CHAPTER XXII
Francis I and the Reformation in France
1515–59

I. LE ROI GRAND NEZ

HE was born under a tree in Cognac on September 12, 1494. His grandfather was Charles of Orléans, the poet; perhaps song and the love of beauty were in his blood. His father was Charles of Valois and Orléans, Count of Angoulême, who died, after many adulteries, in the third year of Francis’ life. His mother was Louise of Savoy, a woman of beauty, ability, and ambition, with a taste for wealth and power. Widowed at seventeen, she refused the hand of Henry VII of England, and devoted herself—barring some liaisons—to making her son king of France. She did not mourn when Anne of Brittany, second wife of Louis XII, had a stillborn son, leaving Francis heir to the throne. Louis sadly made Francis Duke of Valois, and appointed tutors to instruct him in the art of royalty. Louise and his sister Marguerite mothered him to idolatry, and prepared him to be a ladies’ king. Louise called him Mon roi, mon seigneur, mon César, fed him chivalric romances, gloried in his gallantries, and swooned at the blows he received in the jousts that he loved. He was handsome, gay, courteous, brave; he met dangers like a Roland or an Amadis; when a wild boar, escaping from its cage, sought to frolic in his princely court, it was Francis who, while others fled, faced the beast and slew it splendidly.

At the age of twelve (1506) he was betrothed to Claude of France, the seven-year-old daughter of Louis XII. She had been promised to the boy who was to become the Emperor Charles V; the engagement had been broken to avoid yoking France to Spain; this was one item in a hundred irritations that urged Hapsburg and Valois into conflict from youth to death. At fourteen Francis was bidden leave his mother and join Louis at Chinon. At twenty he married Claude. She was stout and dull, lame and fertile and good; she gave him children in 1515, 1516, 1518, 1520, 1522, 1523, and died in 1524.

Meanwhile he became king (January 1, 1515). Everybody was happy, above all his mother, to whom he gave the duchies of Angoulême and Anjou, the counties of Maine and Beaufort, the barony of Amboise. But he was generous to others too—to nobles, artists, poets, pages, mistresses. His pleasant voice, his cordiality and good temper, his vivacity and charm, his living synthesis of chivalry and the Renaissance, endeared him to his country, even to his court. France rejoiced, and placed high hopes in him, as England in those years in Henry VIII, and the Empire in Charles V; the world seemed young again, so freshened with royal youth. And Francis, even more than Leo X, was resolved to enjoy his throne.

What was he really, this Arthur plus Lancelot? Physically he would have been magnificent, had not his nose been more so; irreverent contemporaries called him le roi grand nez. He was six feet tall, broad-shouldered, agile, strong; he could run, jump, wrestle, fence with the best; he could wield a two-handed sword or a heavy lance. His thin beard and mustache did not disguise his youth; he was twenty-one when crowned. His narrow eyes suggested alertness and humor, but not subtlety or depth. If his nose betokened virility it conformed to his reputation. Brantôme, whose Dames Galantes cannot be taken as history, wrote therein that “King Francis loved greatly and too much; for being young and free, he embraced now one, now another, with indifference... from which he took the grande vérole that shortened his days.”¹ The King’s mother was reported to have said that he was punished where he had sinned.* Perhaps history has exaggerated the variety of his amours. Whatever their number, he remained outwardly faithful first to Françoise de Foix, Comtesse de Chateaubriand, then, from 1526 to his death, to Anne de Pisselieu, whom he made Duchesse d’Étampes. Gossip spread a hundred romantic tales about him—that he besieged Milan not for Milan but for a pair of unforgettable eyes that he had seen there,³ or that a siren in Pavia lured him to his central tragedy.⁴ In any case we may have some sympathy for so sensitive a king. He was capable of tenderness as well as infatuation: when he proposed to divorce his son from the persistently barren Catherine de Médicis, her tears dissuaded him.⁵ “Nothing can be imagined more humane than Francis,” said Erasmus;⁶ and if that was the pathos of distance, Budé, France’s own humanist, described him as “gentle and accessible.”⁷

He was vain even for a man. He rivaled Henry VIII in the splendor of his royal robes, and in the furry insouciance of his beret. He took the salamander as his symbol, betokening persistent resurrection from every conflagration, but life scorched him none the less. He loved honors, distinctions, adulation, and could not bear criticism. He had an actor whipped for satirizing the court; Louis XII, bitten by the same wit, had merely smiled.⁸ He could be ungrateful, as to Anne de Montmorency, unfair, as to Charles of Bourbon, cruel, as to Semblançay; but by and large he was forgiving and generous; Italians marveled at his liberality.⁹ No ruler in history was kinder to artists. He loved beauty intensely and intelligently, and spent almost as readily on art as on war; he was half the purse of the French Renaissance.

