Chapter XII: Imperial Struggles of Francis I and Henry II (2)

With these opposite views--grasping severity, that over-reached itself, on the one side, and premeditated bad faith, the almost compulsory resource of Francis, on the other--the Treaty of Madrid was concluded. By it the king agreed to give up Burgundy, to renounce all right to Milan and Naples, as well as to Flanders and Artois. He was to be set at liberty, and to espouse Leonora of Portugal, the emperor’s sister. He was, moreover, to abandon his allies, the king of Navarre, the dukes of Gelderland, of Würtemberg, and the count de la Mark; and he was to re-establish Bourbon in all his property and privileges. Moreover, the two sons of Francis were to remain as hostages for the performance of these conditions, the king himself promising to return into captivity if they were not fulfilled. On the 14th of January, 1526, the treaty was signed; Francis taking the precaution to protest secretly, in presence of his chancellor, against the validity of such exactions. Charles himself could not but mistrust the sincerity of Francis, and he even retained him prisoner a month after the signature. The king’s health again declined in consequence; and at length Charles, in a hurried and irresolute way, gave orders for his final liberation. He was led to the river Bidassoa, which separates the countries: his sons, who appeared on the opposite bank, were exchanged for him, and Francis, mounting a horse of extreme swiftness, galloped without drawing rein to St. Jean de Luz, and thence to Bayonne.

_Further Dissensions and the “Ladies’ Peace”_

Thus freed from captivity, on terms which, if fulfilled, must ruin his kingdom, and if unfulfilled must stain his honour, Francis, it might have been expected, would be instantly occupied in the duty of defending himself and retrieving his affairs. His first act on arriving at Bordeaux, however, was to become enamoured of Mademoiselle d’Heilly, better known as the duchess d’Étampes, who superseded the countess of Châteaubriant in his affections, and held thenceforward the greatest influence over the monarch.

The liberation of Francis was the signal for a general league against the emperor. The Italian powers were ever disposed to unite against the strongest. Sforza had already rebelled against Charles, and had been driven from Milan by Pescara. All of them--the pope, the Venetians, the Florentines--now formed an alliance with the king, on condition that Sforza should remain in possession of Milan. A treaty to this effect was signed at Cognac, but was kept secret for some time. The states of Burgundy had assembled, to protest against the transfer of their province to the emperor. The king, they said, had no right nor power to make such a stipulation without their consent. When Lannoy, on the part of Charles, demanded the cession of Burgundy, Francis referred him to the answer of the states. The emperor, on learning this evasion of the treaty, called on Francis, as a man of honour, to redeem his word and return into captivity.

This was a trying moment for Francis, who piqued himself on possessing all the chivalric virtues. He could not openly deride the credulity of Charles, as Louis the XI or Ferdinand the Catholic would have done. He was perplexed, distressed, and could only allege the necessity of the case; a plea which by no means satisfied his nice notions of honour. He therefore resolved on taking the advice of his subjects. Despotic as he was, he felt in this case at least the necessity of having the nation to participate his responsibility. To call together the states-general of the kingdom was obviously the natural step in such a case. But no; Francis dreaded the very name of that assembly, in which the vulgar _tiers état_, or people, had a voice. The legists and judges of the parliament had for some time taken upon them to represent the nation, in demurring to taxes and to edicts. Francis, and his minister Duprat, though not wholly contented with the parliament, yet deemed that preferable to an assembly of bourgeois. It was resolved therefore between them that the voice of the nation should now be taken, not in the good old states-general, but in what has since been called an assembly of notables--one of the most unfortunate inventions or innovations that despotic craft could have imagined.

[Sidenote: [1526-1527 A.D.]]

This assembly of notables, or, as some historians will call it, this bed of justice, was held in December, 1526. It consisted of prelates, nobles, courtiers, gentlemen, the parliament of Paris, and the presidents of the provincial parliaments; the only admixture of democracy being the provost of merchants and the four sheriffs of the city of Paris. Before those Francis made a long discourse; entering at large into the affairs of the kingdom, its finances and resources. He recounted the misfortunes of his captivity, and declared his readiness to return to it, if his people thought that either their interest or his honour so demanded. The reply of each class, for all answered separately, was that he was absolved from an unjust and compulsory oath, against which he had previously protested, and the fulfilment of which the privileges and welfare of his people alike forbade. They at the same time accorded to him the liberty of raising two millions for the ransom of his sons, assuming in this particular all the rights of the states-general. Thus satisfied, Francis published the general league against the emperor, denominated “holy,” because the pope was at its head. Not only the Italian states, but the Swiss and the king of England acceded to it; so that the reverses of Francis, if they had stripped him of territories, rendered him much stronger in alliances than his rival.

The emperor, on his side, promised to Bourbon the investiture of the Milanese, if he succeeded in expelling Sforza. This the constable accomplished, subsisting his mercenary troops on the unfortunate inhabitants of Milan--for of money Charles had as notorious a lack as his grandsire Maximilian. Milan taken, pillaged, and wasted, how was Bourbon to support his army--that army by which he lived? For since his exile the prince had inhabited camps, and was averse to any more orderly way of life. He loved his soldiers, rapacious and licentious as they were; and was beloved by them, as a valiant and successful leader inclined to tolerate the license of the freebooter. Since his treason, Bourbon had met everywhere with insults and ingratitude from the French, the Spaniards, the emperor, and his brother generals. This situation made him misanthropic, and his character degenerated into that of the reckless and ferocious corsair. To obtain plunder for his army of lansquenets, in lieu of pay, became indispensable; and he accordingly led them south, menacing all the great cities of the peninsula, and uncertain which he should attack. Florence and Rome had both declared against the emperor; Bourbon fixed upon the imperial city as the more glorious prey, and accordingly marched thither his mercenary army. Pope Clement was terrified at his approach, and used all his country’s artifices to avert the danger. It approached nevertheless, and Clement shut himself up in the castle of St. Angelo.

