This resolution was taken and these letters patent prepared just at the expiry of the safe-conduct granted to the Princess Marguerite, and, consequently, just when she would have to return to France. Charles V. was somewhat troubled at the very different position in which he was about to find himself, when he would have to treat no longer at Madrid with a captive king, but at Paris with a young king out of his power and with his own people about him. Marguerite fully perceived his embarrassment. From Toledo, where she was, she wrote to her brother, “After having been four days without seeing the emperor, when I went to take leave I found him so gracious that I think he is very much afraid of my going; those gentry yonder are in a great fix, and, if you will be pleased to hold firm, I can see them coming round to your wishes. But they would very much like to keep me here doing nothing, in order to promote their own affairs, as you will be pleased to understand.” Charles V., in fact, signified to the king his desire that the negotiations should be proceeded with at Madrid or Toledo, never ceasing to make protestations of his pacific intentions. Francis I. replied that, for his part, “he would not lay any countermand on the duchess, that he would willingly hear what the emperor’s ambassadors had to say, but that, if they did not come to any conclusion as to a peace and his own liberation, he would not keep his own ambassadors any longer, and would send them away.” Marguerite set out at the end of November; she at first travelled slowly, waiting for good news to reach her and stop her on the road; but, suddenly, she received notice from Madrid to quicken her steps; according to some historians, it was the Duke of Bourbon who, either under the influence of an old flame or in order to do a service to the king he had betrayed, sent word to the princess that Charles V., uneasy about what she was taking with her to France, had an idea of having her arrested the moment her safe-conduct had expired. According to a more probable version, it was Francis I. himself who, learning that three days after Marguerite’s departure Charles V. had received a copy of the royal act of abdication, at once informed his sister, begging her to make all haste. And she did so to such purpose that, “making four days’ journey in one,” she arrived at Salces, in the Eastern Pyrenees, an hour before the expiry of her safe-conduct. She no doubt took to her mother, the regent, the details of the king’s resolutions and instructions; but the act itself containing them, the letters patent of Francis I., had not been intrusted to her; it was Marshal de Montmorency who, at the end of December, 15225, was the first bearer of them to France.

Did Francis I. flatter himself that his order to have his son the dauphin declared and crowned king, and the departure of his sister Marguerite, who was going, if not to carry the actual text of the resolution, at any rate to announce it to the regent and to France, would embarrass Charles V. so far as to make him relax in his pretensions to the duchy of Burgundy and its dependencies? There is nothing to show that he was allured by such a hope; any how, if it may have for a moment arisen in his mind, it soon vanished. Charles V. insisted peremptorily upon his requirements; and Francis I. at once gave up his attitude of firmness, and granted, instead, the concession demanded of him, that is, the relinquishment of Burgundy and its dependencies to Charles V., “to hold and enjoy with every right of supremacy until it hath been judged, decided, and determined, by arbiters elected on the emperor’s part and our own, to whom the said duchy, countships, and other territories belong. . . . And for guarantee of this concession, the dauphin, the king’s eldest son, and his second son, Henry, Duke of Orleans, or other great personages, to the number of twelve, should be sent to him and remain in his keeping as hostages.” The regent, Louise, was not without a hand in this determination of the king; her maternal affection took alarm at the idea of her son’s being for an indefinite period a prisoner in the hands of his enemy. Besides, in that case, war seemed to her inevitable; and she dreaded the responsibility which would be thrown upon her. Charles V., on his side, was essentially a prudent man; he disliked remaining, unless it were absolutely necessary, for a long while in a difficult position. His chancellor, Gattinera, refused to seal a treaty extorted by force and violated, in advance, by lack of good faith. “Bring the King of France so low,” he said, “that he can do you no harm, or treat him so well that he can wish you no harm, or keep him a prisoner: the worst thing you can do is to let him go half satisfied.” Charles V. persisted in his pacific resolution. There is no knowing whether he was tempted to believe in the reality of Francis I.‘s concession, and to regard the guarantees as seriously meant; but it is evident that Francis I. himself considered them a mere sham; for four months previously, on the 22d of August, 1525, at the negotiations entered into on this subject, he had taken care to deposit in the hands of his negotiators a nullifying protest “against all pacts, conventions, renunciations, quittances, revocations, derogations, and oaths that he might have to make contrary to his honor and the good of his crown, to the profit of the said emperor or any other whosoever.” And on the 13th of January, 1526, four weeks after having given his ambassadors orders to sign the treaty of Madrid containing the relinquishment of Burgundy and its dependencies, the very evening before the day on which that treaty was signed, Francis I. renewed, at Madrid itself, and again placed in the hands of his ambassadors, his protest of the 22d of August preceding against this act, declaring “that it was through force and constraint, confinement and length of imprisonment, that he had signed it, and that all that was contained in it was and should remain null and of no effect.” We may not have unlimited belief in the scrupulosity of modern diplomats; but assuredly they would consider such a policy so fundamentally worthless that they would be ashamed to practise it. We may not hold sheer force in honor; but open force is better than mendacious weakness, and less debasing for a government as well as for a people.