His intellectual ability did not equal his charm of character. He had little Latin and no Greek, but astonished many men by the variety and accuracy of his knowledge in agriculture, hunting, geography, military science, literature, and art; and he enjoyed philosophy when it did not interfere with love or war. He was too reckless and impetuous to be a great commander, too lighthearted and fond of pleasure to be a great statesman, too fascinated by appearances to get to essences, too amiably influenced by favorites and mistresses to choose the best available generals and ministers, too open and frank to be a competent diplomat. His sister Marguerite grieved over his incapacity for government, and foresaw that the subtle but inflexible Emperor would unhorse him in their lifelong joust. Louis XII, who admired him as “a fine young gallant,” saw with foreboding the lavish hedonism of his successor. “All our work is useless,” he said; “this great boy will spoil everything.”¹⁰

II. FRANCE IN 1515

France was now enjoying the prosperity engendered by a bountiful soil, a skillful and thrifty people, and a beneficent reign. The population was some 16,000,000, compared with 3,000,000 in England and 7,000,000 in Spain. Paris, with 300,000, was the largest city in Europe after Constantinople. The social structure was semi-feudal: nearly all the peasants owned the land they tilled, but usually they held it in fief—and owed dues or services—to seigneurs and chevaliers whose function was to organize agriculture and provide military protection to their locality and the nation. Inflation, caused by the repeated debasement of coinages and the mining or import of precious metals, eased the traditional money dues, and enabled peasants to buy land cheaply from the land-rich, money-poor nobility; hence a rural prosperity that kept the French peasant merry and Catholic while the German Bauer was making economic and religious revolution. Stimulated by ownership, French energy drew from the soil the best corn and wine in Europe; cattle grew fat and multiplied; milk, butter, and cheese were on every table; chickens or other fowl were in almost every yard; and the peasant accepted the odor of his pigsty as one of the blessed fragrances of life.

The town worker—still chiefly a craftsman in his own shop—did not share proportionately in this prosperity. Inflation raised prices faster than wages, and protective tariffs and royal monopolies, as of salt, helped to keep the cost of living high. Discontented workers went on strike, but were nearly always defeated; and the law forbade workingmen to unite for economic purposes. Commerce moved leisurely along the bountiful rivers, but painfully along the poor roads, paying each lord a toll to pass through his domain Lyons, where the trade of the Mediterranean, ascending the Rhone, met the flow of goods from Switzerland and Germany, was second only to Paris in French industry, and only to Antwerp as a bourse or center of investment and finance. From Marseilles French commerce roamed the Mediterranean, and profited from the friendly relations that Francis dared to maintain with Suleiman and the Turks.

From this economy Francis, after the fashion of governments, drew revenues to the limit of tolerance. The taille (cut) fell as a personal or property tax upon all but nobles and clergy; the clergy paid the King ecclesiastical tithes and grants, the nobles supplied and equipped the cavalry that was still the flamboyant mainstay of French arms. Taking a lesson from the popes, Francis sold—and created to sell—noble titles and political offices; in this way the nouveaux riches slowly formed (as in England) a new aristocracy, and the lawyers, buying offices, established a powerful bureaucracy that—sometimes over the head of the King—administered the government of France.

The King’s pleasures did not allow him much time for government. He delegated its tasks, even the formation of its policies, to men like Admiral Bonnivet, Anne de Montmorency, Cardinals Duprat and de Tournon, and the Vicomte de Lautrec. Three councils aided and advised these men and the King: a Privy Council of Nobles, a more intimate Council of Affairs, and a Grand Council that handled appeals to the King. Except for this, the Parlement of Paris, composed of some 200 secular or ecclesiastical members appointed for life by the King, served as a supreme court. It had the right to remonstrate with him when it thought that his edicts contravened the fundamental institutions of France; and his decrees lacked the full prestige of law until “registered”—in effect ratified—by this ancient corps. Dominated by lawyers and old men, the Parlement of Paris became the national political organ of the middle classes, and—next to the Sorbonne—the most conservative organization in France. Local parlements, and governors appointed by the King, administered the provinces. The States-General was for the time being ignored; the collection of taxes replaced grants-in-aid, and the role of the nobility in government declined.