The army of Bourbon attacked Rome in the morning of the 5th of May, 1527. Bourbon himself applied the first scaling-ladder, and was in the act of mounting it, when the first shot from the walls struck him and put an end to his disastrous career. His army passed over his body to the assault, and Rome was carried by storm. The pillage was general, so merciless were the soldiery. Not all the ravages of Hun and Goth surpassed those of the army of the first prince in Christendom. The cruelty of the German soldiers was unequalled: they indulged in the most horrid extravagance of debauch and impiety. For two months they remained masters of the city; and the pontiff himself was finally obliged to surrender himself a prisoner.

[Sidenote: [1527-1528 A.D.]]

This new triumph of the emperor, over the head of the church too, roused the zeal of Henry VIII. He already meditated a divorce from Catherine, Charles’ aunt; and it therefore became his policy to befriend and protect the pope, whose assistance he would chiefly require, against the emperor. Wolsey was therefore despatched to France; the treaty between the crowns was renewed; and a joint army was raised, to march into Italy under the command of Lautrec. That general now compensated for his former ill success. He made himself master of Genoa by the aid of Andrea Doria; and took Pavia by assault, abandoning it to pillage, in revenge for the defeat which the French had suffered under its walls. The conquest of Milan would have been easy; but as that city was now to belong to Sforza, the French general turned from it towards Rome, in order to procure the liberation of the pope. His approach effected this: the emperor became less harsh in his terms, and Clement soon found himself free at Orvieto.

It was about this time, towards the commencement of 1528, that challenges and defiances passed between Charles and Francis. The former, in his reply to the French envoy, reproached the restored king with an infamous breach of faith; and hinted that he was ready to support his charge as a true knight, sword in hand. Francis, indignant, sent a reply that the emperor “lied in his throat”; and demanded a rendezvous, or _champ clos_, for the duel; but notwithstanding the choler of both parties, it never took place. It is singular that in this affair of the single combat the cold and politic Charles seems to have been most in earnest, whilst the obstacles and delays were raised by the headlong and chivalric Francis.

Lautrec in the meantime advanced to the conquest of Naples. He marched to the eastern coast, and soon reduced the provinces bordering on the Adriatic. The command of Bourbon’s army had devolved on Philibert, the last prince of Orange of the house of Châlons, another French chief of talents and influence, whom the petulance of Francis had alienated from him and driven into exile. With some difficulty this prince withdrew his army from the spoils of Rome to the defence of Naples. He was not strong enough to face Lautrec in the field: the prince of Orange, therefore, and Moncada, the new viceroy, shut themselves up in Naples, where they were soon besieged by Lautrec. Andrea Doria, a faithful partisan of France, held the sea with his Genoese galleys, and blockaded the port. It was proposed to reduce the town by famine. After some time Moncada, fitting out all the galleys in port, made an attack on the Genoese, then commanded by Filippino Doria, Andrea’s nephew. The attempt failed: the Spaniards were beaten, Moncada slain, and most of the captains taken; amongst others, the marquis del Guasto, and two brothers Colonna. Naples thus became in prospect an easy prey to Lautrec. Its fall might have brought the final submission of the kingdom; but the same blunder which Francis persevered in committing throughout his whole reign lost him this advantage, among so many others.

Such was the fatal habit of the French king to disgust and alienate his best and most attached friends. Doria, for example, like Trivulzio, was an Italian who united with a love of his own country a firm attachment to the French. His exertions had but just torn Genoa from the emperor to give it to Francis: he was now doing the very same by Naples, when it pleased the French court to insult and disoblige him. The prisoners he had won in action were taken from him, and no allowance was made for their ransom. These insults to himself Doria might have passed over; of wrongs offered to his country he was more sensible. The French undertook to fortify Savona, and to raise it into a rival of Genoa. They removed thither the trade in salt, one of the most lucrative sources of the Genoese commerce. Doria expostulated; and another admiral, Barbescenas, was sent to supersede him and bring him prisoner to France. When the admiral arrived, Doria received him, saying, “I know what brings you hither: the French vessels I deliver to you; the Genoese remain under my command. Do the rest of your errand if you dare!” The consequence of this blindness and ingratitude on the part of Francis was soon seen; Genoa declared herself free, and allied herself with the emperor. The blockade of Naples by sea was raised; and the influx of fresh troops and provisions enabled the city to defy its besiegers. These, encamped under a midsummer sun, ill supplied, and harassed, were soon attacked by pestilence. Lautrec their general died of it. The marquis of Saluzzo, who succeeded him, raised the siege and retired to Aversa, where he soon after surrendered to the prince of Orange; and thus another unsuccessful Italian expedition was added to the long list of French disasters.

[Sidenote: [1528-1529 A.D.]]

