was ill: “from great melancholy he had fallen into a violent fever.” The population of Madrid was in commotion; Francis I. had become popular there; many people went to pray for him in the churches; the doctors told the emperor that there was fear for the invalid’s life, and that he alone could alleviate the malady by administering some hope. Charles V. at once granted the safe-conduct which had been demanded of him for Marguerite of France, and on the 18th of September he himself went to Madrid to pay a visit to the captive. Francis, on seeing him enter the chamber, said, “So your Majesty has come to see your prisoner die?” “You are not my prisoner,” answered Charles, “but my brother and my friend: I have no other purpose than to give you your liberty and every satisfaction you can desire.” Next day Marguerite arrived; her mother, the regent, had accompanied her as far as Pont-Saint-Esprit; she had embarked, on the 27th of August, at Aigues-Mortes, and, disembarking at Barcelona, had gone to Madrid by litter; in order to somewhat assuage her impatience she had given expression to it in the following tender stanzas:
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“For the bliss that awaits me so strong Is my yearning that yearning is pain; One hour is a hundred years long; My litter, it bears me in vain; It moves not, or seems to recede; Such speed would I make if I might: O, the road, it is weary indeed, Where lies—at the end—my delight! “I gaze all around me all day For some one with tidings to bring, Not ceasing—ne’er doubt me—to pray Unto God for the health of my king I gaze; and when none is descried, Then I weep; and, what else? if you ask, To my paper my grief I confide This, this is my sorrowful task. “O, welcome be he who at length Shall tap at my door and shall cry, ‘The king to new health and new strength Is returning; the king will not die!’ Then she, who were now better dead, Will run, the news-bearer to see, And kiss him for what he hath said, That her brother from danger is free.” |
Francis was not “free from danger” when his sister arrived; she took her post at his side; on the 25th of September a serious crisis came on; and he remained for some time “without speaking, or hearing, or seeing.” Marguerite had an altar set up in her chamber; and all the French, of the household, great lords and domestics, knelt beside the sick man’s sister, and received the communion from the, hands of the Archbishop of Embrun, who, drawing near the bed, entreated the king to turn his eyes to the holy sacrament. Francis came out of his lethargy, and asked to communicate likewise, saying, “God will cure me, soul and body.” He became convalescent, and on the 20th of October he was sufficiently recovered for Marguerite to leave Madrid, and go and resume negotiations at Toledo, whither Charles V. had returned.
The day but one after her arrival she wrote to the king, “The emperor gave me courteous and kind reception, and, after coming to meet me at the entrance of this house, he used very kind and courteous language to me. He desired that he and I should be alone in the same room, and one of my women to keep the door. This evening I will send you word of what has been done; entreating you, my lord, to put on before Sieur Alancon (the king’s custodian) an air of weakness and weariness, for your debility will strengthen me and will hasten my despatch, which seems to me slower than I can tell you; as well for the sake of seeing you liberated, which you will be by God’s help, as of returning and trying whether your dear hand can be of any use to you.” Marguerite was impressed by the good-will she discovered at the court of Toledo in respect of the King of France, his liberation, and the establishment of peace; she received from the people in the streets, as well as from the great lords in their houses, the most significant proofs of favor. Charles V. took umbrage at it, and had the Duke of Infantado, amongst others, informed that, if he wished to please the emperor, neither he nor his sons must speak to Madame d’Alencon. “But,” said she, “I am not tabooed to the ladies, to whom I will speak double.” She contracted a real intimacy with even the sister of Charles V., Eleanor, widow of the King of Portugal, whom Charles had promised to the Duke of Bourbon, and between whom and her brother, King Francis, Marguerite set brewing a marriage, which was not long deferred. But, in spite of her successes at the court, and even in the family of the emperor, Marguerite had no illusions touching the small chance of bringing her grand object of negotiation to a happy issue. “Every one tells me,” she wrote, “that he loves the king; but there is small experience of it. . . . If I had to do with good sort of people, who understand what honor is, I would not care; but the contrary is the case.” She did not lose courage, however: “she spoke to the emperor so bravely and courteously,” says Brantome, “that he was quite astounded, and she said still worse to those of his council, at which she had audience; there she had full triumph of her good speaking and haranguing, with an easy grace in which she was not deficient; and she did so well with her fine speaking that she made herself rather agreeable than hateful or tiresome, that her reasons were found good and pertinent, and that she remained in high esteem with the emperor, his council, and his court.”
But neither good and pertinent reasons, nor the charm of eloquence in the mouth of a pleasing and able woman, are sufficient to make head against the passions and interests of the actors who are at a given moment in possession of the political arena; it needs time, a great deal of time, before the unjust or unreasonable requirements and determinations of a people, a generation, and the chief of a state become acknowledged as such and abandoned. At the negotiations entered upon, in 1525, between Francis I. and Charles V., Francis I. was prompt in making large and unpalatable concessions: he renounced his pretensions, so far as Italy was concerned, to the duchy of Milan, to Genoa, and to the kingdom of Naples; his suzerainty over the countships of Flanders and Artois, and possession of Hesdin and Tournay; he consented to reinstate Duke Charles of Bourbon in all his hereditary property and rights, and to pay three millions of crowns in gold for his own ransom; but he refused to cede Provence and Dauphiny to the Duke of Bourbon as an independent state, and to hand over the duchy of Burgundy to Charles V., as heir of his grandmother, Mary of Burgundy, only daughter of Charles the Rash. Charles V., after somewhat lukewarmly persisting, gave up the demand he had made on behalf of the Duke of Bourbon, for having Provence and Dauphiny erected into an independent state; but he insisted absolutely, on his own behalf, in his claim to the duchy of Burgundy as a right and a condition, sine qua non, of peace. The question at the bottom of the negotiations between the two sovereigns lay thus: the acquisition of Burgundy was for Charles V. the crowning-point of his victory and of his predominance in Europe; the giving up of Burgundy was for Francis I. a lasting proof of his defeat and a dismemberment of his kingdom: one would not let his prisoner go at any price but this, the other would not purchase at this price even his liberty and his restoration to his friends. In this extremity Francis I. took an honorable and noble resolution; in October, 1525, he wrote to Charles V., “Sir, my brother, I have heard from the Archbishop of Embrun and my premier-president at Paris of the decision you have expressed to them as to my liberation, and I am sorry that what you demand of me is not in my power. But feeling that you could not take a better way of telling me that you mean to keep me prisoner forever than by demanding of me what is impossible on my part, I have made up my mind to put up with imprisonment, being sure that God, who knows that I have not deserved a long one, being a prisoner of fair war, will give me strength to bear it patiently. And I can only regret that your courteous words, which you were pleased to address to me in my illness, should have come to nothing.” [Documents inedits sur l’Histoire de France. Captivite du roi Francois I., p. 384.]
The resolution announced in this letter led before long to the official act which was certain to be the consequence of it. In November, 1525, by formal letters patent, Francis I., abdicating the kingship which he could not exercise, ordered that his eldest son, the dauphin Francis, then eight years old, should be declared, crowned, anointed, and consecrated Most Christian King of France, and that his grandmother, Louise of Savoy, Duchess of Angouleme, or, in default of her, his aunt Marguerite, Duchess of Alencon, should be regent of the kingdom: “If it should please God that we should recover our personal liberty, and be able to proceed to the government and conduct of our kingdom, in that case our most dear and most beloved son shall quit and give up to us the name and place of king, all things re-becoming just as they were before our capture and captivity.” The letters patent ordered the regent “to get together a number of good and notable personages from the three estates in all the districts, countries, and good towns of France, to whom, either in a body or separately, one after another, she should communicate the said will of the king, as above, in order to have their opinion, counsel, and consent.” Thus, during the real king’s very captivity, and so, long as it lasted, France was again about to have a king whom the States General of France would be called upon to support with their counsels and adhesion.
This resolution was taken and these letters patent prepared just at the expiry of the safe-conduct granted to the Princess Marguerite, and, consequently, just when she would have to return to France. Charles V. was somewhat troubled at the very different position in which he was about to find himself, when he would have to treat no longer at Madrid with a captive king, but at Paris with a young king out of his power and with his own people about him. Marguerite fully perceived his embarrassment. From Toledo, where she was, she wrote to her brother, “After having been four days without seeing the emperor, when I went to take leave I found him so gracious that I think he is very much afraid of my going; those gentry yonder are in a great fix, and, if you will be pleased to hold firm, I can see them coming round to your wishes. But they would very much like to keep me here doing nothing, in order to promote their own affairs, as you will be pleased to understand.” Charles V., in fact, signified to the king his desire that the negotiations should be proceeded with at Madrid or Toledo, never ceasing to make protestations of his pacific intentions. Francis I. replied that, for his part, “he would not lay any countermand on the duchess, that he would willingly hear what the emperor’s ambassadors had to say, but that, if they did not come to any conclusion as to a peace and his own liberation, he would not keep his own ambassadors any longer, and would send them away.” Marguerite set out at the end of November; she at first travelled slowly, waiting for good news to reach her and stop her on the road; but, suddenly, she received notice from Madrid to quicken her steps; according to some historians, it was the Duke of Bourbon who, either under the influence of an old flame or in order to do a service to the king he had betrayed, sent word to the princess that Charles V., uneasy about what she was taking with her to France, had an idea of having her arrested the moment her safe-conduct had expired. According to a more probable version, it was Francis I. himself who, learning that three days after Marguerite’s departure Charles V. had received a copy of the royal act of abdication, at once informed his sister, begging her to make all haste. And she did so to such purpose that, “making four days’ journey in one,” she arrived at Salces, in the Eastern Pyrenees, an hour before the expiry of her safe-conduct. She no doubt took to her mother, the regent, the details of the king’s resolutions and instructions; but the act itself containing them, the letters patent of Francis I., had not been intrusted to her; it was Marshal de Montmorency who, at the end of December, 15225, was the first bearer of them to France.
Did Francis I. flatter himself that his order to have his son the dauphin declared and crowned king, and the departure of his sister Marguerite, who was going, if not to carry the actual text of the resolution, at any rate to announce it to the regent and to France, would embarrass Charles V. so far as to make him relax in his pretensions to the duchy of Burgundy and its dependencies? There is nothing to show that he was allured by such a hope; any how, if it may have for a moment arisen in his mind, it soon vanished. Charles V. insisted peremptorily upon his requirements; and Francis I. at once gave up his attitude of firmness, and granted, instead, the concession demanded of him, that is, the relinquishment of Burgundy and its dependencies to Charles V., “to hold and enjoy with every right of supremacy until it hath been judged, decided, and determined, by arbiters elected on the emperor’s part and our own, to whom the said duchy, countships, and other territories belong. . . . And for guarantee of this concession, the dauphin, the king’s eldest son, and his second son, Henry, Duke of Orleans, or other great personages, to the number of twelve, should be sent to him and remain in his keeping as hostages.” The regent, Louise, was not without a hand in this determination of the king; her maternal affection took alarm at the idea of her son’s being for an indefinite period a prisoner in the hands of his enemy. Besides, in that case, war seemed to her inevitable; and she dreaded the responsibility which would be thrown upon her. Charles V., on his side, was essentially a prudent man; he disliked remaining, unless it were absolutely necessary, for a long while in a difficult position. His chancellor, Gattinera, refused to seal a treaty extorted by force and violated, in advance, by lack of good faith. “Bring the King of France so low,” he said, “that he can do you no harm, or treat him so well that he can wish you no harm, or keep him a prisoner: the worst thing you can do is to let him go half satisfied.” Charles V. persisted in his pacific resolution. There is no knowing whether he was tempted to believe in the reality of Francis I.‘s concession, and to regard the guarantees as seriously meant; but it is evident that Francis I. himself considered them a mere sham; for four months previously, on the 22d of August, 1525, at the negotiations entered into on this subject, he had taken care to deposit in the hands of his negotiators a nullifying protest “against all pacts, conventions, renunciations, quittances, revocations, derogations, and oaths that he might have to make contrary to his honor and the good of his crown, to the profit of the said emperor or any other whosoever.” And on the 13th of January, 1526, four weeks after having given his ambassadors orders to sign the treaty of Madrid containing the relinquishment of Burgundy and its dependencies, the very evening before the day on which that treaty was signed, Francis I. renewed, at Madrid itself, and again placed in the hands of his ambassadors, his protest of the 22d of August preceding against this act, declaring “that it was through force and constraint, confinement and length of imprisonment, that he had signed it, and that all that was contained in it was and should remain null and of no effect.” We may not have unlimited belief in the scrupulosity of modern diplomats; but assuredly they would consider such a policy so fundamentally worthless that they would be ashamed to practise it. We may not hold sheer force in honor; but open force is better than mendacious weakness, and less debasing for a government as well as for a people.
“As soon as the treaty of Madrid was signed, the emperor came to Madrid to see the king; then they went, both in one litter, to see Queen Eleanor, the emperor’s sister and the king of Portugal’s widow, whom, by the said treaty, the king was to espouse before he left Spain, which he did.” [Memoires de Martin Du Bellay, t. ii. p. 15.] After which Francis was escorted by Lannoy to Fontarabia, whilst, on the other hand, the regent Louise, and the king’s two sons who were to go as hostages to Spain, were on their way to Bayonne. A large bark was anchored in the middle of the Bidassoa, the boundary of the two kingdoms, between Irun and Andaye. Lannoy put the king on board, and received in exchange, from the hands of Marshal Lautrec, the little princes Francis and Henry. The king gave his children his blessing, and reached the French side whilst they were being removed to the Spanish; and as soon as he set foot on shore, he leaped upon a fine Turkish horse, exclaiming, as he started at a gallop for Bayonne, where his mother and his sister awaited him, “So now I am king again!”
On becoming king again, he fell under the dominion of three personal sentiments, which exercised a decisive influence upon his conduct, and, consequently, upon the destiny of France joy at his liberation, a thirsting for revenge, we will not say for vengeance, to be wreaked on Charles V., and the burden of the engagement he had contracted at Madrid in order to recover his liberty, alternately swayed him. From Bayonne he repaired to Bordeaux, where he reassembled his court, and thence to Cognac, in Saintonge, where he passed nearly three months, almost entirely abandoning himself to field-sports, galas, diversions, and pleasures of every kind, as if to indemnify himself for the wearisomeness and gloom in which he had lived at Madrid. “Age subdues the blood, adversity the mind, risks the nerve, and the despairing monarch has no hope but in pleasures,” says Tavannes in his Memoires: “such was Francis I., smitten of women both in body and mind. It is the little circle of Madame d’Etampes that governs.” One of the regent’s maids of honor, Anne d’Heilly, whom Frances I. made Duchess of Etampes, took the place of the Countess of Chateaubriant as his favorite. With strange indelicacy Francis demanded back from Madame de Chateaubriant the beautiful jewels of gold which he had given her, and which bore tender mottoes of his sister Marguerite’s composition. The countess took time enough to have the jewels melted down, and said to the king’s envoy, “Take that to the king, and tell him that, as he has been pleased to recall what he gave me, I send it back to him in metal. As for the mottoes, I cannot suffer any one but myself to enjoy them, dispose of them, and have the pleasure of them.” The king sent back the metal to Madame de Chateaubriant; it was the mottoes that he wished to see again, but he did not get them.
At last it was absolutely necessary to pass from pleasure to business. The envoys of Charles V., with Lannoy, the Viceroy of Naples, at their head, went to Cognac to demand execution of the treaty of Madrid. Francis waited, ere he gave them an answer, for the arrival of the delegates from the estates of Burgundy, whom he had summoned to have their opinion as to the cession of the duchy. These delegates, meeting at Cognac in June, 1527, formally repudiated the cession, being opposed, they said, to the laws of the kingdom, to the rights of the king, who could not by his sole authority alienate any portion of his dominions, and to his coronation-oath, which superseded his oaths made at Madrid. Francis invited the envoys of Charles V. to a solemn meeting of his court and council present at Cognac, at which the delegates from Burgundy repeated their protest. Whilst availing himself of this declaration as an insurmountable obstacle to the complete execution of the treaty of Madrid, Francis offered to give two million crowns for the redemption of Burgundy, and to observe the other arrangements of the treaty, including the relinquishment of Italy and his marriage with the sister of Charles V. Charles formally rejected this proposal. “The King of France,” he said, “promised and swore, on the faith of an honest king and prince, that, if he did not carry out the said restitution of Burgundy, he would incontinently come and surrender himself prisoner to H. M. the emperor, wherever he might be, to undergo imprisonment in the place where the said lord the emperor might be pleased to order him, up to and until the time when this present treaty should be completely fulfilled and accomplished. Let the King of France keep his oath.” [Traite de Madrid, 14th of January, 1526: art. vi.]
However determined he was, at bottom, to elude the strict execution of the treaty of Madrid, Francis was anxious to rebut the charge of perjury by shifting the responsibility on to the shoulders of the people themselves and their representatives. He did not like to summon the states-general of the kingdom, and recognize their right as well as their power; but, after the meeting at Cognac, he went to Paris, and, on the 12th of December, 1527, the Parliament met in state with the adjunct of the princes of the blood, a great number of cardinals, bishops, noblemen, deputies from the Parliaments of Toulouse, Bordeaux, Rouen, Dijon, Grenoble, and Aix, and the municipal body of Paris. In presence of this assembly the king went over the history of his reign, his expeditions in Italy, his alternate successes and reverses, and his captivity. “If my subjects have suffered,” he said, “I have suffered with them.” He then caused to be read the letters patent whereby he had abdicated and transferred the crown to his son the dauphin, devoting himself to captivity forever. He explained the present condition of the finances, and what he could furnish for the ransom of his sons detained as hostages; and he ended by offering to return as a prisoner to Spain if no other way could be found out of a difficult position, for he acknowledged having given his word, adding, however, that he had thought it pledged him to nothing, since it had not been given freely.
This last argument was of no value morally or diplomatically; but in his bearing and his language Francis I. displayed grandeur and emotion. The assembly also showed emotion; they were four days deliberating; with some slight diversity of form the various bodies present came to the same conclusion; and, on the 16th of December, 1527, the Parliament decided that the king was not bound either to return to Spain or to execute, as to that matter, the treaty of Madrid, and that he might with full sanction and justice levy on his subjects two millions of crowns for the ransom of his sons and the other requirements of the state.
Before inviting such manifestations Francis I. had taken measures to prevent them from being in vain. Since the battle of Pavia and his captivity at Madrid the condition and disposition of Europe, and especially of Italy, had changed. From 1513 to 1523, three popes, Leo X., Adrian VI., and Clement VII. had occupied the Holy See. Adrian VI. alone embraced the cause of Charles V., whose preceptor he had been; but he reigned only one year, eight months, and five days; and even during that short time he made only a timid use of his power on his patron’s behalf. His successor, Clement VII., was a Florentine and a Medici, and, consequently, but little inclined to favor the emperor’s policy. The success of Charles V. at Pavia and the captivity of Francis I. inspired the pope and all Italy with great dread of the imperial pretensions and predominance. A league was formed between Rome, Florence, Venice, and Milan for the maintenance of Italian independence; and, as the pope was at its head, it was called the Holy League. Secret messages and communications were interchanged between these Italian states, the regent Louise of Savoy at Paris, and King Henry VIII. in London, to win them over to this coalition, not less important, it was urged, for the security of Europe than of Italy. The regent of France and the King of England received these overtures favorably; promises were made on either side and a commencement was even made of preparations, which were hastily disavowed both at Paris and in London, when Charles V. testified some surprise at them. But when Francis I. was restored to freedom and returned to his kingdom, fully determined in his own mind not to execute the treaty of Madrid, the negotiations with Italy became more full of meaning and reality. As early as the 22d of May, 1526, whilst he was still deliberating with his court and Parliament as to how he should behave towards Charles V. touching the treaty of Madrid, Francis I. entered into the Holy League with the pope, the Venetians, and the Duke of Milan for the independence of Italy; and on the 8th of August following Francis I. and Henry VIII. undertook, by a special treaty, to give no assistance one against the other to Charles V., and Henry VIII. promised to exert all his efforts to get Francis I.‘s two sons, left as hostages in Spain, set at liberty. Thus the war between Francis I. and Charles V., after fifteen months’ suspension, resumed its course.
It lasted three years in Italy, from 1526 to 1529, without interruption, but also without result; it was one of those wars which are prolonged from a difficulty of living in peace rather than from any serious intention, on either side, of pursuing a clear and definite object. Bourbon and Lannoy commanded the imperial armies, Lautrec the French army. Only two events, one for its singularity and the other for its tragic importance, deserve to have the memory of them perpetuated in history.
After the battle of Pavia and whilst Francis I. was a captive in Spain, Bourbon, who had hitherto remained in Italy, arrived at Madrid on the 13th of November, 1525, almost at the same time at which Marguerite de Valois was leaving it for France. Charles V. received the hero of Pavia with the strongest marks of consideration and favor; and the Spanish army were enthusiastic in their attachment to him. Amongst the great Spanish lords there were several who despised him as a traitor to his king and country. Charles V. asked the Marquis de Villena to give him quarters in his palace. “I can refuse the king nothing,” said the marquis; “but as soon as the traitor is out of the house, I will fire it with my own hand; no man of honor could live in it any more.” Holding this great and at the same time doubtful position, Bourbon remained in Spain up to the moment when the war was renewed between Francis I. and Charles V. The latter could not at that time dispense with his services in Italy for the only soldier who could have taken his place there, the Marquis of Pescara, had died at Milan on the 30th of November, 1525, aged thirty-six. Charles V. at once sent Bourbon to take the command of the imperial armies in Italy. On arriving at Milan in July, 1527, Bourbon found not only that town, but all the emperor’s party in Italy, in such a state of disorder, alarm, and exhaustion as to render them incapable of any great effort. In view of this general disturbance, Bourbon, who was as ambitious as able, and had become the chief of the great adventurers of his day, conceived the most audacious hopes. Charles V. had promised him the duchy of Milan; why should he not have the kingdom of Naples also, and make himself independent of Charles V.? He had immense influence over his Spanish army; and he had recruited it in Germany with from fourteen to fifteen thousand lanzknechts, the greater part of them Lutherans, and right glad to serve Charles V., then at war with the pope. Their commander, Freundsberg, a friend of Bourbon’s, had got made a handsome gold chain, “expressly,” he said, “to hang and strangle the pope with his own hand, because ‘honor to whom honor is due;’ and since the pope called himself premier in Christendom, he must be deferred to somewhat more than others.” [Brantome, t. i. p. 354.] On the 30th of January, 1527, at Piacenza, Bourbon, late Constable of France, put himself at the head of this ruck of bold and greedy adventurers. “I am now,” said he to them, “nothing but a poor gentleman, who hasn’t a penny to call his own any more than you have; but, if you will have a little patience, I will make you all rich or die in the attempt;” and, so saying, he distributed amongst them all he had left of money, rings, and jewels, keeping for himself nothing but his clothes and a jacket of silver tissue to put on over his armor. “We will follow you everywhere, to the devil himself!” shouted the soldiers; “no more of Julius Caesar, Hannibal, and Scipio! Hurrah! for the fame of Bourbon!” Bourbon led this multitude through Italy, halting before most of the towns, Bologna and Florence even, which he felt a momentary inclination to attack, but, after all, continuing his march until, having arrived in sight of Rome on the 5th of March, 1527, in the evening, he had pitched his camp, visited his guards, and ordered the assault for the morrow. “The great chances of our destiny,” said he to his troops, “have brought us hither to the place where we desired to be, after traversing so many bad roads, in midwinter, with snows and frosts so great, with rain, and mud, and encounters of the enemy, in hunger and thirst, and without a halfpenny. Now is the time to show courage, manliness, and the strength of your bodies. If this bout you are victorious, you will be rich lords and mighty well off; if not, you will be quite the contrary. Yonder is the city whereof, in time past, a wise astrologer prophesied concerning me, telling me that I should die there; but I swear to you that I care but little for dying there, if, when I die, my corpse be left with endless glory and renown throughout the world.” Afterwards he gave the word for retiring, some to rest, and some on guard, and for every one to be ready to assault on the morrow early. . . . “After that the stars became obscured by the greater resplendency of the sun and the flashing arms of the soldiers who were preparing for the assault, Bourbon, clad all in white that he might be better known and seen (which was not the sign of a coward), and armor in hand, marched in front close up to the wall, and, when he had mounted two rungs of his ladder, just as he had said the night before, so did it happen to him, that envious, or, to more properly speak, traitorous Fortune would have an arquebuse-shot to hit him full in the left side and wound him mortally. And albeit she took from him his being and his life, yet could she not in one single respect take away his magnanimity and his vigor so long as his body had sense, as he well showed out of his own mouth, for, having fallen when he was hit, he told certain of his most faithful friends who were nigh him, and especially the Gascon captain, Jonas, to cover him with a cloak and take him away, that his death might not give occasion to the others to leave an enterprise so well begun. . . . Just then, as M. de Bourbon had recommended,—to cover and hide his body,—so did his men; in such sort that the escalade and assault went on so furiously that the town, after a little resistance, was carried; and the soldiers, having by this time got wind of his death, fought the more furiously that it might be avenged, the which it certainly was right well, for they set up a shout of, ‘Slay, slay! blood, blood! Bourbon, Bourbon!’” [Brantome, t. i. pp. 262-269.]
The celebrated artist-in-gold, Benvenuto Cellini, says, in his Life written by himself, that it was he who, from the top of the wall of the Campo Santo at Rome, aiming his arquebuse at the midst of a group of besiegers, amongst whom he saw one man mounted higher than the rest, hit him, and that he then saw an extraordinary commotion around this man, who was Bourbon, as he found out afterwards. [Vita di Benvenuto Cellini, ch. xvii. pp. 157-159.] “I have heard say at Rome,” says Brantome on the contrary, “that it was held that he who fired that wretched arquebuse-shot was a priest.” [Brantome, t. ii. p. 268.]
Whatever hand it was that shot down Bourbon, Rome, after his death, was plundered, devastated and ravaged by a brutal, greedy, licentious, and fanatical soldiery. Europe was moved at the story of the sack of Rome and the position of the pope, who had taken refuge in the castle of St. Angelo. Francis I. and Henry VIII. renewed their alliance; and a French army under the command of Lautrec advanced into Italy. Charles V., fearing lest it should make a rapid march to Rome and get possession of the pope whilst delivering him from captivity, entered into negotiations with him; and, in consideration of certain concessions to the emperor, it was arranged that the pope should be set at liberty without delay. Clement VII. was so anxious to get out of his position, lately so perilous and even now so precarious, that he slank out of the castle of St. Angelo in the disguise of a tradesman the very night before the day fixed by the emperor for his liberation; and he retired to Orvieto, on the territory occupied by the French army. During this confusion of things in Italy, Charles V. gave orders for arresting in Spain the ambassadors of Francis I. and of Henry VIII., who were in alliance against him, and who, on their side, sent him two heralds-at-arms to declare war against him. Charles V. received them in open audience at Burgos, on the 22d of January, 1528. “I am very much astonished,” said he to the French envoy, “to find the King of France declaring against me a war which he has been carrying on for seven years; he is not in a position to address to me such a declaration; he is my prisoner. Why has he taken no notice of what I said to his ambassador immediately after his refusal to execute the treaty of Madrid?” Charles V. now repeated, in the very terms addressed to the French ambassador, the communication to which he alluded: “The king your master acted like a Bastard and a scoundrel in not keeping his word that he gave me touching the treaty of Madrid; if he likes to say to the contrary, I will maintain it against him with my body to his.” When these words were reported to Francis I., he summoned, on the 27th of March, 1528, the princes of the blood, the cardinals, the prelates, the grandees of the kingdom, and the ministers from foreign courts, and, after having given a vivid account of his relations with Charles V., “I am not the prisoner of Charles,” he said: “I have not given him my word; we have never met with arms in our hands.” He then handed his herald, Guyenne, a cartel written with his own hand, and ending with these words addressed to Charles V.: “We give you to understand that, if you have intended or do intend to charge us with anything that a gentleman loving his honor ought not to do, we say that you have lied in your throat, and that, as often as you say so, you will lie. Wherefore for the future write us nothing at all; but appoint us the time and place of meeting, and we will bring our sword for you to cross; protesting that the shame of any delay in fighting shall be yours, seeing that, when it comes to an encounter, there is an end of all writing.” Charles V. did not receive Francis I.‘s challenge till the 8th of June; when he, in his turn, consulted the grandees of his kingdom, amongst others the Duke of Infantado, one of the most considerable in rank and character, who answered him in writing: “The jurisdiction of arms extends exclusively to obscure and foggy matters in which the ordinary rules of justice are at a discount; but, when one can appeal to oaths and authentic acts, I do not think that it is allowable to come to blows before having previously tried the ordinary ways of justice. . . It seems to me that this law of honor applies to princes, however great they may be, as well as to knights. It would be truly strange, my lord, that a debt so serious, so universally recognized, as that contracted by the King of France, should be discharged by means of a personal challenge.” Charles V. thereupon sent off his herald, Burgundy, with orders to carry to Francis I. “an appointment for a place of meeting between Fontarabia and Andaye, in such a spot as by common consent should be considered most safe and most convenient by gentlemen chosen on each side;” and this offer was accompanied by a long reply which the herald was at the same time to deliver to the King of France, whilst calling on him to declare his intention within forty days after the delivery of that letter, dated the 24th of June, “in default whereof,” said Charles, “the delay in fighting will be yours.”