The function of the nobles was twofold: to organize the army, and to serve the King at court. The court, consisting of the administrative heads, the leading nobles, their wives, and the family and favorites of the King, now became the head and front of France, the mirror of fashion, the mobile perpetual festival of royalty. At the summit of this whirl was the Master of the King’s Household, who organized the whole and patrolled the protocol; then the Chamberlain, who had charge of the royal bedchamber; then four Gentlemen of the Bedchamber or First Lords in Waiting, who were always at the King’s elbow to wait on his desires; these men were changed every three months, to give other notables a turn at this exhilarating intimacy; lest anyone be overlooked, there were twenty to fifty-four Lords of the Bedchamber to serve the highest four; add twelve Pages of the Bedchamber a id four Ushers of the Bedchamber, and the King’s sleeping quarters were adequately cared for. Twenty lords served as stewards of the King’s cuisine, managing a staff of forty-five men and twenty-five cupbearers. Some thirty enfants d’honneur—boys of awesome pedigree—functioned as royal pages, shining in silvered livery; and a host of secretaries multiplied the hand and memory of the King. A cardinal was Grand Chaplain of the royal chapel; a bishop was Master of the Oratory or prayer service; and fifty diocesan bishops were allowed to grace the court and so augment their fame. Honorary positions as “grooms of the chamber,” with pensions of 240 livres, were awarded for divers accomplishments, as to scholars like Budé and poets like Marot. We must not forget seven physicians, seven surgeons four barbers, seven choristers, eight craftsmen, eight clerks of the kitchen, eight ushers for the audience chamber. Each of the King’s sons had his own attendants—stewards, chancellors, tutors, pages, and servants. Each of the two queens at court—Claude and Marguerite—had her retinue of fifteen or ten ladies in waiting, sixteen or eight maids of honor—filles demoiselles. It was the most characteristic distinction of Francis that he raised women to high place at his court, winked expertly at their liaisons, encouraged and enjoyed their parade of finery and soft charms. “A court without ladies,” he said, “is a garden without flowers”;¹¹ and probably it was the women—dowered with the ageless beauty of art—who gave the court of Francis I a graceful splendor and gay stimulus unequaled even in the palaces of Imperial Rome. All the potentates of Europe taxed their peoples to provide some minor mirroring of this Parisian fantasy.

Beneath the polished surface was an immense base of servantry: four chefs, six assistant chefs, cooks specializing in soups or sauces or pastries or roasts, and a countless personnel to supply and serve the King’s table, the cuisine commune of the court, and the needs and comforts of ladies and gentlemen. There were court musicians, led by the most notable singers, composers, and instrumentalists in Europe outside of Rome. A Master of the Horse, twenty-five noble equerries, and a swarm of coachmen and grooms attended the royal stables. There were Masters of the Hunt, a hundred dogs, and 300 falcons—trained and cared for by a hundred falconers under a Grand Falconer. Four hundred archers formed the King’s bodyguard, and brightened the court with their colorful costumes.

For court banquets, balls, marriages, and diplomatic receptions no one building in Paris sufficed. The Louvre was then a gloomy fortress; Francis abandoned it for the assorted palaces known as Les Tournelles (The Little Towers) near the Bastille, or for the spacious palace where the Parlement had been wont to sit; better still, loving to hunt, he moved out to Fontainebleau, or down to his châteaux along the Loire at Blois, Chambord, Amboise, or Tours—dragging half the court and wealth of France with him. Cellini, with his wonted hyperbole, described his royal patron as traveling with a retinue of 18,000 persons and 12,000 horses.¹² Foreign ambassadors protested the cost and weariness of catching or keeping up with the King; and when they found him he was, as like as not, in bed till noon, recovering from the pleasures of the night before, or busy preparing a hunt or a tournament. The cost of all this perambulating glory was enormous. The treasury was always near bankruptcy, taxes were forever mounting, the bankers of Lyons were dragooned into risky royal loans. In 1523, perceiving that his expenditures were losing sight of his revenues, the King promised to put a limit on his personal indulgences, “not including, however, the ordinary run of our little necessities and pleasures.” ¹³ He excused his extravagance as needed to impress envoys, overwhelm ambitious nobles, and please the populace; the Parisians, he thought, hungered for spectacles, and admired rather than resented the splendor of their King.