Another army led by the count of Saint-Pol into the north of Italy met with as little success. Francis felt that he could not re-establish his fortunes: he sickened of the love of glory that had hitherto animated him, and showed himself willing to treat for peace on any terms, provided the cession of Burgundy was not insisted on. Charles by this time saw that the nation would never consent to such a sacrifice: he therefore waived this part of the Treaty of Madrid. The negotiations on both sides were carried on by the duchess d’Angoulême and Margaret of Austria. The king gave up all his claims to possessions in Italy, Milan, Naples, and even Asti, and abandoned all his allies in that country; he renounced all right of sovereignty over Flanders or Artois; he ceded Tournay and Arras; two millions were to be paid as ransom for the young princes; the lands of the house of Bourbon were to be restored to the heirs of that family (a stipulation, by the by, never performed); and, finally, the treaty was to be sealed by the marriage of Francis with Leonora, the emperor’s sister. This Peace of Cambray, called also the “Ladies’ Peace,” was concluded in August, 1529: it was as glorious for Charles as it was disgraceful to France and her monarch. The emperor remained supreme master of Italy; the pope submitted, and obtained the re-establishment of the Medici in Florence, with hereditary power; the Venetians, who said that Cambray was destined to be their purgatory, were shorn of their conquests. Charles forgave Sforza, and left him the duchy of Milan. Henry VIII reaped nothing save the emperor’s enmity by his interference: the English monarch showed himself generous to Francis, by remitting to him, at this moment, a large debt. Thus was Europe pacified for the time.[i]

INTERNAL AFFAIRS

[Sidenote: [1525-1547 A.D.]]

The melancholy Peace of Cambray will not be of long duration; the wars of Italy are not wholly finished; Francis I has not sincerely renounced “his heritage” beyond the mountains, the theatre of his former glory; he will continue to meditate and more than once to attempt, with some partial success, to shake his rival’s dominion over Italy. But neither great expeditions nor great events in the heart of the peninsula will again be seen under his reign. The essential interest of the history of France is no longer there: it returns to the interior; it is in the moral, intellectual, and social condition of that nation--thrown back upon itself after having failed in conquest, and confronted at home and abroad by the problem, growing daily more formidable, of a religious revolution or reaction which will compromise its destiny for centuries. The question is no longer whether France will snatch Italy from the political domination of Spain united with the empire, but whether France will find, in the elements which the Renaissance has brought her, the strength and light necessary to maintain or redeem her political and religious independence between those two genii of the north and south, Teutonic Protestantism and Hispano-Roman Papism[69] which, coming into collision, are about to make an attempt to drag everyone into their whirl.

We will not here enter on the religious history, whose crisis does not appear in all its intensity till some years after the Treaty of Cambray. We will first take a glance at the economical situation of France, at the industrial arts and particularly at the fine arts, at letters and science, at that Renaissance movement which continued to develop under the patronage of Francis I. The taste for a civilisation elegant and learned, picturesque and varied, was the sole affection to which Francis always remained faithful. He had a more genuine right to the title of “father of letters” (_père des lettres_) than to that of “knightly king” (_roi chevalier_). Even his own mistakes and the misfortunes of the allies he had abandoned were made to contribute to the progress of the arts among the French, a progress whose advance in a good direction remains, indeed, questionable. The fall of Florence, the persecutions of the partisans of France at Naples and in Lombardy, sent a multitude of emigrants, the flower of the Italian population, streaming across the Alps; and France, as she was so often obliged to do, at least opened an asylum to the friends she had not managed to protect. The king endeavoured to palliate the wrong he had done Italy by favours to Italians, and the exiles experienced some consolation in finding on the banks of the Seine and the Loire the tastes, fashions, habits of thought, and almost the language of their own country.

Many refugees were pensioned or invested with distinguished posts in the army and in diplomacy. The Florentine Strozzi and the Neapolitan Caraccioli, prince of Melfi, became marshals of France. Italy not only sent France artists and politicians, but merchants and skilful manufacturers, who brought into her cities their industry and the remains of their fortunes which had escaped the hands of the tyrants. The pre-eminence of the manufactures of Lyons dates from the fall of Florence: Louis XI had made Lyons a great commercial city and an international entrepôt by instituting three annual fairs which caused the decline of those of Geneva, and had endeavoured by the aid of Italian workmen to develop the manufacture of silk goods, simultaneously at Lyons and Tours: still Lyons, where various manufactures had rapidly developed, did not begin to rival Tours in silks until about 1525; the Florentine refugees soon gave her the superiority; two Genoese are also mentioned amongst the chief founders of the manufactures of Lyons.

A bank was instituted at Lyons. An import duty of two gold crowns per piece on velvet or silk goods protected the French silk manufactures against foreign competition; as to the cloths and woollen goods of Spain and Perpignan, they were absolutely prohibited in favour of the cloths of Languedoc. In the north the manufacture of the cloths of Darnétal near Rouen was very considerable; the edict of May, 1542, which regulated the manufacture at Darnétal, qualities it as almost inestimable. An edict of the 18th of July, 1540, had decreed that foreign stuffs in gold, silver, and silk should enter France by Susa if they came from Italy, by Narbonne or Bayonne if they came from Spain: they were to be taken straight to Lyons and, there only, unpacked and exposed for sale. This privilege must have enormously increased the prosperity of Lyons. Yet in 1543 one of those sumptuary edicts which the rigid spirit of the parliament from time to time wrung from the kings forbade the wearing of gold and silver stuffs. French merchandises were subjected to a uniform export duty of one sou per livre. In 1540 a royal ordinance attempted to establish a uniform measure as already planned by Louis XI: an ell of three feet, seven inches, eight lines was prescribed for use throughout the kingdom. But commercial relations were not yet sufficiently active for the advantage of such an improvement to be generally felt; local practice protested and prevailed: the edict was revoked in 1543.