On arriving at the frontier of France the Spanish herald demanded a safe-conduct. He was made to wait seven weeks, from the 30th of June to the 19th of August, without the king’s cognizance, it is said. At last, on the 19th of September, 1528, Burgundy entered Paris, and was conducted to the palace. Francis I. received him in the midst of his court; and, as soon as he observed the entrance of the herald, who made obeisance preliminary to addressing him, “Herald,” cried the king, “all thy letters declare that thou bringest appointment of time and place; dost thou bring it?” “Sir,” answered the Spaniard, “permit me to do my office, and say what the emperor has charged me to say.” “Nay, I will not listen to thee,” said Francis, “if thou do not first give me a patent signed by thy master, containing an appointment of time and place.” “Sir, I have orders to read you the cartel, and give it you afterwards.” “How, pray!” cried the king, rising up angrily: “doth thy master pretend to introduce new fashions in my kingdom, and give me laws in my own court?” Burgundy, without being put out, began again: “Sir, . . . “ “Nay,” said Francis, “I will not suffer him to speak to me before he has given me appointment of time and place. Give it me, or return as thou hast come.” “Sir, I cannot, without your permission, do my office; if you will not deign to grant it to me, let me have your refusal handed me, and your ratification I of my safe-conduct for my return.” “I am quite willing,” said the king; “let him have it!” Burgundy set off again for Madrid, and the incident was differently reported by the two courts; but there was no further question of a duel between the two kings.
One would not think of attempting to decide, touching this question of single combat, how far sincerity was on the side of Francis or of Charles. No doubt they were both brave; the former with more brilliancy than his rival, the latter, at need, with quite as much firmness. But in sending challenges one to the other, as they did on this occasion, they were obeying a dying-out code, and rather attempting to keep up chivalrous appearances than to put seriously in practice the precedents of their ancestors. It was no longer a time when the fate of a people could be placed in the hands of a few valiant warriors, such as the three Horatii and the three Curiatii, or the thirty Bretons and thirty English. The era of great nations and great contests was beginning, and one is inclined to believe that Francis I. and Charles V. were themselves aware that their mutual challenges would not come to any personal encounter. The war which continued between them in Italy was not much more serious or decisive; both sides were weary of it, and neither one nor the other of the two sovereigns espied any great chances of success. The French army was wasting itself, in the kingdom of Naples, upon petty, inconclusive engagements; its commander, Lautrec, died of the plague on the 15th of August, 1528; a desire for peace became day by day stronger; it was made, first of all, at Barcelona, on the 20th of June, 1529, between Charles V. and Pope Clement VII.; and then a conference was opened at Cambrai for the purpose of bringing it about between Charles V. and Francis I. likewise. Two women, Francis I.‘s mother and Charles V.‘s aunt, Louise of Savoy and Margaret of Austria, had the real negotiation of it; they had both of them acquired the good sense and the moderation which come from experience of affairs and from difficulties in life; they did not seek to give one another mutual surprises and to play-off one another reciprocally; they resided in two contiguous houses, between which they had caused a communication to be made on the inside, and they conducted the negotiation with so much discretion, that the petty Italian princes who were interested in it did not know the results of it until peace was concluded on the 5th of August, 1529. Francis I. yielded on all the Italian and Flemish questions; and Charles V. gave up Burgundy, and restored to liberty the King of France’s two sons, prisoners at Madrid, in consideration of a ransom put at two millions of crowns and of having the marriage completed between his sister Eleanor and Francis I. King Henry VIII. complained that not much account had been made of him, either during the negotiations or in the treaty; but his discontent was short-lived, and he none the less came to the assistance of Francis I. in the money-questions to which the treaty gave rise. Of the Italian states, Venice was most sacrificed in this accommodation between the kings. “The city of Cambrai,” said the doge, Andrew Gritti, “is the purgatory of the Venetians; it is the place where emperors and kings of France make the Republic expiate the sin of having ever entered into alliance with them.” Francis went to Bordeaux to meet his sons and his new wife. At Bordeaux, Cognac, Amboise, Blois, and Paris, galas, both at court and amongst the people, succeeded one another for six months; and Europe might consider itself at peace.
The peace of Cambrai was called the ladies’ peace, in honor of the two princesses who had negotiated it. Though morally different and of very unequal worth, they both had minds of a rare order, and trained to recognize political necessities, and not to attempt any but possible successes. They did not long survive their work: Margaret of Austria died on the 1st of December, 1530, and Louise of Savoy on the 22d of September, 1531. All the great political actors seemed hurrying away from the stage, as if the drama were approaching its end. Pope Clement VII. died on the 26th of September, 1534. He was a man of sense and moderation; he tried to restore to Italy her independence, but he forgot that a moderate policy is, above all, that which requires most energy and perseverance. These two qualities he lacked totally; he oscillated from one camp to the other without ever having any real influence anywhere. A little before his death he made France a fatal present; for, on the 28th of October, 1533, he married his niece Catherine de’ Medici to Francis I.‘s second son, Prince Henry of Valois, who by the death of his elder brother, the Dauphin Francis, soon afterwards became heir to the throne. The chancellor, Anthony Duprat, too, the most considerable up to that time amongst the advisers of Francis I., died on the 9th of July, 1535. According to some historians, when he heard, in the preceding year, of Pope Clement VII.‘s death, he had conceived a hope, being already Archbishop of Sens, and a cardinal, of succeeding him; and he spoke to the king about it. “Such an election would cost too dear,” said Francis I.; “the appetite of cardinals is insatiable; I could not satisfy it.” “Sir,” replied Duprat, “France will not have to bear the expense; I will provide for it; there are four hundred thousand crowns ready for that purpose.” “Where did you get all that money, pray?” asked Francis, turning his back upon him; and next day he caused a seizure to be made of a portion of the chancellor-cardinal’s property. “This, then,” exclaimed Duprat, “is the king’s gratitude towards the minister who has served him body and soul!” “What has the cardinal to complain of?” said the king: “I am only doing to him what he has so often advised me to do to others.” [Trois Magestrats Francais du Seizieme Siecle, by Edouard Faye de Brys, 1844, pp. 77-79.] The last of the chancellor’s biographers, the Marquis Duprat, one of his descendants, has disputed this story. [Vie d’Antoine Duprat, 1857, p. 364.] However that may be, it is certain that Chancellor Duprat, at his death, left a very large fortune, which the king caused to be seized, and which he partly appropriated. We read in the contemporary Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris [published by Ludovic Lalanne, 1854, p. 460], “When the chancellor was at the point of death, the king sent M. de Bryon, Admiral of France, who had orders to have everything seized and all his property placed in the king’s hands. . . . They found in his place at Nantouillet eight hundred thousand crowns, and all his gold and silver plate . . . and in his Hercules-house, close to the Augustins’, at Paris, where he used to stay during his life-time, the sum of three hundred thousand livres, which were in coffers bound with iron, and which were carried off by the king for and to his own profit.” In the civil as well as in the military class, for his government as well as for his armies, Francis I. had, at this time, to look out for new servants.
He did not find such as have deserved a place in history. After the deaths of Louise of Savoy, of Chancellor Duprat, of La Tremoille, of La Palice, and of all the great warriors who fell at the battle of Pavia, it was still one more friend of Francis I.‘s boyhood, Anne de Montmorency, who remained, in council as well as army, the most considerable and the most devoted amongst his servants. In those days of war and discord, fraught with violence, there was no man who was more personally rough and violent than Montmorency. From 1521 to 1541, as often as circumstances became pressing, he showed himself ready for anything and capable of anything in defence of the crown and the re-establishment of order. “Go hang me such a one,” he would say, according to Brantome. “Tie you fellow to this tree; give yonder one the pike or arquebuse, and all before my eyes; cut me in pieces all those rascals who chose to hold such a clock-case as this against the king; burn me this village; set me everything a-blaze, for a quarter of a league all round.” In 1548, a violent outbreak took place at Bordeaux on account of the gabel or salt-tax; and the king’s lieutenant was massacred in it. Anne de Montmorency, whom the king had made constable in 1538, the fifth of his family invested with that dignity, repaired thither at once. “Aware of his coming,” says Brantome, “MM. de Bordeaux went two days’ journey to meet him and carry him the keys of their city: ‘Away, away,’ said he, ‘with your keys; I will have nothing to do with them; I have others which I am bringing with me, and which will make other sort of opening than yours (meaning his cannon); I will have you all hanged; I will teach you to rebel against your king, and kill his governor and lieutenant.’ Which he did not fail to do,” adds Brantome, “and inflicted exemplary punishment, but not so severe assuredly as the case required.” The narrator, it will be seen, was not more merciful than the constable. Nor was the constable less stern or less thorough in battles than in outbreaks. In 1562, at the battle of Dreux, he was aged and so ill that none expected to see him on horseback. “But in the morning,” says Brantome, “knowing that the enemy was getting ready, he, brimful of courage, gets out of bed, mounts his horse, and appears at the moment the march began; whereof I do remember me, for I saw him and heard him, when M. de Guise came forward to meet him to give him good day, and ask how he was. He, fully armed, save only his head, answered him, ‘Right well, sir: this is the real medicine that hath cured me for the battle which is toward and a-preparing for the honor of God and our king.’” In spite of this indomitable aptness for rendering the king everywhere the most difficult, nay, the most pitiless services, the Constable de Montmorency none the less incurred, in 1541, the disfavor of Francis I.; private dissensions in the royal family, the intrigues of rivals at court, and the enmity of the king’s mistress, the Duchess of Etampes, effaced the remembrance of all he had done and might still do. He did accept his disgrace; he retired first to Chantilly, and then to Ecouen; and there he waited for the dauphin, when he became King Henry II., to recall him to his side and restore to him the power which Francis I., on his very death-bed, had dissuaded his son from giving back. The ungratefulnesses of kings are sometimes as capricious as their favors.
The ladies’ peace, concluded at Cambrai in 1529, lasted up to 1536; incessantly troubled, however, by far from pacific symptoms, proceedings, and preparations. In October, 1532, Francis I. had, at Calais, an interview with Henry VIII., at which they contracted a private alliance, and undertook “to raise between them an army of eighty thousand men to resist the Turk, as true zealots for the good of Christendom.” The Turks, in fact, under their great sultan, Soliman II., were constantly threatening and invading Eastern Europe. Charles V., as Emperor of Germany, was far more exposed to their attacks and far more seriously disquieted by them than Francis I. and Henry VIII. were; but the peril that hung over him in the East urged him on at the same time to a further development of ambition and strength; in order to defend Eastern Europe against the Turks he required to be dominant in Western Europe; and in that very part of Europe a large portion of the population were disposed to wish for his success, for they required it for their own security. “To read all that was spread abroad hither and thither,” says William du Bellay, “it seemed that the said lord the emperor was born into this world to have fortune at his beck and call.” Two brothers, Mussulman pirates, known under the name of Barbarossa, had become masters, one of Algiers and the other of Tunis, and were destroying, in the Mediterranean, the commerce and navigation of Christian states. It was Charles V. who tackled them. In 1535 he took Tunis, set at liberty twenty thousand Christian slaves, and remained master of the regency. At the news of this expedition, Francis I., who, in concert with Henry VIII., was but lately levying an army to “offer resistance,” he said, “to the Turk,” entered into negotiations with Soliman II., and concluded a friendly treaty with him against what was called the common enemy. Francis had been for some time preparing to resume his projects of conquest in Italy; he had effected an interview at Marseilles, in October, 1533, with Pope Clement VII., who was almost at the point of death, and it was there that the marriage of Prince Henry of France with Catherine de’ Medici was settled. Astonishment was expressed that the pope’s niece had but a very moderate dowry. “You don’t see, then,” said Clement VII.‘s ambassador, “that she brings France three jewels of great price, Genoa, Milan, and Naples?” When this language was reported at the court of Charles V., it caused great irritation there. In 1536 all these combustibles of war exploded; in the month of February, a French army entered Piedmont, and occupied Turin; and, in the month of July, Charles V. in person entered Provence at the head of fifty thousand men. Anne de Montmorency having received orders to defend southern France, began by laying it waste in order that the enemy might not be able to live in it; officers had orders to go everywhere and “break up the bake-houses and mills, burn the wheat and forage, pierce the wine-casks, and ruin the wells by throwing the wheat into them to spoil the water.” In certain places the inhabitants resisted the soldiers charged with this duty; elsewhere, from patriotism, they themselves set fire to their corn-ricks and pierced their casks. Montmorency made up his mind to defend, on the whole coast of Provence, only Marseilles and Arles; he pulled down the ramparts of the other towns, which were left exposed to the enemy. For two months Charles V. prosecuted this campaign without a fight, marching through the whole of Provence an army which fatigue, shortness of provisions, sickness, and ambuscades were decimating ingloriously. At last he decided upon retreating. “From Aix to Frejus, where the emperor at his arrival had pitched his camp, all the roads were strewn with the sick and the dead pell-mell, with harness, lances, pikes, arquebuses, and other armor of men and horses gathered in a heap. I say what I saw,” adds Martin du Bellay, “considering the toil I had with my company in this pursuit.” At the village of Mery, near Frejus, some peasants had shut themselves up in a tower situated on the line of march; Charles V. ordered one of his captains to carry it by assault; from his splendid uniform the peasants, it is said, took this officer for the emperor himself, and directed their fire upon him; the officer, mortally wounded, was removed to Nice, where he died at the end of a few days. It was Garcilaso de la Vega, the prince of Spanish poesy, the Spanish Petrarch, according to his fellow-countrymen. The tower was taken, and Charles V. avenged his poet’s death by hanging twenty-five of these patriot-peasants, being all that survived of the fifty who had maintained the defence.
On returning from his sorry expedition, Charles V. learned that those of his lieutenants whom he had charged with the conduct of a similar invasion in the north of France, in Picardy, had met with no greater success than he himself in Provence. Queen Mary of Hungary, his sister and deputy in the government of the Low Countries, advised a local truce; his other sister, Eleanor, the Queen of France, was of the same opinion; Francis I. adopted it; and the truce in the north was signed for a period of three months. Montmorency signed a similar one for Piedmont. It was agreed that negotiations for a peace should be opened at Locate in Roussillon, and that, to pursue them, Francis should go and take up his quarters at Montpellier, and Charles V. at Barcelona. Pope Paul III. (Alexander Farnese), who, on the 13th of October, 1534, had succeeded Clement VII., came forward as mediator. He was a man of capacity, who had the gift of resolutely continuing a moderate course of policy, well calculated to gain time, but insufficient for the settlement of great and difficult questions. The two sovereigns refused to see one another officially; they did not like the idea of discussing together their mutual pretensions, and they were so different in character that, as Marguerite de Valois used to say, “to bring them to accord, God would have had to re-make one in the other’s image.” They would only consent to treat by agents; and on the 15th of June, 1538, they signed a truce for ten years, rather from weariness of a fruitless war than from any real desire of peace; they, both of them, wanted time to bring them unforeseen opportunities for getting out of their embarrassments. But for all their refusal to take part in set negotiations, they were both desirous of being personally on good terms again, and to converse together without entering into any engagement. Charles V. being forced by contrary winds to touch at the Island of Sainte-Marie, made a proposal to Francis I. for an interview at Aigues Mortes; Francis repaired thither on the 14th of July, 1538, and went, the very same day, in a small galley, to pay a visit to the emperor, who stepped eagerly forward, and held out a hand to him to help him on to the other vessel. Next day, the 15th of July, Charles V., embarking on board one of the king’s frigates, went and returned the visit at Aigues-Mortes, where Francis, with his whole court, was awaiting him; after disembarkation at the port they embraced; and Queen Eleanor, glad to see them together, “embraced them both,” says an eyewitness, “a round the waist.” They entered the town amidst the roar of artillery and the cheers of the multitude, shouting, “Hurrah! for the emperor and the king!” The dauphin, Henry, and his brother Charles, Duke of Orleans, arriving boot and spur from Provence, came up at this moment, shouting likewise, “Hurrah! for the emperor and the king!” “Charles V. dropped on his knees,” says the narrator, and embraced the two young princes affectionately. They all repaired together to the house prepared for their reception, and, after dinner, the emperor, being tired, lay down to rest on a couch. Queen Eleanor, before long, went and tapped at his door, and sent word to the king that the emperor was awake. Francis, with the Cardinal de Lorraine and the Constable de Montmorency, soon arrived. On entering the chamber, he found the emperor still lying down and chatting with his sister the queen, who was seated beside him on a chair. At sight of the king Charles V. sprang from the couch and went towards him without any shoes on. “Well, brother,” said the king, “how do you feel? Have you rested well?” “Yes,” said Charles; “I had made such cheer that I was obliged to sleep it off.” “I wish you,” said Francis, “to have the same power in France as you have in Flanders and in Spain;” whereupon he gave him, as a mark of affection, a diamond valued at thirty thousand crowns, and having on the ring in which it was set this inscription: “A token and proof of affection” (Dilectionis testis et exemplum). Charles put the ring on his finger; and, taking from his neck the collar of the order (the Golden Fleece) he was wearing, he put it upon the king’s neck. Francis did the converse with his own collar. Only seven of the attendants remained in the emperor’s chamber; and there the two sovereigns conversed for an hour, after which they moved to the hall, where a splendid supper awaited them. After supper the queen went in person to see if the emperor’s room was ready; she came back to tell him when it was, and Charles V. retired. Next morning, July 16, Francis went to see him again in his room; they heard mass together; Charles re-embarked the same day for Spain; Francis I. went and slept, on the 17th, at Nimes; and thus ended this friendly meeting, which left, if not the principal actors, at any rate the people all around, brimful of satisfaction, and feeling sure that the truce concluded in the previous month would really at last be peace. The people are easily deceived; and whenever they are pleased with appearances they readily take them for realities.
An unexpected event occurred to give this friendly meeting at Aigues-Mortes a value which otherwise it would probably never have attained. A year afterwards, in August, 1539, a violent insurrection burst out at Ghent. The fair deputy of the Low Countries had obtained from the estates of Flanders a gratuitous grant of twelve hundred thousand florins for the assistance of her brother the emperor, whom his unfortunate expedition in Provence had reduced to great straits for want of money; and the city of Ghent had been taxed, for its share, to the extent of four hundred thousand florins. The Ghentese pleaded their privilege of not being liable to be taxed without their own consent. To their plea Charles V. responded by citing the vote of the estates of Flanders and giving orders to have it obeyed. The Ghentese drove out the officers of the emperor, entered upon open rebellion, incited the other cities of Flanders, Ypres and Bruges amongst the rest, to join them, and, taking even more decisive action, sent a deputation to Francis I., as their own lord’s suzerain, demanding his support, and offering to make him master of the Low Countries if he would be pleased to give them effectual assistance. The temptation was great; but whether it were from prudence or from feudal loyalty, or in consequence of the meeting at Aigues-Mortes, and of the prospects set before him by Charles of an arrangement touching Milaness, Francis rejected the offer of the Ghentese, and informed Charles V. of it. The emperor determined resolutely upon the course of going in person and putting down the Ghentese; but how to get to Ghent? The sea was not safe; the rebels had made themselves masters of all the ports on their coasts; the passage by way of Germany was very slow work, and might be difficult by reason of ill-will on the part of the Protestant states which would have to be traversed. France was the only direct and quick route. Charles V. sent to ask Francis I. for a passage, whilst thanking him for the loyalty with which he had rejected the offers of the Ghentese, and repeating to him the fair words that had been used as to Milaness. Francis announced to his council his intention of granting the emperor’s request. Some of his councillors pressed him to annex some conditions, such, at the least, as a formal and written engagement instead of the vague and verbal promises at Aigues-Mortes. “No,” said the king, with the impulsiveness of his nature, “when you do a generous thing, you must do it completely and boldly.” On leaving the council he met his court-fool Triboulet, whom he found writing in his tablets, called Fools’ Diary, the name of Charles V., “A bigger fool than I,” said he, “if he comes passing through France.” “What wilt thou say, if I let him pass?” said the king. “I will rub out his name and put yours in its place.” Francis I. was not content with letting Charles V. pass; he sent his two sons, the dauphin and the Duke of Orleans, as far as Bayonne to meet him, went in person to receive him at Chatellerault, and gave him entertainments at Amboise, at Blois, at Chambord, at Orleans, and Fontainebleau, and lastly at Paris, which they entered together on the 1st of January, 1540. Orders had been sent everywhere to receive him “as kings of France are received on their joyous accession.” “The king gave his guest,” says Du Bellay, “all the pleasures that can be invented, as royal hunts, tourneys, skirmishes, fights a-foot and a-horseback, and in all other sorts of pastimes.” Some petty incidents, of a less reassuring kind, were intermingled with these entertainments. One day the Duke of Orleans, a young prince full of reckless gayety, jumped suddenly on to the crupper of the emperor’s horse, and threw his arms round Charles, shouting, “Your Imperial Majesty is my prisoner.” Charles set off at a gallop, without turning his head.
Another day the king’s favorite, the Duchess of Etampes, was present with the two monarchs. “Brother,” said Francis, “you see yonder a fair dame who is of opinion that I should not let you out of Paris without your having revoked the treaty of Madrid.” “Ah! well,” said Charles, “if the opinion is a good one, it must be followed.” Such freedom of thought and speech is honorable to both sovereigns. Charles V., impressed with the wealth and cheerful industry that met his eye, said, according to Brantome, “There is not in the world any greatness such as that of a King of France.” After having passed a week at Paris he started for the Low Countries, halted at Chantilly, at the Constable de Montmorency’s, who, as well as the king’s two sons, the dauphin and the Duke of Orleans, was in attendance upon him, and did not separate from his escort of French royalty until he arrived at Valenciennes, the first town in his Flemish dominions. According to some historians there had been at Chantilly, amongst the two young princes and their servants, some idea of seizing the emperor and detaining him until he had consented to the concessions demanded of him; others merely say that the constable, before leaving him, was very urgent with him that he should enter into some positive engagement as to Milaness. “No,” said Charles, “I must not bind myself any more than I have done by my words as long as I am in your power; when I have chastised my rebellious subjects I will content your king.”
He did chastise, severely, his Flemish subjects, but he did not content the King of France. Francis I. was not willing to positively renounce his Italian conquests, and Charles V. was not willing to really give them up to him. Milaness was still, in Italy, the principal object of their mutual ambition. Navarre, in the south-east of France, and the Low Countries in the north, gave occasion for incessantly renewed disputes between them. The two sovereigns sought for combinations which would allow them to make, one to the other, the desired concessions, whilst still preserving pretexts for and chances of recovering them. Divers projects of marriage between their children or near relatives were advanced with that object, but nothing came of them; and, after two years and a half of abortive negotiations, another great war, the fourth, broke out between Francis I. and Charles V., for the same causes and with the same by-ends as ever. It lasted two years, from 1542 to 1544, with alternations of success and reverse on either side, and several diplomatic attempts to embroil in it the different European powers. Francis I. concluded an alliance in 1543 with Sultan Soliman II., and, in concert with French vessels, the vessels of the pirate Barbarossa cruised about and made attacks upon the shores of the Mediterranean. An outcry was raised against such a scandal as this. “Sir Ambassador,” said Francis I. to Marino Giustiniano, ambassador from Venice, “I cannot deny that I eagerly desire to see the Turk very powerful and ready for war; not on his own account, for he is an infidel and all we are Christians, but in order to cripple the power of the emperor, to force him into great expense, and to give all other governments security against so great an enemy.” “As for me,” says the contemporary Montluc in his Memoires, “if I could summon all the spirits of hell to break the head of my enemy who would fain break mine, I would do it with all my heart, God forgive me!” On the other hand, on the 11th of February, 1543, Charles V. and Henry VIII., King of England, concluded an alliance against Francis I. and the Turks. The unsuccess which had attended the grand expedition conducted by Charles V. personally in 1541, with the view of attacking Barbarossa and the Mussulmans in Algiers itself, had opened his eyes to all the difficulty of such enterprises, and he wished to secure the co-operation of a great maritime power before engaging therein afresh. He at the same time convoked a German diet at Spires in order to make a strong demonstration against the alliance between Francis I. and the Turks, and to claim the support of Germany in the name of Christendom. Ambassadors from the Duke of Savoy and the King of Denmark appeared in support of the propositions and demands of Charles V. The diet did not separate until it had voted twenty-four thousand foot and four thousand horse to be employed against France, and had forbidden Germans, under severe penalties, to take service with Francis I. In 1544 the war thus became almost European, and in the early days of April two armies were concentrated in Piedmont, near the little town of Ceresole, the Spanish twenty thousand strong and the French nineteen thousand; the former under the orders of the Marquis del Guasto, the latter under those of the Count d’Enghien; both ready to deliver a battle which was, according to one side, to preserve Europe from the despotic sway of a single master, and, according to the other, to protect Europe against a fresh invasion of Mussulmans.