“As soon as the treaty of Madrid was signed, the emperor came to Madrid to see the king; then they went, both in one litter, to see Queen Eleanor, the emperor’s sister and the king of Portugal’s widow, whom, by the said treaty, the king was to espouse before he left Spain, which he did.” [Memoires de Martin Du Bellay, t. ii. p. 15.] After which Francis was escorted by Lannoy to Fontarabia, whilst, on the other hand, the regent Louise, and the king’s two sons who were to go as hostages to Spain, were on their way to Bayonne. A large bark was anchored in the middle of the Bidassoa, the boundary of the two kingdoms, between Irun and Andaye. Lannoy put the king on board, and received in exchange, from the hands of Marshal Lautrec, the little princes Francis and Henry. The king gave his children his blessing, and reached the French side whilst they were being removed to the Spanish; and as soon as he set foot on shore, he leaped upon a fine Turkish horse, exclaiming, as he started at a gallop for Bayonne, where his mother and his sister awaited him, “So now I am king again!”

On becoming king again, he fell under the dominion of three personal sentiments, which exercised a decisive influence upon his conduct, and, consequently, upon the destiny of France joy at his liberation, a thirsting for revenge, we will not say for vengeance, to be wreaked on Charles V., and the burden of the engagement he had contracted at Madrid in order to recover his liberty, alternately swayed him. From Bayonne he repaired to Bordeaux, where he reassembled his court, and thence to Cognac, in Saintonge, where he passed nearly three months, almost entirely abandoning himself to field-sports, galas, diversions, and pleasures of every kind, as if to indemnify himself for the wearisomeness and gloom in which he had lived at Madrid. “Age subdues the blood, adversity the mind, risks the nerve, and the despairing monarch has no hope but in pleasures,” says Tavannes in his Memoires: “such was Francis I., smitten of women both in body and mind. It is the little circle of Madame d’Etampes that governs.” One of the regent’s maids of honor, Anne d’Heilly, whom Frances I. made Duchess of Etampes, took the place of the Countess of Chateaubriant as his favorite. With strange indelicacy Francis demanded back from Madame de Chateaubriant the beautiful jewels of gold which he had given her, and which bore tender mottoes of his sister Marguerite’s composition. The countess took time enough to have the jewels melted down, and said to the king’s envoy, “Take that to the king, and tell him that, as he has been pleased to recall what he gave me, I send it back to him in metal. As for the mottoes, I cannot suffer any one but myself to enjoy them, dispose of them, and have the pleasure of them.” The king sent back the metal to Madame de Chateaubriant; it was the mottoes that he wished to see again, but he did not get them.

At last it was absolutely necessary to pass from pleasure to business. The envoys of Charles V., with Lannoy, the Viceroy of Naples, at their head, went to Cognac to demand execution of the treaty of Madrid. Francis waited, ere he gave them an answer, for the arrival of the delegates from the estates of Burgundy, whom he had summoned to have their opinion as to the cession of the duchy. These delegates, meeting at Cognac in June, 1527, formally repudiated the cession, being opposed, they said, to the laws of the kingdom, to the rights of the king, who could not by his sole authority alienate any portion of his dominions, and to his coronation-oath, which superseded his oaths made at Madrid. Francis invited the envoys of Charles V. to a solemn meeting of his court and council present at Cognac, at which the delegates from Burgundy repeated their protest. Whilst availing himself of this declaration as an insurmountable obstacle to the complete execution of the treaty of Madrid, Francis offered to give two million crowns for the redemption of Burgundy, and to observe the other arrangements of the treaty, including the relinquishment of Italy and his marriage with the sister of Charles V. Charles formally rejected this proposal. “The King of France,” he said, “promised and swore, on the faith of an honest king and prince, that, if he did not carry out the said restitution of Burgundy, he would incontinently come and surrender himself prisoner to H. M. the emperor, wherever he might be, to undergo imprisonment in the place where the said lord the emperor might be pleased to order him, up to and until the time when this present treaty should be completely fulfilled and accomplished. Let the King of France keep his oath.” [Traite de Madrid, 14th of January, 1526: art. vi.]

However determined he was, at bottom, to elude the strict execution of the treaty of Madrid, Francis was anxious to rebut the charge of perjury by shifting the responsibility on to the shoulders of the people themselves and their representatives. He did not like to summon the states-general of the kingdom, and recognize their right as well as their power; but, after the meeting at Cognac, he went to Paris, and, on the 12th of December, 1527, the Parliament met in state with the adjunct of the princes of the blood, a great number of cardinals, bishops, noblemen, deputies from the Parliaments of Toulouse, Bordeaux, Rouen, Dijon, Grenoble, and Aix, and the municipal body of Paris. In presence of this assembly the king went over the history of his reign, his expeditions in Italy, his alternate successes and reverses, and his captivity. “If my subjects have suffered,” he said, “I have suffered with them.” He then caused to be read the letters patent whereby he had abdicated and transferred the crown to his son the dauphin, devoting himself to captivity forever. He explained the present condition of the finances, and what he could furnish for the ransom of his sons detained as hostages; and he ended by offering to return as a prisoner to Spain if no other way could be found out of a difficult position, for he acknowledged having given his word, adding, however, that he had thought it pledged him to nothing, since it had not been given freely.

This last argument was of no value morally or diplomatically; but in his bearing and his language Francis I. displayed grandeur and emotion. The assembly also showed emotion; they were four days deliberating; with some slight diversity of form the various bodies present came to the same conclusion; and, on the 16th of December, 1527, the Parliament decided that the king was not bound either to return to Spain or to execute, as to that matter, the treaty of Madrid, and that he might with full sanction and justice levy on his subjects two millions of crowns for the ransom of his sons and the other requirements of the state.