Now the government of France became bisexual. Francis ruled in apparent omnipotence, but he was so fond of women that he readily yielded to his mother, his sister, his mistress, even his wife. He must have loved Claude somewhat, to keep her so constantly pregnant. He had married her for reasons of state; he felt entitled to appreciate other women more artistically designed. The court followed the lead of the King in making a mannerly art of adultery. The clergy adjusted themselves after making the requisite objections. The people made no objections, but gratefully imitated the easy code of the court—except one girl, who, we are told, deliberately marred her beauty to deflect the royal lechery (1524).¹⁴

The most influential woman at the court was the King’s mother. “Address yourself to me,” said Louise of Savoy to a papal legate; “and we shall go our way. If the King complains we’ll just let him talk.”¹⁵ Very often her advice was good, and when she served as his regent the country fared better than at his own lax hands. But her covetousness drove the Duke of Bourbon to treason, and let a French army starve in Italy. Her son forgave her everything, grateful that she had made him a god.

III. MARGUERITE OF NAVARRE

Probably he loved his sister only next to his mother, and above his mistresses—whose ministrations gave him something less lasting and profound than her selfless adoration. Love was her life—love of her mother, of her brother, of her husbands, Platonic love, mystical religious love. A pretty story said “she was born smiling, and held out her little hand to each comer.” ¹⁶ She called her mother, her brother, and herself Nôtre Trinité, and was content to be “the smallest angle” of that “perfect triangle.” ¹⁷ By her birth she was Marguerite of Angoulême, Orléans, and Valois. Two years older than Francis, she shared in bringing him up, and in their childhood games “she was his mother, his mistress, and his little wife.” ¹⁸ She watched over him as fondly as if he had been some saving divinity become man; and when she found that he was also a satyr she accepted that disposition as the right of a Greek god, though she herself seems to have taken no taint from her environment. She far outstripped Francis in studies, but she never equaled his connoisseur’s .appreciation of art. She learned Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek, and some Hebrew; she surrounded herself avidly with scholars, poets, theologians, and philosophers. Nevertheless she grew into an attractive woman, not physically beautiful (she too had the long Valois nose), but exercising a strong fascination by her charms of character and intellect. She was sympatica, agreeable, generous, kind, with a frequent dash of sprightly humor. She herself was one of the best poets of the time, and her court at Nérac or Pau was the most brilliant literary center in Europe. Everyone loved her and wished to be near her. That romantic but cynical age called her la perle des Valois—for margarita was Latin for pearl; and a pretty legend grew that Louise of Savoy had conceived her by swallowing a pearl.

Her letters to her brother are among the fairest and tenderest in literature. There must have been much good in him to draw out such devotion. Her other loves flowed or ebbed, burned or cooled; this pure passion was constant through fifty years, and always intense. The breath of that love almost clears the air of that perfumed time.

Gaston de Foix, nephew of Louis XII, aroused her first romance, then went off to Italy to conquer and die at Ravenna (1512). Guillaume de Bonnivet fell deeply in love with her, but found her heart still full of Gaston; he married one of her ladies in waiting to be near her. At seventeen (1509) she was wed to Charles, Duke of Alençon, also of royal pedigree; Francis had requested the marriage to cement an alliance of troublesomely rival families; but Marguerite found it hard to love the youth. Bonnivet offered her the consolations of adultery; she disfigured her face with a sharp stone to break the spell of her charm on him. Both Alençon and Bonnivet went to fight for Francis in Italy; Bonnivet died a hero at Pavia; Alençon was reported to have fled at the crisis of the battle. He returned to Lyons to find himself universally scorned; Louise of Savoy berated him as a coward; he fell ill of pleurisy; Marguerite forgave him and nursed him tenderly, but he died (1525).