Francis of Bourbon, Count d’Enghien, had received from the king a prohibition to give battle. He was believed to be weaker than the Marquis del Guasto, who showed eagerness to deliver it. Convinced that such a position was as demoralizing as it was disagreeable for him, the young Count d’Enghien sent a valiant and intelligent gentleman, Blaise de Montluc, who had already had experience in the great wars of the reign, to carry his representations to the king. Francis I. summoned the messenger to a meeting of the council, at which the dauphin, Henry, stood behind his father’s chair. “Montluc,” said the king, “I wish you to return and report my deliberation and the opinion of my council to M. d’Enghien, and to listen here to the difficulty that stands in the way of our being able to grant him leave to give battle, as he demands.” The Count de St. Pol spoke and set forth the reasons the king had for not desiring battle; and the end of them all was that there was a chance of losing, which would be a matter for regret beyond all comparison with the advantage to be gained from winning. “I stamped with impatience to speak,” says Montluc, “and would have broken in; but M. de St. Pol made me a sign with his hand, saying, ‘Quiet! quiet!’ which made me hold my tongue, and I saw that the king set on a-laughing. Then he told me that he wished me to say freely what I thought about it. ‘I consider myself most happy, sir,’ said I, ‘for when you were dauphin, and before you were called to this great charge which God hath given you, you tried the fortune of war as much as any king that ever hath been in France, without sparing your own person any more than the meanest gentleman. Well, a soldier-king is the only one I can address.’ The dauphin, who was facing me,” continued Montluc, “made me a sign with his head, which caused me to think that he wished me to speak boldly. Then said I, ‘Sir, I count that there will be forty-five hundred or forty-six hundred of us Gascons, all told; and all of us, captains and soldiers, will give you our names and the places whence we come, and will stake our heads that we will fight on the day of battle, if it should please you to grant it. It is a matter that we have been awaiting and desiring this long while, without much taking of counsel; be assured, sir, there are not more resolute soldiers than yonder. There are, besides, thirteen companies of Swiss, who will give you the same pledge as we who are your subjects; and we will hand in to you the names of them all for to be sent to their cantons in order that, if there be any who shall not do his duty, he may die. You have thus nine thousand men and more of whom you may be certain that they will fight to the last gasp of their lives. As for the Italians and Provencals, I will not answer to you for them; but perhaps they will all do as well as we, when they see us getting to work;’ and then I raised my arm up, as if to strike, whereat the king smiled. Sir,’ said I, ‘I have heard from wise captains that it is not the great number that wins, but the stout heart; on a day of battle, a moiety doth not fight at all. We desire no more; leave it to us.’ The king, who had very favorably listened to me, and who took pleasure in seeing my impatience, turned his eyes towards M. de St. Pol, who said, ‘Sir, would you change your opinion at the words of this madcap, who has no thought for the calamity it would be if we were to lose the battle? It is a matter too important to be left for settlement to the brains of a young Gascon.’ I answered him, ‘Sir, let me assure you that I am no braggart, nor so hare-brained as you consider me. All we have to do is not to go and attack the enemy in a stronghold, as we did at La Bicocca; but M. d’Enghien has too many good and veteran captains about him to commit such an error. The only question will be to find means of coming at them in open country, where there is neither hedge nor ditch to keep us from setting to work; and then, sir, you shall hear talk of the most furious fights that ever were. I do entreat you most humbly, sir, to admit no thought of anything but a victory.’ The dauphin,” continues Montluc, “went on more and more smiling, and making signs to me, which gave me still greater boldness in speaking. All the rest spoke and said that the king must not place any reliance upon my words. Admiral d’Annebaut said not a syllable, but smiled; I suppose he had seen the signs the dauphin was making to me. M. de St. Pol turns to speak to the king, and says, ‘How, sir! You seem disposed to change your opinion, and listen to the words of this rabid madman!’ To whom the king replied, ‘On my honor as a gentleman, cousin, he has given me such great and clear reasons, and has represented to me so well the good courage of my men, that I know not what to do.’ ‘I see quite well,’ said the Lord of St. Pol, ‘that you have already turned round.’ Whereupon the king, addressing the admiral, asked him what he thought about it. ‘Sir,’ answered the admiral, ‘you have a great mind to give them leave to fight. I will not be surety to you, if they fight, for gain or loss, since God alone can know about that; but I will certainly pledge you my life and my honor that all they whom he has mentioned to you will fight, and like good men and true, for I know what they are worth from having commanded them. Only do one thing; we know well that you are half brought round and inclined rather to fighting than the contrary; make, then, your prayer to God, and entreat Him to be pleased this once to aid you and counsel you as to what you ought to do.’ Then the king lifted his eyes towards heaven, and, clasping his hands and throwing his cap upon the table, said, ‘O God, I entreat Thee that it may please Thee to this day give me counsel as to what I ought to do for the preservation of my kingdom, and that all may be to Thy honor and glory!’ Whereupon the admiral asked him, ‘Sir, what opinion occurs to you now?’ The king, after pausing a little, turned towards me, saying, with a sort of shout, ‘Let them fight! let them fight!’ ‘Well, then, there is no more to be said,’ replied the admiral; ‘if you lose, you alone will be the cause of the loss; and, if you win, in like manner; and you, all alone, will have the satisfaction of it, you alone having given the leave.’ Then the king and every one rose up, and, as for me, I tingled with joy. His Majesty began talking with the admiral about my despatch and about giving orders for the pay which was in arrears. And M. de St. Pol accosted me, saying with a laugh, ‘Rabid madman, thou wilt be cause of the greatest weal that could happen to the king, or of the greatest woe.’”
Montluc’s boldness and Francis I.‘s confidence in yielding to it were not unrewarded. The battle was delivered at Ceresole on the 14th of April, 1544; it was bravely disputed and for some time indecisive, even in the opinion of the anxious Count d’Enghien, who was for a while in an awkward predicament; but the ardor of the Gascons and the firmness of the Swiss prevailed, and the French army was victorious. Montluc was eagerly desirous of being commissioned to go and carry to the king the news of the victory which he had predicted and to which he had contributed; but another messenger had the preference; and he does not, in his Memoires, conceal his profound discontent; but he was of those whom their discontent does not dishearten, and he continued serving his king and his country with such rigorous and stubborn zeal as was destined hereafter, in the reign of Henry III., to make him Marshal of France at last. He had to suffer a disappointment more serious than that which was personal to himself; the victory of Ceresole had not the results that might have been expected. The war continued; Charles V. transferred his principal efforts therein to the north, on the frontiers of the Low Countries and France, having concluded an alliance with Henry VIII. for acting in concert and on the offensive. Champagne and Picardy were simultaneously invaded by the Germans and the English; Henry VIII. took Boulogne; Charles V. advanced as far as Chateau-Thierry and threatened Paris. Great was the consternation there; Francis I. hurried up from Fontainebleau and rode about the streets, accompanied by the Duke of Guise, and everywhere saying, “If I cannot keep you from fear, I will keep you from harm.” “My God,” he had exclaimed, as he started from Fontainebleau, “how dear Thou sellest me my kingdom!” The people recovered courage and confidence; they rose in a body; forty thousand armed militiamen defiled, it is said, before the king. The army arrived by forced marches, and took post between Paris and Chateau-Thierry.
Charles V. was not rash; he fell back to Crespy in Laonness, some few leagues from his Low Countries. Negotiations were opened; and Francis I., fearing least Henry VIII., being master of Boulogne, should come and join Charles V., ordered his negotiator, Admiral d’Annebaut, to accept the emperor’s offers, “for fear lest he should rise higher in his demands when he knew that Boulogne was in the hands of the King of England.” The demands were hard, but a little less so than those made in 1540; Charles V. yielded on some special points, being possessed beyond everything with the desire of securing Francis I.‘s co-operation in the two great contests he was maintaining, against the Turks in eastern Europe and against the Protestants in Germany. Francis I. conceded everything in respect of the European policy in order to retain his rights over Milaness and to recover the French towns on the Somme. Peace was signed at Crespy on the 18th of September, 1544; and it was considered so bad an one that the dauphin thought himself bound to protest, first of all secretly before notaries and afterwards at Fontainebleau, on the 12th of December, in the presence of three princes of the royal house. This feeling was so general that several great bodies, amongst others the Parliament of Toulouse (on the 22d of January, 1545), followed the dauphin’s example.
Francis I. was ill, saddened, discouraged, and still he thought of nothing but preparing for a fifth great campaign against Charles V. Since his glorious victory at Melegnano in the beginning of his reign, fortune had almost invariably forsaken his policy and all his enterprises, whether of war or of diplomacy; but, falling at one time a victim to the defects of his mind and character, and being at another hurried away by his better qualities and his people’s sympathy, he took no serious note of the true causes or the inevitable consequences of his reverses, and realized nothing but their outward and visible signs, whilst still persisting in the same hopeful illusions and the same ways of government. Happily for the lustre of his reign and the honor of his name, he had desires and tastes independent of the vain and reckless policy practised by him with such alternations of rashness and feebleness as were more injurious to the success of his designs than to his personal renown, which was constantly recovering itself through the brilliancy of his courage, the generous though superficial instincts of his soul, and the charm of a mind animated by a sincere though ill-regulated sympathy for all the beautiful works of mankind in literature, science, and art, and for all that does honor and gives embellishment to the life of human beings.
CHAPTER XXIX.
FRANCIS I. AND THE RENAISSANCE.
Francis I., in his life as a king and a soldier, had two rare pieces of good fortune: two great victories, Melegnano and Ceresole, stand out at the beginning and the end of his reign; and in his direst defeat, at Pavia, he was personally a hero. In all else, as regards his government, his policy was neither an able nor a successful one; for two and thirty years he was engaged in plans, attempts, wars, and negotiations; he failed in all his designs; he undertook innumerable campaigns or expeditions that came to nothing; he concluded forty treaties of war, peace, or truce, incessantly changing aim, and cause, and allies; and, for all this incoherent activity, he could not manage to conquer either the empire or Italy; he brought neither aggrandizement nor peace to France.
Outside of the political arena, in quite a different field of ideas and facts, that is, in the intellectual field, Francis I. did better and succeeded better. In this region he exhibited an instinct and a taste for the grand and the beautiful; he had a sincere love for literature, science, and art; he honored and protected, and effectually too, their works and their representatives. And therein it is that more than one sovereign and more than one age have found their purest glory to consist. Virgil, Horace, and Livy contributed quite as much as the foundation of the empire to shed lustre on the reign of Augustus. Bossuet, Pascal, and Fenelon, Corneille, Racine, Boileau, Moliere, and La Fontaine, count for quite as much as his great warriors and his able administrators in regard to the splendor of the age of Louis XIV. People are quite right to set this estimate upon the heroes of the human mind and upon their works; their portion in the history of mankind is certainly not the most difficult, but it is that which provides both those who give and those who take with the purest delights, and which is the least dear in respect of what it costs the nation.
The reign of Francis I. occupies the first half of the century (the sixteenth), which has been called the age of Renaissance. Taken absolutely, and as implying a renaissance, following upon a decay of science, literature, and art, the expression is exaggerated, and goes beyond the truth; it is not true that the five centuries which rolled by between the establishment of the Capetians and the accession of Francis I. (from 987 to 1515), were a period of intellectual barrenness and decay; the middle ages, amidst the anarchy, violence, and calamities of their social condition, had, in philosophy, literature, and art, works of their own and a glory of their own, which lacked not originality, or brilliancy, or influence over subsequent ages. There is no idea of telling their history here; we only desire to point out, with some sort of precision, their special character and their intellectual worth.
At such a period, what one would scarcely expect to find is intellectual ambition on a very extensive scale and great variety in the branches of knowledge and in the scope of ideas. And yet it is in the thirteenth century that we meet for the first time in Europe and in France with the conception and the execution of a vast repertory of different scientific and literary works produced by the brain of man, in fact with a veritable Encyclopaedia. It was a monk, a preaching friar, a simple Dominican reader (lector qualiscumque), whose life was passed, as he himself says, by the side and under the eye of the superior-general of his order, who undertook and accomplished this great labor. Vincent of Beauvais, born at Beauvais between 1184 and 1194, who died at his native place in 1264, an insatiable glutton for books (librorum helluo), say his contemporaries, collected and edited what he called Bibliotheca Mundi, Speculum majus (Library of the World, an enlarged Mirror), an immense compilation, the first edition of which, published at Strasbourg in 1473, comprises ten volumes folio, and would comprise fifty or sixty volumes octavo. The work contains three, and, according to some manuscripts, four parts, entitled Speculum naturale (Mirror of Natural Science), Speculum historiale (Mirror of Historical Science), Speculum doctrinale (Mirror of Metaphysical Science), and Speculum morale (Mirror of Moral Science). M. Daunou, in the notice he has given to it [in the xviiith volume of the Histoire litteraire de la France, begun by the Benedictines and continued by the Academie des Inscriptions et Belleslettres de l’Institut, pp. 449-519], disputes, not without reason, the authenticity of this last part. Each of these Specula contains a summary, extracted from the various writings which have reference to the subject of it, and the authors of which Vincent of Beauvais takes care to name. M. Daunou, at the end of his learned notice, has described the nature, the merit, and the interest of the work in the following terms: “The writings and documents which we have to thank Vincent of Beauvais for having preserved to us are such as pertain to veritable studies, to doctrines, to traditions, and even to errors which obtained a certain amount of credit or exercised a certain amount of influence in the course of ages. . . . Whenever it is desirable to know what were in France, about 1250, the tendency and the subjects of the most elevated studies, what sciences were cultivated, what books, whether ancient, or, for the time, modern, were or might have been read, what questions were in agitation, what doctrines were prevalent in schools, monasteries, churches, and the world, it will be to Vincent of Beauvais, above all, that recourse must be had.” There is nothing to be added to this judicious estimate; there is no intention of entering here into any sort of detail about the work of Vincent of Beauvais; only it is desirable to bring some light to bear upon the intellectual aspirations and activity of the middle ages in France previously to the new impulse which was to be communicated to them by the glorious renaissance of Greek and Roman antiquity. A scientific, historical, and philosophical encyclopaedia of the thirteenth century surely deserves to find a place in the preface to the sixteenth.
After the encyclopaedist of the middle ages come, naturally, their philosophers. They were numerous; and some of them have remained illustrious. Several of them, at the date of their lives and labors, have already been met with and remarked upon in this history, such as Gerbert of Aurillac, who became Pope Sylvester II., St. Anselm, Abelard, St. Bernard, Robert of Sorbon, founder of the Sorbonne, and St. Thomas Aquinas.
To these names, known to every enlightened man, might be added many others less familiar to the public, but belonging to men who held a high place in the philosophical contests of their times, such as John Scot Erigena, Berenger, Roscelin, William of Champeaux, Gilbert of La Poree, &c. The questions which always have taken and always will take a passionate hold of men’s minds in respect of God, the universe, and man, in respect of our origin, our nature, and our destiny, were raised and discussed, from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, if not with so much brilliancy, at any rate with as much boldness and earnest thought, as at any other period. The middle ages had, in France, their spiritualists, their materialists, their pantheists, their rationalists, their mystics, and their sceptics, not very clear or refined in their notions, but such as lacked neither profundity in their general view of the questions, nor ingenious subtilty in their argumentative process. We do not care to give in this place any exposition or estimate of their doctrines; we shall simply point out what there was original and characteristic in their fashion of philosophizing, and wherein their mental condition differed essentially from that which was engendered and propagated, in the sixteenth century, by the resuscitation of Greek and Roman antiquity.
It is the constant idea of the philosophers and theologians of that period to affirm and to demonstrate the agreement between Christian faith and reason. They consider themselves placed between two fixed points, faith in the Christian truths inculcated from the very first or formally revealed by God to man, and reason, which is the faculty given to man to enable him to recognize the truth. “Faith,” wrote Hildebert, Archbishop of Tours, in the eleventh century, “is not contrary to reason, but it is above reason. If, like the philosophers, one willeth not to believe anything but what reason comprehends, faith, in this case, hath no merit. The merit is in believing that which, without being contrary to reason, is above it. . . . Faith is certainty in respect of things which fall not under the perceptions of the body; it is below knowledge, for to believe is less than to know; and it is above opinion, for to believe is more than to imagine.” “I do not seek to understand in order to believe,” says St. Anselm; “I believe in order to understand. . . . Authority requires faith in order to prepare man for reason.” But “authority,” said St. Columban, in the sixth century, “proceeds from right reason, not at all reason from authority. Every authority whereof the decrees are not approved of by right reason appears mighty weak.” Minds so liberal in the face of authority, and at the same time attached to revealed and traditional faith, could not but be sometimes painfully perplexed. “My wounded spirit,” said Adam of the Premontre-order (le premontre), in the twelfth century, “calls to her aid that which is the source of all grace and all life. But where is it? What is it? In her trouble the spirit hath love abiding; but she knows no longer what it is she loves, what she ought to love. She addresseth herself to the stones and to the rocks, and saith to them, ‘What are ye?’ And the stones and the rocks make answer, ‘We are creatures of the same even as thou art.’ To the like question the sun, the moon, and the stars make the like answer. The spirit doth interrogate the sand of the sea, the dust of the earth, the drops of rain, the days of the years, the hours of the days, the moments of the hours, the turf of the fields, the branches of the trees, the leaves of the branches, the scales of fish, the wings of birds, the utterances of men, the voices of animals, the movements of bodies, the thoughts of minds; and these things declare, all with one consent, unto the spirit, ‘We are not that which thou demandest; search up above us, and thou wilt find our Creator!’” In the tenth century, Remigius the theologian had gone still farther: “I have resolved,” said he, “to make an investigation as to my God; for it doth not suffice me to believe in Him; I wish further to see somewhat of Him. I feel that there is somewhat beyond my spirit. If my spirit should abide within herself without rising above herself, she would see only herself; it must be above herself that my spirit will reach God.”
God, creator, lawgiver, and preserver of the universe and of man, everywhere and always present and potent, in permanent connection, nay, communication, with man, at one time by natural and at another by supernatural means, at one time by the channel of authority and at another by that of free-agency, this is the point of departure, this the fixed idea of the philosopho-theologians of the middle ages. There are great gaps, great diversities, and great inconsistencies in their doctrines; they frequently made unfair use of the subtile dialectics called scholastics (la scolastique), and they frequently assigned too much to the master’s authority (l’autorite du maitre); but Christian faith, more or less properly understood and explained, and adhesion to the facts, to the religious and moral precepts, and to the primitive and essential testimonies of Christianity, are always to be found at the bottom of their systems and their disputes. Whether they be pantheists even or sceptics, it is in an atmosphere of Christianity that they live and that their thoughts are developed.
A breath from the grand old pagan life of Greece and Rome heaved forth again and spread, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, throughout this Christian atmosphere of the middle ages. Greek and Roman antiquity, with its ideas and its works, had never been completely forgotten therein. Aristotle and Plato, Seneca, Epictetus, Boetius, and other ancients had taken their place amongst the studies and philosophical notions of that period; but their influence had been limited to professional scholars, and had remained without any social influence. In spite of the stateliness of its ceremonies and the charm of its traditions, paganism had never been, in plain truth, a religion; faith and piety had held but a paltry place in it; instead of a God, the creator and acting sovereign of the world, its gods were of human invention and human nature: their adventures and the parts they played were pleasing to the imagination, but gave no sort of satisfaction to the deep instincts and higher aspirations of the soul. Christianity is God hovering over, watching over, and descending to earth; paganism is earth, its children and the stories of their lives transported, with their vices rather than their virtues, to heaven. Olympus was peopled with nothing but personages belonging to popular tradition, mythology, or allegory; and in the fifteenth century this mythology was in full course of decay; all that it might have commanded of credence or influence had vanished; there remained of it nothing but barren memories or a contemptuous incredulity. Speaking from the religious point of view, the Renaissance was but a resurrection of paganism dying out before the presence of the Christian world, which was troubled and perplexed, but full of life and futurity.
The religious question thus set on one side, the Renaissance was a great and happy thing, which restored to light and honor the works and glories of the Greek and Roman communities, those two communities which, in history anterior to the sixteenth century, had reached the greatest prosperity and splendor under a civil regimen, in the midst of a more or less stormy but real and strong political freedom, and had attained by the mere development of human thought and human energy the highest degree of civilization yet known in Europe, and, one would be inclined to say, in the world. The memorials and monuments of this civilization, which were suddenly removed, at the fall of the Greek empire, to Italy first and then from Italy to France, and throughout the whole of Western Europe, impressed with just admiration people as well as princes, and inspired them with the desire of marching forward in their turn in this attractive and glorious career. This kind of progress, arrived at by the road of imitation, often costs dear in the interruption it causes to the natural course of the peculiar and original genius of nations; but this is the price at which the destinies of diverse communities get linked together and interpenetrate, and the general progress of humanity is accomplished.
It was not only in religious questions and by their philosopho- theologians that the middle ages, before the Renaissance, displayed their activity and fecundity. In literature and in art, in history and in poesy, in architecture and in sculpture, they had produced great and beautiful works, which were quite worthy of surviving, and have, in fact, survived the period of their creation. Here, too, the Renaissance of Greek and Roman antiquity came in, and altered the originality of the earliest productions of the middle ages, and gave to literature and to art in France a new direction. It will be made a point here to note with some exactness the peculiar and native character of French literature at its origin. It is a far cry from the middle ages to the time of Louis XIV.; but the splendors of the most lovely days do not efface the charm belonging to the glimmerings of dawn.
The first amongst the literary creations of the middle ages is that of the French language itself. When we pass from the ninth to the thirteenth century, from the oath of Charles the Bald and Louis the Germanic at Strasbourg, in 842, to the account of the conquest of Constantinople in 1203, given by Geoffrey de Villehardouin, seneschal of Champagne, what a space has been traversed, what progress accomplished in the language of France! It was, at first, nothing but a coarse and irregular mixture of German and Latin, the former still in a barbarous and the latter already in a corrupted state; and amidst this mixture appear some fragments of the Celtic idioms of Gaul, without any literary tradition to regulate this mass of incoherence and confusion. As for following the development, regulation, and transformation of the French national language during these three centuries, and marking how it issued from this formless and vulgar chaos, there are not facts and documents enough for our guidance throughout that long travail; but when the thirteenth century begins, when Villehardouin tells the tale of the crusade, which put, for seventy years, Constantinople and the Greek empire of the East in the hands of the Latin and German warriors of the West, the French language, though still rude and somewhat fluctuating, appears already rich, varied, and capable of depicting with fidelity and energy events, ideas, characters, and the passions of men. There we have French prose and French poesy in their simple and lusty youth; the Conquest of Constantinople by Geoffrey de Villehardouin, and the Song of Roland by the unknown poet who collected and put together in the form of an epopee the most heroic amongst the legends of the reign of Charlemagne, are the first great and beautiful monuments of French literature in the middle ages.
The words are French literature; and of that alone is there any intention of speaking here. The middle ages had, up to the sixteenth century, a Latin literature; philosophers, theologians, and chroniclers all wrote in Latin. The philosophers and theologians have already been spoken of. Amongst the chroniclers some deserve the name of historians; not only do they alone make us acquainted with the history of their times, but they sometimes narrate it with real talent as observers and writers. Gregory of Tours, Eginhard, William of Tyre, Guibert of Nogent, William of Jumieges, and Orderic Vital are worthy of every attention from those whose hearts are set upon thoroughly understanding the history of the periods and the provinces of which those laborers of the middle ages have, in Latin, preserved the memorials. The chief of those works have been gathered together and translated in a special collection bearing the name of Guizot. But it is with the reign of Francis I. that, to bid a truce to further interruption, we commence the era of the real grand literature of France, that which has constituted and still constitutes the pride and the noble pleasure of the French public. Of that alone we would here denote the master-works and the glorious names, putting them carefully at the proper dates and places in the general course of events; a condition necessary for making them properly understood and their influence properly appreciated. As to the reign of Francis I., however, it must be premised as follows: several of the most illustrious of French writers, in poesy and prose, Ronsard, Montaigne, Bodin, and Stephen Pasquier, were born during that king’s lifetime and during the first half of the sixteenth century; but it is to the second half of that century and to the first of the seventeenth that they belong by the glory of their works and of their influence; their place in history will be assigned to them when we enter upon the precise epoch at which they performed and shone. We will at present confine ourselves to the great survivors of the middle ages, whether in prose or poesy, and to the men who shed lustre on the reign of Francis I. himself, and led French literature in its first steps along the road on which it entered at that period.
The middle ages bequeathed to French literature four prose-writers whom we cannot hesitate to call great historians: Villehardouin, Joinville, Froissart, and Commynes. Geoffrey de Villehardouin, after having taken part, as negotiator and soldier, in the crusade which terminated in the capture of Constantinople, and having settled in Thessaly, at Messinopolis, as holder of considerable fiefs, with the title of Marshal of Romania (Roumelia), employed his leisure in writing a history of this great exploit. He wrote with a dignified simplicity, epic and at the same time practical, speaking but little of himself, narrating facts with the precision of one who took part in them, and yet without useless detail or personal vanity, finding pleasure in doing justice to his comrades, amongst others the veteran Doge of Venice, Henry Dandolo, and sometimes intermingling with his story the reflections of a judicious and sincere Christian, without any pious fanaticism and without ostentation. Joinville wrote his History of St. Louis at the request of Joan of Navarre, wife of Philip the Handsome, and five years after that queen’s death; his manuscripts have it thus: “The things which I personally saw and heard were written in the year of grace 1309, in the month of October.” He was then eighty-five, and he dedicated his book to Louis le Hutin (the quarreller), great-grandson of St. Louis. More lively and more familiar in style than Villehardouin, he combines the vivid and natural impressions of youth with an old man’s fond clinging to the memories of his long life; he likes to bring himself upon the scene, especially as regards his relations towards and his conversations with St. Louis, for whom he has a tender regard and admiration, at the same time that he maintains towards him a considerable independence of ideas, conduct, and language; he is a valiant and faithful knight, who forms a very sensible opinion as to the crusade in which he takes part, and who will not enter upon it a second time even to follow the king to whom he is devoted, but whose pious fanaticism and warlike illusions he does not share; his narrative is at one and the same time very full of himself without any pretension, and very spirited without any show of passion, and fraught with a graceful and easy carelessness which charms the reader and all the while inspires confidence in the author’s veracity. Froissart is an insatiable Fry, who revels in all the sights of his day, events and personages, wars and galas, adventures of heroism or gallantry, and who is incessantly gadding about through all the dominions and all the courts of Europe, everywhere seeking his own special amusement in the satisfaction of his curiosity. He has himself given an account of the manner in which he collected and wrote his Chronicles. “Ponder,” says he, “amongst yourselves, such of ye as read me, or will read me, or have read me, or shall hear me read, how I managed to get and put together so many facts whereof I treat in so many parts. And, for to inform you of the truth, I began young, at the age of twenty years, and I came into the world amidst the deeds and adventures, and I did always take great delight in them, more than in aught else. And God gave me such grace that I was well with all parties, and with the households of the kings, and, especially, the household of King Edward of England, and the noble queen his wife, Madame Philippa of Hainault, unto whom, in my youth, I was clerk, and I did minister unto her with beautiful ditties and amorous treatises. And for love of the service of the noble and valiant dame with whom I was, all the other lords, kings, dukes, counts, barons, and knights, of whatsoever nation they might be, did love me and hear me and see me gladly, and brought me great profit. . . . Thus, wherever I went, I made inquiry of the old knights and squires who had been at deeds of arms, and who were specially fit to speak thereof, and also of certain heralds in good credit for to verify and justify all matters. Thus have I gotten together this lofty and noble history.” This picture of Froissart and his work by his own hand would be incomplete without the addition of a characteristic anecdote. In one of his excursions in search of adventures and stories, “he fell in at Pamiers with a good knight, Messire Espaing of Lyons, who had been in all the wars of the time, and managed the great affairs of princes. They set out to travel together, Messire Espaing telling his comrade what he knew about the history of the places whereby they passed, and Froissart taking great care to ride close to him for to hear his words. Every evening they halted at hostels where they drained flagons full of white wine as good as the good canon had ever drunk in his life; then, after drinking, so soon as the knight was weary of relating, the chronicler wrote down just the substance of his stories, so as to better leave remembrance of them for time to come, as there is no way of retaining so certain as writing down.”
There is no occasion to add to these quotations; they give the most correct idea that can be formed of Froissart’s chronicles and their literary merit as well as their historical value.
Philip de Commynes is quite another affair, and far more than Froissart, nay, than Joinville and Villehardouin. He is a politician proficient in the understanding and handling of the great concerns and great personages of his time. He served Charles the Rash and Louis XI.; and, after so trying an experience, he depicted them and passed judgment upon them with imperturbable clearsightedness and freedom of thought. With the recital of events, as well as the portrayal of character, he mingles here and there the reflections, expressed in precise, firm, and temperate language, of a profound moralist, who sets before himself no other aim but that of giving his thoughts full utterance. He has already been spoken of in the second volume of this History, in connection with his leaving the Duke of Burgundy’s service for that of Louis XI., and with his remarks upon the virtues as well as the vices of that able but unprincipled despot. We will not go again over that ground. As a king’s adviser, Commynes would have been as much in place at the side of Louis XIV. as at that of Louis XI.; as a writer, he, in the fifteenth century, often made history and politics speak a language which the seventeenth century would not have disowned.
Let us pass from the prose-writers of the middle ages to their poets.
The grand name of poesy is here given only to poetical works which have lived beyond their cradles and have taken rank amongst the treasures of the national literature. Thanks to sociability of manners, vivacity of intellect, and fickleness of taste, light and ephemeral poesy has obtained more success and occupied more space in France than in any other country; but there are successes which give no title to enter into a people’s history; quality and endurance of renown are even more requisite in literature than in politics; and many a man whose verses have been very much relished and cried up in his lifetime has neither deserved nor kept in his native land the beautiful name of poet. Setting aside, of course, the language and poems of the troubadours of Southern France, we shall find, in French poesy previous to the Renaissance, only three works which, through their popularity in their own time, still live in the memory of the erudite, and one only which, by its grand character and its superior beauties, attests the poetical genius of the middle ages and can claim national rights in the history of France. The Romance of the Rose in the erotic and allegorical style, the Romances of Renart in the satirical, and the Farce of Patelin, a happy attempt in the line of comedy, though but little known nowadays to the public, are still and will remain subjects of literary study. The Song of Roland alone is an admirable sample of epic poesy in France, and the only monument of poetical genius in the middle ages which can have a claim to national appreciation in the nineteenth century. It is almost a pity not to reproduce here the whole of that glorious epopee, as impressive from the forcible and pathetic simplicity of its sentiments and language as from the grandeur of the scene and the pious heroism of the actors in it. It is impossible, however, to resist the pleasure of quoting some fragments of it. The best version to refer to is that which has been given almost word for word, from the original text, by M. Leon Gaultier, in his beautiful work, so justly crowned by the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres, on Lee Epopees Francaises.