Before inviting such manifestations Francis I. had taken measures to prevent them from being in vain. Since the battle of Pavia and his captivity at Madrid the condition and disposition of Europe, and especially of Italy, had changed. From 1513 to 1523, three popes, Leo X., Adrian VI., and Clement VII. had occupied the Holy See. Adrian VI. alone embraced the cause of Charles V., whose preceptor he had been; but he reigned only one year, eight months, and five days; and even during that short time he made only a timid use of his power on his patron’s behalf. His successor, Clement VII., was a Florentine and a Medici, and, consequently, but little inclined to favor the emperor’s policy. The success of Charles V. at Pavia and the captivity of Francis I. inspired the pope and all Italy with great dread of the imperial pretensions and predominance. A league was formed between Rome, Florence, Venice, and Milan for the maintenance of Italian independence; and, as the pope was at its head, it was called the Holy League. Secret messages and communications were interchanged between these Italian states, the regent Louise of Savoy at Paris, and King Henry VIII. in London, to win them over to this coalition, not less important, it was urged, for the security of Europe than of Italy. The regent of France and the King of England received these overtures favorably; promises were made on either side and a commencement was even made of preparations, which were hastily disavowed both at Paris and in London, when Charles V. testified some surprise at them. But when Francis I. was restored to freedom and returned to his kingdom, fully determined in his own mind not to execute the treaty of Madrid, the negotiations with Italy became more full of meaning and reality. As early as the 22d of May, 1526, whilst he was still deliberating with his court and Parliament as to how he should behave towards Charles V. touching the treaty of Madrid, Francis I. entered into the Holy League with the pope, the Venetians, and the Duke of Milan for the independence of Italy; and on the 8th of August following Francis I. and Henry VIII. undertook, by a special treaty, to give no assistance one against the other to Charles V., and Henry VIII. promised to exert all his efforts to get Francis I.‘s two sons, left as hostages in Spain, set at liberty. Thus the war between Francis I. and Charles V., after fifteen months’ suspension, resumed its course.

It lasted three years in Italy, from 1526 to 1529, without interruption, but also without result; it was one of those wars which are prolonged from a difficulty of living in peace rather than from any serious intention, on either side, of pursuing a clear and definite object. Bourbon and Lannoy commanded the imperial armies, Lautrec the French army. Only two events, one for its singularity and the other for its tragic importance, deserve to have the memory of them perpetuated in history.

After the battle of Pavia and whilst Francis I. was a captive in Spain, Bourbon, who had hitherto remained in Italy, arrived at Madrid on the 13th of November, 1525, almost at the same time at which Marguerite de Valois was leaving it for France. Charles V. received the hero of Pavia with the strongest marks of consideration and favor; and the Spanish army were enthusiastic in their attachment to him. Amongst the great Spanish lords there were several who despised him as a traitor to his king and country. Charles V. asked the Marquis de Villena to give him quarters in his palace. “I can refuse the king nothing,” said the marquis; “but as soon as the traitor is out of the house, I will fire it with my own hand; no man of honor could live in it any more.” Holding this great and at the same time doubtful position, Bourbon remained in Spain up to the moment when the war was renewed between Francis I. and Charles V. The latter could not at that time dispense with his services in Italy for the only soldier who could have taken his place there, the Marquis of Pescara, had died at Milan on the 30th of November, 1525, aged thirty-six. Charles V. at once sent Bourbon to take the command of the imperial armies in Italy. On arriving at Milan in July, 1527, Bourbon found not only that town, but all the emperor’s party in Italy, in such a state of disorder, alarm, and exhaustion as to render them incapable of any great effort. In view of this general disturbance, Bourbon, who was as ambitious as able, and had become the chief of the great adventurers of his day, conceived the most audacious hopes. Charles V. had promised him the duchy of Milan; why should he not have the kingdom of Naples also, and make himself independent of Charles V.? He had immense influence over his Spanish army; and he had recruited it in Germany with from fourteen to fifteen thousand lanzknechts, the greater part of them Lutherans, and right glad to serve Charles V., then at war with the pope. Their commander, Freundsberg, a friend of Bourbon’s, had got made a handsome gold chain, “expressly,” he said, “to hang and strangle the pope with his own hand, because ‘honor to whom honor is due;’ and since the pope called himself premier in Christendom, he must be deferred to somewhat more than others.” [Brantome, t. i. p. 354.] On the 30th of January, 1527, at Piacenza, Bourbon, late Constable of France, put himself at the head of this ruck of bold and greedy adventurers. “I am now,” said he to them, “nothing but a poor gentleman, who hasn’t a penny to call his own any more than you have; but, if you will have a little patience, I will make you all rich or die in the attempt;” and, so saying, he distributed amongst them all he had left of money, rings, and jewels, keeping for himself nothing but his clothes and a jacket of silver tissue to put on over his armor. “We will follow you everywhere, to the devil himself!” shouted the soldiers; “no more of Julius Caesar, Hannibal, and Scipio! Hurrah! for the fame of Bourbon!” Bourbon led this multitude through Italy, halting before most of the towns, Bologna and Florence even, which he felt a momentary inclination to attack, but, after all, continuing his march until, having arrived in sight of Rome on the 5th of March, 1527, in the evening, he had pitched his camp, visited his guards, and ordered the assault for the morrow. “The great chances of our destiny,” said he to his troops, “have brought us hither to the place where we desired to be, after traversing so many bad roads, in midwinter, with snows and frosts so great, with rain, and mud, and encounters of the enemy, in hunger and thirst, and without a halfpenny. Now is the time to show courage, manliness, and the strength of your bodies. If this bout you are victorious, you will be rich lords and mighty well off; if not, you will be quite the contrary. Yonder is the city whereof, in time past, a wise astrologer prophesied concerning me, telling me that I should die there; but I swear to you that I care but little for dying there, if, when I die, my corpse be left with endless glory and renown throughout the world.” Afterwards he gave the word for retiring, some to rest, and some on guard, and for every one to be ready to assault on the morrow early. . . . “After that the stars became obscured by the greater resplendency of the sun and the flashing arms of the soldiers who were preparing for the assault, Bourbon, clad all in white that he might be better known and seen (which was not the sign of a coward), and armor in hand, marched in front close up to the wall, and, when he had mounted two rungs of his ladder, just as he had said the night before, so did it happen to him, that envious, or, to more properly speak, traitorous Fortune would have an arquebuse-shot to hit him full in the left side and wound him mortally. And albeit she took from him his being and his life, yet could she not in one single respect take away his magnanimity and his vigor so long as his body had sense, as he well showed out of his own mouth, for, having fallen when he was hit, he told certain of his most faithful friends who were nigh him, and especially the Gascon captain, Jonas, to cover him with a cloak and take him away, that his death might not give occasion to the others to leave an enterprise so well begun. . . . Just then, as M. de Bourbon had recommended,—to cover and hide his body,—so did his men; in such sort that the escalade and assault went on so furiously that the town, after a little resistance, was carried; and the soldiers, having by this time got wind of his death, fought the more furiously that it might be avenged, the which it certainly was right well, for they set up a shout of, ‘Slay, slay! blood, blood! Bourbon, Bourbon!’” [Brantome, t. i. pp. 262-269.]

