“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:—

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:—

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:

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.