In 778 Charlemagne was returning from a great expedition in Spain, during which, after having taken Pampeluna, he had failed before Saragossa, and had not considered himself called upon to prolong his struggle with the Arab Mussulmans. He with the main body of his army had crossed the Pyrenees, leaving as rearguard a small division under his nephew Roland, prefect of the Marches of Brittany, Anselm, count of the palace, Oliver, Roland’s comrade, Archbishop Turpin, and several other warriors of renown. When they arrived at the little valley of Roncesvalles, between the defiles of Sizer and Val Carlos, this rearguard was unexpectedly attacked by thousands of Basque mountaineers, who were joined by thousands of Arabs eager to massacre and plunder the Christians and Franks, who, indeed, perished to a man in this ambuscade. “The news of this disaster,” says Eginhard, in his Annales, “obscured the glory of the successes the king had but lately obtained in Spain.” This fact, with large amplifications, became the source of popular legends and songs, which, probably towards the end of the eleventh century, became embodied in the Song of Roland, attributed, in two manuscripts, but without any certainty, to a certain Thuroulde (Turold), Abbot of Malmesbury and Peterborough under William the Conqueror. It must suffice to reproduce here only the most beautiful and most characteristic passages of this little national epopee, a truly Homeric picture of the quasi-barbarous times and manners of knightly Christendom.
The eighty-second strophe of the poem commences thus:
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“‘Of Paynim yonder, saw I more,’ Quoth Oliver, ‘than e’er before The eye of man hath seen An hundred thousand are a-field, With helm and hauberk, lance and shield, And pikes and pike-heads gleaming bright; Prepare for fight, a fiercer fight Than ever yet hath been. Blow Olifant, friend Roland, blow, That Charles and all his host may know.’ “To whom Sir Roland in reply: ‘A madman, then, good faith, were I For I should lose all countenance Throughout the pleasant land of France Nay, rather, facing great and small, I’ll smite amain with Durandal, Until the blade, with blood that’s spilt, Is crimson to the golden hilt.’ ‘Friend Roland, sound a single blast Ere Charles beyond its reach hath passed.’ ‘Forbid it, God,’ cried Roland, then, ‘It should be said by living men That I a single blast did blow For succor from a Paynim foe!’ When Roland sees what moil will be, Lion nor pard so fierce as he. “Archbishop Turpin looks around, Then forward pricks to higher ground He halts, he speaks; the French give ear: ‘Lords barons, Charles hath left us here, And for our king we’re bound to die; For him maintain the Christian cause; Behold! how near the battle draws; Behold! where yonder Paynim lie; Confess to God; and I will give Absolvement, that your souls may live. Pure martyrs are ye if ye fall; And Paradise awaits ye all.’ “Down leap the French, on bended knee They fall for benison; and he Doth lay on all a penance light— To strike their hardest in the fight. “The French have risen to their feet; They leap upon their chargers fleet; Into the defiles rides their chief On his good war-horse, Veillantif. O, in his harness he looks grand! On, on he goes with lance on high Its tip is pointed to the sky; It bears a snow-white pennon, and Its golden fringes sweep his hand. He scans the foe with haughty glance, With meek and sweet the men of France ‘Lords barons, gently, gently ride; Yon Paynim rush to suicide; No king of France could ever boast The wealth we’ll strip from yonder host.’ And as the words die off his lips, Christian and Paynim are at grips. “A wondrous fight! The men of France Thrust fiercely with the burnished lance! O, ‘twas a sight of grief and dread, So many wounded, bleeding, dead! On back or face together they, One on another falling, lay! The Paynim cannot choose but yield, And, willy-nilly, quit the field The eager French are on their track, With lances pointed at the back. . . . “Then pricketh forth a Saracen, Abyme by name, but worst of men No faith hath he in God the One, No faith in Holy Mary’s Son; As black as melted pitch is he, And not for all Galicia’s gold Could he be bribed his hand to hold From murder and from treachery; No merry laugh, no sportive mien In him was ever heard or seen. . . . The good archbishop could not brook On pagan such as he to look; He saw and fain would strike him dead, And calmly to himself he said, ‘Yon pagan, as it seems to me, A grievous heretic must be; ‘There best to slay him, though I died; Cowards I never could abide.’ “He mounts his steed, won, so they tell, From Denmark’s monarch, hight Grosselle; He slew the king and took the steed The beast is light and built for speed; His hoofs are neat, his legs are clean, His thigh is short, his flanks are lean, His rump is large, his back full height, His mane is yellow, his tail is white; With little ears and tawny head, No steed like him was ever bred. The good archbishop spurs a-field, And smites Abyme upon the shield, His emir’s shield, so thickly sown With many a gem and precious stone, Amethyst and topaz, crystals bright, And red carbuncles flashing light: The shield is shivered by the blow; No longer worth a doit, I trow; Stark dead the emir lies below. ‘Ha! bravely struck!’ the Frenchmen yell: ‘Our bishop guards the Cross right well!’ “To Oliver Sir Roland cried, ‘Sir comrade, can it be denied Our bishop is a gallant knight? None better ever saw the light! How he doth strike With lance and pike!’ Quoth Oliver, ‘Then in the fight Haste we to aid him with our might!’ And so the battle is renewed: The blows are hard, the melley rude; The Christians suffer sore Four times they charge and all is well, But at the fifth—dread tale to tell— The knights of France are doomed to fall,— All, all her knights; for of them all God spareth but threescore. But O, their lives they dearly sell! Sir Roland marks what loss is there, And turns him to Sir Oliver ‘Dear comrade, whom pray God to bless, In God’s own name see what distress— Such heaps of vassals lying low— Fair France hath suffered at a blow Well may we weep for her, who’s left A widow, of such lords bereft! And why, O, why art thou not near, Our king, our friend, to aid us here? Say, Oliver, how might we bring Our mournful tidings to the king?’ Quoth Oliver, ‘I know not, I To fly were shame; far better die.’ Quoth Roland, ‘I my horn will blow, That Charles may hear and Charles may know; And, in the defiles, from their track The French, I swear, will hasten back.’ Quoth Oliver, ‘'Twere grievous shame; ‘Twould bring a blush to all thy name When I said thus thou scornedst me, And now I will not counsel thee. And shouldst thou blow, ‘twere no great blast; Already blood is gushing fast From both thine arms.’ ‘That well may be,’ Quoth he, ‘I struck so lustily! The battle is too strong: I’ll blow Mine Olifant, that Charles may know.’ Quoth Oliver, ‘Had Charles been here, This battle had not cost so dear; But as for yon poor souls, I wis, No blame can rest with them for this.’ ‘Why bear me spite?’ Sir Roland said. ‘The fault,’ said he, ‘lies on thy head. And mark my words; this day will see The end of our good company; We twain shall part—not as we met— Full sadly ere yon sun bath set.’ The good archbishop hears the stir, And thither pricks with golden spur; And thus he chides the wrangling lords ‘Roland, and you, Sir Oliver, Why strive ye with such bitter words Horns cannot save you; that is past; But still ‘twere best to sound a blast; Let the king come: he’ll strike a blow For vengeance, lest the Paynim foe Back to their homes in triumph go.’ “With pain and dolor, groan and pant, Count Roland sounds his Olifant: The crimson stream shoots from his lips; The blood from bursten temple drips; But far, O, far the echoes ring, And, in the defiles, reach the king; Reach Naymes, and the French array: ‘Tis Roland’s horn,’ the king doth say; ‘He only sounds when brought to bay.’ How huge the rocks! How dark and steep! The streams are swift! The valleys deep! Out blare the trumpets, one and all, As Charles responds to Roland’s call. Round wheels the king, with choler mad, The Frenchmen follow grim and sad; Not one but prays for Roland’s life, Till they have joined him in the strife. But ah! what prayer can alter fate? The time is past; too late! too late! As Roland scans both plain and height, And sees how many Frenchmen lie Stretched in their mortal agony, He mourns them like a noble knight: ‘Comrades, God give ye grace to-day, And grant ye Paradise, I pray! No lieges ever fought as they. What a fair land, O France, art thou! But ah! forlorn and widowed now! O Oliver, at least to thee, My brother, I must faithful be Back, comrade mine, back let us go, And charge once more the Paynim foe!’ “When Roland spies the cursed race, More black than ink, without a trace, Save teeth, of whiteness in the face, ‘Full certified,’ quoth he, ‘am I, That we this very day shall die. Strike, Frenchmen, strike; that’s all my mind!’ ‘A curse on him who lags behind!’ Quoth gallant Oliver; and so Down dash the Frenchmen on the foe. . . . Sir Oliver with failing breath, Knowing his wound is to the death, Doth call to him his friend, his peer, His Roland: ‘Comrade, come thou here; To be apart what pain it were!’ When Roland marks his friend’s distress, His face all pale and colorless, ‘My God!’ quoth he, ‘what’s now to do? O my sweet France, what dole for you, Widowed of all your warriors true! You needs must perish!’ At such plaint, Upon his steed he falls a-faint. “See Roland riding in a swound: And Oliver with mortal wound; With loss of blood so dazed is he He neither near nor far can see What manner of man a man may be: And, meeting with Sir Roland so, He dealeth him a fearful blow That splits the gilded helm in two Down to the very nasal, though, By luck, the skull it cleaves not through. With blank amaze doth Roland gaze, And gently, very gently, says, ‘Dear comrade, smit’st thou with intent? Methinks no challenge hath been sent I’m Roland, who doth love thee so.’ Quoth Oliver, ‘Thy voice I know, But see thee not; God save thee, friend: I struck thee; prithee pardon me. No hurt have I; and there’s an end.’ Quoth Roland, ‘And I pardon thee ‘Fore man and God right willingly.’ They bow the head, each to his brother, And so, in love, leave one another.” |
(Oliver dies: Roland and Archbishop Turpin continue the fight.)
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“Then Roland takes his horn once more; His blast is feebler than before, But still it reaches the emperor He hears it, and he halts to shout, ‘Let clarions, one and all, ring out!’ Then sixty thousand clarions ring, And rocks and dales set echoing. And they, too, hear—the pagan pack; They force the rising laughter back; ‘Charles, Charles,’ they cry, ‘is on our track!’ They fly; and Roland stands alone— Alone, afoot; his steed is gone— Brave Veillantif is gone, and so, He, willy-nilly, afoot must go. Archbishop Turpin needs his aid: The golden helm is soon unlaced, The light, white hauberk soon unbraced; And gently, gently down he laid On the green turf the bishop’s head; And then beseechingly he said,— “‘Ah! noble sir, your leave I crave The men we love, our comrades brave, All, all are dead; they must not lie Here thus neglected; wherefore I Will seek for them, each where he lies, And lay them out before your eyes.’ ‘Go,’ said the bishop, ‘and speed be thine Thank God! the field is thine and mine.’ “Sir Roland searched the plain, and found His comrade’s body on the ground; Unto his heart he strained it tight, And bore it off, as best he might. Upon a shield he lays his friend Beside the rest, and, for an end, The bishop gives them, all and one, Absolvement and a benison. As Roland marks them lying there, His peers all dead—and Oliver, His mighty grief he cannot stay, And, willy-nilly, swoons away. “The bishop feeleth grief profound To see Sir Roland in a swound. Through Roncesvalles, well he knows, A stream of running water flows, And fain would he a journey make To fetch thereof for Roland’s sake, He totters forth; he makes essay; But all! his feeble limbs give way; Breaks his great heart; he falls and lies, Face downward, in death’s agonies! So Charles’s soldier-priest is dead He who with mighty lance and sword And preacher’s craft incessant warred Against the scorners of the Lord: God’s benediction on his head! Count Roland laid him to his rest Between his shoulders, on his breast, He crossed the hands so fine and fair, And, as his country’s customs were, He made oration o’er him there ‘Ah! noble knight, of noble race, I do commend thee to God’s grace Sure never man of mortal birth Served Him so heartily on earth. Thou hadst no peer in any clime To stoutly guard the Christian cause And turn bad men to Christian laws, Since erst the great Apostles’ time. Now rest thy soul from dolor free, And Paradise be oped to thee!’” |
(A last encounter takes place: a Saracen left wounded on the battle-field, seeing Roland in a swoon, gets up, and approaches him, saying, “Vanquished, he is vanquished, the nephew of Charles! There is his sword, which I will carry off to Arabia!”)
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“And as he makes to draw the steel, A something doth Sir Roland feel; He opes his eyes, says nought but this, ‘Thou art not one of us, I wis,’ Raises the horn he would not quit, And cracks the pagan’s skull with it. . . And then the touch of death that steals Down, down from head to heart he feels Under yon pine he hastes away On the green turf his head to lay Placing beneath him horn and sword, He turns towards the Paynim horde, And, there, beneath the pine, he sees A vision of old memories A thought of realms he helped to win, Of his sweet France, of kith and kin, And Charles, his lord, who nurtured him. He sighs, and tears his eyes bedim. Then, not unmindful of his case, Once more he sues to God for grace ‘O Thou, true Father of us all, Who hatest lies, who erst did call The buried Lazarus from the grave, And Daniel from the lions save, From all the perils I deserve For sinful life my soul preserve!’ Then to his God outstretcheth he The glove from his right hand; and, see! St. Gabriel taketh it instantly. God sends a cherub-angel bright, And Michael, Saint of Peril hight; And Gabriel comes; up, up they rise, And bear the Count to Paradise.” |
It is useless to carry these quotations any further; they are sufficient to give an idea of the grand character of the poem in which so many traits of really touching affection and so many bursts of patriotic devotion and pious resignation are mingled with the merest brute courage. Such, in its chief works, philosophical, historical, and poetical, was the literature which the middle ages bequeathed to the reign of Francis I. In history only, and in spite of the new character assumed afterwards by the French language, this literature has had the honor of preserving its nationality and its glory. Villehardouin, Joinville, Froissart, and Commynes have remained great writers. In philosophy and in poesy a profound revolution was approaching; the religious reform and the fine literary genius as well as the grand French language of the seventeenth century were preparing to rise above the intellectual horizon. But between the moment when such advances dawn and that when they burst forth there is nearly always a period of uncertain and unfruitful transition: and such was the first half of the sixteenth century, that is to say, the actual reign of Francis I.; it is often called the reign of the Renaissance, which certainly originated in his reign, but it did not grow and make any display until after him; the religious, philosophical, and poetical revolution, Calvin, Montaigne, and Ronsard, born in the earlier half of the seventeenth century, did not do anything that exercised any power until the later. One single poet, a third-rate one, Clement Marot, attained lustre under Francis I. Rabelais is the only great prose writer who belongs strictly to that period. The scholars, the learned critics of what had been left by antiquity in general and by Greek and Roman antiquity in particular, Bude (Budaeus), J. C. Scaliger; Muretus, Danes (Danesius), Arnyot, Ramus (Peter la Ramee), Robert Estienne (Stephanus), Vatable (Watebled), Cujas, and Turnebius make up the tale of literature specially belonging to and originating in the reign of Francis I., just as the foundation of the College Royal, which became the College de France, is his chief personal claim to renown in the service of science and letters.
Let us return to the poets of the actual reign of Francis I. The first we encounter speaks thus of himself:—
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“I am not rich; that, certes, I confess; But, natheless, well born and nobly bred; I’m read by both the people and noblesse, Throughout the world: ‘That’s Clement,’ it is said. Men live their span; but I shall ne’er be dead. And thou—thou hast thy meadow, well, and spring, Wood, field, and castle—all that wealth can bring. There’s just that difference ‘twixt thee and me. But what I am thou couldst not be: the thing Thou art, why, anybody else might be.” |
Now who was this who, with perfect confidence, indulged in such proud language? Was it a Homer, a Dante, a Corneille, one of those great poetical geniuses whose works can move a whole people, are addressed to all the world, and “will live forever”? No; it was a poet of the court and of the fashionable world of Paris, of Blois, and of Amboise, in the sixteenth century, a groom-of-the-chamber to Marguerite de Valois, and one of Francis I.‘s favorites, who had written elegies, eclogues, epistles, complaints, roundelays, and epigrams on the incidents and for his masters and mistresses of the hour; France owed to him none of those great poetical works consecrated to description of the grand destinies and grand passions of man, and to the future as well as to the writer’s own time.
Clemont Marot, the son of a petty burgess of Cahors, named John Marot, himself a poet in a small way, who had lived some time at the court of Louis XII., under the patronage of Queen Anne of Bretagne, had a right to style himself, “well born and nobly bred;” many of the petty burgesses of Cahors were of noble origin, and derived therefrom certain privileges; John Marot, by a frugal and regular life, had acquired and left to his son two estates in the neighborhood of Cahors, where, no doubt, Clement resided but little, for he lived almost constantly at the court, or wandering about Europe, in every place where at one time the fortunes of the king his protector and at another the storm of the nascent religious reform left him stranded willy-nilly. He was present in 1525 at the battle of Pavia, where he was wounded and taken prisoner with his king, but soon released, since the Imperialists let go on easy terms gentlemen of whom it was impossible to make a rich booty. From that time we do not meet any more with Clement Marot in war or politics; to Marguerite de Valois, to adventures of gallantry, and to success in his mundane line of poesy his life was thenceforth devoted. The scandal of history has often been directed against his relations with his royal patroness; but there seems to be no real foundation for such a suspicion; the manners of the sixteenth century admitted of intimacies in language, and sometimes even of familiarities in procedure, contrasting strangely with demonstrations of the greatest respect, nay, humility. Clement Marot was the king of poesy and set the fashion of wit in his time; Marguerite had a generous and a lively sympathy with wit, talent, success, renown; the princess and the poet were mutually pleased with and flattered one another; and the liberties allowed to sympathy and flattery were great at that time, but far less significant than they would be in our day.
What were the cause, the degree, and the real value of this success and this renown of which Clement Marot made so much parade, and for which his contemporaries gave him credit? What change, what progress effected by him, during his lifetime, in French literature and the French language won for him the place he obtained and still holds in the opinion of the learned?
A poet who no more than Clement Marot produced any great poetical work, and was very different from him in their small way, Francis Villon, in fact, preceded him by about three quarters of a century. The most distinguished amongst the literary critics of our time have discussed the question as to which of the two, Villon or Marot, should be regarded as the last poet of the middle ages and the first of modern France. M. Sainte-Beuve, without attempting to precisely solve that little problem, has distinguished and characterized the two poets with so much of truth and tact that there can be no hesitation about borrowing his words: “Was Villon,” is the question he puts to himself, “an originator? Did he create a style of poesy? Had he any idea of a literary reaction, as we should say nowadays? What is quite certain is, that he possessed original talent; that amidst all the execrable tricks wherein he delighted and wherein he was a master, he possessed the sacred spark. . . . A licentious scamp of a student, bred at some shop in the Cite or the Place Maubert, he has a tone which, at least as much as that of Regnier, has a savor of the places the author frequented. The beauties whom he celebrates—and I blush for him—are none else than la blanche Savetiere (the fair cobbleress), or la gente Saul cissiere, du coin (the pretty Sausage girl at the corner). But he has invented for some of those natural regrets which incessantly recur in respect of vanished beauty and the flight of years a form of expression, truthful, charming, and airy, which goes on singing forever in the heart and ear of whosoever has once heard it. He has flashes, nothing more than flashes, of melancholy. . . . It is in reading the verses of Clement Marot that we have, for the first time as it seems to me, a very clear and distinct feeling of having got out from the circumbendibus of the old language, from the Gallic tangle. We are now in France, in the land and amidst the language of France, in the region of genuine French wit, no longer that of the boor, or of the student, or of the burgess, but of the court and good society. Good society, in poesy, was born with Marot, with Francis I., and his sister Marguerite, with the Renaissance: much will still have to be done to bring it to perfection, but it exists and will never cease again. . . . Marot, a poet of wits rather than of genius or of great talent, but full of grace and breeding, who has no passion, but is not devoid of sensibility, has a way of his own of telling and saying things; he has a turn of his own; he is, in a word, the agreeable man, the gentleman-like man, who is bound to be pleasant and amusing, and who discharges his duty with an easy air and unexceptionable gallantry.”
There we have exactly the new character which Marot, coming between Villon and Ronsard, gave in the sixteenth century to French poesy. We may be more exacting than M. Sainte-Beuve; we may regret that Marot, whilst rescuing it from the streets, confined it too much to the court; the natural and national range of poesy is higher and more extensive than that; the Hundred Years’ War and Joan of Arc had higher claims. But it is something to have delivered poesy from coarse vulgarity, and introduced refinement into it. Clement Marot rendered to the French language, then in labor of progression, and, one might say, of formation, eminent service: he gave it a naturalness, a clearness, an easy swing, and, for the most part, a correctness which it had hitherto lacked. It was reserved for other writers, in verse and prose, to give it boldness, the richness that comes of precision, elevation, and grandeur.
In 1534, amidst the first violent tempest of reform in France, Clement Marot, accused of heresy, prudently withdrew and went to seek an asylum at Ferrara, under the protection of the duchess, Renee of France, daughter of Louis XII. He there met Calvin, who already held a high position amongst the Reformers, and who was then engaged on a translation of the Psalms in verse. The reformer talked to the poet about this grand Hebrew poesy, which, according to M. Villemain’s impression, “has defrayed in sublime coin the demands of human imagination.” Marot, on returning to France, found the College Royal recently instituted there, and the learned Vatable [Francis Watebled, born at Gamaches, in Picardy, died at Paris in 1547] teaching Hebrew with a great attendance of pupils and of the curious. The professor engaged the poet to translate the Psalms, he himself expounding them to him word by word. Marot translated thirty of them, and dedicated them to Francis I., who not only accepted the dedication, but recommended the work and the author to Charles V., who was at that time making a friendly passage through France on his way to put down the insurrection at Ghent. “Charles V. accepted the said translation graciously” [as appears by a letter in 1559 to Catherine de’ Medici from Villemadon, one of Marguerite of Navarre’s confidential servants], “commended it both by words and by a present of two hundred doubloons, which he made to Marot, thus giving him courage to translate the rest of the Psalms, and praying him to send him as soon as possible the Psalm Confitemini Domino, quoniam bonus [Trust in the Lord, for He is good], so fond was he of it.” Singular fellow-feeling between Charles V. and his great adversary Luther, who said of that same psalm, “It is my friend; it has saved me in many a strait from which emperor, kings, sages, nor saints could have delivered me!” Clement Marot, thus aided and encouraged in this work which gave pleasure to Francis I. and Charles V., and must have been still more interesting to Calvin and Luther, prosecuted his work and published in 1541 the first thirty psalms; three years afterwards, in 1543, he added twenty others, and dedicated the collection “to the ladies of France,” in an epistle wherein the following verses occur:
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“Happy the man whose favored ear In golden days to come shall hear The ploughman, as he tills the ground, The tarter, as he drives his round, The shopman, as his task he plies, With psalms or sacred melodies Whiling the hours of toil away! O, happy he who hears the lay Of shepherd and of shepherdess, As in the woods they sing and bless, And make the rocks and pools proclaim With them their great Creator’s name! O, can ye brook that God invite Them before you to such delight? Begin, ladies, begin! . . .” |
A century after Marot’s time, in 1649, a pious and learned Catholic, Godeau, Bishop of Grasse and member of the nascent French Academy, was in his turn translating the Psalms, and rendered full justice to the labors of the poet, his predecessor, and to the piety of the Reformers, in the following terms “Those whose separation from the church we deplore have rendered the version they make use of famous by the pleasing airs that learned musicians set them to when they were composed. To know them by heart is, amongst them, a sign of the communion to which they belong, and in the towns in which they are most numerous the airs may be heard coming from the mouths of artisans, and in the country from those of tillers.”
In 1555, eight years after the death of Francis I., Estienne Pasquier wrote to Ronsard, “In good faith, there was never seen in France such a glut of poets. I fear that in the long run people will weary of them. But it is a vice peculiar to us that as soon as we see anything succeeding prosperously for any one, everybody wants to join in.” Estienne Pasquier’s fear was much better grounded after the death of Francis I., and when Ronsard had become the head of the poet-world, than it would have been in the first half of the sixteenth century. During the reign of Francis I. and after the date of Clement Marot, there is no poet of any celebrity to speak of, unless we except Francis I. himself and his sister Marguerite; and it is only in compliment to royalty’s name that they need be spoken of. They, both of them, had evidently a mania for versifying, even in their most confidential communications, for many of their letters to one another, those during the captivity of Francis I. at Madrid amongst the rest, are written in verse; but their verses are devoid of poesy; they are prose, often long-winded and frigid, and sometimes painfully labored. There is, however, a distinction to be made between the two correspondents. In the letters and verses of Marguerite there is seen gleaming forth here and there a sentiment of truth and tenderness, a free and graceful play of fancy. We have three collections of her writings: 1. her Heptameron, ou les Sept Journees de la Reine de Navarre, a collection of sixty-eight tales more or less gallant, published for the first time in 1558, without any author’s name; 2. her OEuvres poetiques, which appeared at Lyons in 1547 and 1548, in consequence of her being alive, under the title of Les Marguerites de la Marguerite des Princesses (the Pearls of the Pearl of Princesses), and of which one of her grooms of the chamber was editor; in addition to which there is a volume of Poesies inedites, collected by order of Marguerite herself, but written by the hand of her secretary John Frotte, and preserved at Paris amongst the manuscripts of the Bibliotheque nationale; 3. the Collection of her Letters, published in 1841, by M. F. Genin. This last collection is, morally as well as historically, the most interesting of the three. As for Francis I. himself, there is little, if anything, known of his posies beyond those which have been inserted in the Documents relatifs a sa Captivite a Madrid, published in 1847 by M. Champollion-Figeac; some have an historical value, either as regards public events or Francis I.‘s relations towards his mother, his sister, and his mistresses; the most important is a long account of his campaign, in 1525, in Italy, and of the battle of Pavia; but the king’s verses have even less poetical merit than his sister’s.
Francis I.‘s good will did more for learned and classical literature than for poesy. Attention has already been drawn to the names of the principal masters in the great learned and critical school which devoted itself, in this reign, to the historical, chronological, philological, biographical, and literary study of Greek and Roman antiquity, both Pagan and Christian. It is to the labors of this school and to their results that the word Renaissance is justly applied, and that the honor is especially to be referred of the great intellectual progress made in the sixteenth century. Francis I. contributed to this progress, first by the intelligent sympathy he testified towards learned men of letters, and afterwards by the foundation of the College Royal, an establishment of a special, an elevated, and an independent sort, where professors found a liberty protected against the routine, jealousy, and sometimes intolerance of the University of Paris and the Sorbonne. The king and his sister Marguerite often went to pay a visit, at his printing-place in St. Jean de Beauvais Street, to Robert Estienne (Stephanus), the most celebrated amongst that family of printer-publishers who had so much to do with the resurrection of ancient literature. It is said that one day the king waited a while in the work-room, so as not to disturb Robert Estienne in the correction of a proof.
When the violence bred of religious quarrels finally forced the learned and courageous printer to expatriate himself, his first care was to say, at the head of his apology, “When I take account of the war I have carried on with the Sorbonne for a space of twenty years or thereabouts, I cannot sufficiently marvel how so small and broken-down a creature as I am had strength to maintain it. When I was seen being harried on all sides, how often have I been the talk on street and at banquets, whilst people said, ‘It is all over with him; he is caught, he cannot escape; even if the king would, he could not save him.’ . . . I wish to justify myself against the reproach of having left my country, to the hurt of the public weal, and of not having acknowledged the great liberality displayed towards me by the king; since it was a high honor for me that the king, having deigned to make me his printer, always kept me under his protection, in the face of all who envied me and wished me ill, and never ceased to aid me graciously in all sorts of ways.”
The College Royal, no less than Robert Estienne, met with obstacles and ill-wishers; it was William Bude (Budeaus) who first suggested the idea of the college to the king, primarily with the limited purpose of securing instruction in Greek and Hebrew, after the fashion of the College of Young Grecians and the College of the Three Languages (the Trilingual, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin), of which the former was founded at Rome by Leo X., the latter at Louvain by Canon Jerome Busleyden. Francis I. readily surrendered himself to more magnificent projects; he was anxious to erect a splendid building on the site of the Hotel de Nesle, and to put Erasmus at the head of the College Royal. War incessantly renewed and the nascent religious troubles interfered with his resolutions; but William Bude never ceased to urge upon the king an extension of the branches of learning in the establishment; and after the Peace of Cambrai in 1529, chairs of mathematics, Oriental languages, Latin oratory, Greek and Latin philosophy, and medicine were successively added to the chairs of Hebrew and Greek which had been the original nucleus of instruction in the College Royal. It continued to be an object of suspicion to the Sorbonne and of hesitation in the Parliament, to which royalty had recourse against the attacks of its adversaries. But it had no lack of protectors, nevertheless: the Cardinal of Lorraine, Charles IX., and Catherine de’ Medici herself supported it in its trials; and Francis I. had the honor of founding a great school of the higher sort of education, a school, which, throughout all the religious dissensions and all the political revolutions of France, has kept its position and independence, whatever may have been elsewhere, in the matter of public instruction, the system and the regimen of state establishments.