The celebrated artist-in-gold, Benvenuto Cellini, says, in his Life written by himself, that it was he who, from the top of the wall of the Campo Santo at Rome, aiming his arquebuse at the midst of a group of besiegers, amongst whom he saw one man mounted higher than the rest, hit him, and that he then saw an extraordinary commotion around this man, who was Bourbon, as he found out afterwards. [Vita di Benvenuto Cellini, ch. xvii. pp. 157-159.] “I have heard say at Rome,” says Brantome on the contrary, “that it was held that he who fired that wretched arquebuse-shot was a priest.” [Brantome, t. ii. p. 268.]

Whatever hand it was that shot down Bourbon, Rome, after his death, was plundered, devastated and ravaged by a brutal, greedy, licentious, and fanatical soldiery. Europe was moved at the story of the sack of Rome and the position of the pope, who had taken refuge in the castle of St. Angelo. Francis I. and Henry VIII. renewed their alliance; and a French army under the command of Lautrec advanced into Italy. Charles V., fearing lest it should make a rapid march to Rome and get possession of the pope whilst delivering him from captivity, entered into negotiations with him; and, in consideration of certain concessions to the emperor, it was arranged that the pope should be set at liberty without delay. Clement VII. was so anxious to get out of his position, lately so perilous and even now so precarious, that he slank out of the castle of St. Angelo in the disguise of a tradesman the very night before the day fixed by the emperor for his liberation; and he retired to Orvieto, on the territory occupied by the French army. During this confusion of things in Italy, Charles V. gave orders for arresting in Spain the ambassadors of Francis I. and of Henry VIII., who were in alliance against him, and who, on their side, sent him two heralds-at-arms to declare war against him. Charles V. received them in open audience at Burgos, on the 22d of January, 1528. “I am very much astonished,” said he to the French envoy, “to find the King of France declaring against me a war which he has been carrying on for seven years; he is not in a position to address to me such a declaration; he is my prisoner. Why has he taken no notice of what I said to his ambassador immediately after his refusal to execute the treaty of Madrid?” Charles V. now repeated, in the very terms addressed to the French ambassador, the communication to which he alluded: “The king your master acted like a Bastard and a scoundrel in not keeping his word that he gave me touching the treaty of Madrid; if he likes to say to the contrary, I will maintain it against him with my body to his.” When these words were reported to Francis I., he summoned, on the 27th of March, 1528, the princes of the blood, the cardinals, the prelates, the grandees of the kingdom, and the ministers from foreign courts, and, after having given a vivid account of his relations with Charles V., “I am not the prisoner of Charles,” he said: “I have not given him my word; we have never met with arms in our hands.” He then handed his herald, Guyenne, a cartel written with his own hand, and ending with these words addressed to Charles V.: “We give you to understand that, if you have intended or do intend to charge us with anything that a gentleman loving his honor ought not to do, we say that you have lied in your throat, and that, as often as you say so, you will lie. Wherefore for the future write us nothing at all; but appoint us the time and place of meeting, and we will bring our sword for you to cross; protesting that the shame of any delay in fighting shall be yours, seeing that, when it comes to an encounter, there is an end of all writing.” Charles V. did not receive Francis I.‘s challenge till the 8th of June; when he, in his turn, consulted the grandees of his kingdom, amongst others the Duke of Infantado, one of the most considerable in rank and character, who answered him in writing: “The jurisdiction of arms extends exclusively to obscure and foggy matters in which the ordinary rules of justice are at a discount; but, when one can appeal to oaths and authentic acts, I do not think that it is allowable to come to blows before having previously tried the ordinary ways of justice. . . It seems to me that this law of honor applies to princes, however great they may be, as well as to knights. It would be truly strange, my lord, that a debt so serious, so universally recognized, as that contracted by the King of France, should be discharged by means of a personal challenge.” Charles V. thereupon sent off his herald, Burgundy, with orders to carry to Francis I. “an appointment for a place of meeting between Fontarabia and Andaye, in such a spot as by common consent should be considered most safe and most convenient by gentlemen chosen on each side;” and this offer was accompanied by a long reply which the herald was at the same time to deliver to the King of France, whilst calling on him to declare his intention within forty days after the delivery of that letter, dated the 24th of June, “in default whereof,” said Charles, “the delay in fighting will be yours.”