The French navy was making remarkable progress: Dieppe had raised its head since the expulsion of the English and had resumed its ancient preponderance amongst the French ports on the ocean; Norman and Breton navigators gleaned, so to speak, on the tracks of the Spaniards and Portuguese and tried to take up the threads of their old commercial relations with Africa, and to open new ones with both Indies. Such expeditions were full of peril, for the haughty rulers of the western and eastern seas treated as pirates those competitors who ventured into their domains. Captain Denis of Honfleur had touched at Brazil as early as 1504, before the Portuguese, who discovered it in 1500, had founded any settlement there; the French navigators continued to traffic with the savage tribes who sold them those precious woods from which Brazil has derived its name, and who “gave a better welcome to the French than to the Portuguese and other European peoples.” In 1529 two ships from Dieppe, under the command of Jean Parmentier, made a voyage to Madagascar and Sumatra. During this time attempts which had more lasting results were directed to the north of America, towards the countries whither the Spaniards had not turned their steps. In 1506 Denis of Honfleur had visited the island of Newfoundland which was then taken for a portion of the continent; in 1508 Aubert, a native of Dieppe, followed him there with a vessel fitted out by Jean Ango, the father of the illustrious shipowner of the same name; the Bretons for their part discovered and named the island of Cape Breton, and the annual codfishery was founded on those coasts. The French government at last decided to second private enterprise, and to claim its share of the New World. In 1524, by order of Francis I, the Florentine Verazzano undertook a voyage of discovery, reconnoitred all the coasts from Cape Breton and Acadia to Florida, and took possession of them in the name of Francis I. Ten years afterwards, in 1534, the Breton Jacques Cartier of St. Malo, commissioned by the king at the suggestion of Admiral Chabot de Brion, satisfied himself that Newfoundland was an island, penetrated into the vast gulf which that great island bars, and reconnoitred the mouth of the St. Lawrence: the year following he ascended this immense river as far as the spot where Quebec was afterwards built, and discovered Canada. The name of New France (_Nouvelle-France_) was imposed on the whole northern part of America.

In 1540 Roberval, a Picard _gentilhomme_, was appointed viceroy of Canada by Francis I, and set out with a squadron of five ships which Cartier commanded under his orders; the colony was installed at Cape Breton. The severity of the climate, so different from the magnificent regions conquered by the Spaniards, the insufficiency of supplies, the improvidence and negligence of the royal government were the cause of the failure at the close of a few years of this first attempt at colonisation, which was not renewed till the reign of Henry IV; but the sailors of Normandy, Brittany, and La Rochelle continued the codfishery and the fur trade with the peoples of Canada. A wealthy shipowner of Dieppe, Jean Ango, whom the documents of the time describe as “merchant of Rouen and viscount de Dieppe,” made himself one of the glories of the French nation by his great enterprises, by his taste for the arts, and the energy with which he sustained the honour of the French flag against the rulers of the seas, particularly the Portuguese. His beautiful manor of Warengeville, farm-house rather than château, still charms the traveller amongst the green woodlands of the Dieppe coast. This family of Ango was probably the same whence came the architect Roger Ango who built the Palais de Justice at Rouen.

_The French Renaissance_

Whilst industry and navigation were thus progressing, the arts surrounded Francis I with a splendour which Charles V and Henry VIII in vain attempted to rival: for example, the king and all the nobles contended with one another in erecting buildings, and there sprang from the earth all those Renaissance châteaux which arose on French soil to take the place of the feudal fortresses, and which like them have unfortunately in great part disappeared. There was Madrid, the elegant retreat of the Bois de Boulogne, so called because Francis loved to recall the weariness of the prison in the midst of pleasures and liberty; there was La Meute (by corruption La Muette), and St. Germain, and Villers-Cotterets and Chantilly and Follembrai and Nantouillet, the splendid residence of Duprat. The national architecture, threatened by the growing invasion of the Italian taste, seemed to concentrate all its forces to protest against it by a last creation of brilliant originality (1526). He who has not seen Chambord does not suspect all the fantastic poetry that was to be found in the French art of the sixteenth century. There is something indescribable in this palace of the fairies, rising suddenly before the eyes of the traveller from the depths of the gloomy woods of La Sologne with its forests of turrets, spires, aërial campaniles, the beautiful tints of their pearl gray stones, chequered with black mosaics standing out on the sombre slates of the great roofs. This impression could only be surpassed by the spectacle which delights us on the terraces of the keep at the foot of the charming cupola which terminates the grand staircase, the centre and pivot of this vast and varied whole and which stands up radiant above the terraces like a flower one hundred feet high. Everywhere between the _lacs d’amours_ and crowned F’s, mysterious salamanders, vomiting flames, climb on the pediments, curl round the medallions, or hang from the cornices and panels of the vaults, like the dragons which watch over the enchanted castles of old legend, waiting the return of the master who will come no more.[k]

Francis I had at first been the pupil of the Italian, Baldassare Castiglione, author of a book called _Il Cortegiano_, or “the perfect courtier.” Struck by the qualities of the Italian people, the French monarch cherished for them a peculiar love, and drew about him the most celebrated men of the peninsula. Leonardo da Vinci died at Fontainebleau almost in the arms of the king. Primaticcio, Il Rosso, Andrea del Sarto, and Benvenuto Cellini came with alacrity at his call, and some of their greatest works were destined to be the property of France. The early and most illustrious French artists, among them Jean Goujon, were trained in the school formed by these masters, and it was to the construction and embellishment of Chambord and Fontainebleau that the king devoted their inspired brushes and chisels.