A few words have already been said about the development of the arts, especially architecture and sculpture, in the middle ages, and of the characteristics, original and national, Gallic and Christian, which belonged to them at this period, particularly in respect of their innumerable churches, great and small. A foreglance has been given of the alteration which was brought about in those characteristics, at the date of the sixteenth century, by the Renaissance, at the same time that the arts were made to shine with fresh and vivid lustre. Francis I. was their zealous and lavish patron; he revelled in building and embellishing palaces, castles, and hunting-boxes, St. Germain, Chenonceaux, Fontainebleau, and Chambord; his chief councillors, Chancellor Duprat and Admiral Bonnivet, shared his taste and followed his example; several provinces, and the banks of the Loire especially, became covered with splendid buildings, bearing the marks of a complicated character which smacked of imitations from abroad. Italy, which, from the time of Charles VIII. and Louis XII., had been the object of French kings’ ambition and the scene of French wars, became also the school of French art; national and solemn Christian traditions were blended, whilst taking an altered form, with the Italian resuscitation of Greek and Roman antiquity. Italian artists, such as Rosso of Florence, Primatice of Bologna, Niccolo dell’ Abbate of Modena, and Benvenuto Cellini of Florence, came and settled in France, and there inspired and carried out the king’s projects and works. Leonardo da Vinci, full of years and discontented with his Italian patrons, accompanied Francis I. to France, and died in his arms at the castle of Clou, near Amboise, where he had fixed his residence. Some great French artists, such as the painter John Cousin and the sculptor John Goujon, strove ably to uphold the original character and merits of French art; but they could not keep themselves entirely aloof from the influence of this brilliant Italian art, for which Francis I.‘s successors, even more than he, showed a zealous and refined attachment, but of which he was, in France, the first patron.
We will not quit the first half of the sixteenth century and the literary and philosophical Renaissance which characterizes that period, without assigning a place therein at its proper date and in his proper rank to the name, the life, and the works of the man who was not only its most original and most eminent writer, but its truest and most vivid representative, Rabelais.
Francis Rabelais, who was born at Chinon in 1495, and died at Paris in 1553, wandered during those fifty-eight years about France and Europe from town to town, from profession to profession, from good to bad and from bad to good estate; first a monk of the Cordeliers; then, with Pope Clement VII.‘s authority, a Benedictine; then putting off the monk’s habit and assuming that of a secular priest in order to roam the world, “incurring,” as he himself says, “in this vagabond life, the double stigma of suspension from orders and apostasy;” then studying medicine at Montpellier; then medical officer of the great hospital at Lyons, but, before long, superseded in that office “for having been twice absent without leave;” then staying at Lyons as a corrector of proofs, a compiler of almanacs, an editor of divers books for learned patrons, and commencing the publication of his Vie tres-horrifique du grand Gargantua, pere de Pantagruel (Most horrifying life of the great Gargantua, father of Pantagruel), which was immediately proceeded against by the Sorbonne “as an obscene tale.” On grounds of prudence or necessity Rabelais then quitted Lyons and set out for Rome as physician attached to the household of Cardinal John Du Bellay, Bishop of Paris and envoy from France to the Holy See; the which bishop “having relished the profound learning and competence of Rabelais, and having, besides, discovered in him fine humor and a conversation capable of diverting the blackest melancholy, retained him near his person in the capacity of physician in ordinary to himself and all his family, and held him ever afterwards in high esteem.” After two years passed at Rome, and after rendering all sorts of service in his patron’s household, Rabelais, “feeling that the uproarious life he was leading and his licentious deeds were unworthy of a man of religion and a priest,” asked Pope Paul III. for absolution, and at the same time permission to resume the habit of St. Benedict, and to practise “for piety’s sake, without hope of gain and in any and every place,” the art of medicine, wherein he had taken, he said, the degrees of bachelor, licentiate, and doctor. A brief of Pope Paul III.‘s, dated January 17, 1536, granted his request. Seventeen months afterwards, on the 22d of May, 1537, Rabelais reappears at Montpellier, and there receives, it is said, the degree of doctor, which he had already taken upon himself to assume. He pursues his life of mingled science and adventure, gives lessons, and gads about so much that “his doctor’s gown and cap are preserved at Montpellier, according to tradition, all dirty and torn, but objects of respectful reminiscence.” In 1538 Rabelais leaves Montpellier, and goes to practise medicine at Narbonne, Castres, and Lyons. In 1540 he tires of it, resumes, as he had authority to do, the habit of a canon of St. Maur, and settles in that residence, “a paradise,” as he himself says, “of salubrity, amenity, serenity, convenience, and all the chaste pleasures of agriculture and country-life.” Between 1540 and 1551 he is, nevertheless, found once more wandering, far away from this paradise, in France, Italy, and, perhaps, England; he completes and publishes, under his own name, the Faits et Dicts heroiques de Pantagruel, and obtains from Francis I. a faculty for the publication of “these two volumes not less useful than delightful, which the printers had corrupted and perverted in many passages, to the great displeasure and detriment of the author, and to the prejudice of readers.” The work made a great noise; the Sorbonne resolved to attack it, in spite of the king’s approbation; but Francis I. died on the 31st of March, 1547. Rabelais relapsed into his life of embarrassment and vagabondage; on leaving France he had recourse, first at Metz and afterwards in Italy, to the assistance of his old and ever well-disposed patron, Cardinal John Du Bellay. On returning to France he obtained from the new king, Henry II., a fresh faculty for the printing of his books “in Greek, Latin, and Tuscan;” and, almost at the same time, on the 18th of January, 1551, Cardinal Du Bellay, Bishop of Paris, conferred upon him the cure of St. Martin at Meudon, “which he discharged,” says his biographer Colletet, “with all the sincerity, all the uprightness, and all the charity that can be expected of a man who wishes to do his duty, and to the satisfaction of his flock.” Nevertheless, when the new holder of the cure at Meudon, shortly after his installation, made up his mind to publish the fourth book of the Faits et Dicts heroiques du bon Pantagruel, the work was censured by the Sorbonne and interdicted by decree of Parliament, and authority to offer it for sale was not granted until, on the 9th of February, 1552, Rabelais had given in his resignation of his cure at Meudon, and of another cure which he possessed, under the title of benefice, in the diocese of Le Mans. He retired in bad health to Paris, where he died shortly afterwards, in 1553, “in Rue des Jardins, parish of St. Paul, in the cemetery whereof he was interred,” says Colletet, “close to a large tree which was still to be seen a few years ago.”
Such a life, this constant change of position, profession, career, taste, patron, and residence, bore a strong resemblance to what we should nowadays call a Bohemian life; and everything shows that Rabelais’ habits, without being scandalous, were not more regular or more dignified than his condition in the world. Had we no precise and personal information about him in this respect, still his literary work, Gargantua and Pantagruel, would not leave us in any doubt: there is no printed book, sketch, conversation, or story, which is more coarse and cynical, and which testifies, whether as regards the author or the public for whom the work is intended, to a more complete and habitual dissoluteness in thought, morals, and language. There is certainly no ground for wondering that the Sorbonne, in proceeding against the Vie tres-horrifique du grand Gargantua, pere de Pantagruel, should have described it as “an obscene tale;” and the whole part of Panurge, the brilliant talker of the tale,
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“Take him for all in all the best boy in the world,” |
fully justifies the Sorbonne. But, by way of striking contrast, at the same time that the works of Rabelais attest the irregularity of men’s lives and minds, they also reveal the great travail that is going on and the great progress that has already been made in the intellectual condition of his day, in the influence of natural and legitimate feelings, and in the appreciation of men’s mutual rights and duties. Sixty-two years ago M. Guizot published, in a periodical collection entitled Annales de l’Education, a Study of Rabelais’ ideas compared with the practice and routine of his day in respect of Education; an important question in the sixteenth as it is in the nineteenth century. It will be well to quote here from that Study certain fragments which will give some notion of what new ideas and tendencies were making their way into the social life of France, and were coincident with that great religious and political ferment which was destined to reach bursting-point in the reign of Francis I., and to influence for nearly a century the fortunes of France.
“It was no easy matter,” were the words used by M. Guizot in 1811, “to speak reasonably about education at the time when Rabelais wrote. There was then no idea of home-education and the means of rendering it practicable. As to public education, there was no extensive range and nothing really useful to the community in the instruction received by children at college; no justice and no humanity in the treatment they experienced; a fruitless and ridiculously prolonged study of words succeeded by a no less fruitless study of interminable subtilties, and all this fruitless knowledge driven into the brains of children by help of chastisements, blows, and that barbarous severity which seems to regard the Compelle intrare as the principal law and object of instruction. How proceed, in such a state of things, to conceive a plan of liberal, gentle, and reasonable education? Rabelais, in his book, had begun by avoiding the danger of directly shocking received ideas; by transporting both himself and his heroes to the regions of imagination and extravagance he had set himself at liberty to bring them up in quite a different fashion than that of his times; the rectors of colleges could not pretend that Pantagruel, who was hardly born before he sucked down at every meal the milk of four thousand six hundred cows, and for whose first shirt there had been cut nine hundred ells of Chatellerault linen, was a portrait of any of the little boys who trembled at their ferules. . . . Pantagruel is in his cradle; he is bound and swathed in it like all children at that time; but, ere long, Gargantua, his father, perceives that these bands are constraining his movements, and that he is making efforts to burst there; he immediately, by advice of the princes and lords present, orders the said shackles to be undone, and lo! Pantagruel is no longer uneasy. . . . And thus became he big and strong full early. . . . There came, however, the time when his instruction must begin. ‘My will,’ said Gargantua, ‘is to hand him over to some learned man for to indoctrinate him according to his capacity, and to spare nothing to that end.’ He, accordingly, put Pantagruel under a great teacher, who began by bringing him up after the fashion of those times. He taught him his charte (alphabet) to such purpose that he could say it by heart backwards, and he was five years and three months about it. Then he read with him Donotus and Facetus (old elementary works on Latin grammar), and he was thirteen years, six months, and two weeks over that. Then he read with him the De Modis significandi, with the commentaries of Hurtebisius, Fasquin, and a heap of others, and he was more than eighteen years and eleven months over them, and knew them so well that he proved on his fingers to his mother that de modis signifieandi non erat scientia. After so much labor and so many years, what did Pantagruel know? Gargantua was no bigot: he did not shut his eyes that he might not see, and he believed what his eyes told him. He saw that Pantagruel worked very hard and spent all his time at it, and yet he got no good by it. And what was worse, he was becoming daft, silly, dreamy, and besotted through it. So Pantagruel was taken away from his former masters and handed over to Ponocrates, a teacher of quite a different sort, who was bidden to take him to Paris to make a new creature of him and complete his education there. Ponocrates was very careful not to send him to any college. Rabelais, as it appears, had a special aversion for Montaigu College. ‘Tempeste,’ says he, ‘was a great boy-flogger at Montaigu College. If for flogging poor little children, unoffending school-boys, pedagogues are damned, he, upon my word of honor, is now on Ixion’s wheel, flogging the dock-tailed cur that turns it.’ Pantagruel’s education was now humane and gentle. Accordingly he soon took pleasure in the work which Ponocrates was at the pains of rendering interesting to him by the very nature and the variety of the subjects of it. . . . Is it not a very remarkable phenomenon that at such a time and in such a condition of public instruction a man should have had sufficient sagacity not only to regard the natural sciences as one of the principal subjects of study which ought to be included in a course of education, but further to make the observation of nature the basis of that study, to fix the pupil’s attention upon examination of facts, and to impress upon him the necessity of applying his knowledge by studying those practical arts and industries which profit by such applications? That, however, Rabelais did, probably by dint of sheer good sense, and without having any notion himself about the wide bearing of his ideas. Ponocrates took Pantagruel through a course of what we should nowadays call practical study of the exact and natural sciences as they were understood in the sixteenth century; but, at the same time, far from forgetting the moral sciences, he assigns to them, for each day, a definite place and an equally practical character. ‘As soon as Pantagruel was up,’ he says, ‘some page or other of the sacred Scripture was read with him aloud and distinctly, with pronunciation suited to the subject. . . . In accordance with the design and purport of this lesson, he at frequent intervals devoted himself to doing reverence and saying prayers to the good God, whose majesty and marvellous judgments were shown forth in what was read. . . . When evening came, he and his teacher briefly recapitulated together, after the manner of the Pythagoreans, all that he had read, seen, learned, and heard in the course of the whole day. They prayed to God the Creator, worshipping Him, glorifying Him for his boundless goodness, giving Him thanks for all the time that was past, and commending themselves to His divine mercy for all that was to come. This done, they went to their rest.’ And at the end of this course of education, so complete both from the worldly and the religious point of view, Rabelais shows us young Pantagruel living in affectionate and respectful intimacy with his father Gargantua, who, as he sees him off on his travels, gives him these last words of advice: Science without conscience is nought but ruin to the soul; it behooves thee to serve, love, and fear God. Have thou in suspicion the abuses of the world; set not thine heart on vanity, for this life is transitory, but the word of God abideth forever. Reverence thy teachers; flee the company of those whom thou wouldest not resemble. . . . And when thou feelest sure that thou hast acquired all that is to be learned yonder, return to me that I may see thee and give thee my blessing ere I die.’”
After what was said above about the personal habits and the works of Rabelais, these are certainly not the ideas, sentiments, and language one would expect to find at the end and as the conclusion of his life and his book. And it is precisely on account of this contrast that more space has been accorded in this history to the man and his book than would in the natural course of things have been due to them. At bottom and, beyond their mere appearances the life and the book of Rabelais are a true and vivid reflection of the moral and social ferment characteristic of his time. A time of innovation and of obstruction, of corruption and of regeneration, of decay and of renaissance, all at once. A deeply serious crisis in a strong and complicated social system, which had been hitherto exposed to the buffets and the risks of brute force, but was intellectually full of life and aspiration, was in travail of a double yearning for reforming itself and setting itself in order, and did indeed, in the sixteenth century, attempt at one and the same time a religious and a political reformation, the object whereof, missed as it was at that period, is still at the bottom of all true Frenchmen’s trials and struggles. This great movement of the sixteenth century we are now about to approach, and will attempt to fix its character with precision and mark the imprint of its earliest steps.
CHAPTER XXX.
FRANCIS I. AND THE REFORMATION.
Nearly half a century before the Reformation made any noise in France it had burst out with great force and had established its footing in Germany, Switzerland, and England. John Huss and Jerome of Prague, both born in Bohemia, one in 1373 and the other in 1378, had been condemned as heretics and burned at Constance, one in 1415 and the other in 1416, by decree and in the presence of the council which had been there assembled. But, at the commencement of the sixteenth century, Luther in Germany and Zwingle in Switzerland had taken in hand the work of the Reformation, and before half that century had rolled by they had made the foundations of their new church so strong that their powerful adversaries, with Charles V. at their head, felt obliged to treat with them and recognize their position in the European world, though all the while disputing their right. In England, Henry VIII., under the influence of an unbridled passion, as all his passions were, for Anna Boleyn, had, in 1531, broken with the church of Rome, whose pope, Clement VII., refused very properly to pronounce him divorced from his wife Catherine of Aragon, and the king had proclaimed himself the spiritual head of the English church without meeting either amongst his clergy or in his kingdom with any effectual opposition. Thus in these three important states of Western Europe the Reformers had succeeded, and the religious revolution was in process of accomplishment.
In France it was quite otherwise. Not that, there too, there were not amongst Christians profound dissensions and ardent desires for religious reform. We will dwell directly upon its explosion, its vicissitudes, and its characteristics. But France did not contain, as Germany did, several distinct states, independent and pretty strong, though by no means equally so, which could offer to the different creeds a secure asylum, and could form one with another coalitions capable of resisting the head of that incohesive coalition which was called the empire of Germany. In the sixteenth century, on the contrary, the unity of the French monarchy was established, and it was all, throughout its whole extent, subject to the same laws and the same master, as regarded the religious bodies as well as the body politic. In this monarchy, however, there did not happen to be, at the date of the sixteenth century, a sovereign audacious enough and powerful enough to gratify his personal passions at the cost of embroiling himself, like Henry VIII., with the spiritual head of Christendom, and, from the mere desire for a change of wife, to change the regimen of the church in his dominions. Francis I., on the contrary, had scarcely ascended the throne when, by abolishing the Pragmatic Sanction and signing the Concordat of 1516, he attached himself more closely to the papacy. The nascent Reformation, then, did not meet in France with either of the two important circumstances, politically considered, which in Germany and in England rendered its first steps more easy and more secure. It was in the cause of religious creeds alone, and by means of moral force alone, that she had to maintain the struggles in which she engaged.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, there lived, at a small castle near Gap in Dauphiny, in the bosom of a noble and unostentatiously pious family, a young man of ardent imagination, fiery temperament, and energetic character, who shared his relatives’ creeds and joined in their devotions, but grew weary of the monotony of his thoughts and of his life. William Farel heard talk of another young man, his contemporary and neighbor, Peter du Terrail, even now almost famous under the name of Bayard. “Such sons,” was said in his hearing, “are as arrows in the hand of a giant; blessed is he who has his quiver full of them!” Young Farel pressed his father to let him go too and make himself a man in the world. The old gentleman would willingly have permitted his son to take up such a life as Bayard’s; but it was towards the University of Paris, “that mother of all the sciences, that pure and shining mirror of the faith,” that the young man’s aspirations were directed. The father at first opposed, but afterwards yielded to his wishes; and, about 1510, William Farel quitted Gap and arrived at Paris. The questions raised by the councils of Bale and Florence, and by the semi-political, semi-ecclesiastical assembly at Tours, which had been convoked by Louis XII., the instruction at the Parisian University, and the attacks of the Sorbonne on the study of Greek and Hebrew, branded as heresy, were producing a lively agitation in the public mind. A doctor of theology, already advanced in years, of small stature, of mean appearance, and of low origin, Jacques Lefevre by name, born at Etaples in Picardy, had for seventeen years filled with great success a professorship in the university. “Amongst many thousands of men,” said Erasmus, “you will not find any of higher integrity and more versed in polite letters.” “He is very fond of me,” wrote Zwingle about him; “he is perfectly open and good; he argues, he sings, he plays, and be laughs with me at the follies of the world.” Some circumstance or other brought the young student and the old scholar together; they liked one another, and soon became friends. Farel was impressed by his master’s devotion as well as learning; he saw him on his knees at church praying fervently; and, “Never,” said he, “had I seen a chanter of mass who chanted it with deeper reverence.” But this old-fashioned piety did not interfere at all with the freedom of the professor’s ideas and conversations touching either the abuses or the doctrines of the church. “How shameful it is,” he would say, “to see a bishop soliciting people to drink with him, caring for nought but gaming, constantly handling the dice and the dice-box, constantly hunting, hallooing after birds and game, frequenting bad houses! . . . Religion has but one foundation, but one end, but one head, Jesus Christ blessed forever; he alone trod the wine-press. Let us not, then, call ourselves by the name of St. Paul, or Apollos, or St. Peter.” These free conversations worked, not all at once, but none the less effectually, upon those who heard them. “The end was,” says Farel, “that little by little the papacy slipped from its place in my heart; it did not come down at the first shock.” At the same time that he thus talked with his pupils, Lefevre of Etaples published a commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul, and then a commentary on the Gospels. “Christians,” said he, “are those only who love Jesus Christ and His word. May everything be illumined with His light! Through it may there be a return of times like those of that primitive church which devoted to Jesus Christ so many martyrs! May the Lord of the harvest, foreseeing a new harvest, send new and diligent laborers! . . . My dear William,” he added, turning to Farel and taking his hand, “God will renew the world, and you will see it!”
It was not only professors and pupils, scholars grown old in meditation and young folks eager for truth, liberty, action, and renown, who welcomed passionately those boundless and undefined hopes, those yearnings towards a brilliant and at the same time a vague future, at which they looked forward, according to the expression used by Lefevre of Etaples to Farel, to a “renewal of the world.” Men holding a social position very different from that of the philosophers, men with minds formed on an acquaintance with facts and in the practice of affairs, took part in this intellectual and religious ferment, and protected and encouraged its fervent adherents. William Briconnet, Bishop of Meaux, a prelate who had been Louis XII.‘s ambassador to Pope Julius II., and one amongst the negotiators of Francis I.‘s Concordat with Leo X., opened his diocese to the preachers and writers recommended to him by his friend Lefevre of Staples, and supported them in their labors for the translation and propagation, amongst the people, of the Holy Scriptures. They had at court, and near the king’s own person, the avowed support of his sister, Princess Marguerite, who was beautiful, sprightly, affable, kind, disposed towards all lofty and humane sentiments as well as all intellectual pleasures, and an object of the sometimes rash attentions of the most eminent and most different men of her time, Charles V., the Constable de Bourbon, Admiral Bonnivet, and Clement Marot. Marguerite, who was married to the Duke d’Alencon, widowed in 1525, and married a second time, in 1527, to Henry d’Albret, King of Navarre, was all her life at Pau and at Nerac, as well as at Paris, a centre, a focus of social, literary, religious, and political movement. “The king her brother loved her dearly,” says Brantome, “and always called her his darling. . . Very often, when he had important business, he left it to her, waiting for her definitive and conclusive decision.
The ambassadors who talked with her were enchanted by her, and always went to see her after having paid their first ambassadorial visit. She had so great a regard and affection for the king, that when she heard of his dangerous illness she said, ‘Whosoever shall come to my door, and announce to me the recovery of the king my brother, such courier, should he be tired, and worn out, and muddy, and dirty, I will go and kiss and embrace as if he were the sprucest prince and gentleman of France; and, should he be in want of a bed and unable to find one whereon to rid him of his weariness, I would give him mine, and I would rather lie on the hard, for the good news he brought me.’ . . . She was suspected of inclining to the religion of Luther, but she never made any profession or sign thereof; and, if she believed it, she kept it in her heart very secret, inasmuch as the king did hate it sorely.” . . . “The heresy was seen glimmering here and there,” says another contemporary witness [Florimond de Raimond in his Histoire de l’Heresie], “but it appeared and disappeared like a nightly meteor which has but a flickering brightness.”—At bottom this reserve was quite in conformity with the mental condition of that class, or as one might he inclined to say, that circle of Reformers at court. Luther and Zwingle had distinctly declared war on the papacy; Henry VIII. had with a flourish separated England from the Romish church; Marguerite de Valois and Bishop Briconnet neither wished nor demanded so much; they aspired no further than to reform the abuses of the Romish church by the authority of that church itself, in concert with its heads and according to its traditional regimen; they had no idea of more than dealing kindly, and even sympathetically, with the liberties and the progress of science and human intelligence. Confined within these limits, the idea was legitimate and honest enough, but it showed want of foresight, and was utterly vain. When, whether in state or church, the vices and defects of government have lasted for ages and become habits not only inveterate but closely connected with powerful personal interests, a day at last comes when the deplorable result is seen in pig-headedness and weakness. Then there is an explosion of deep-seated and violent shocks, from which infinitely more is expected than they can accomplish, and which, even when they are successful, cost the people very dear, for their success is sullied and incomplete. A certain amount of good government and general good sense is a necessary preface and preparation for any good sort of reform. Happy the nations who are spared by their wisdom or their good fortune the cruel trial of only obtaining such reforms as they need when they have been reduced to prosecute them beneath the slings and arrows of outrageous revolution! Christian France in the sixteenth century was not so favorably situated.
During the first years of Francis I.‘s reign (from 1515 to 1520) young and ardent Reformers, such as William Farel and his friends, were but isolated individuals, eager after new ideas and studies, very favorable towards all that came to them from Germany, but without any consistency yet as a party, and without having committed any striking act of aggression against the Roman church. Nevertheless they were even then, so far as the heads and the devoted adherents of that church were concerned, objects of serious disquietude and jealous supervision.
The Sorbonne, in particular, pronounced vehemently against them. Luther and his progress were beginning to make a great noise in France. After his discussion with Dr. Eck at Leipzig in 1519 he had consented to take for judges the Universities of Erfurt and Paris; on the 20th of January, 1520, the quoestor of the nation of France bought twenty copies of Luther’s conference with Dr. Eck to distribute amongst the members of his committee; the University gave more than a year to its examination. “All Europe,” says Crevier, “was waiting for the decision of the University of Paris.” Whenever an incident occurred or a question arose, “We shall see,” said they of the Sorbonne, “what sort of folks hold to Luther. Why, that fellow is worse than Luther!” In April, 1521, the University solemnly condemned Luther’s writings, ordering that they should be publicly burned, and that the author should be compelled to retract. The Syndic of the Sorbonne, Noel Bedier, who, to give his name a classical twang, was called Beda, had been the principal and the most eager actor in this procedure; he was a theologian full of subtlety, obstinacy, harshness, and hatred. “In a single Beda there are three thousand monks,” Erasmus used to say of him. The syndic had at court two powerful patrons, the king’s mother, Louise of Savoy, and the chancellor, Duprat, both decided enemies of the Reformers. Louise of Savoy, in consequence of her licentious morals and her thirst for riches; Duprat, by reason of the same thirst, and of his ambition to become an equally great lord in the church as in the state; and he succeeded, for in 1525 he was appointed Archbishop of Sens. They were, moreover, both of them, opposed to any liberal reform, and devoted, in any case, to absolute power. Beaucaire de Peguilhem, a contemporary and most Catholic historian,—for he accompanied the Cardinal of Lorraine to the Council of Trent,—calls Duprat “the most vicious of bipeds.” Such patrons did not lack hot-headed executants of their policy; friendly relations had not ceased between the Reformers and their adversaries; a Jacobin monk, De Roma by name, was conversing one day at Meaux with Farel and his friends; the Reformers expressed the hopes they had in the propagation of the gospel; De Roma all at once stood up, shouting, “Then I and all the rest of the brotherhood will preach a crusade we will stir up the people; and if the king permits the preaching of your gospel, we will have him expelled by his own subjects from his own kingdom.” Fanatical passions were already at work, though the parties were too unequal as yet to come to actual force.
Against such passions the Reformers found Francis I. a very indecisive and very inefficient protector. “I wish,” said he, “to give men of letters special marks of my favor.” When deputies from the Sorbonne came and requested him to put down the publication of learned works taxed with heresy, “I do not wish,” he replied, “to have those folks meddled with; to persecute those who instruct us would be to keep men of ability from coming to our country.” But in spite of his language, orders were given to the bishops to furnish the necessary funds for the prosecution of heretics, and, when the charge of heresy became frequent, Francis I. no longer repudiated it. “Those people,” he said, “do nothing but bring trouble into the state.” Troubles, indeed, in otherwise tranquil provinces, where the Catholic faith was in great force, often accompanied the expression of those wishes for reform to which the local clergy themselves considered it necessary to make important concessions. A serious fire took place at Troyes in 1524. “It was put down,” says M. Boutiot, a learned and careful historian of that town, “to the account of the new religious notions, as well as to that of the Emperor Charles V.‘s friends and the Constable de Bourbon’s partisans. As early as 1520 there had begun to be felt at Troyes the first symptoms of repressive measures directed against the Reformation; in 1523, 1527, and 1528, provincial councils were held at Meaux, Lyons, Rouen, Bourges, and Paris, to oppose the Lutherans. These councils drew up regulations tending to reformation of morals and of religious ceremonies; they decided that the administration of the sacraments should take place without any demand for money, and that preachers, in their sermons, should confine themselves to the sacred books, and not quote poets or profane authors; they closed the churches to profane assemblies and burlesques (fetes des fous); they ordered the parish priests, in their addresses (au prone), to explain the gospel of the day; they ruled that a stop should be put to the abuses of excommunication; they interdicted the publication of any book on religious subjects without the permission of the bishop of the diocese. . . . Troyes at that time contained some enlightened men; William Bude (Budaeus) was in uninterrupted communication with it; the Pithou family, represented by their head, Peter Pithou, a barrister at Troyes and a man highly thought of, were in correspondence with the Reformers, especially with Lefevre of Etaples.” [Histoire de la Ville de Troyes et de la Champagne meridionale, by T. Boutiot, 1873, t. iii. p. 379.] And thus was going on throughout almost the whole of France, partly in the path of liberty, partly in that of concessions, partly in that of hardships, the work of the Reformation, too weak as yet and too disconnected to engage to any purpose in a struggle, but even now sufficiently wide-spread and strong to render abortive any attempt to strangle it.