On arriving at the frontier of France the Spanish herald demanded a safe-conduct. He was made to wait seven weeks, from the 30th of June to the 19th of August, without the king’s cognizance, it is said. At last, on the 19th of September, 1528, Burgundy entered Paris, and was conducted to the palace. Francis I. received him in the midst of his court; and, as soon as he observed the entrance of the herald, who made obeisance preliminary to addressing him, “Herald,” cried the king, “all thy letters declare that thou bringest appointment of time and place; dost thou bring it?” “Sir,” answered the Spaniard, “permit me to do my office, and say what the emperor has charged me to say.” “Nay, I will not listen to thee,” said Francis, “if thou do not first give me a patent signed by thy master, containing an appointment of time and place.” “Sir, I have orders to read you the cartel, and give it you afterwards.” “How, pray!” cried the king, rising up angrily: “doth thy master pretend to introduce new fashions in my kingdom, and give me laws in my own court?” Burgundy, without being put out, began again: “Sir, . . . “ “Nay,” said Francis, “I will not suffer him to speak to me before he has given me appointment of time and place. Give it me, or return as thou hast come.” “Sir, I cannot, without your permission, do my office; if you will not deign to grant it to me, let me have your refusal handed me, and your ratification I of my safe-conduct for my return.” “I am quite willing,” said the king; “let him have it!” Burgundy set off again for Madrid, and the incident was differently reported by the two courts; but there was no further question of a duel between the two kings.

One would not think of attempting to decide, touching this question of single combat, how far sincerity was on the side of Francis or of Charles. No doubt they were both brave; the former with more brilliancy than his rival, the latter, at need, with quite as much firmness. But in sending challenges one to the other, as they did on this occasion, they were obeying a dying-out code, and rather attempting to keep up chivalrous appearances than to put seriously in practice the precedents of their ancestors. It was no longer a time when the fate of a people could be placed in the hands of a few valiant warriors, such as the three Horatii and the three Curiatii, or the thirty Bretons and thirty English. The era of great nations and great contests was beginning, and one is inclined to believe that Francis I. and Charles V. were themselves aware that their mutual challenges would not come to any personal encounter. The war which continued between them in Italy was not much more serious or decisive; both sides were weary of it, and neither one nor the other of the two sovereigns espied any great chances of success. The French army was wasting itself, in the kingdom of Naples, upon petty, inconclusive engagements; its commander, Lautrec, died of the plague on the 15th of August, 1528; a desire for peace became day by day stronger; it was made, first of all, at Barcelona, on the 20th of June, 1529, between Charles V. and Pope Clement VII.; and then a conference was opened at Cambrai for the purpose of bringing it about between Charles V. and Francis I. likewise. Two women, Francis I.‘s mother and Charles V.‘s aunt, Louise of Savoy and Margaret of Austria, had the real negotiation of it; they had both of them acquired the good sense and the moderation which come from experience of affairs and from difficulties in life; they did not seek to give one another mutual surprises and to play-off one another reciprocally; they resided in two contiguous houses, between which they had caused a communication to be made on the inside, and they conducted the negotiation with so much discretion, that the petty Italian princes who were interested in it did not know the results of it until peace was concluded on the 5th of August, 1529. Francis I. yielded on all the Italian and Flemish questions; and Charles V. gave up Burgundy, and restored to liberty the King of France’s two sons, prisoners at Madrid, in consideration of a ransom put at two millions of crowns and of having the marriage completed between his sister Eleanor and Francis I. King Henry VIII. complained that not much account had been made of him, either during the negotiations or in the treaty; but his discontent was short-lived, and he none the less came to the assistance of Francis I. in the money-questions to which the treaty gave rise. Of the Italian states, Venice was most sacrificed in this accommodation between the kings. “The city of Cambrai,” said the doge, Andrew Gritti, “is the purgatory of the Venetians; it is the place where emperors and kings of France make the Republic expiate the sin of having ever entered into alliance with them.” Francis went to Bordeaux to meet his sons and his new wife. At Bordeaux, Cognac, Amboise, Blois, and Paris, galas, both at court and amongst the people, succeeded one another for six months; and Europe might consider itself at peace.