The type of the old fortress-castle of feudal times gradually gave place to another and less repellent one, that of the great pleasure-mansions which included among their attractions everything that the most luxurious and refined taste could devise. The court journeyed without ceasing from castle to castle and from feast to feast, eliciting loud complaints from the foreign ambassadors, who, though unable to afford the expense of such continual moving about, were yet obliged to follow.

Not satisfied with the presence of foreign artists about him, Francis I offered great inducements to men of science to visit his court. Erasmus, the literary oracle of Europe, was warmly solicited to leave Holland and establish himself in France, but he consented merely to make the voyage thither. Many Italians, however, among whom was the poet Alamanni, and a number of Greeks with the aged Lascaris at their head, established for themselves a second fatherland in France. The famous Guillaume Budé, guardian of the king’s library and one of the most learned men of the century, was, with the Estiennes, deputed by the king to show these colonists all the honours of the land. Francis I gave his envoys to Turkey the mission of procuring for him manuscripts in Greek, and the translation into French of ancient documents was undertaken; while the art of printing, introduced in France during the reign of Louis XI, underwent rapid development; the presses of Lyons, where a numerous Italian colony had become established, gaining a celebrity for the town almost rivalling that of Venice or Bâle.

The College of France, called in the beginning College of the Three Tongues, was founded in 1529 after a plan indicated by Budé, less with the object of giving general instruction than for the purpose of promoting the study of the three languages of learning, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The institution bore a great resemblance to the Italian academies. Philology, its chief object, was the science most in vogue at that time, as it was held to be the initiatory stage in the study of antiquity. Thus conceived, the College of France left all instruction, properly speaking, in the hands of the old Sorbonne, the ancient university. True to its old scholastic spirit, opposed to innovations, and attached to its ancient privileges which it now believed to be menaced, the Sorbonne entered upon a bitter war against the new institution; but the latter, strong in the royal favour and patronage, issued victorious from the conflict. The number of chairs was increased, to the study of languages was added that of science, particularly mathematics, and beginning with the very first years of its existence the College of France gained the reputation of being the most brilliant and complete of all the European institutes of learning.

The reason for the creation of this college and for its rapid success and growth may be found in the tendencies of an age that was rich in discoveries of all kinds. There are, in the history of the human mind, certain happy periods when the horizons of thought seem to become enlarged on all sides at once. A new field was opened to philological research, as the Middle Ages had had but little knowledge of Greek and less of Hebrew. A corresponding progress was also made in geography and the natural sciences by the study of climates and races hitherto unknown.

Always powerful over the entire country, the influence of the court increased under Francis I, and was no less beneficial to letters and society in general than it was to the cause of learning. The king, beloved of his men-at-arms because he was the best knight in the kingdom; of artists and scientists because he so generously patronised and encouraged them, commended himself equally to courtiers, men of letters, and ladies because no one in his realm carried to such a point as he the love of the beautiful. Aided by his mother and sister and later by his daughter-in-law Catherine de’ Medici, he made his court the most remarkable in Europe, not only for the luxury it displayed but for its wit and grace and a certain elegant not to say corrupt refinement of manners that was best exemplified in the foreign princess brought up under the eyes of Catherine, Mary Stuart.

Never had the French court counted so many members. Under Louis XII it had been composed of a few favourites, a definite number of officers, and a guard of a hundred nobles. Francis I increased in enormous proportion the number of court officers, which he intended to bestow on upstarts who could in this manner rise to nobility. The posts were mostly filled, however, by landless gentlemen of birth upon whom were also bestowed detached titles. Thus arose a company of marquises and dukes possessing neither marquisates nor duchies. These two innovations alone would have sufficed to make the court the point upon which converged all ambitions and hopes of fortune. Francis I desired that women should share the offices and dignities of the court, and should have a hierarchy of their own; he loved to shower upon them, as upon his nobles, the marks of his liberality. Two of his mistresses, Madame de Châteaubriant, sister of Lautrec and of Lescun; and afterwards Mademoiselle de Heilly, whom he made Duchess d’Étampes, reigned for a long time side by side with the king, and patronised artists as well as distributed remunerative posts.

Unfortunately one cannot have much to say about this court without speaking of its corruption, to which Francis I himself contributed by the changes he brought about and by his personal example. Destroying as they did the simplicity of former modes of living, the innovations introduced by him resulted in confusion to the rules and usages of the nobility, and fostered fawning and intrigues. His own many scandalous deeds as well as those that were with impunity committed around him, have heavily burdened his memory with the charge of violating the public morality.

It would, however, be most unjust to view the court of the Valois only through the biased medium of Brantôme’s[p] chronicle of scandals, or the writings of contemporaneous Calvinists. As for these latter, they have neglected no means by which they could blacken the fame of the prince and personages who were the first to persecute their co-religionists; hence, on many points, their testimony is not to be believed. The letters of Venetian envoys, on the other hand, who were observers of great depth and keenness, reveal the warmest admiration for a court of which they, among all foreigners, were the quickest to feel the great seduction and charm. All the literature of this century, in fact, imaginative as well as historical, attests with striking force the elevated character of the influence exercised by the court of Francis I over public opinion.