After two years of widowhood Marguerite, now thirty-five, married Henri d’Albret, titular King of Navarre, a youth of twenty-four. Kept out of his principality by the claims of Ferdinand II and Charles V to Navarre, Henri was made governor of Guienne by Francis, and established a minor court at Nérac, sometimes at Pau, in southwest France. He treated Marguerite as a mother, almost as a mother-in-law; he did not imitate her fidelity to the marriage vows, and she had to console herself by playing hostess and protectress to writers, philosophers, and Protestant refugees. In 1528 she bore Henri a daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, destined to fame as the mother of Henry IV. Two years later she gave birth to a son, who died in infancy; thereafter she wore nothing but black. Francis wrote her a letter of such tender piety as we might rather have expected from her pen. Soon, however, he commanded her and Henri to surrender Jeanne to him to be brought up near the royal court; he feared that Henri would betroth her to Philip II of Spain, or that she would be reared as a Protestant. This separation was the profoundest of Marguerite’s many griefs before the death of the King, but it did not interrupt her devotion to him. It is sad but necessary to relate that when Francis bade Jeanne marry the Duke of Cleves, and Jeanne refused, Marguerite supported the King to the point of instructing Jeanne’s governess to thrash her till she consented. Several beatings were administered, but plucky Jeanne—a girl of twelve—issued a signed document to the effect that if she were forced into the marriage she would hold it null. The wedding was arranged nevertheless, on the theory that the needs of the state were the supreme law; Jeanne resisted to the last, and had to be carried into the church. As soon as the ceremony was over she fled, and went to live with her parents at Pau, where her extravagance in dress, retinue, and charities almost ruined them.

Marguerite herself was the embodiment of charity. She walked unescorted in the streets of Pau, “like a simple demoiselle,” allowed anyone to approach her, and heard at first hand the sorrows of her people. “No one ought to go away sad or disappointed from the presence of a prince,” she said, “for kings are the ministers of the poor .... and the poor are the members of God.” ¹⁹ She called herself the “Prime Minister of the Poor.” She visited them in their homes, and sent them physicians from her court. Henri co-operated fully in this, for he was as excellent a ruler as he was a negligent husband, and the public works directed by him served as a model to France. Together he and Marguerite financed the education of a large number of poor students, among them the Amyot who later translated Plutarch. Marguerite gave shelter and safety to Marot, Rabelais, Desperiers, Lefèvre d’Étaples, Calvin, and so many others that one of her protégés compared her to “a hen carefully calling together her chicks, and covering them with her wings.” ²⁰

Aside from her charities three interests dominated her life at Nérac and Pau: literature, Platonic love, and a mystic theology that found room for Catholicism and Protestantism alike, and tolerance even for free thought. It was her custom to have poets read to her as she embroidered; and she herself composed verses of some worth, in which human and divine love mingled in one obscure ecstasy. She published in her lifetime several volumes of poetry and drama; they are not as fine as her letters, which were not printed till 1841. All the world knows of her Heptameron, because of its reputed indecency; but patrons of pornography will be disappointed in it. These stories were in the manner of the time, which found its chief humor in the pranks, anomalies, and vicissitudes of love, and in the deviations of monks from their vows; the stories themselves are told with restraint. They are the tales related by the men and women of Marguerite’s court, or that of Francis; they were written down by or for her (1544–48), but were never published by her; they appeared in print ten years after her death. She had intended them to form another Decameron, but as the book stopped short with the seventh day of the storytelling, the editor called it Heptameron. Many of the narratives seem to be authentic histories, disguised with changed names. Brantôriie tells us that his mother was one of the storytellers, and that she had a key to the real persons concealed by pseudonyms in the tales; he assures us, for example, that the fourth tale of the fifth day is an account of Bonnivet’s attempts upon Marguerite herself.²¹

It must be admitted that the professed taste of our day would feel obliged to blush at these stories of seduction, told by French ladies and gentlemen who thus beguiled their days of waiting for a flood to abate and let them return from the baths of Cauterets. Some of the incidental remarks are startling: “You mean to say, then, that all is lawful to those who love, provided no one knows?” “Yes, in truth; ‘tis only fools who are found out.” ²² The general philosophy of the book finds expression in a pregnant sentence of the fifth story: “Unhappy the lady who does not carefully preserve the treasure which does her so much honor when well kept, and so much dishonor when she continues to keep it.” ²³ The stories are lightened by many a jolly quip: so we hear of a pious pharmacist of Pau “who never had anything to do with his wife except in Holy Week by way of penance.” ²⁴ Half the humor, as in Boccaccio, turns on monastic gamboling. “These good fathers,” says a character in the fifth story, “preach chastity to us, and want to foul our wives.” An outraged husband agrees: “They dare not touch money, but they are ready to handle women’s thighs, which are much more dangerous.” It should be added that the merry storytellers hear Mass every morning, and fumigate every second page with arias of piety.