The peace of Cambrai was called the ladies’ peace, in honor of the two princesses who had negotiated it. Though morally different and of very unequal worth, they both had minds of a rare order, and trained to recognize political necessities, and not to attempt any but possible successes. They did not long survive their work: Margaret of Austria died on the 1st of December, 1530, and Louise of Savoy on the 22d of September, 1531. All the great political actors seemed hurrying away from the stage, as if the drama were approaching its end. Pope Clement VII. died on the 26th of September, 1534. He was a man of sense and moderation; he tried to restore to Italy her independence, but he forgot that a moderate policy is, above all, that which requires most energy and perseverance. These two qualities he lacked totally; he oscillated from one camp to the other without ever having any real influence anywhere. A little before his death he made France a fatal present; for, on the 28th of October, 1533, he married his niece Catherine de’ Medici to Francis I.‘s second son, Prince Henry of Valois, who by the death of his elder brother, the Dauphin Francis, soon afterwards became heir to the throne. The chancellor, Anthony Duprat, too, the most considerable up to that time amongst the advisers of Francis I., died on the 9th of July, 1535. According to some historians, when he heard, in the preceding year, of Pope Clement VII.‘s death, he had conceived a hope, being already Archbishop of Sens, and a cardinal, of succeeding him; and he spoke to the king about it. “Such an election would cost too dear,” said Francis I.; “the appetite of cardinals is insatiable; I could not satisfy it.” “Sir,” replied Duprat, “France will not have to bear the expense; I will provide for it; there are four hundred thousand crowns ready for that purpose.” “Where did you get all that money, pray?” asked Francis, turning his back upon him; and next day he caused a seizure to be made of a portion of the chancellor-cardinal’s property. “This, then,” exclaimed Duprat, “is the king’s gratitude towards the minister who has served him body and soul!” “What has the cardinal to complain of?” said the king: “I am only doing to him what he has so often advised me to do to others.” [Trois Magestrats Francais du Seizieme Siecle, by Edouard Faye de Brys, 1844, pp. 77-79.] The last of the chancellor’s biographers, the Marquis Duprat, one of his descendants, has disputed this story. [Vie d’Antoine Duprat, 1857, p. 364.] However that may be, it is certain that Chancellor Duprat, at his death, left a very large fortune, which the king caused to be seized, and which he partly appropriated. We read in the contemporary Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris [published by Ludovic Lalanne, 1854, p. 460], “When the chancellor was at the point of death, the king sent M. de Bryon, Admiral of France, who had orders to have everything seized and all his property placed in the king’s hands. . . . They found in his place at Nantouillet eight hundred thousand crowns, and all his gold and silver plate . . . and in his Hercules-house, close to the Augustins’, at Paris, where he used to stay during his life-time, the sum of three hundred thousand livres, which were in coffers bound with iron, and which were carried off by the king for and to his own profit.” In the civil as well as in the military class, for his government as well as for his armies, Francis I. had, at this time, to look out for new servants.

He did not find such as have deserved a place in history. After the deaths of Louise of Savoy, of Chancellor Duprat, of La Tremoille, of La Palice, and of all the great warriors who fell at the battle of Pavia, it was still one more friend of Francis I.‘s boyhood, Anne de Montmorency, who remained, in council as well as army, the most considerable and the most devoted amongst his servants. In those days of war and discord, fraught with violence, there was no man who was more personally rough and violent than Montmorency. From 1521 to 1541, as often as circumstances became pressing, he showed himself ready for anything and capable of anything in defence of the crown and the re-establishment of order. “Go hang me such a one,” he would say, according to Brantome. “Tie you fellow to this tree; give yonder one the pike or arquebuse, and all before my eyes; cut me in pieces all those rascals who chose to hold such a clock-case as this against the king; burn me this village; set me everything a-blaze, for a quarter of a league all round.” In 1548, a violent outbreak took place at Bordeaux on account of the gabel or salt-tax; and the king’s lieutenant was massacred in it. Anne de Montmorency, whom the king had made constable in 1538, the fifth of his family invested with that dignity, repaired thither at once. “Aware of his coming,” says Brantome, “MM. de Bordeaux went two days’ journey to meet him and carry him the keys of their city: ‘Away, away,’ said he, ‘with your keys; I will have nothing to do with them; I have others which I am bringing with me, and which will make other sort of opening than yours (meaning his cannon); I will have you all hanged; I will teach you to rebel against your king, and kill his governor and lieutenant.’ Which he did not fail to do,” adds Brantome, “and inflicted exemplary punishment, but not so severe assuredly as the case required.” The narrator, it will be seen, was not more merciful than the constable. Nor was the constable less stern or less thorough in battles than in outbreaks. In 1562, at the battle of Dreux, he was aged and so ill that none expected to see him on horseback. “But in the morning,” says Brantome, “knowing that the enemy was getting ready, he, brimful of courage, gets out of bed, mounts his horse, and appears at the moment the march began; whereof I do remember me, for I saw him and heard him, when M. de Guise came forward to meet him to give him good day, and ask how he was. He, fully armed, save only his head, answered him, ‘Right well, sir: this is the real medicine that hath cured me for the battle which is toward and a-preparing for the honor of God and our king.’” In spite of this indomitable aptness for rendering the king everywhere the most difficult, nay, the most pitiless services, the Constable de Montmorency none the less incurred, in 1541, the disfavor of Francis I.; private dissensions in the royal family, the intrigues of rivals at court, and the enmity of the king’s mistress, the Duchess of Etampes, effaced the remembrance of all he had done and might still do. He did accept his disgrace; he retired first to Chantilly, and then to Ecouen; and there he waited for the dauphin, when he became King Henry II., to recall him to his side and restore to him the power which Francis I., on his very death-bed, had dissuaded his son from giving back. The ungratefulnesses of kings are sometimes as capricious as their favors.