Particularly prominent among the writers of that time are Marguerite de Valois[q] and Marot,[r] the king’s valet, from whose works the fairest judgments may be formed concerning the tastes of the court--its gallantry, its love of wit and social pleasures, the esteem in which it held pure learning and the tolerance it accorded free thought. Severely as we may condemn certain of their works, they are nevertheless worthy to serve as models for sentiment, beauty of form, and light, poetic grace. To these two writers compare Rabelais, the author of the people, the creator of that strange and inexplicable encyclopædia wherein, as the product of a great intellectual debauch, the whole sixteenth century passes by us in review, and you will be able to judge on which side lay delicacy and taste, in what degree the literature of the court was qualified to elevate and refine the literature of the people.[f] But, on the other hand, Rabelais[70] remains a classic in our own day, while these other writers are forgotten. Rabelais, indeed, is not merely the greatest writer of this time, but by common consent he is named as one of the three or four greatest humourists of any age or country.[a] His work is in itself sufficient proof that Francis I destroyed neither the liberty of his subjects nor their originality. Although more absolute than his predecessors, Francis always took account of public opinion and had the insight to distinguish, as Ranke[s] ingeniously puts it, enforced obedience from that which is rendered voluntarily.

Thus even in those personal memoirs wherein the individuality of the writer is most wholly revealed, it is to be observed that the tendency of the century was all toward expansion, in height as well as breadth. We note the origin, the preliminary flights of that freedom of thought and research that was later to soar so high. Apparent as are the excesses of the age, we must not judge it by its faults alone; its very shortcomings raised controversies that served to form public opinion in a graver, sterner mould. More ado was made about the use or abuse of supreme power, which was for the first time subjected to control. The writer who passes the severest judgment on Francis I and his court is Gaspard de Saulx-Tavannes, the representative of the most radical of the independent nobility.[f]

A word must be said about another phase of intellectual development--that which found expression in the words and deeds of Luther and Calvin and their followers.[a] The new opinions early crept into France; their first converts were men of letters. All the great French jurisconsults of that century, in secret or openly accepted the Reformation. A party at the court itself inclined towards it. Louise of Savoy appears not to have been opposed to it. Her daughter Marguerite, queen of Navarre, an independent genius and the author of mysteries and novels, openly professed the principles of the German reformers; the duchess of Étampes, the king’s mistress, made a point of protecting them. Lefèbre d’Étaples (Faber Stapulensis), and Louis Berquin, both men of learning known and esteemed by Francis, sustained these in their favour: the first had begun six years before Luther. Finally the favourite court poet, Clement Marot, abandoned his elegies and epigrams to translate the psalms of David, which the reformists of Paris sang about the Pré-aux-Clercs. At first Francis, far from being alarmed at these symptoms, would fain have attached to himself Erasmus of Rotterdam, the king of the learned and of the men of letters of the century, who was accused of having prepared the way for Luther by his attacks on the monks. But when the German peasants, following out the new doctrines to their socialistic consequences, would have overturned all authority, Francis I thought that the Reformation, which was a revolt against the pope, was in danger of leading politically to a revolt against the king; and if he remained the interested friend of the German Protestants he had no wish to allow their doctrines to gain ground in his own states.

During the king’s captivity two Lutherans had been burned in the capital. He had put a stop to these executions, but in 1528 a statue of the Virgin was mutilated at Paris. Francis declared that “if he knew one of his own members to be infected with this doctrine he would tear it away for fear lest the rest should be corrupted,” and from that day he persecuted the innovators. Berquin, who refused to retract, was burned on the place de Grève (1529); at Vienne, at Séez, at Toulouse there were other executions. The necessity of propitiating the Protestants of Germany mitigated the persecution. Again in 1536 six unfortunates were sacrificed on different squares in Paris in presence of the court.[m]

WAR AGAIN BETWEEN FRANCIS I AND CHARLES V

[Sidenote: [1528-1535 A.D.]]

But we must not pause for further details of this character;[71] we must return to the sweep of political events in France, and the renewed quarrels of Francis and his old enemy Charles V. A lasting peace between such rivals as Charles and Francis was not to be expected. Even if the latter could have confined himself to the pursuit of pleasure, to the internal regulation of his kingdom, and to the patronage of the arts, the spirit of Charles, ever restless in the cabinet, could not fail to have provoked him. At one time the emperor sent him a summons, requiring his aid against the Turks, and ending with the accusation that he had called Suleiman to invade Europe. Francis was now on the closest terms of alliance with Henry VIII, who was bent on divorcing the emperor’s aunt. The French king used all his influence with the pope to procure the necessary license for Henry, but was still baffled by the influence of Charles. Clement VII was the potentate whose alliance was most warmly disputed by the rival sovereigns. And both assailed the pontiff on a pontiff’s weak side, by the offer of aggrandisement to his family. Charles proposed that Clement’s niece, Catherine de’ Medici, should espouse Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan; by which means the Medici would necessarily be ever adverse to the claims of the French kings on Milan. Francis, in opposition, offered his second son, Henry, duke of Orleans, as a husband for Catherine; and Clement, elated by the honour of an alliance with the royal house of France, exulted at the proposal. The emperor, who knew the proud character of Francis, could not believe that he would sincerely permit his son to ally with such upstarts as the Medici; and this incredulity neutralised the exertions that he might otherwise have made to obstruct the match. It took place, however, in 1533, at Marseilles, where Clement and Francis met to honour the ceremonial, and to arrange the conditions of their future friendship. One of these, there is no doubt, was the vigorous prosecution and extirpation of heresy. Francis, however, reaped as usual little advantage from the negotiation. He failed to obtain for Henry VIII the dispensation required, and that impatient monarch broke with the church in consequence. Clement himself died in the year following, and was succeeded by Paul III of the house of Farnese.[i]

[Sidenote: [1535-1537 A.D.]]