That Marguerite should have enjoyed or collected these tales points the mood of the age, and cautions us not to picture her as a saint until her declining years. While she herself seems to have been sedulously pure, she tolerated much laxity in others, made no recorded objections to the King’s distribution of his powers, and kept on terms of intimate friendship with his successive mistresses. Apparently the men, and most of the women, thought of love between the sexes in unashamedly sexual terms. It was a charming custom of French women, in that lighthearted reign, to make presents of their garters to imaginative men.²⁵ Marguerite considered physical desire as quite permissible, but she herself made room in her heart for Platonic and religious love. The cult of Platonic love had come down from medieval “courts of love,” reinforced by such Italian strains as Bembo’s paean at the end of Castiglione’s Courtier. It was good, Marguerite felt, that women should accept, in addition to the usual sexual passion, the devotion of men who were to be rewarded only with a tender friendship and some harmless intimacies; this association would train esthetic sensitivity in the male, refine his manners, and teach him moral restraint; so woman would civilize man. But in Marguerite’s philosophy there was a higher love than either the sexual or the Platonic—the love of goodness, beauty, or any perfection, and therefore, above all, the love of God. But “to love God one must first love a human creature perfectly.” ²⁶

Her religion was as complex and confused as her conception of love. Just as the selfishness of her brother could not dim her devotion to him, so the tragedies and brutalities of life left her religious faith pure and fervent, however unorthodox. She had skeptical moments; in Le miroir de Fâme pécheresse she confessed that at times she had doubted both Scripture and God; she charged God with cruelty, and wondered had He really written the Bible.²⁷ In 1533 the Sorbonne summoned her to answer an accusation of heresy; she ignored the summons; a monk told his congregation that she deserved to be sewn in a sack and thrown into the Seine;²⁸ but the King told the Sorbonne and the monks to let his sister alone. He could not credit the charges against her; “she loves me so much,” he said, “that she will believe only what I believe.”²⁹ He was too happy and confident to dream of being a Huguenot. But Marguerite could; she had a sense of sin, and made mountain peaks out of her peccadilloes. She despised the religious orders as idling, wenching wastrels; reform, she felt, was long overdue. She read some of the Lutheran literature, and approved its attacks upon ecclesiastical immorality and greed. Francis was amazed to find her, once, praying with Farel³⁰—the John the Baptist of Calvin. At Nérac and Pau. while continuing to pray to the Virgin with trustful piety, she spread her protective skirts over fugitive Protestants, including Calvin himself. However, Calvin was much offended to find at her court freethinkers like Etienne Dolet and Bonaventure Desperiers; he reproved her for her tolerance, but she continued it. She would gladly have composed the Edict of Nantes for her grandson. In Marguerite the Renaissance and the Reformation were for a moment one.³¹ Her influence radiated through France. Every free spirit looked up to her as protectress and ideal. Rabelais dedicated Gargantua to her. Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay followed, now and then, her Platonizing, Plotinizing mysticism. Marot’s translations of the Psalms breathed her half-Huguenot spirit. In the eighteenth century Bayle sang an ode to her in his Dictionnaire. In the nineteenth century the Protestant Michelet, in that magnificent, interminable, unwearying rhapsody called Histoire de France, offered her his gratitude: “Let us always remember this tender Queen of Navarre, in whose arms our people, fleeing from prison or the pyre, found safety, honor, and friendship. Our gratitude to you, lovable Mother of our Renaissance! Your hearth was that of our saints, your heart was the nest of our freedom.” ³²