The ladies’ peace, concluded at Cambrai in 1529, lasted up to 1536; incessantly troubled, however, by far from pacific symptoms, proceedings, and preparations. In October, 1532, Francis I. had, at Calais, an interview with Henry VIII., at which they contracted a private alliance, and undertook “to raise between them an army of eighty thousand men to resist the Turk, as true zealots for the good of Christendom.” The Turks, in fact, under their great sultan, Soliman II., were constantly threatening and invading Eastern Europe. Charles V., as Emperor of Germany, was far more exposed to their attacks and far more seriously disquieted by them than Francis I. and Henry VIII. were; but the peril that hung over him in the East urged him on at the same time to a further development of ambition and strength; in order to defend Eastern Europe against the Turks he required to be dominant in Western Europe; and in that very part of Europe a large portion of the population were disposed to wish for his success, for they required it for their own security. “To read all that was spread abroad hither and thither,” says William du Bellay, “it seemed that the said lord the emperor was born into this world to have fortune at his beck and call.” Two brothers, Mussulman pirates, known under the name of Barbarossa, had become masters, one of Algiers and the other of Tunis, and were destroying, in the Mediterranean, the commerce and navigation of Christian states. It was Charles V. who tackled them. In 1535 he took Tunis, set at liberty twenty thousand Christian slaves, and remained master of the regency. At the news of this expedition, Francis I., who, in concert with Henry VIII., was but lately levying an army to “offer resistance,” he said, “to the Turk,” entered into negotiations with Soliman II., and concluded a friendly treaty with him against what was called the common enemy. Francis had been for some time preparing to resume his projects of conquest in Italy; he had effected an interview at Marseilles, in October, 1533, with Pope Clement VII., who was almost at the point of death, and it was there that the marriage of Prince Henry of France with Catherine de’ Medici was settled. Astonishment was expressed that the pope’s niece had but a very moderate dowry. “You don’t see, then,” said Clement VII.‘s ambassador, “that she brings France three jewels of great price, Genoa, Milan, and Naples?” When this language was reported at the court of Charles V., it caused great irritation there. In 1536 all these combustibles of war exploded; in the month of February, a French army entered Piedmont, and occupied Turin; and, in the month of July, Charles V. in person entered Provence at the head of fifty thousand men. Anne de Montmorency having received orders to defend southern France, began by laying it waste in order that the enemy might not be able to live in it; officers had orders to go everywhere and “break up the bake-houses and mills, burn the wheat and forage, pierce the wine-casks, and ruin the wells by throwing the wheat into them to spoil the water.” In certain places the inhabitants resisted the soldiers charged with this duty; elsewhere, from patriotism, they themselves set fire to their corn-ricks and pierced their casks. Montmorency made up his mind to defend, on the whole coast of Provence, only Marseilles and Arles; he pulled down the ramparts of the other towns, which were left exposed to the enemy. For two months Charles V. prosecuted this campaign without a fight, marching through the whole of Provence an army which fatigue, shortness of provisions, sickness, and ambuscades were decimating ingloriously. At last he decided upon retreating. “From Aix to Frejus, where the emperor at his arrival had pitched his camp, all the roads were strewn with the sick and the dead pell-mell, with harness, lances, pikes, arquebuses, and other armor of men and horses gathered in a heap. I say what I saw,” adds Martin du Bellay, “considering the toil I had with my company in this pursuit.” At the village of Mery, near Frejus, some peasants had shut themselves up in a tower situated on the line of march; Charles V. ordered one of his captains to carry it by assault; from his splendid uniform the peasants, it is said, took this officer for the emperor himself, and directed their fire upon him; the officer, mortally wounded, was removed to Nice, where he died at the end of a few days. It was Garcilaso de la Vega, the prince of Spanish poesy, the Spanish Petrarch, according to his fellow-countrymen. The tower was taken, and Charles V. avenged his poet’s death by hanging twenty-five of these patriot-peasants, being all that survived of the fifty who had maintained the defence.