Francis I and Charles V vied with each other in seeking alliance with the church. Francis burned heretics in the great cities, and made adhesion to the new opinions a crime against the crown. Charles, on the other hand, led an expedition into Africa, and slaughtered the infidels in a new crusade (1535). Victorious over Barbarossa, the usurper of Tunis, and followed by the blessings of the thousands of Christian captives whom he had delivered from slavery, he made his way to Rome. There, in presence of the pope, he stood forth and made his complaint against Francis. He declared his readiness to invest one of his sons with Milan, on such conditions of suzerainty and subjection as he should afterwards choose to name; failing that, to meet his enemy foot to foot, on horseback, or in a boat, armed _cap-à-pie_ or naked to their shirts; or, finally, to declare internecine war upon him, binding himself by an oath never to sheathe the sword till he had made him the poorest gentleman that ever lived. After this decent and courageous bravado, at which the pontiff must have been greatly amazed, the assembly broke up in most admired disorder, and the dogs of war were let loose. An invasion of France was resolved on, and Charles already counted his victory so secure that he distributed the estates of the French nobility among his favourites (1536). An army of Spaniards and Italians was to overrun Provence, and another of Flemings to break in on Picardy. Between the two, Francis was to be crushed.

Misfortunes crowded, not in single file but in battalions, upon the thoughtless but affectionate king. His eldest son Francis, the dauphin, died at this time [suddenly; there were suspicions, probably unfounded, of poisoning]. Defection deprived him of some of the strongest fortresses in Savoy; and the forces of his enemy were reported to be on the soil of France. Instantly the courageous Francis was roused from his grief and dejection. The territory in front of the Spaniards was made a desert; the cattle were driven away, the villages burned, and parties of resolute horsemen sent forth to harass them on the march. Charles expected that all would be risked on the arbitrament of one great engagement, and was foiled by the unexpected tactics. He marched without glory, for he saw no enemy; and without food, for every field was bare. Sickness came to aid; and, in frightful disorganisation, the starving hordes hurried across the Alps, slain and pillaged on their way by the angry peasantry, and perishing in the clefts of the rocks of hunger and fatigue. Thus fell the pride of the invader almost without a blow.

Francis took now the lofty part which hitherto had been played by his rival; and at a bed of justice in the palace of the Louvre, summoned his rebellious vassal before his feudal court (1537), stripped him by solemn sentence of his tenures of Artois, Flanders, and Charolais, which always had been held of the French crown, and of which his renunciation at the Treaty of Madrid was null and of no effect, as having been obtained by violence and fraud. Beside him, on this great occasion, sat the king of Navarre and James V of Scotland, who had just married the short-lived Madeleine of France--a more dignified, though not a more useful demonstration than the quarrel-scene of his rival at Rome. The forms of feudalism were occasionally revived to gratify a hatred, as the forms of chivalry were retained to justify a duel; but the hatred of the two greatest sovereigns in Europe carried them beyond the bounds both of feudalism and chivalry. Their language, by their respective heralds, would have done honour to two English prize-fighters. They interchanged the names of perjurer and liar, and reminded each other of the discomfitures they had sustained; Charles being particularly caustic on the subject of Pavia and the prison of Madrid, and Francis retorting with reminiscences of the emperor’s overthrow in Provence, and starvation among the hills. Yet, in a year after this time, the enemies met, and spent four of the happiest days of their lives in unrestrained intimacy at Aigues Mortes, a small seaport on the Mediterranean. Charles arrived in a galley. Francis went on board, and grasping his hand said, “My brother, you see I am your prisoner again.” Charles returned the visit on shore; listened well-pleased to the open unsuspecting talk of his companion, and put down all his sayings, and plans, and recollections in his memory, to be used against him at the proper time. He promised him great things in return for all his confidence; the investiture of Milan for his son, and aid in all his schemes.

[Sidenote: [1537-1544 A.D.]]

A French king at that time would have sacrificed anything for the vainglory of establishing himself in Italy. Charles saw his triumph, confirmed it by a friendly visit to Paris, and made use of it by obtaining permission to pass through France to punish the men of Ghent who had rebelled (1539). And, when thus the whole advantages of his superior policy were secured, he denounced his friend to the indignation of every Christian, as an ally of Suleiman the chief of the unbelievers, and bestowed the duchy of Milan on his own son, Philip, the prince of Spain. Five armies sprang up at the king’s lifting his hand, to revenge this wrong and insult. But though indignation may raise troops, it cannot raise money. Fresh burdens were imposed; church ornaments were coined into crowns, but still the chest was empty. La Rochelle set the dangerous example of rebellion on account of its over-taxation, and was only quelled by alleviation of its payments and pardon of its behaviour. Assistance was greedily looked to by both parties. Suleiman, the champion of Mohammedanism, on the side of Francis, was balanced by Henry, the defender of the Protestant faith, on the side of Charles. The Turks, under the same Barbarossa whom Charles had displaced from Tunis, besieged Nice, and ravaged the shores of Catalonia. Henry did little but keep Scotland from aiding France by the intrigues and menaces with which he sued for the hand of the unfortunate Mary Stuart, now queen, for his son Edward. A great victory at Ceresoles, in 1544, added another useless wreath to the chaplet of French achievements, and for a moment Milan opened its gates. But Charles and Henry were by this time on the soil of France. The Spaniards were at St. Dizier, the English at Boulogne. Troops were summoned from Italy, and collected from all quarters. Charles steadily advanced, seized Épernay, and rested in Château-Thierry. Paris almost heard the thunder of his guns; and, flushed with the possession of Boulogne, Henry was reported to be upon the march to join the army.