IV. THE FRENCH PROTESTANTS

No one questioned the need of religious reform. The same ecclesiastical good and evil appeared here as elsewhere: faithful priests, devout monks, saintly nuns, here and there a bishop dedicated to religion rather than politics; and ignorant or lackadaisical priests, idle and lecherous monks, moneygrubbing friars pretending poverty, weak sisters in the convents, bishops who took the earthly cash and let the celestial credit go. As education rose, faith fell; and as the clergy had most of the education, they showed in their conduct that they no longer took to heart the once terrifying eschatology of their official creed. Some bishops appropriated to themselves a luxurious multiplicity of benefices and sees; so Jean of Lorraine held—and enjoyed revenues from—the bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun, the archbishoprics of Reims, Lyons, Narbonne, Albi, Macon, Agen, and Nantes, and the abbeys of Gorze, Fécamp, Cluny, Marmoutiers, Saint-Ouen, Saint-de-Laon, Saint-Germer, Saint-Médard of Soissons, and Saint-Mansuy of Toul.³³ It was not enough for his needs; he complained of poverty.³⁴ Monks denounced the worldliness of the bishops; priests denounced the monks; Brantôme quotes a phrase then popular in France: “Avaricious or lecherous as a priest or a monk.” ³⁵ The first sentence of the Heptameron describes the Bishop of Sées as itching to seduce a married woman; and a dozen stories in the book retail the similar enterprises of various monks. “I have such a horror of the very sight of a monk,” says one character, “that I could not even confess to them, believing them to be worse than all other men.”³⁶ “There are some good men among them,” admits Öisille—which is Margaret’s name, in the Heptameron, for her mother—but this same Louise of Savoy wrote in her journal: “In the year 1522... my son and I, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, began to know the hypocrites, white, black, gray, smoky, and of all colors, from whom God in His infinite mercy and goodness preserve and defend us; for if Jesus Christ is not a liar, there is not among all mankind a more dangerous generation.” ³⁷

Yet the acquisitiveness of Louise, the polygyny of her son, the anarchic morals of the court, gave no inspiring example to the clergy, who were so largely subject to the King. In 1516 Francis secured from Leo X a Concordat empowering him to appoint the bishops and abbots of France; but since he used these appointments largely as rewards for political services, the worldly character of the prelacy was confirmed. The Concordat in effect made the Gallican Church independent of the papacy and dependent upon the state. In this way Francis, a year before Luther’s Theses, achieved in fact, though graciously not in form, what the German princes and Henry VIII would win by war or revolution—the nationalization of Christianity. What more could French Protestants offer the French King?

The first of them antedated Luther. In 1512 Jacques Lefèvre, born at Etaples in Picardy but then teaching at the University of Paris, published a Latin translation of Paul’s Epistles, with a commentary expounding, among other heresies, two that ten years later would be basic with Luther: that men can be saved not by good works but only by faith in the grace of God earned by the redeeming sacrifice of Christ; and that Christ is present in the Eucharist by His own operation and good will, not through any priestly transubstantiation of bread and wine. Lefèvre, like Luther, demanded a return to the Gospel; and, like Erasmus, he sought to restore and clarify the authentic text of the New Testament as a means of cleansing Christianity from medieval legends and sacerdotal accretions. In 1523 he issued a French translation of the Testament, and, a year later, of the Psalms. “How shameful it is,” said one of his comments, “to see a bishop soliciting people to drink with him, caring for naught but gambling .... constantly hunting .... frequenting bad houses!” ³⁸ The Sorbonne condemned him as a heretic; he fled to Strasbourg (1525); Marguerite interceded for him; Francis recalled him and made him royal librarian at Blois and tutor to his children. In 1531, when Protestant excesses had angered the King, Lefèvre took refuge with Marguerite in southern France, and lived there till his death at the age of eighty-seven (1537).

His pupil Guillaume Briçonnet, appointed Bishop of Meaux (1516), set himself to reform that diocese in the spirit of his master. After four years of zealous work he felt strong enough to venture upon theological innovations. He appointed to benefices such known reformers as Lefèvre, Farel, Louis de Berquin, Gérard Roussel, and François Vatable, and encouraged them to preach a “return to the Gospel.” Marguerite applauded him, and made him her spiritual director. But when the Sorbonne—the school of theology that now dominated the University of Paris—proclaimed its condemnation of Luther (1521), Briçonnet bade his cohorts make their peace with the Church. The unity of the Church seemed to him, as to Erasmus and Marguerite, more important than reform.