On returning from his sorry expedition, Charles V. learned that those of his lieutenants whom he had charged with the conduct of a similar invasion in the north of France, in Picardy, had met with no greater success than he himself in Provence. Queen Mary of Hungary, his sister and deputy in the government of the Low Countries, advised a local truce; his other sister, Eleanor, the Queen of France, was of the same opinion; Francis I. adopted it; and the truce in the north was signed for a period of three months. Montmorency signed a similar one for Piedmont. It was agreed that negotiations for a peace should be opened at Locate in Roussillon, and that, to pursue them, Francis should go and take up his quarters at Montpellier, and Charles V. at Barcelona. Pope Paul III. (Alexander Farnese), who, on the 13th of October, 1534, had succeeded Clement VII., came forward as mediator. He was a man of capacity, who had the gift of resolutely continuing a moderate course of policy, well calculated to gain time, but insufficient for the settlement of great and difficult questions. The two sovereigns refused to see one another officially; they did not like the idea of discussing together their mutual pretensions, and they were so different in character that, as Marguerite de Valois used to say, “to bring them to accord, God would have had to re-make one in the other’s image.” They would only consent to treat by agents; and on the 15th of June, 1538, they signed a truce for ten years, rather from weariness of a fruitless war than from any real desire of peace; they, both of them, wanted time to bring them unforeseen opportunities for getting out of their embarrassments. But for all their refusal to take part in set negotiations, they were both desirous of being personally on good terms again, and to converse together without entering into any engagement. Charles V. being forced by contrary winds to touch at the Island of Sainte-Marie, made a proposal to Francis I. for an interview at Aigues Mortes; Francis repaired thither on the 14th of July, 1538, and went, the very same day, in a small galley, to pay a visit to the emperor, who stepped eagerly forward, and held out a hand to him to help him on to the other vessel. Next day, the 15th of July, Charles V., embarking on board one of the king’s frigates, went and returned the visit at Aigues-Mortes, where Francis, with his whole court, was awaiting him; after disembarkation at the port they embraced; and Queen Eleanor, glad to see them together, “embraced them both,” says an eyewitness, “a round the waist.” They entered the town amidst the roar of artillery and the cheers of the multitude, shouting, “Hurrah! for the emperor and the king!” The dauphin, Henry, and his brother Charles, Duke of Orleans, arriving boot and spur from Provence, came up at this moment, shouting likewise, “Hurrah! for the emperor and the king!” “Charles V. dropped on his knees,” says the narrator, and embraced the two young princes affectionately. They all repaired together to the house prepared for their reception, and, after dinner, the emperor, being tired, lay down to rest on a couch. Queen Eleanor, before long, went and tapped at his door, and sent word to the king that the emperor was awake. Francis, with the Cardinal de Lorraine and the Constable de Montmorency, soon arrived. On entering the chamber, he found the emperor still lying down and chatting with his sister the queen, who was seated beside him on a chair. At sight of the king Charles V. sprang from the couch and went towards him without any shoes on. “Well, brother,” said the king, “how do you feel? Have you rested well?” “Yes,” said Charles; “I had made such cheer that I was obliged to sleep it off.” “I wish you,” said Francis, “to have the same power in France as you have in Flanders and in Spain;” whereupon he gave him, as a mark of affection, a diamond valued at thirty thousand crowns, and having on the ring in which it was set this inscription: “A token and proof of affection” (Dilectionis testis et exemplum). Charles put the ring on his finger; and, taking from his neck the collar of the order (the Golden Fleece) he was wearing, he put it upon the king’s neck. Francis did the converse with his own collar. Only seven of the attendants remained in the emperor’s chamber; and there the two sovereigns conversed for an hour, after which they moved to the hall, where a splendid supper awaited them. After supper the queen went in person to see if the emperor’s room was ready; she came back to tell him when it was, and Charles V. retired. Next morning, July 16, Francis went to see him again in his room; they heard mass together; Charles re-embarked the same day for Spain; Francis I. went and slept, on the 17th, at Nimes; and thus ended this friendly meeting, which left, if not the principal actors, at any rate the people all around, brimful of satisfaction, and feeling sure that the truce concluded in the previous month would really at last be peace. The people are easily deceived; and whenever they are pleased with appearances they readily take them for realities.

An unexpected event occurred to give this friendly meeting at Aigues-Mortes a value which otherwise it would probably never have attained. A year afterwards, in August, 1539, a violent insurrection burst out at Ghent. The fair deputy of the Low Countries had obtained from the estates of Flanders a gratuitous grant of twelve hundred thousand florins for the assistance of her brother the emperor, whom his unfortunate expedition in Provence had reduced to great straits for want of money; and the city of Ghent had been taxed, for its share, to the extent of four hundred thousand florins. The Ghentese pleaded their privilege of not being liable to be taxed without their own consent. To their plea Charles V. responded by citing the vote of the estates of Flanders and giving orders to have it obeyed. The Ghentese drove out the officers of the emperor, entered upon open rebellion, incited the other cities of Flanders, Ypres and Bruges amongst the rest, to join them, and, taking even more decisive action, sent a deputation to Francis I., as their own lord’s suzerain, demanding his support, and offering to make him master of the Low Countries if he would be pleased to give them effectual assistance. The temptation was great; but whether it were from prudence or from feudal loyalty, or in consequence of the meeting at Aigues-Mortes, and of the prospects set before him by Charles of an arrangement touching Milaness, Francis rejected the offer of the Ghentese, and informed Charles V. of it. The emperor determined resolutely upon the course of going in person and putting down the Ghentese; but how to get to Ghent? The sea was not safe; the rebels had made themselves masters of all the ports on their coasts; the passage by way of Germany was very slow work, and might be difficult by reason of ill-will on the part of the Protestant states which would have to be traversed. France was the only direct and quick route. Charles V. sent to ask Francis I. for a passage, whilst thanking him for the loyalty with which he had rejected the offers of the Ghentese, and repeating to him the fair words that had been used as to Milaness. Francis announced to his council his intention of granting the emperor’s request. Some of his councillors pressed him to annex some conditions, such, at the least, as a formal and written engagement instead of the vague and verbal promises at Aigues-Mortes. “No,” said the king, with the impulsiveness of his nature, “when you do a generous thing, you must do it completely and boldly.” On leaving the council he met his court-fool Triboulet, whom he found writing in his tablets, called Fools’ Diary, the name of Charles V., “A bigger fool than I,” said he, “if he comes passing through France.” “What wilt thou say, if I let him pass?” said the king. “I will rub out his name and put yours in its place.” Francis I. was not content with letting Charles V. pass; he sent his two sons, the dauphin and the Duke of Orleans, as far as Bayonne to meet him, went in person to receive him at Chatellerault, and gave him entertainments at Amboise, at Blois, at Chambord, at Orleans, and Fontainebleau, and lastly at Paris, which they entered together on the 1st of January, 1540. Orders had been sent everywhere to receive him “as kings of France are received on their joyous accession.” “The king gave his guest,” says Du Bellay, “all the pleasures that can be invented, as royal hunts, tourneys, skirmishes, fights a-foot and a-horseback, and in all other sorts of pastimes.” Some petty incidents, of a less reassuring kind, were intermingled with these entertainments. One day the Duke of Orleans, a young prince full of reckless gayety, jumped suddenly on to the crupper of the emperor’s horse, and threw his arms round Charles, shouting, “Your Imperial Majesty is my prisoner.” Charles set off at a gallop, without turning his head.