[Sidenote: [1544-1547 A.D.]]

But other sounds reached the ears of the belligerents. The Protestants in Germany were sharpening their swords, and Charles feared the men of the confession of Augsburg more than the Catholic French. A peace was patched up at Crespy in the Valois (1544) which left things as they were, and enabled the two monarchs to turn their religious minds to the extirpation of heresy. The royal heretic [Henry VIII] who had been the faithful ally of one of them, and the considerate foe of the other, contented himself with demanding a bribe of 2,000,000 crowns for the restitution of his conquests. From this time Francis and Charles had more interests in common. Both glowed with a hatred of the Reformation such as only tyrants can feel. They persuaded the pope to summon a general council to extirpate Lutheranism and Calvinism at once, and while the famous council of Trent was gathering from all the orthodox nationalities, they occupied themselves in cruel persecutions of their suspected subjects (1545).[v]

LAST YEARS AND DEATH OF FRANCIS I

Francis, however, was growing feeble. He was no longer the brilliant knight of Marignano or Pavia, the friend of Leonardo da Vinci and of Erasmus. Worn out before his time by excesses, at fifty-one he was a morose old man. The greatest blot on his reign belongs to these last unhappy years. So long as the war with Charles V continued, Francis I was careful not to offend the dissenters; the Edict of Coucy had even ordered, in 1535, the suspension of all persecution on account of religion. The peace concluded, men of harsh and sinister counsel, such as Montmorency and Cardinal de Tournon, resumed the upper hand. They attributed the king’s reverses to the relaxation of severity and he allowed himself to be persuaded to order new executions. At Meaux fourteen pyres were erected in one day (1546); at the place Maubert Étienne Dolet was hanged and then burned.

The most odious execution was that of a whole inoffensive population, the Vaudois, whose beliefs were more than three centuries old. In 1540 they had been condemned as heretics. The execution of the sentence had been suspended in favour of a peaceable peasantry who paid their taxes regularly and merely offered the spectacle of pure and simple manners in the two little towns of Mérindol and Cabrières and in some thirty villages of the Alps of Provence.

But in the month of April, 1545, precise and rigorous orders from the court reached the parliament of Aix. Without warning, the baron de la Garde, assisted by the president D’Oppède and the _avocat-général_ Guérin and accompanied by soldiers, entered the territory of these unfortunate people: 3,000 were massacred or burned in their dwellings; 660 sent to the galleys; the rest dispersed in the woods and mountains, where the greater part died of hunger and privation. For fifteen leagues round not a house, not a tree was left.

Francis I, who perhaps did not know all the details of this execrable drama, approved what had taken place and ordered the persecution to be continued. Foreign affairs went no better. It was the time when Charles V, no longer trammelled by the war with France and assured of peace with the Turks, turned his forces against the Protestants of Germany and, under pretext of stifling heresy, sought to stifle German liberty; the battle of Mühlberg seemed to lay the empire at his feet. Francis I did not see this great success of his rival; he had died three weeks before at the château of Rambouillet, at the age of fifty-two years (31st of March, 1547).[m] He was buried with a magnificence far surpassing anything which had yet been witnessed in France; eleven cardinals assisted at his obsequies, and the ceremony extended over two and twenty days. The bodies of his two sons, the dauphin Francis and Charles duke of Orleans, were conveyed to St. Denis together with his own, and Henry II succeeded to the vacant throne.[n] Before we take up the events of that monarch’s reign, let us listen to an estimate of the character and influence of the showy ruler whose life story we have just followed to its close.[a]

GAILLARD’S ESTIMATE OF FRANCIS I

[Sidenote: [1515-1547 A.D.]]

Charles V and Francis I (says Gaillard) perhaps owe it to each other that they were great men; each had some advantages that were denied the other. The leading characteristic of Charles was diplomacy, of Francis straightforwardness. If we compare the two princes as warriors, the sum total of their military exploits appears about equal; nevertheless the deeds of Francis are more famous. His early career was so brilliant that it has shed a lustre over his whole life, even over his misfortunes. To gain a victory at twenty makes a man famous forever. Charles V began his career, or at any rate distinguished himself in it, too late. His first important expedition was the one against the Turks in 1532; for the time when he appeared at Valenciennes only to fly on the approach of the king, and the occasion of his failure before Bayonne, when he was enabled to regain Fuenterrabia by the treachery of a coward, must count for nothing. The expedition to Tunis in 1536 was the first exploit of Charles V which can be compared with the battle of Marignano; nevertheless it was certainly better to gain the battle of Mühlberg than to lose that of Pavia. On the whole Charles V was perhaps the greater general and Francis I the better soldier, and this division of military talent is very much what might be expected from their individual characters, the one deliberate and thoughtful, the other ardent and impetuous.