The defeat at Pavia and the captivity of Francis I. at Madrid placed the governing power for thirteen months in the hands of the most powerful foes of the Reformation, the regent Louise of Savoy and the chancellor Duprat. They used it unsparingly, with the harsh indifference of politicians who will have, at any price, peace within their dominions and submission to authority. It was under their regimen that there took place the first martyrdom decreed and executed in France upon a partisan of the Reformation for an act of aggression and offence against the Catholic church. John Leclerc, a wool-carder at Meaux, seeing a bull of indulgences affixed to the door of Meaux cathedral, had torn it down, and substituted for it a placard in which the pope was described as Antichrist. Having been arrested on the spot, he was, by decree of the Parliament of Paris, whipped publicly, three days consecutively, and branded on the forehead by the hangman in the presence of his mother, who cried, “Jesus Christ forever!” He was banished, and retired in July, 1525, to Metz; and there he was working at his trade when he heard that a solemn procession was to take place, next day, in the environs of the town. In his blind zeal he went and broke down the images at the feet of which the Catholics were to have burned incense. Being arrested on his return to the town, he, far from disavowing the deed, acknowledged it and gloried in it. He was sentenced to a horrible punishment; his right hand was cut off, his nose was torn out, pincers were applied to his arms, his nipples were plucked out, his head was confined in two circlets of red-hot iron, and, whilst he was still chanting, in a loud voice, this versicle from the cxvth Psalm,—
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“Their idols are silver and gold, The work of men’s hands.” |
his bleeding and mutilated body was thrown upon the blazing fagots. He had a younger brother, Peter Leclerc, a simple wool-carder like himself, who remained at Meaux, devoted to the same faith and the same cause. “Great clerc,” says a contemporary chronicler, playing upon his name, “who knew no language but that which he had learned from his nurse, but who, being thoroughly grounded in the holy writings, besides the integrity of his life, was chosen by the weavers and became the first minister of the gospel seen in France.” An old man of Meaux, named Stephen Mangin, offered his house, situated near the market-place, for holding regular meetings. Forty or fifty of the faithful formed the nucleus of the little church which grew up. Peter Leclerc preached and administered the sacraments in Stephen Mangin’s house so regularly that, twenty years after his brother John’s martyrdom, the meetings, composed partly of believers who flocked in from the neighboring villages, were from three to four hundred in number. One day when they had celebrated the Lord’s Supper, the 8th of September, 1546, the house was surrounded, and nearly sixty persons, men, women, and children, who allowed themselves to be arrested without making any resistance, were taken. They were all sent before the Parliament of Paris; fourteen of the men were sentenced to be burned alive in the great marketplace at Meaux, on the spot nearest to the house in which the crime of heresy had been committed; and their wives, together with their nearest relatives, were sentenced to be present at the execution, “the men bare-headed and the women ranged beside them individually, in such sort that they might be distinguished amongst the rest.” The decree was strictly carried out.
It costs a pang to recur to these hideous exhibitions, but it must be done; for history not only has a right, but is bound to do justice upon the errors and crimes of the past, especially when the past had no idea of guilt in the commission of them. A wit of the last century, Champfort, used to say, “There is nothing more dangerous than an honest man engaged in a rascally calling.” There is nothing more dangerous than errors and crimes of which the perpetrators do not see the absurd and odious character. The contemporary historian, Sleidan, says, expressly, “The common people in France hold that there are no people more wicked and criminal that heretics; generally, as long as they are a prey to the blazing fagots, the people around them are excited to frenzy and curse them in the midst of their torments.” The sixteenth century is that period of French history at which this intellectual and moral blindness cost France “Their idols are silver and gold, The work of men’s hands,”— most dear; it supplied the bad passions of men with a means, of which they amply availed themselves, of gratifying then without scruple and without remorse. If, in the early part of this century, the Reformation was as yet without great leaders, it was not, nevertheless, amongst only the laborers, the humble and the poor, that it found confessors and martyrs. The provincial nobility, the burgesses of the towns, the magistracy, the bar, the industrial classes as well as the learned, even then furnished their quota of devoted and faithful friends. A nobleman, a Picard by birth, born about 1490 at Passy, near Paris, where he generally lived, Louis de Berquin by name, was one of the most distinguished of them by his social position, his elevated ideas, his learning, the purity of his morals, and the dignity of his life. Possessed of a patrimonial estate, near Abbeville, which brought him in a modest income of six hundred crowns a year, and a bachelor, he devoted himself to study and to religious matters with independence of mind and with a pious heart. “Most faithfully observant,” says Erasmus, “of the ordinances and rites of the church, to wit, prescribed fasts, holy days, forbidden meats, masses, sermons, and, in a word, all, that tends to piety, he strongly reprobated the doctrines of Luther.” He was none the less, in 1523, denounced to the Parliament of Paris as being on the side of the Reformers. He had books, it was said; he even composed them himself on questions of faith, and he had been engaged in some sort of dispute with the theologian William de Coutance, head of Harcourt College.
The attorney-general of the Parliament ordered one of his officers to go and make an examination of Berquin’s books as well as papers, and to seize what appeared to him to savor of heresy. The officer brought away divers works of Luther, Melancthon, and Carlostadt, and some original treatises of Berquin himself, which were deposited in the keeping of the court. The theological faculty claimed to examine them as being within their competence. On being summoned by the attorney-general, Berquin demanded to be present when an inventory was made of his books or manuscripts, and to give such explanations as he should deem necessary; and his request was granted without question. On the 26th of June, 1523, the commissioners of the Sorbonne made their report. On the 8th of July, Peter Lizet, king’s advocate, read it out to the court. The matter came on again for hearing on the 1st of August. Berquin was summoned and interrogated, and, as the result of this interrogatory, was arrested and carried off to imprisonment at the Conciergerie in the square tower. On the 5th of August sentence was pronounced, and Louis de Berquin was remanded to appear before the Bishop of Paris, as being charged with heresy, “in which case,” says the Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, “he would have been in great danger of being put to death according to law, as he had well deserved.” The public were as ready as the accusers to believe in the crime and to impatiently await its punishment.
It was not without surprise or without displeasure that, on the 8th of August, just as they had “made over to the Bishop of Paris, present and accepting” the prisoner confined in the Conciergerie, the members of the council-chamber observed the arrival of Captain Frederic, belonging to the archers of the king’s guard, and bringing a letter from the king, who changed the venue in Berquin’s case so as to decide it himself at his grand council; in consequence of which the prisoner would have to be handed over, not to the bishop, but to the king. The chamber remonstrated; Berquin was no longer their prisoner; the matter had been decided; it was the bishop to whom application must be made. But these remonstrances had been foreseen; the captain had verbal instructions to carry off Louis de Berquin by force in case of a refusal to give him up. The chamber decided upon handing over the bishop’s prisoner to the king, contenting themselves with causing the seized books and manuscripts to be burned that very day in the space in front of Notre Dame. It was whilst repairing to the scene of war in Italy, and when he was just entering Melun, where he merely passed through, that the king had given this unexpected order, on the very day, August 5, on which the Parliament pronounced the decree which sent Berquin to appear before the Bishop of Paris. There is no clear trace of the vigilant protect, or who had so closely watched the proceedings against Berquin, and so opportunely appealed for the king’s interference. In any incident of this sort there is a temptation to presume that the influence was that of Princess Marguerite; but it is not certain that she was at this time anywhere near the king; perhaps John du Bellay, Bishop of Bayonne, acted for her. Francis I. was, moreover, disposed to extend protection, of his own accord, to gentlemen and scholars against furious theologians, when the latter were not too formidable for him. However that may be, Berquin, on becoming the king’s prisoner, was summoned before the chancellor, Duprat, who, politely reproaching him with having disquieted the church, confined himself to requesting that he would testify some regret for it. Berquin submitted with a good grace, and, being immediately set at liberty, left Paris and repaired to his estate in Picardy.
Whilst he there resumed his life of peaceful study, the Parliament continued to maintain in principle and openly proclaim its right of repression against heretics. On the 12th of August, 1523, it caused notice to be given, by sound of trumpet, throughout the whole of Paris, that clergy and laymen were to deposit in the keeping of the Palace all Luther’s books that they possessed. Laymen who did not comply with this order would have their property confiscated; clergymen would be deprived of their temporalities and banished. Toleration, in a case of suspected heresy, was an act of the king’s which itself required toleration; proceedings against heresy remained the law of the land, constantly hanging over every head.
Eighteen months later, in May, 1525, there seemed to be no further thought about Berquin; but the battle of Pavia was lost; Francis I. was a prisoner at Madrid; Louise of Savoy and the chancellor, Duprat, wielded the power. The question of heretics again came to the front. “The queen must be told,” said Peter Lizet, king’s advocate, “as St. Gregory told Brunehaut, Queen of the Franks, that the best way of driving away the enemies of the kingdom is to drive away from it the enemies of God and His spouse, the Church.” On the 10th of April, 1525, on occasion of giving the regent some counsel as to her government, the Parliament strongly recommended her to take proceedings against the heretics. “The court,” they said to her, “has before now passed several provisional decrees against the guilty, which have not been executed because of the evil disposition of the times and the hinderances effected by the delinquents, who have found means of suspending and delaying the judgments given against them, as well by transference of the venue to the grand council as by seizure and removal of certain of them, prisoners at the time, whom they have had withdrawn from their prisons by exercise of sovereign and absolute power, which has given the rest occasion and boldness to follow the evil doctrine.” It was impossible to reproach the king more broadly with having set Berquin at liberty. The Parliament further advised the regent to ask the pope to send over to France pontifical delegates invested with his own powers to watch and to try in his name “even archbishops, bishops, and abbots, who by their deeds, writings, or discourses, should render themselves suspected of a leaning towards heresy.” Louise of Savoy, without any appearance of being hurt by the attack made by the Parliament on the acts of the king her son, eagerly followed the advice given her; and on the 20th of May, 1525, Clement VII., in his turn, eagerly appointed four delegates commissioned to try all those suspected of heresy, who, in case of condemnation, were to be left to the secular arm. On the very day on which the pope appointed his delegates, the faculty of theology at Paris passed censure upon divers writings of Erasmus, translated and spread abroad in France by Berquin; and on the 8th of January, 1526, the Bishop of Amiens demanded of the Parliament authority “to order the body to be seized of Louis de Berquin, who resided in his diocese and was scandalizing it by his behavior.” The Parliament authorized his arrest; and, on the 24th of January, Berquin was once more a prisoner in the Conciergerie, at the same time that orders were given to seize all his books and papers, whether at his own house or at that of his friend the Lord of Rambure at Abbeville. The great trial of Berquin for heresy was recommenced, and in it the great name of Erasmus was compromised.
When the question was thus solemnly reopened, Berquin’s defenders were much excited. Defenders, we have said; but, in truth, history names but one, the Princess Marguerite, who alone showed any activity, and alone did anything to the purpose. She wrote at once to the king, who was still at Madrid “My desire to obey your commands was sufficiently strong without having it redoubled by the charity you have been pleased to show to poor Berquin according to your promise; I feel sure that He for whom I believe him to have suffered will approve of the mercy which, for His honor, you have had upon His servant and yours.” Francis I. had, in fact, written to suspend until his return the proceedings against Berquin, as well as those against Lefevre, Roussel, and all the other doctors suspected of heresy. The regent transmitted the king’s orders to the pope’s delegates, who presented themselves on the 20th of February before the Parliament to ask its advice. “The king is as badly advised as he himself is good,” said the dean of the faculty of theology. The Parliament answered that “for a simple letter missive” it could not adjourn; it must have a letter patent; and it went on with the trial. Berquin presented several demands for delay, evidently in order to wait for the king’s return and personal intervention. The court refused them; and, on the 5th of March, 1526, the judgment was read to him in his prison at the Conciergerie. It was to the effect that his books should be again burned before his eyes, that he should declare his approval of so just a sentence, and that he should earn the compassion of the church by not refusing her any satisfaction she might demand; else he should himself go to the stake.
Whilst Berquin’s trial was thus coming to an end, Francis I. was entering France once more in freedom, crying, “So I am king again!” During the latter days of March, amongst the numerous personages who came to congratulate him was John de Selve, premier president of the Parliament of Paris. The king gave him a very cold reception. “My lords,” wrote the premier president to his court, “I heard, through M. de Selve, my nephew, about some displeasure that was felt as regards our body, and I also perceived it myself. I have already begun to speak of it to Madame [the king’s mother]. I will do, as I am bound to, my duty towards the court, with God’s help.” On the 1st of April the king, who intended to return by none but slow stages to Paris, wrote from Mont-de-Marsan, to the judges holding his court of Parliament at Paris:—
“We have presently been notified how that, notwithstanding that, through our dear and much-loved lady and mother, regent in France during our absence, it was written unto you and ordered that you would be pleased not to proceed in any way whatever with the matter of Sieur Berquin, lately detained a prisoner, until we should have been enabled to return to this our kingdom, you have, nevertheless, at the request and pursuance of his ill-wishers, so far proceeded with his business that you have come to a definitive judgment on it. Whereat we cannot be too much astounded. . . . For this cause we do will and command and enjoin upon you . . that you are not to proceed to execution of the said judgment, which, as the report is, you have pronounced against the said Berquin, but shall put him, himself and the depositions and the proceedings in his said trial, in such safe keeping that you may be able to answer to us for them. . . . And take care that you make no default therein, for we do warn you that, if default there be, we shall look to such of you as shall seem good to us to answer to us for it.”
Here was not only a letter patent, but a letter minatory. As to the execution of their judgment, the Parliament obeyed the king’s injunction, maintaining, however, the principle as well as the legality of Berquin’s sentence, and declaring that they awaited the king’s orders to execute it. “According to the teaching of the two Testaments,” they said, “God ever rageth, in His just wrath, against the nations who fail to enforce respect for the laws prescribed by Himself. It is important, moreover, to hasten the event in order as soon as possible to satisfy, independently of God, the people who murmur and whose impatience is becoming verily troublesome.” Francis I. did not reply. He would not have dared, even in thought, to attack the question of principle as to the chastisement of heresy, and he was afraid of weakening his own Authority too much if he humiliated his Parliament too much; it was sufficient for him that he might consider Berquin’s life to be safe. Kings are protectors who are easily satisfied when their protection, to be worth anything, might entail upon them the necessity of an energetic struggle and of self-compromise. “Trust not in princes nor their children,” said Lord Strafford, after the Psalmist [Nolite confidere principibus et filiis eorum, quia non est sales in illis, Ps. cxlvi.], when, in the seventeenth century, he found that Charles I. was abandoning him to the English Parliament and the executioner. Louis de Berquin might have felt similar distrust as to Francis I., but his nature was confident and hopeful; when he knew of the king’s letter to the Parliament, he considered himself safe, and he testified as much to Erasmus in a long letter, in which he told him the story of his trial, and alluded to “the fresh outbreak of anger on the part of those hornets who accuse me of heresy,” said he, “simply because I have translated into the vulgar tongue some of your little works, wherein they pretend that they have discovered the most monstrous pieces of impiety.” He transmitted to Erasmus a list of the paragraphs which the pope’s delegates had condemned, pressing him to reply, “as you well know how. The king esteems you much, and will esteem you still more when you have heaped confusion on this brood of benighted theologians whose ineptitude is no excuse for their violence.” By a strange coincidence, Berquin’s most determined foe, Noel Beda, provost of the Sorbonne, sent at the same time to Erasmus a copy of more than two hundred propositions which had been extracted from his works, and against which he, Beda, also came forward as accuser. Erasmus was a prudent man, and did not seek strife; but when he was personally and offensively attacked by enemies against whom he was conscious of his strength, he exhibited it proudly and ably; and he replied to Beda by denouncing him, on the 6th of June, to the Parliament of Paris itself, as an impudent and ignorant calumniator. His letter, read at the session of Parliament on the 5th of July, 1526, was there listened to with profound deference, and produced a sensation which did not remain without effect; in vain did Beda persist in accusing Erasmus of heresy and in maintaining that he was of the brotherhood of Luther; Parliament considered him in the wrong, provisionally prohibited the booksellers from vending his libels against Erasmus, and required previous authorization to be obtained for all books destined for the press by the rectors of the Sorbonne.
The success of Erasmus was also a success for Berquin; but he was still in prison, ill and maltreated. The king wrote on the 11th of July to Parliament to demand that he should enjoy at least all the liberties that the prison would admit of, that he should no longer be detained in an unhealthy cell, and that he should be placed in that building of the Conciergerie where the court-yard was. “That,” was the answer, “would be a bad precedent; they never put in the court-yard convicts who had incurred the penalty of death.” An offer was made to Berquin of the chamber reserved for the greatest personages, for princes of the blood, and of permission to walk in the court-yard for two hours a day, one in the morning and the other in the evening, in the absence of the other prisoners. Neither the king nor Berquin was inclined to be content with these concessions. The king in his irritation sent from Beaugency, on the 5th of October, two archers of his guard with a letter to this effect: “It is marvellously strange that what we ordered has not yet been done. We do command and most expressly enjoin upon you, this once for all, that you are incontinently to put and deliver the said Berquin into the hands of the said Texier and Charles do Broc, whom we have ordered to conduct him to our castle of the Louvre.” The court still objected; a prisoner favored by so high a personage, it was said, would soon be out of such a prison. The objection resulted in a formal refusal to obey. The provost of Paris, John de la Barre, the king’s premier gentleman, was requested to repair to the palace and pay Berquin a visit, to ascertain from himself what could be done for him. Berquin, for all that appears, asked for nothing but liberty to read and write. “It is not possible,” was the reply; “such liberty is never granted to those who are condemned to death.” As a great favor, Berquin was offered a copy of the Letters of St. Jerome and some volumes of history; and the provost had orders not to omit that fact in his report: “The king must be fully assured that the court do all they can to please him.”
But it was to no purpose. On the 19th of November, 1526, the provost of Paris returned to the palace with a letter from the king, formally commanding him to remove Berquin and transfer him to the Louvre. The court again protested that they would not deliver over the said Berquin to the said provost; but, they said, “seeing what the times are, the said provost will be able to find free access to the Conciergerie, for to do there what he hath a mind to.” The same day, about six in the evening, John de la Barre repaired to the Conciergerie, and removed from it Louis de Berquin, whom he handed over to the captain of the guard and four archers, who took him away to the Louvre. Two months afterwards, in January, 1527, Princess Marguerite married Henry d’Albret, King of Navarre, and about the same time, though it is difficult to discover the exact day, Louis de Berquin issued forth a free man from the Louvre, and the new queen, on taking him at once into her service, wrote to the Constable Anne de Montmorency, whom the king had charged with the duty of getting Berquin set at liberty, “I thank you for the pleasure you have done me in the matter of poor Berquin, whom I esteem as much as if he were myself; and so you may say that you have delivered me from prison, since I consider in that light the pleasure done to me.”
Marguerite’s sympathetic joy was as natural as touching; she must have thought Berquin safe; he was free and in the service of one who was fundamentally a sovereign-prince, though living in France and in dependence upon the King of France, whose sister he had just married. In France, Berquin was under the stigma of having been condemned to death as a heretic, and was confronted by determined enemies. In so perilous a position his safety depended upon his courting oblivion. But instead of that, and consulting only the dictates of his generous and blind confidence in the goodness of his cause, he resolved to assume the offensive and to cry for justice against his enemies. “Beneath the cloak of religion,” he wrote to Erasmus, “the priests conceal the vilest passions, the most corrupt morals, and the most scandalous infidelity. It is necessary to rend the veil which covers them, and boldly bring an accusation of impiety against the Sorbonne, Rome, and all their flunkies.” Erasmus, justly alarmed, used all his influence to deter him: but “the more confidence he showed,” says he, “the more I feared for him. I wrote to him frequently, begging him to get quit of the case by some expedient, or even to withdraw himself on the pretext of a royal ambassadorship obtained by the influence of his friends. I told him that the theologians would probably, as time went on, let his affair drop, but that they would never admit themselves to be guilty of impiety. I told him to always bear in mind what a hydra was that Beda, and at how many mouths he belched forth venom. I told him to reflect well that he was about to commit himself with a foe that was immortal, for a faculty never dies, and to rest assured that after having brought three monks to bay, he would have to defend himself against numerous legions, not only opulent and powerful, but, besides, very dishonest and very experienced in the practice of every kind of cheatery, who would never rest until they had effected his ruin, were his cause as just as Christ’s. I told him not to trust too much to the king’s protection, the favor of princes being unstable and their affections easily alienated by the artifices of informers. . . . And if all this could not move him, I told him not to involve me in his business, for, with his permission, I was not at all inclined to get into any tangle with legions of monks and a whole faculty of theology. But I did not succeed in convincing him; whilst I argued in so many ways to deter him from his design, I did nothing but excite his courage.”
Not only did Berquin turn a deaf ear to the wise counsels of Erasmus, but his protectress, Marguerite, being moved by his courage, and herself also as imprudent as she was generous, persuaded herself that he was in the right, and supported him in his undertaking. She wrote to the king her brother, “Poor Berquin, who, through your goodness, holds that God has twice preserved his life, throws himself upon you, having no longer any one to whom he can have recourse, for to give you to understand his innocence; and whereas, Monseigneur, I know the esteem in which you hold him and the desire he hath always had to do you service, I do not fear to entreat you, by letter instead of speech, to be pleased to have pity on him. And if it please you to show signs of taking his matter to heart, I hope that the truth, which he will make to appear, will convict the forgers of heretics of being slanderers and disobedient towards you rather than zealots for the faith.”
In his complaisance and indifference Francis I. attended to his sister’s wishes, and appeared to support Berquin in his appeal for a fresh and definite investigation of his case. On the other hand, Parliament, to whom the matter was referred, showed a disposition to take into account the king’s good will towards Berquin, lately convicted, but now become in his turn plaintiff and accuser. “We have no wish to dispute your power,” said the president, Charles de Guillard, to the king at a bed of justice held on the 24th of July, 1527: “it would be a species of sacrilege, and we know well that you are above the laws, and that neither laws nor ordinances can constrain you. Your most humble and most obedient court is comforted and rejoiced at your presence and advent, just as the apostles were when they saw their God after the resurrection. We are assured that your will is to be the peculiar protector and defender of religion, and not to permit or suffer in your kingdom any errors, heresies, or false doctrines.”
The matter thus reopened pursued its course slowly; twelve judges were appointed to give a definite decision; and the king himself nominated six, amongst whom he placed Berquin’s friend, William Bude. Various incidents unconnected with religious disputes supervened. The Queen of Navarre was brought to bed at Pau, on the 7th of January, 1528, of a daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, the future mother of Henry IV. The marriage of Princess Renee of France, daughter of Louis XII., with Duke Hercules of Ferrara, was concluded, and the preparations for its celebration were going on at Fontainebleau, when, on Monday, June 1, 1528, the day after the Feast of Pentecost, “some heretics came by night,” says the Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, “to an image of Notre-Dame de Pierre, which is at a corner of the street behind the church of Petit St. Antoine; to the which image they gave several blows with their weapons, and cut off her head and that of her little child, Our Lord. But it was never known who the image-breakers were.
The king, being then at Paris, and being advertised thereof, was so wroth and upset that, it is said, he wept right sore. And, incontinently, during the two days following, he caused it to be proclaimed by sound of trumpet throughout the cross-roads of the city that if any persons knew who had done it they should make their report and statement to justice and to him, and he would give them a thousand crowns of gold. Nevertheless nothing could be known about it, although the king showed great diligence in the matter, and had officers commissioned to go from house to house to make inquiry. . . . On Tuesday and other days following there were special processions from the parish churches and other churches of the city, which nearly all of them went to the said place. . . . And on the day of the Fete-Dieu, which was the 11th day of the said month of June, the king went in procession, most devoutly, with the parish of St. Paul and all the clergy, to the spot where was the said image. He himself carried a lighted waxen taper, bareheaded, with very great reverence, having with him the band and hautbois with several clarions and trumpets, which made a glorious show, so melodiously did they play. And with him were the Cardinal of Lorraine, and several prelates and great lords, and all the gentlemen, having each a taper of white wax in their hands, and all his archers had each a waxen taper alight, and thus they went to the spot where was the said image, with very great honor and reverence, which was a beautiful sight to see, and with devotion.” [Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, pp. 347-351.]
In the sixteenth century men were far from understanding that respect is due to every religious creed sincerely professed and practised; the innovators, who broke the images of the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus, did not consider that by thus brutally attacking that which they regarded as a superstition, they were committing a revolting outrage upon Christian consciences. Such an incident was too favorable for Berquin’s enemies not to be eagerly turned to profit by them. Although his prosecution had been resumed, he had hitherto remained at large, and been treated respectfully; he repaired without any guard over him from the Louvre to the Palace of Justice. But now he was arrested, and once more confined in the tower of the Conciergerie. Some books of his, seized hap-hazard and sent to the syndic Beda, were found covered with notes, which were immediately pronounced to be heretical. On the 16th of April, 1529, he was brought before the court. “Louis Berquin,” said the president to him, “you are convicted of having belonged to the sect of Luther, and of having made wicked books against the majesty of God and of His glorious Mother. In consequence, we do sentence you to make honorable amends, bareheaded and with a waxen taper alight in your hand, in the great court of the palace, crying for mercy to God, the king, and the law, for the offence by you committed. After that, you will be conducted bareheaded and on foot to the Place de Greve, where your books will be burned before your eyes. Then you will be taken in front of the church of Notre-Dame, where you will make honorable amends to God and to the glorious Virgin His Mother. After which a hole will be pierced in your tongue, that member wherewith you have sinned. Lastly, you will be placed in the prison of Monsieur de Paris (the bishop), and will be there confined between two stone walls for the whole of your life. And we forbid that there be ever given you book to read or pen and ink to write.” This sentence, which Erasmus called atrocious, appeared to take Berquin by surprise; for a moment he remained speechless, and then he said, “I appeal to the king:” whereupon he was taken back to prison. The sentence was to be carried out the same day about three P. M. A great crowd of more than twenty thousand persons, says a contemporary chronicler, rushed to the bridges, the streets, the squares, where this solemn expiation was to take place. The commissioner of police, the officer of the Chatelet, the archers, crossbowmen, and arquebusiers of the city had repaired to the palace to form the escort; but when they presented themselves at the prison to take Berquin, he told them that he had appealed to the king, and that he would not go with them. The escort and the crowd retired disappointed. The president convoked the tribunal the same evening, and repairing to the prison, he made Berquin sign the form of his appeal. William Bude hurried to the scene, and vehemently urged the prisoner to give it up. “A second sentence,” said he, “is ready, and it pronounces death. If you acquiesce in the first, we shall be able to save you later on. All that is demanded of you is to ask pardon: and have we not all need of pardon?” It appears that for a moment Berquin hesitated, and was on the point of consenting; but Bude remained anxious. “I know him,” said he; “his ingenuousness and his confidence in the goodness of his cause will ruin him.” The king was at Blois, and his sister Marguerite at St. Germain; on the news of this urgent peril she wrote to her brother, “I for the last time, make you a very humble request; it is, that you will be pleased to have pity upon poor Berquin, whom I know to be suffering for nothing but loving the word of God and obeying yours. You will be pleased, Monseigneur, so to act that it be not said that separation has made you forget your most humble and most obedient subject and sister, Marguerite.” We can discover no trace of any reply whatever from Francis I. According to most of the documentary evidence, uncertainty lasted for three days. Berquin persisted in his resolution. “No,” he to his friend Bude, who again came to the prison, “I would rather endure death than give my approval, even by silence only to condemnation of the truth.” The president of the court went once more to pay him a visit, and asked him if he held to his appeal. Berquin said, “Yes.” court revised its original sentence, and for the penalty of perpetual imprisonment substituted that of the stake. On the 22d of April, 1529, according to most of the documents, but on the 17th, according to the Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, which the details of the last days render highly improbable, the officers of Parliament entered Berquin’s gloomy chamber. He rose quietly and went with them; the procession set out, and at about three arrived at the Place de Greve; where the stake was ready. “Berquin had a gown of velvet, garments of satin and damask, and hosen of gold thread,” says the Bourgeois de Paris. “‘Alas!’ said some as they saw him pass, ‘he is of noble lineage, a mighty great scholar, expert in science and subtile withal, and nevertheless he hath gone out of his senses.’” We borrow the account of his actual death from a letter of Erasmus, written on the evidence of an eye-witness: “Not a symptom of agitation appeared either in his face or the attitude of his body: he had the bearing of a man who is meditating in his cabinet on the subject of his studies, or in a temple on the affairs of heaven. Even when the executioner, in a rough voice, proclaimed his crime and its penalty, the constant serenity of his features was not at all altered. When the order was given him to dismount from the tumbrel, he obeyed cheerfully without hesitating; nevertheless he had not about him any of that audacity, that arrogance, which in the case of malefactors is sometimes bred of their natural savagery; everything about him bore evidence to the tranquillity of a good conscience. Before he died he made a speech to the people; but none could hear him, so great was the noise which the soldiers made, according, it is said, to the orders they had received. When the cord which bound him to the post suffocated his voice, not a soul in the crowd ejaculated the name of Jesus, whom it is customary to invoke even in favor of parricides and the sacrilegious, to such extent was the multitude excited against him by those folks who are to be found everywhere, and who can do anything with the feelings of the simple and ignorant.” Theodore de Beze adds that the grand penitentiary of Paris, Merlin, who was present at the execution, said, as he withdrew from the still smoking stake, “I never saw any one die more Christianly.” The impressions and expressions of the crowd, as they dispersed, were very diverse; but the majority cried, “He was a heretic.” Others said, “God is the only just Judge, and happy is the man whom He absolves.” Some said below their breath, “It is only through the cross that Christ will triumph in the kingdom of the Gauls.” A man went up to the Franciscan monk who had placed himself at Berquin’s side in the procession, and had entreated him without getting from him anything but silence, and asked him, “Did Berquin say that he had erred?” “Yes, certainly,” answered the monk, “and I doubt not but that his soul hath departed in peace.” This expression was reported to Erasmus; but “I don’t believe it,” said he; “it is the story that these fellows are obliged to invent after their victim’s death, to appease the wrath of the people.”
We have dwelt in detail upon these two martyrs, Leclerc and Berquin, the wool-carder and the scholarly gentleman, because they are faithful and vivid representatives of the two classes amongst which, in the sixteenth century, the Reformation took root in France. It had a double origin, morally and socially, one amongst the people and the other amongst the aristocratic and the learned; it was not national, nor was it embraced by the government of the country. Persecution was its first and its only destiny in the reign of Francis I., and it went through the ordeal with admirable courage and patience; it resisted only in the form of martyrdom. We will give no more of such painful and hideous pictures; in connection with this subject, and as regards the latter portion of this reign, we will dwell upon only those general facts which bear the impress of public morals and the conduct of the government rather than of the fortunes and the feelings of individuals. It was after Francis I.‘s time that the Reformation, instead of confining itself to submitting with dignity to persecution, made a spirited effort to escape from it by becoming a political party, and taking up, in France, the task of the opposition—a liberal and an energetic opposition, which claims its rights and its securities. It then took its place in French history as a great public power, organized and commanded by great leaders, and no longer as a multitude of scattered victims falling one after another, without a struggle, beneath the blows of their persecutors.
The martyrdom of Berquin put a stop to the attempt at quasi-tolerance in favor of aristocratic and learned Reformers which Francis I. had essayed to practise; after having twice saved Berquin from a heretic’s doom, he failed to save him ultimately; and, except the horrible details of barbarity in the execution, the scholarly gentleman received the same measure as the wool-carder, after having been, like him, true to his faith and to his dignity as a man and a Christian. Persecution thenceforward followed its course without the king putting himself to the trouble of applying the drag for anybody; his sister Marguerite alone continued to protect, timidly and dejectedly, those of her friends amongst the reformers whom she could help or to whom she could offer an asylum in Bearn without embroiling herself with the king, her brother, and with the Parliaments. We will not attempt to enumerate the martyrdoms which had to be undergone by the persevering Reformers in France between 1529 and 1547, from the death of Louis de Berquin to that of Francis I.; the task would be too long and intermingled with too many petty questions of dates or proper names; we will confine ourselves to quoting some local computations and to conning over the great historic facts which show to what extent the persecution was general and unrelenting, though it was ineffectual, in the end, to stifle the Reformation and to prevent the bursting out of those religious wars which, from the death of Francis I. to the accession of Henry IV., smothered France in disaster, blood, and crime.
In the reign of Francis I., from 1524 to 1547, eighty-one death-sentences for heresy were executed. At Paris only, from the 10th of November to the 2d of May, a space of some six months, one hundred and two sentences to death by fire for heresy were pronounced; twenty-seven were executed; two did not take place, because those who ought to have undergone them denounced other Reformers to save themselves; and seventy-three succeeded in escaping by flight. The Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris (pp. 444- 450) does not mention sentences to lesser penalties. In a provincial town, whose history one of its most distinguished inhabitants, M. Boutiot, has lately written from authentic documents and local traditions, at Troyes in fact, in 1542 and 1546, two burgesses, one a clerk and the other a publisher, were sentenced to the stake and executed for the crime of heresy: “on an appeal being made by the publisher, Mace Moreau, the Parliament of Paris confirmed the sentence pronounced by the bailiff’s court,” and he underwent his punishment on the Place St. Pierre with the greatest courage. The decree of the Parliament contains the most rigorous enactments against books in the French language treating of religious matters; and it enjoins upon all citizens the duty of denouncing those who, publicly or not, make profession of the new doctrine. “The Lutheran propaganda,” say the documents, “is in great force throughout the diocese; it exercises influence not only on the class of artisans, but also amongst the burgesses. Doubt has made its way into many honest souls. The Reformation has reached so far even where the schism is not complete. Catholic priests profess some of the new doctrines, at the same time that they remain attached to their offices. Many bishops declare themselves partisans of the reformist doctrines. The Protestant worship, however, is not yet openly conducted. The mass of the clergy do not like to abandon the past; they cling to their old traditions, and, if they have renounced certain abuses, they yield only on a few points of little importance. The new ideas are spreading, even in the country. . . . Statues representing the Virgin and the saints are often broken, and these deeds are imputed to those who have adopted the doctrines of Luther and of Calvin. A Notre-Dame de Pitie, situated at the Hotel-Dieule-Comte, was found with its head broken. This event excites to madness the Catholic population. The persecutions continue.” Many people emigrated for fear of the stake. “From August, 1552, to the 6th of January, 1555,” says the chronicler, “Troyes loses in consequence of exile, probably voluntary, a certain number of its best inhabitants,” and he names thirteen families with the style and title of “nobleman.” He adds, “There is scarcely a month in the year when there are not burned two or three heretics at Paris, Meaux, and Troyes, and sometimes more than a dozen.” Troyes contained, at that time, says M. Boutiot, eighteen thousand two hundred and eighty-five inhabitants, counting five persons to a household. [Histoire de la Ville de Troyes, t. iii. pp. 381, 387, 398, 415, 431.] Many other provincial towns offered the same spectacle.
During the long truce which succeeded the peace of Cambrai, from 1532 to 1536, it might have been thought for a while that the persecution in France was going to be somewhat abated. Policy obliged Francis I. to seek the support of the Protestants of Germany against Charles V.; he was incessantly fluctuating between that policy and a strictly Catholic and papal policy; by marrying his son Henry, on the 28th of October, 1533, to Catherine de’ Medici, niece of Pope Clement VII., he seemed to have decided upon the latter course; but he had afterwards made a movement in the contrary direction; Clement VII. had died on the 26th of September, 1524; Paul III. had succeeded him; and Francis I. again turned towards the Protestants of Germany; he entered into relations with the most moderate amongst their theologians, with Melancthon, Bucer, and Sturm; there was some talk of conciliation, of a re-establishment of peace and harmony in the church; nor did the king confine himself to speaking by the mouth of diplomatists; he himself wrote to Melancthon, on the 23d of June, 1535, “It is some time now since I heard from William du Bellay, my chamberlain and councillor, of the zeal with which you are exerting yourself to appease the altercations to which Christian doctrine has given rise. I now hear that you are very much disposed to come to us for to confer with some of our most distinguished doctors as to the means of re-establishing in the church that sublime harmony which is the chief of all my desires. Come, then, either in an official capacity or in your own private character; you will be most welcome to me, and you shall in either case have proof of the interest I feel in the glory of your own Germany and in the peace of the world.” Melancthon had, indeed, shown an inclination to repair to Paris; he had written, on the 9th of May, 1535, to his friend Sturm, “I will not let myself be stopped by domestic ties or by fear of danger. There is no human greatness before which I do not prefer Christ’s glory. One thought alone gives me pause: I doubt my ability to do any good; I fear it is impossible to obtain from the king that which I regard as necessary for the Lord’s glory and for the peace of France. You know that kingdom. Pronounce your judgment. If you think that I shall do well to undertake the journey, I am off.”
Melancthon had good reason to doubt whether success, such as he deemed necessary, were possible. Whilst Francis I. was making all these advances to the Protestants of Germany, he was continuing to proceed against their brother Christians in France more bitterly and more flagrantly than ever. Two recent events had very much envenomed party feeling between the French Catholics and Reformers, and the king had been very much compromised in this fresh crisis of the struggle. In 1534 the lawless insurrection of Anabaptists and peasants, which had so violently agitated Germany in 1525, began again; the insurgents seized the town of Munster, in Westphalia, and there renewed their attempt to found the kingdom of Israel, with community of property and polygamy. As in 1525, they were promptly crushed by the German princes, Catholic and Protestant, of the neighborhood; but their rising had created some reverberation in France, and the Reformers had been suspected of an inclination to take part in it. “It is said,” wrote the Chancellor de Granvelle, in January, 1535, to the ambassador of France at the court of Charles V., “that the number of the strayed from the faith in France, and the danger of utter confusion, are very great; the enterprise of the said strayed, about which you write to me, to set fire to the churches and pillage the Louvre, proves that they were in great force. Please God the king may be able to apply a remedy!” [Papiers d’Etat du Cardinal de Granvelle, t. ii. p. 283.] The accusation was devoid of all foundation; but nothing is absurd in the eyes of party hatred and suspicion, and an incident, almost contemporaneous with the fresh insurrection of the Anabaptists, occurred to increase the king’s wrath, as well as the people’s, against the Reformers, and to rekindle the flames of persecution. On the 24th of October, 1534, placards against the mass, transubstantiation, and the regimen as well as the faith of the Catholic church, were posted up during the night in the thoroughfares of Paris, and at Blois on the very chamberdoor of Francis I., whose first glance, when he got up in the morning, they caught. They had been printed at Neufchatel, in Switzerland, where the influence of the refugee William Farel was strong, and their coarse violence of expression could not fail to excite the indignation of even the most indifferent Catholics. In their fanatical blindness factions say only what satisfies their own passions, without considering moral propriety or the effect which will be produced by their words upon the feelings of their adversaries, who also have creeds and passions. Francis I., equally shocked and irritated, determined to give the Catholic faith striking satisfaction, and Protestant audacity a bloody lesson. On the 21st of January, 1535, a solemn procession issued from the church of St. Germain l’Auxerrois. John du Bellay, Bishop of Paris, held in his hands the holy sacrament, surrounded by the three sons of France and the Duke de Vendome, who were the dais-bearers; and the king walked behind, with a taper in his hand, between the Cardinals of Bourbon and Lorraine. At each halting-place he handed his taper to the Cardinal of Lorraine, folded his hands, and humbly prostrating himself, implored divine mercy for his people. After the procession was over, the king, who had remained to dine with John du Bellay, assembled in the great hall of the palace the heads of all the companies, and taking his place on a sort of throne which had been prepared for him, said, “Whatever progress may have already been made by the pest, the remedy is still easy if each of you, devoured by the same zeal as I, will forget the claims of flesh and blood to remember only that he is a Christian, and will denounce without pity all those whom he knows to be partisans or favorers of heresy. As for me, if my arm were gangrened, I would have it cut off though it were my right arm, and if my sons who hear me were such wretches as to fall into such execrable and accursed opinions, I would be willing to give them up to make a sacrifice of them to God.” On the 29th of January there was published an edict which sentenced concealers of heretics, “Lutheran or other,” to the same penalties as the said heretics, unless they denounced their guests to justice; and a quarter of the property to be confiscated was secured to the denouncers. Fifteen days previously Francis I. had signed a decree still stranger for a king who was a protector of letters; he ordered the abolition of printing, that means of propagating heresies, and “forbade the printing of any book on pain of the halter.” Six weeks later, however, on the 26th of February, he became ashamed of such an act, and suspended its execution indefinitely. Punishments in abundance preceded and accompanied the edicts; from the 10th of November, 1534, to the 3d of May, 1535, twenty-four heretics were burned alive in Paris, without counting many who were sentenced to less cruel penalties. The procedure had been made more rapid; the police commissioner of the Chatelet dealt with cases summarily, and the Parliament confirmed. The victims had at first been strangled before they were burned; they were now burned alive, after the fashion of the Spanish Inquisition. The convicts were suspended by iron chains to beams which alternately “hoisted” and “lowered” them over the flames until the executioner cut the cord to let the sufferer fall. The evidence was burned together with the convicts; it was undesirable that the Reformers should be able to make a certified collection of their martyrs’ acts and deeds.
After a detailed and almost complacent enumeration of all these executions, we find in the Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris this paragraph: “The rumor was, in June, 1535, that Pope Paul III., being advertised of the execrable and horrible justice which the king was doing upon the Lutherans in his kingdom, did send word to the King of France that he was advertised of it, and that he was quite willing to suppose that he did it in good part, as he still made use of the beautiful title he had to be called the Most Christian king; nevertheless, God the Creator, when he was in this world, made more use of mercy than of rigorous justice, which should never be used rigorously; and that it was a cruel death to burn a man alive because he might have to some extent renounced the faith and the law. Wherefore the pope did pray and request the king, by his letters, to be pleased to mitigate the fury and rigor of his justice by granting grace and pardon. The king, wishing to follow the pope’s wishes, according as he had sent him word by his letters patent, sent word to the court of Parliament not to proceed any more with such rigor as they had shown heretofore. For this cause were there no more rigorous proceedings on the part of justice.” [Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, p. 456.]
Search has been made to discover whether the assertion of the Bourgeois de Paris has any foundation, whether Pope Paul III. really did write in June, 1535, the letter attributed to him, and whether its effect was, that the king wrote to Parliament not to proceed against the Reformers “with such rigor.” No proof has, however, been obtained as to the authenticity of the pope’s letter, and in any case it was not very effectual, for the same Bourgeois de Paris reports, that in September, 1535, three months after that, according to him, it was written: Two fellows, makers of silk ribbons and tissues, were burned all alive, one in the Place Maubert and the other in St. John’s cemetery, as Lutherans, which they were. They had handed over to their host at Paris some Lutheran books to take care of, saying, ‘Keep this book for us while we go into the city, and show it to nobody.’ When they were gone, this host was not able to refrain from showing this book to a certain priest, the which, after having looked at it, said incontinently, ‘This is a very wicked book, and proscribed.’ Then the said host went to the commissioner of police to reveal that he had such and such a book of such an one, the which sent forth with to the house of the said host to take and carry off the said two fellows to the Chatelet. Being questioned, they confessed the state of the case. Whereupon, by sentence of the said commissioner, confirmed by decree, “they made honorable amends in front of the church of Notre-Dame de Paris, had their tongues cut out, and were burned all alive and with unshaken obstinacy.” Proceedings and executions, then, did not cease, even in the case of the most humble class of Reformers, and at the very moment when Francis I. was exerting himself to win over the Protestants of Germany with the cry of conciliation and re-establishment of harmony in the church. Melancthon, Bucer, and Luther himself had allowed themselves to be tempted by the prospect; but the German politicians, princes, and counsellors were more clear-sighted. “We at Augsburg,” wrote Sailer, deputy from that city, “know the King of France well; he cares very little for religion, or even for morality. He plays the hypocrite with the pope, and gives the Germans the smooth side of his tongue, thinking of nothing but how to cheat them of the hopes he gives them. His only aim is to crush the emperor.” The attempt of Francis I. thus failed, first in Germany, and then at Paris also, where the Sorbonne was not disposed, any more than the German politicians were, to listen to any talk about a specious conciliation; and the persecution resumed its course in France, paving the way for civil war.
The last and most atrocious act of persecution in the reign of Francis I. was directed not against isolated individuals, but against a whole population, harried, despoiled, and banished or exterminated on account of heresy. About the year 1525 small churches of Reformers began to assume organization between the Alps and the Jura. Something was there said about Christians who belonged to the Reformation without having ever been reformed. It was said that, in certain valleys of the Piedmontese Alps and Dauphiny and in certain quarters of Provence, there were to be found believers who for several centuries had recognized no authority save that of the Holy Scriptures. Some called them Vaudians (Waldensians), others poor of Lyons, others Lutherans. The rumor of the Reformation was heard in their valleys, and created a lively emotion amongst them. One of them determined to go and see what this reformation was; and he returned to his valleys with good news and with pious books. Regular relations were from that time established between the Reformers of Switzerland, France, and Germany, and the Christian shepherds of these mountains. Visits were exchanged Farel and Saunier went amongst the Vaudians and conversed with them about their common faith, common in spite of certain differences. Rustic conferences, composed of the principal landholders, barbas or pastors, and simple members of the faithful, met more than once in the open air under the pines of their mountains. The Vaudians of Provence had been settled there since the end of the thirteenth century; and in the course of the fourteenth other Vaudians from Dauphiny, and even from Calabria, had come thither to join them. “Their barbas,” says a contemporary monk [Histoire des Guerres excitees dans le Comtat venaissin par les Calvinistes du seizieme siecle, par le pere Justin, capucin], “used to preside at their exercises of religion, which were performed in secret. As they were observed to be quiet and circumspect, as they faithfully paid taxes, tithe, and seigniorial dues, and as they were besides very laborious, they were not troubled on the score of their habits and doctrines.” Their new friends from Switzerland and Germany reproached them with concealment of their faith and worship. As soon as they had overtly separated from the Roman church, persecution began; Francis I. checked its first excesses, but it soon began again; the episcopal prisons were filled with Vaudians, who bristled at the summons to abjure; and on the 29th of March, 1535, thirteen of them were sentenced to be burned alive. Pope Paul III. complained to Francis I. of their obstinacy; the king wrote about it to the Parliament of Aix; the Parliament ordered the lords of the lands occupied by the Vaudians to force their vassals to abjure or leave the country. When cited to appear before the court of Aix to explain the grounds of their refusal, several declined. The court sentenced them, in default, to be burned alive. Their friends took up arms and went to deliver the prisoners. Merindol was understood to be the principal retreat of the sectaries; by decree of November 18, 1540, the Parliament ordered that “the houses should be demolished and razed to the ground, the cellars filled up, the woods cut down, the trees of the gardens torn up, and that the lands of those who had lived in Merindol should not be able to be farmed out to anybody whatever of their family or name.” In the region of Parliament itself complaints were raised against such hardships; the premier president, Barthelemy Chassaneuz, was touched, and adjourned the execution of the decree. The king commissioned William du Bellay to examine into the facts; the report of Du Bellay was favorable to the Vaudians, as honest, laborious, and charitable farmers, discharging all the duties of civil life; but, at the same time, he acknowledged that they did not conform to the laws of the church, that they did not recognize the pope or the bishops, that they prayed in the vulgar tongue, and that they were in the habit of choosing certain persons from amongst themselves to be their pastors. On this report, Francis I., by a declaration of February 18, 1541, pardoned the Vaudians for all that had been irregular in their conduct, on condition that within the space of three months they should abjure their errors; and he ordered the Parliament to send to Aix deputies from their towns, burghs, and villages, to make abjuration in the name of all, at the same time authorizing the Parliament to punish, according to the ordinances, those who should refuse to obey, and to make use, if need were, of the services of the soldiery. Thus persecuted and condemned for their mere faith, undemonstrative as it was, the Vaudians confined themselves to asking that it might be examined and its errors pointed out. Those of Merindol and those of Cabriere in the countship of Venasque drew up their profession of faith and sent it to the king and to two bishops of the province, Cardinal Sadolet, Bishop of Carpentras, and John Durandi, Bishop of Cavaillon, whose equity and moderation inspired them with some confidence. Cardinal Sadolet did not belie their expectation; he received them with kindness, discussed with them their profession of faith, pointed out to them divers articles which might be remodelled without disavowing the basis of their creed, and assured them that it would always be against his sentiments to have them treated as enemies. “I am astonished,” he wrote to the pope, “that these folks should be persecuted when the Jews are spared.” The Bishop of Cavaillon testified towards them a favor less unalloyed: “I was quite sure,” said he, “that there was not so much mischief amongst you as was supposed; however, to calm men’s minds, it is necessary that you should submit to a certain appearance of abjuration.” “But what would you have us abjure, if we are already within the truth?” “It is but a simple formality that I demand of you; I do not require in your case notary or signature; if you are unwilling to assent to this abjuration, none can argue you into it.” “We are plain men, monseigneur; we are unwilling to do anything to which we cannot assent;” and they persisted in their refusal to abjure. Cardinal Sadolet was summoned to Rome, and the premier president Chassaneuz died suddenly. His successor, John de Maynier, Baron of Oppede, was a violent man, passionately bigoted, and moreover, it is said, a personal enemy of the Vaudians of Cabrieres, on which his estates bordered; he recommenced against them a persecution which was at first covert; they had found protectors in Switzerland and in Germany; at the instance of Calvin, the Swiss Protestant cantons and the German princes assembled at Smalkalden wrote to Francis I. in their favor; it was to his interest to humor the Protestants of Germany, and that fact turned out to the advantage of the Vaudians of Provence; on the 14th of June, 1544, he issued an edict which, suspending the proceedings commenced against them, restored to them their privileges, and ordered such of them as were prisoners to be set at large; “and as the attorney-general of Provence,” it goes on to say, “is related to the Archbishop of Aix, their sworn enemy, there will be sent in his place a counsellor of the court for to inform me of their innocence.” But some months later the peace of Crespy was made; and Francis I. felt no longer the same solicitude about humoring the Protestants of Switzerland and Germany. Baron d’Oppede zealously resumed his work against the Vaudians; he accused them of intriguing; with foreign Reformers, and of designing to raise fifteen thousand men to surprise Marseilles and form Provence into a republic. On the 1st of January, 1545, Francis I. signed, without reading it they say, the revocation of his edict of 1544, and ordered execution of the decree issued by the Parliament of Aix, dated November 18, 1540, on the subject of the Vaudians, “notwithstanding all letters of grace posterior to that epoch, and ordered the governor of the province to give, for that purpose, the assistance of the strong hand to justice.” The duty of assisting justice was assigned to Baron d’Oppede; and from the 7th to the 25th of April, 1545, two columns of troops, under the orders, respectively, of Oppede himself and Baron de la Garde, ravaged with fire and sword the three districts of Merindol, Cabrieres, and La Coste, which were peopled chiefly by Vaudians.
We shrink from describing in detail all the horrors committed against a population without any means of self-defence by troops giving free rein to their brutal passions and gratifying the hateful passions of their leaders. In the end three small towns and twenty-two villages were completely sacked; seven hundred and sixty-three houses, eighty-nine cattle-sheds, and thirty-one barns burned; three thousand persons massacred; two hundred and fifty-five executed subsequently to the massacre, after a mockery of trial; six or seven hundred sent to the galleys; many children sold for slaves; and the victors, on retiring, left behind them a double ordinance, from the Parliament of Aix and the vice-legate of Avignon, dated the 24th of April, 1545, forbidding “that any one, on pain of death, should dare to give asylum, aid, or succor, or furnish money or victuals, to any Vaudian or heretic.”
It is said that Francis I., when near his end, repented of this odious extermination of a small population, which, with his usual fickleness and carelessness, he had at one time protected, and at another abandoned to its enemies. Amongst his last words to his son Henry II. was an exhortation to cause an inquiry to be made into the iniquities committed by the Parliament of Aix in this instance. It will be seen, at the opening of Henry II.‘s reign, what was the result of this exhortation of his father’s.
Calvin was lately mentioned as having pleaded the cause of the Vaudians, in 1544, amongst the Protestants of Switzerland and Germany. It was from Geneva, where he had lived and been the dominant spirit for many years, that the French Reformer had exercised such influence over the chiefs of the German Reformation in favor of that small population whose creed and morals had anticipated by several centuries the Reformation in the sixteenth century. He was born, in 1509 at Noyon in Picardy, was brought up in the bosom of the Catholic church, and held a cure in 1527 at Pont-l’Eveque, where he preached several times, “joyous and almost proud,” as he said himself, “that a single dissertation had brought me a cure.” In 1534, study, meditation on the Gospels, discussion of the religious and moral questions raised on every side, and the free atmosphere of the new spirit that was abroad, changed his convictions and his resolves; he abandoned the career of the law as well as that of the established church, resigned his cure at Pont-l’Eveque, and devoted himself entirely to the work of the nascent and much opposed Reformation. Having a mind that was judicious and free from illusion in the very heat of passion, he soon saw to what an extent the success of the Reformation in France was difficult and problematical; in 1535, impressed by the obstacles it met with even more than by the dangers it evoked, he resolved to leave his country and go else whither in search of security, liberty, and the possibility of defending a cause which became the dearer to him in proportion as it was the more persecuted. He had too much sagacity not to perceive that he was rapidly exhausting his various places of asylum: Queen Marguerite of Navarre was unwilling to try too far the temper of the king her brother; Canon Louis du Tillet was a little fearful lest his splendid library should be somewhat endangered through the use made of it by his guest, who went about, arguing or preaching, in the vicinity of Angouleme; the queen’s almoner, Gerard Roussel, considered that Calvin was going too far, and grew apprehensive lest, if the Reformation should completely succeed, it might suppress the bishopric of Oleron which he desired, and which, indeed, he at a later period obtained. Lefevre of Etaples, who was the most of all in sympathy with Calvin, was seventy-nine years old, and had made up his mind to pass his last days in peace. Calvin quitted Angouleme and Nerac, and went to pass some time at Poitiers, where the friends of the Reformation, assembling round him and hanging upon his words, for the first time celebrated the Lord’s Supper in a grotto close to the town, which still goes by the name of Calvin’s Grotto. Being soon obliged to leave Poitiers, Calvin went to Orleans, then secretly to Paris, then to Noyon to see his family once more, and set out at last for Strasbourg, already one of the strongholds of the Reformation, where he had friends, amongst others the learned Bucer, with whom he had kept up a constant correspondence. He arrived there at the beginning of the year 1535; but it was not at Strasbourg that he took up his quarters; he preferred Bale, where also there was a reunion of men of letters, scholars, and celebrated printers, Erasmus, Simon Grynee (Grymeus), and the Frobens, and where Calvin calculated upon finding the leisure and aid he required for executing the great work he had been for some time contemplating—his Institution de la Religion chretienne (Christian Institutes). This would not be the place, and we have no intention, to sum up the religious doctrines of that book; we might challenge many of them as contrary to the true meaning and moral tendency of Christianity; but we desire to set in a clear light their distinctive and original characteristics, which are those of Calvin himself in the midst of his age. These characteristics are revealed in the preface and even in the dedication of the book. It is to Francis I., the persecutor of the French Reformers, during one of the most cruel stages of the persecution, and at the very moment when he had just left his own country in order that he may live in security and speak with freedom, that Calvin dedicates his work. “Do not imagine,” he says to the king, “that I am attempting here my own special defence in order to obtain permission to return to the country of my birth, from which, although I feel for it such human affection as is my bounden duty, yet, as things are now, I do not suffer any great anguish at being cut off. But I am taking up the cause of all the faithful, and even that of Christ, which is in these days so mangled and down-trodden in your kingdom that it seems to be in a desperate plight. And this has no doubt come to pass rather through the tyranny of certain Pharisees than of your own will.” Calvin was at the same time the boldest and the least revolutionary amongst the innovators of the sixteenth century; bold as a Christian thinker, but full of deference and consideration towards authority, even when he was flagrantly withdrawing himself from it. The idea of his book was at first exclusively religious, and intended for the bulk of the French Reformers; but at the moment when Calvin is about to publish it, prudence and policy recur to his mind, and it is to the King of France that he addresses himself; it is the authority of the royal persecutor that he invokes; it is the reason of Francis I. that he attempts to convince. He acts like a respectful and faithful subject, as well as an independent and innovating Christian.
After having wandered for some time longer in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, Calvin in 1536 arrived at Geneva. It was at this time a small independent republic, which had bravely emancipated itself from the domination of the Dukes of Savoy, and in which the Reformation had acquired strength, but it had not yet got rid of that lawless and precarious condition which is the first phase presented by revolutionary innovations after victory; neither the political nor the religious community at Geneva had yet received any organization which could be called regular or regarded as definitive; the two communities had not yet understood and regulated their reciprocal positions and the terms on which they were to live together. All was ferment and haze in this little nascent state, as regarded the mental as well as the actual condition, when Calvin arrived there; his name was already almost famous there; he had given proofs of devotion to the cause of the Reformation; his book on the Institution de la Religion chretienne had just appeared; a great instinct for organization was strikingly evinced in it, at the same time that the dedication to Francis I. testified to a serious regard for the principle of authority and for its rights, as well as the part it ought to perform in human communities. Calvin had many friends in Switzerland, and they urged him to settle at once at Geneva, and to labor at establishing there Christian order in the Reformed church simultaneously with its independence and its religious liberties in its relations with the civil estate. At first Calvin hesitated and resisted; he was one of those who take strict account, beforehand, of the difficulties to be encountered and the trials to be undergone in any enterprise for the success of which they are most desirous, and who inwardly shudder at the prospect of such a burden. But the Christian’s duty, the Reformer’s zeal, the lively apprehension of the perils which were being incurred by the cause of the Reformation, and the nobly ambitious hope of delivering it,—these sentiments united prevailed over the first misgivings of that great and mighty soul, and Calvin devoted himself in Geneva to a work which, from 1536 to 1564, in a course of violent struggles and painful vicissitudes, was to absorb and rapidly consume his whole life.
From that time forth a principle, we should rather say a passion, held sway in Calvin’s heart, and was his guiding star in the permanent organization of the church which he founded, as well as in his personal conduct during his life. That principle is the profound distinction between the religious and the civil community. Distinction we say, and by no means separation; Calvin, on the contrary, desired alliance between the two communities and the two powers, but each to be independent in its own domain, combining their action, showing mutual respect and lending mutual support. To this alliance he looked for the reformation and moral discipline of the members of the church placed under the authority of its own special religious officers and upheld by the indirect influence of the civil power.
In this principle and this fundamental labor of Calvin’s there were two new and bold reforms attempted in the very heart of the great Reformation in Europe, and over and above the work of its first promoters. Henry VIII., on removing the church of England from the domination of the papacy, had proclaimed himself its head, and the church of England had accepted this royal supremacy. Zwingle, when he provoked in German Switzerland the rupture with the church of Rome, had approved of the arrangement that the sovereign authority in matters of religion should pass into the hands of the civil powers. Luther himself, at the same time that he reserved to the new German church a certain measure of spontaneity and liberty, had placed it under the protection and preponderance of laic sovereigns. In this great question as to the relations between church and state Calvin desired and did more than his predecessors; even before he played any considerable part in the European Reformation, as soon as he heard of Henry VIII.‘s religious supremacy in England, he had strongly declared against such a regimen; with an equitable spirit rare in his day, and in spite of his contest with the church of Rome, he was struck with the strength and dignity conferred upon that church by its having an existence distinct from the civil community, and by the independence of its head. When he himself became a great Reformer, he did not wish the Reformed church to lose this grand characteristic; whilst proclaiming it evangelical, he demanded for it in matters of faith and discipline the independence and special authority which had been possessed by the primitive church; and in spite of the resistance often shown to him by the civil magistrates, in spite of the concessions he was sometimes obliged to make to them, he firmly maintained this principle, and he secured to the Reformed church of Geneva, in purely religious questions and affairs, the right of self-government, according to the faith and the law as they stand written in the Holy Books.
He at the same time put in force in this church a second principle of no less importance. In the course of ages, and by a series of successive modifications, some natural and others factitious and illegitimate, the Christian church had become, so to speak, cut in two, into the ecclesiastical community and the religious community, the clergy and the worshippers. In the Catholic church the power was entirely in the hands of the clergy; the ecclesiastical body completely governed the religious body; and, whilst the latter was advancing more and more in laic ideas and sentiments, the former remained even more and more distinct and sovereign. The German and English Reformations had already modified this state of things, and given to the lay community a certain portion of influence in religious questions and affairs. Calvin provided for the matter in a still more direct and effectual fashion, not only as regarded affairs in general, but even the choice of pastors; he gave admission to laymen, in larger number too than that of the ecclesiastics, into the consistories and synods, the governing authorities in the Reformed church. He thus did away with the separation between the clergy and the worshippers; he called upon them to deliberate and act together; and he secured to the religious community, in its entirety, their share of authority in the affairs and fortunes of the church.
Thus began at Geneva, under the inspiration and through the influence of Calvin, that ecclesiastical organization which, developing, completing, and modifying itself according to the requirements of places and times, became, under the name of Presbyterian regimen, the regimen of the Reformed churches in France, French Switzerland, Holland, Scotland, and amongst a considerable portion of the Protestant population in England and in the United States of America—a regimen evangelical in origin and character, republican in some of its maxims and institutions, but no stranger to the principle of authority, one which admitted of discipline and was calculated for duration, and which has kept for three centuries, amongst the most civilized people, a large measure of Christian faith, ecclesiastical order, and civil liberty. It was a French refugee who instituted, in a foreign city, this regimen, and left it as a legacy to the French Reformation and to the numerous Christian communities who were eager to adopt it. It is on this ground that Calvin takes a place in the history of France, and has a fair right to be counted amongst the eminent men who have carried to a distance the influence, the language, and the fame of the country in the bosom of which it was not permitted them to live and labor. In 1547, when the death of Francis I. was at hand, that ecclesiastical organization of Protestantism which Calvin had instituted at Geneva was not even begun in France. The French Protestants were as yet but isolated and scattered individuals, without any bond of generally accepted and practised faith or discipline, and without any eminent and recognized heads. The Reformation pursued its course; but a Reformed church did not exist. And this confused mass of Reformers and Reformed had to face an old, a powerful, and a strongly constituted church, which looked upon the innovators as rebels over whom it had every right as much as against them it had every arm. In each of the two camps prevailed errors of enormous magnitude, and fruitful of fatal consequences; Catholics and Protestants both believed themselves to be in exclusive possession of the truth, of all religious truth, and to have the right of imposing it by force upon their adversaries the moment they had the power. Both were strangers to any respect for human conscience, human thought, and human liberty. Those who had clamored for this on their own account when they were weak had no regard for it in respect of others when they felt themselves to be strong. On the side of the Protestants the ferment was at full heat, but as yet vague and unsettled; on the part of the Catholics the persecution was unscrupulous and unlimited. Such was the position and such the state of feeling in which Francis I., at his death on the 31st of March, 1547, left the two parties that had already been at grips during his reign. He had not succeeded either in reconciling them or in securing the triumph of that which had his favor and the defeat of that which he would have liked to vanquish. That was, in nearly all that he undertook, his fate; he lacked the spirit of sequence and steady persistence, and his merits as well as his defects almost equally urged him on to rashly attempt that which he only incompletely executed. He was neither prudent nor persevering, and he may be almost said to have laid himself out to please everybody rather than to succeed in one and the same great purpose. A short time before his death a Venetian ambassador who had resided a long while at his court, Marino Cavalli, drew up and forwarded to the Senate of Venice a portrait of him so observantly sketched and so full of truth that it must be placed here side by side with the more exacting and more severe judgment already pronounced here touching this brilliant but by no means far-sighted or effective king.
“The king is now fifty years of age; his aspect is in every respect kingly, insomuch that, without ever having seen his face or his portrait, any one, on merely looking at him, would say at once: ‘That is the king.’ All his movements are so noble and majestic that no prince could equal them. His constitution is robust, in spite of the excessive fatigue he has constantly undergone and still undergoes in so many expeditions and travels. He eats and drinks a great deal, sleeps still better, and, what is more, dreams of nothing but leading a jolly life. He is rather fond of being an exquisite in his dress, which is slashed and laced, and rich with jewelry and precious stones; even his doublets are daintily worked and of golden tissue; his shirt is very fine, and it shows through an opening in the doublet, according to the fashion of France. This delicate and dainty way of living contributes to his health. In proportion as the king bears bodily fatigue well, and endures it without bending beneath the burden, in the same proportion do mental cares weigh heavily upon him, and he shifts them almost entirely on to Cardinal de Tournon and Admiral Annebault. He takes no resolve, he makes no reply, without having had their advice; and if ever, which is very rare, an answer happens to be given or a concession made without having received the approval of these two advisers, he revokes it or modifies it. But in what concerns the great affairs of state, peace or war, his Majesty, docile as he is in everything else, will have the rest obedient to his wishes. In that case there is nobody at court, whatever authority he may possess, who dare gainsay his Majesty. This prince has a very sound judgment and a great deal of information; there is no sort of thing, or study or art, about which he cannot converse very much to the point. It is true that, when people see how, in spite of his knowledge and his fine talk, all his warlike enterprises have turned out ill, they say that all his wisdom lies on his lips, and not in his mind. But I think that the calamities of this king come from lack of men capable of properly carrying out his designs. As for him, he will never have anything to do with the execution, or even with the superintendence of it in any way; it seems to him quite enough to know his own part, which is to command and to supply plans. Accordingly, that which might be wished for in him is a little more care and patience, not by any means more experience and knowledge. His Majesty readily pardons offences; and he becomes heartily reconciled with those whom he has offended.” [Relations des Ambassadeurs venitiens sur les Affaires de France au seizieme siecle, in the Documents inedits sur l’Histoire de France, translated by M. Tommaseo, t. i. pp. 279-283.]
It is said that at the close of his reign Francis I., in spite of all the resources of his mind and all his easy-going qualities, was much depressed, and that he died in sadness and disquietude as to the future. One may be inclined to think that, in his egotism, he was more sad on his own account than disquieted on that of his successors and of France. However that may be, he was assuredly far from foreseeing the terrible civil war which began after him, and the crimes, as well as disasters, which it caused. None of his more intimate circle was any longer in a position to excite his solicitude: his mother, Louise of Savoy, had died sixteen years before him (September 22, 1531); his most able and most wicked adviser, Chancellor Duprat, twelve years (July 29, 1535). His sister Marguerite survived him two years (she died December 21, 1549,) “disgusted with everything,” say the historians, and “weary of life,” said she herself:—
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“No father now have I, no mother, Sister or brother. On God alone I now rely, Who ruleth over earth and sky. O world, I say good by to you; To relatives and friendly ties, To honors and to wealth, adieu; I hold them all for enemies.” |
And yet Marguerite was loath to leave life. She had always been troubled at the idea of death; when she was spoken to about eternal life, she would shake her head sometimes, saying, “All that is true; but we remain a mighty long while dead underground before arriving there.” When she was told that her end was near, she “considered that a very bitter word,” saying that “she was not so old but that she might still live some years.” She had been the most generous, the most affectionate, and the most lovable person in a family and a court which were both corrupt, and of which she only too often acquiesced in the weaknesses and even vices, though she always fought against their injustice and their cruelty. She had the honor of being the grandmother of Henry IV.
CHAPTER XXXI.
HENRY II. (1547-1559.)
Henry II. had all the defects, and, with the exception of personal bravery, not one amongst the brilliant and amiable qualities of the king his father. Like Francis I., he was rash and reckless in his resolves and enterprises, but without having the promptness, the fertility, and the suppleness of mind which Francis I. displayed in getting out of the awkward positions in which he had placed himself, and in stalling off or mitigating the consequences of them. Henry was as cold and ungenial as Francis had been gracious and able to please: and whilst Francis I., even if he were a bad master to himself, was at any rate his own master, Henry II. submitted without resistance, and probably without knowing it, to the influence of the favorite who reigned in his house as well as in his court, and of the advisers who were predominant in his government. Two facts will suffice to set in a clear light, at the commencement of the new reign, this regrettable analogy in the defects, and this profound diversity in the mind, character, and conduct of the two kings.
Towards the close of 1542, a grievous aggravation of the tax upon salt, called Babel, caused a violent insurrection in the town of Rochelle, which was exempted, it was said, by its traditional privileges from that impost. Not only was payment refused, but the commissioners were maltreated and driven away. Francis I. considered the matter grave enough to require his presence for its repression. He repaired to Rochelle with a numerous body of lanzknechts. The terrified population appeared to have determined upon submission, and, having assembled in a mass at the town-hall, there awaited anxiously the king’s arrival. On the 1st of January, 1543, Francis I. entered the town in state, surrounded by his escort. The people’s advocate fell on his knees, and appealed to the king’s clemency in dealing with a revolt of which every one repented. The king, who was seated on a wooden boarding, rose up. “Speak we no more of revolt,” said he; “I desire neither to destroy your persons nor to seize your goods, as was lately done by the Emperor Charles to the Ghentese, whereby his hands are stained with blood; I long more for the hearts of my subjects than for their lives and their riches. I will never at any time of my life think again of your offence, and I pardon you without excepting a single thing. I desire that the keys of your city and your arms be given back to you, and that you be completely reinstated in your liberties and your privileges.” The cheers of the people responded to these words of the king. “I think I have won your hearts,” said the king on retiring; “and I assure you, on the honor of a gentleman, that you have mine. I desire that you ring your bells, for you are pardoned.” The Rochellese were let off for a fine of two hundred thousand francs, which the king gave to his keeper of the seals, Francis de Montholon, whom he wished to compensate for his good service. The keeper of the seals in his turn made a present of them to the town of Rochelle to found a hospital. But the ordinances as to the salt-tax were maintained in principle, and their extension led, some years afterwards, to a rising of a more serious character, and very differently repressed.
In 1548, hardly a year after the accession of Henry II., and in the midst of the rejoicings he had gone to be present at in the north of Italy, he received news at Turin to the effect that in Guienne, Angoumois, and Saintonge a violent and pretty general insurrection had broken out against the salt-tax, which Francis I., shortly before his death, had made heavier in these provinces. The local authorities in vain attempted to repress the rising; the insurgent peasants scoured the country in strong bodies, giving free rein not only to their desires, but also to their revengeful feelings; the most atrocious excesses of which a mob is capable were committed; the director-general of the gabel was massacred cruelly; and two of his officers, at Angouleme, were strapped down stark naked on a table, beaten to death, and had their bodies cast into the river with the insulting remark, “Go, wicked gabellers, and salt the fish of the Charente.” The King of Navarre’s lieutenant, being appealed to for aid, summoned, but to no purpose, the Parliament of Bordeaux; he was forced to take refuge in Chateau-Trompette, and was massacred by the populace whilst he was trying to get out; the president of the Parliament, a most worthy magistrate, and very much beloved, it is said, by the people, only saved his own life by taking the oath prescribed by the insurgents. “This news,” says Vieilleville, in his contemporary Memoires, “grievously afflicted the king; and the Constable de Montmorency represented to him that it was not the first time that these people had been capricious, rebellious, and mutinous; for that in the reign of his lord and father, the late king, the Rochellese and surrounding districts had forgotten themselves in like manner. They ought to be exterminated, and, in case of need, be replaced by a new colony, that they might never return. The said sir constable offered to take the matter in hand, and with ten companies of the old hands whom he would raise in Piedmont, and as many lanzknechts, a thousand men-at-arms all told, he promised to exact a full account, and satisfy his Majesty.”
Montmorency was as good as his word. When he arrived with his troops in Guienne, the people of Bordeaux, in a fit of terror, sent to Langon a large boat, most magnificently fitted up, in which were chambers and saloons emblazoned with the arms of the said sir constable, with three or four deputies to present it to him, and beg him to embark upon it, and drop down to their city. He repulsed them indignantly. “Away, away,” said he, “with your boat and your keys; I will have nought to do with them; I have others here with me which will make me other kind of opening than yours. I will have you all hanged; I will teach you to rebel against your king and murder his governor and his lieutenant.” And he did, in fact, enter Bordeaux on the 9th of October, 1548, by a breach which he had opened in the walls, and, after having traversed the city between two lines of soldiers and with his guns bearing on the suspected points, he ordered the inhabitants to bring all their arms to the citadel. Executions followed immediately after this moral as well as material victory. “More than a hundred and forty persons were put to death by various kinds of punishments,” says Vieilleville; “and, by a most equitable sentence, when the executioner had in his hands the three insurgents who had beaten to death and thrown into the river the two collectors of the Babel at Angouleme, he cast them all three into a fire which was ready at the spot, and said to them aloud, in conformity with the judgment against them, ‘Go, rabid hounds, and grill the fish of the Charente, which ye salted with the bodies of the officers of your king and sovereign lord.’ As to civil death (loss of civil rights),” adds Vieilleville, “nearly all the inhabitants made honorable amends in open street, on their knees, before the said my lords at the window, crying mercy and asking pardon; and more than a hundred, because of their youth, were simply whipped. Astounding fines and interdictions were laid as well upon the body composing the court of Parliament as upon the town-council and on a great number of private individuals. The very bells were not exempt from experiencing the wrath and vengeance of the prince, for not a single one remained throughout the whole city or in the open country—to say nothing of the clocks, which were not spared either —which was not broken up and confiscated to the king’s service for his guns.”
The insurrection at Bordeaux against the gabel in 1548 was certainly more serious than that of Rochelle in 1542; but it is also quite certain that Francis I. would not have set about repressing it as Henry II. did; he would have appeared there himself and risked his own person instead of leaving the matter to the harshest of his lieutenants, and he would have more skilfully intermingled generosity with force, and kind words with acts of severity. And that is one of the secrets of governing. In 1549, scarcely a year after the revolt at Bordeaux, Henry II., then at Amiens, granted to deputies from Poitou, Rochelle, the district of Aunis, Limousin, Perigord, and Saintonge, almost complete abolition of the Babel in Guienne, which paid the king, by way of compensation, two hundred thousand crowns of gold for the expenses of war or the redemption of certain alienated domains. We may admit that on the day after the revolt the arbitrary and bloody proceedings of the Constable de Montmorency must have produced upon the insurgents of Bordeaux the effect of a salutary fright; but we may doubt whether so cruel a repression was absolutely indispensable in 1548, when in 1549 the concession demanded in the former year was to be recognized as necessary.
According to De Thou and the majority of historians, it was on the occasion of the insurrection in Guienne against the Babel that Stephen de la Boetie, the young and intimate friend of Montaigne, wrote his celebrated Discours de la Servitude voluntaire, ou le Contre-un, an eloquent declamation against monarchy. But the testimony of Montaigne himself upsets the theory of this coincidence; written in his own hand upon a manuscript, partly autograph, of the treatise by De la Boetie, is a statement that it was the work “of a lad of sixteen.” La Boetie was born at Sarlat on the 1st of November, 1530, and was, therefore, sixteen in 1546, two years before the insurrection at Bordeaux. The Contre-un, besides, is a work of pure theory and general philosophy, containing no allusion at all to the events of the day, to the sedition in Guienne no more than to any other. This little work owed to Montaigne’s affectionate regard for its author a great portion of its celebrity. Published for the first time, in 1578, in the Memoires de l’Etat de France, after having up to that time run its course without any author’s name, any title, or any date, it was soon afterwards so completely forgotten that when, in the middle of the seventeenth century, Cardinal de Richelieu for the first time heard it mentioned, and “sent one of his gentlemen over the whole street of Saint-Jacques to inquire for la Servitude volontaire, all the publishers said, ‘We don’t know what it is.’ The son of one of them recollected something about it, and said to the cardinal’s gentleman, ‘Sir, there is a book-fancier who has what you seek, but with no covers to it, and he wants five pistoles for it.’ ‘Very well,’ said the gentleman;” and the Cardinal do Richelieu paid fifty francs for the pleasure of reading the little political pamphlet by “a lad of sixteen,” which probably made very little impression upon him, but which, thanks to the elegance and vivacity of its style, and the affectionate admiration of the greatest independent thinker of the sixteenth century, has found a place in the history of French literature. [Memoires de Tallemant des Reaux, t. i. p. 395.]
History must do justice even to the men whose brutal violence she stigmatizes and reproves. In the case of Anne do Montmorency it often took the form of threats intended to save him from the necessity of acts. When he came upon a scene of any great confusion and disorder, “Go hang me such an one,” he would say; “tie yon fellow to that tree; despatch this fellow with pikes and arquebuses, this very minute, right before my eyes; cut me in pieces all those rascals who chose to hold such a clock-case as this against the king; burn me yonder village; light me up a blaze everywhere, for a quarter of a mile all round.” The same man paid the greatest attention to the discipline and good condition of his troops, in order to save the populations from their requisitions and excesses. “On the 20th of November, 1549, he obtained and published at Paris,” says De Thou, “a proclamation from the king doubling the pay of the men-at-arms, arquebusiers and light-horse, and forbidding them at the same time, on pain of death, to take anything without paying for it. A bad habit had introduced itself amongst the troops, whether they were going on service or returning, whether they were in the field or in winter quarters, of keeping themselves at the expense of those amongst whom they lived. Thence proceeded an infinity of irregularities and losses in the towns and in the country, wherein the people had to suffer at the hands of an insolent soldiery the same vexatious as if it had been an enemy’s country. Not only was a stop put to such excesses, but care was further taken that the people should not be oppressed under pretext of recruitments which had to be carried out.” [Histoire de J. A. de Thou, t. i. p. 367.] A nephew of the Constable de Montmorency, a young man of twenty-three, who at a later period became Admiral de Coligny, was ordered to see to the execution of these protective measures, and he drew up, between 1550 and 1552, at first for his own regiment of foot, and afterwards as colonel-general of this army, rules of military discipline which remained for a long while in force.
There was war in the atmosphere. The king and his advisers, the court and the people, had their minds almost equally full of it, some in sheer dread, and others with an eye to preparation. The reign of Francis I. had ended mournfully; the peace of Crespy had hurt the feelings both of royalty and of the nation; Henry, now king, had, as dauphin, felt called upon to disavow it. It had left England in possession of Calais and Boulogne, and confirmed the dominion or ascendency of Charles V. in Germany, Italy, and Spain, on all the French frontiers. How was the struggle to be recommenced? What course must be adopted to sustain it successfully? To fall back upon, there were the seven provincial legions, which had been formed by Francis I. for Normandy, Picardy, Burgundy, Dauphiny, and Provence united, Languedoc, Guienne, and Brittany; but they were not like permanent troops, drilled and always ready; they were recruited by voluntary enlistment; they generally remained at their own homes, receiving compensation at review time and high pay in time of war. The Constable de Montmorency had no confidence in these legions; he spoke of them contemptuously, and would much rather have increased the number of the foreign corps, regularly paid and kept up, Swiss or lanzknechts. Two systems of policy and warfare, moreover, divided the king’s council into two: Montmorency, now old and worn out in body and mind (he was born in 1492, and so was sixty in 1552), was for a purely defensive attitude, no adventures or battles to be sought, but victuals and all sorts of supplies to be destroyed in the provinces which might be invaded by the enemy, so that instead of winning victories there he might not even be able to live there. In 1536 this system had been found successful by the constable in causing the failure of Charles V.‘s invasion of Provence; but in 1550 a new generation had come into the world, the court, and the army; it comprised young men full of ardor and already distinguished for their capacity and valor; Francis de Lorraine, Duke of Guise (born at the castle of Bar, February 17, 1519), was thirty-one; his brother, Charles de Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine, was only six-and-twenty (he was born at Joinville, February 17, 1524); Francis de Scepeaux (born at Durdtal, Anjou, in 1510), who afterwards became Marshal de Vieilleville, was at this time nearly forty; but he had contributed in 1541 to the victory of Ceresole, and Francis I. had made so much of it that he had said, on presenting him to his son Henry, “He is no older than you, and see what he has done already; if the wars do not swallow him up, you will some day make him constable or marshal of France.” Gaspard de Coligny (born at Chatillon-sur-Loing, February 16, 1517) was thirty-three; and his brother, Francis d’Andelot (born at Chatillon, in 1521), twenty-nine. These men, warriors and politicians at one and the same time, in a high social position and in the flower of their age, could not reconcile themselves to the Constable de Montmorency’s system, defensive solely and prudential to the verge of inertness; they thought that, in order to repair the reverses of France and for the sake of their own fame, there was something else to be done, and they impatiently awaited the opportunity.
It was not long coming. At the close of 1551, a deputation of the Protestant princes of Germany came to Fontainebleau to ask for the king’s support against the aggressive and persecuting despotism of Charles V. The Count of Nassau made a speech “very long,” says Vieilleville in his Memoires, “at the same time that it was in very elegant language, whereby all the presence received very great contentment.” Next day the king put the demand before his council for consideration, and expressed at the very outset his own opinion that “in the present state of affairs, he ought not to take up any enterprise, but leave his subjects of all conditions to rest; for generally,” said he, “all have suffered and do suffer when armies pass and repass so often through my kingdom, which cannot be done without pitiable oppression and trampling-down of the poor people.” The constable, “without respect of persons,” says Vieilleville, “following his custom of not giving way to anybody, forthwith began to speak, saying that the king, who asked counsel of them, had very plainly given it them himself and made them very clearly to understand his own idea, which ought to be followed point by point without any gainsaying, he having said nothing but what was most equitable and well known to the company.” Nearly all the members of the council gave in their adhesion, without comment, to the opinion of the king and the constable. “But when it came to the turn of M. de Vieilleville, who had adopted the language of the Count of Nassau,” he unhesitatingly expressed a contrary opinion, unfolding all the reasons which the king had for being distrustful of the emperor and for not letting this chance of enfeebling him slip by. “May it please your Majesty,” said he, “to remember his late passage through France, to obtain which the emperor submitted to carteblanche; nevertheless, when he was well out of the kingdom, he laughed at all his promises, and, when he found himself inside Cambrai, he said to the Prince of Infantado, ‘Let not the King of France, if he be wise, put himself at my mercy, as I have been at his, for I swear by the living God that he shall not be quit for Burgundy and Champagne; but I would also insist upon Picardy and the key of the road to the Bastille of Paris, unless he were minded to lose his life or be confined in perpetual imprisonment until the whole of my wish were accomplished.’ Since thus it is, sir, and the emperor makes war upon you covertly, it must be made upon him overtly, without concealing one’s game or dissimulating at all. No excuses must be allowed on the score of neediness, for France is inexhaustible, if only by voluntary loans raised on the most comfortable classes of the realm. As for me, I consider myself one of the poorest of the company, or at any rate one of the least comfortable; but yet I have some fifteen thousand francs’ worth of plate, dinner and dessert, white and red [silver and gold], which I hereby offer to place in the hands of whomsoever you shall appoint, in order to contribute to the expenses of so laudable an enterprise as this. Putting off, moreover, for the present the communication to you of a certain secret matter which one of the chiefs of this embassy hath told me; and I am certain that when you have discovered it, you will employ all your might and means to carry out that which I propose to you.”
The king asked Vieilleville what this secret matter was which he was keeping back. “If it please your Majesty to withdraw apart, I will tell it you,” said Vieilleville. All the council rose; and Vieilleville, approaching his Majesty, who called the constable only to his side, said, “Sir, you are well aware how the emperor got himself possessed of the imperial cities of Cambrai, Utrecht, and Liege, which he has incorporated with his own countship of Flanders, to the great detriment of the whole of Germany. The electoral princes of the holy empire have discovered that he has a project in his mind of doing just the same with the imperial cities of Metz, Strasbourg, Toul, Verdun, and such other towns on the Rhine as he shall be able to get hold of. They have secretly adopted the idea of throwing themselves upon your resources, without which they cannot stop this detestable design, which would be the total ruin of the empire and a manifest loss to your kingdom. Wherefore, take possession of the said towns, since opportunity offers, which will be about forty leagues of country gained without the loss of a single man, and an impregnable rampart for Champagne and Picardy; and, besides, a fine and perfectly open road into the heart of the duchy of Luxembourg and the districts below it as far as Brussels.”