The Sorbonne could not stop the flow of Lutheran ideas across the Rhine. Students and merchants brought Luther’s writings from Germany as the most exciting news of the day; Froben sent copies from Basel to be sold in France. Discontented workingmen took up the New Testament as a revolutionary document, and listened gladly to preachers who drew from the Gospels a utopia of social equality. In 1523, when Bishop Briçonnet published on his cathedral doors a bull of indulgences, Jean Leclerc, a woolcarder of Meaux, tore it down and replaced it with a placard calling the pope Antichrist. He was arrested, and by order of the Parlement of Paris was branded on the forehead (1525). He moved to Metz, where he smashed the religious images before which a procession was planning to offer incense. His right hand was cut off, his nose was torn away, his nipples were plucked out with pincers, his head was bound with a band of red-hot iron, and he was burned alive (1526).³⁹ Several other radicals were sent to the stake in Paris for “blasphemy,” or for denying the intercessory power of the Virgin and the saints (1526–27).

The people of France generally approved of these executions;⁴⁰ it cherished its religious faith as God’s own revelation and covenant, and abominated heretics as robbing the poor of their greatest consolation. No Luther appeared in France to rouse the middle class against papal tyranny and exactions; the Concordat precluded such an appeal; and Calvin had not as yet reached the Genevan eminence from which he could send his stern summons to reform. The rebels found some support among the aristocracy, but the lords and ladies were too lighthearted to take the new ideas to the point of unsettling the faith of the people or the comforts of the court. Francis himself tolerated the Lutheran propaganda so long as it offered no threat of social or political disturbance. He too had his doubts—about the powers of the pope, the sale of indulgences, the existence of purgatory;⁴¹ and possibly he thought to use his toleration of Protestantism as a weapon over a pope too inclined to favor Charles V. He admired Erasmus, sought him for the new Collège Royale, and believed with him in the encouragement of education and ecclesiastical reform—but by steps that would not divide the people into warring halves, or weaken the services of the Church to private morality and social order.⁴² “The King and Madame” (Louise of Savoy), wrote Marguerite to Briçonnet in 1521, “are more than ever well-disposed toward the reformation of the Church.”⁴³ When the Sorbonne arrested Louis de Berquin for translating some of Luther’s works (1523), he was freed by Marguerite’s intercession with the King. But Francis was frightened by the Peasants’ Revolt in Germany, which seemed to have grown out of Protestant propaganda; and before leaving for his debacle at Pavia he bade the prelates stamp out the Lutheran movement in France. While the King was a captive in Madrid, Berquin was again imprisoned, but Marguerite again secured an order for his release. When Francis himself was freed he indulged in a jubilee of liberalism, perhaps in gratitude to the sister who had so labored for his liberation. He recalled Lefèvre and Roussel from exile, and Marguerite felt that the movement for reform had won the day.

Two events drove the King back to orthodoxy. He needed money to ransom the two sons whom he had surrendered to Charles in exchange for his own freedom; the clergy voted him 1,300,000 livres, but accompanied the grant with a request for a firmer stand against heresy; and he agreed (December 16, 1527). On May 31, 1528, he was dismayed to learn that both the heads on a statue of the Virgin and Child outside a church in the parish of Saint-Germain had been smashed during the night. The people cried out for vengeance. Francis offered a thousand crowns for the discovery of the vandals, and led a somber procession of prelates, state officials, nobles, and populace to repair the broken statues with silver heads. The Sorbonne took advantage of the reaction to imprison Berquin once more; and while Francis was absent at Blois the impenitent Lutheran was burned at the stake (April 17, 1529), to the joy of the attendant multitude.⁴⁴

The mood of the King varied with the shifts of his diplomacy. In 1532, angry at the collaboration of Clement VII with Charles V, he made overtures to the Lutheran princes of Germany, and allowed Marguerite to install Roussel as preacher to large gatherings in the Louvre; and when the Sorbonne protested he banished its leaders from Paris. In October 1533, he was on good terms with Clement, and promised active measures against the French Protestants. On November 1 Nicholas Cop delivered his pro-Lutheran address at the university; the Sorbonne rose in wrath, and Francis ordered a new persecution. But then his quarrel with the Emperor sharpened, and he sent Guillaume du Bellay, favorable to reform, to Wittenberg with a request that Melanchthon should formulate a possible reconciliation between the old faith and the new ideas (1534), and thereby make possible an alliance of Protestant Germany and Catholic France. Melanchthon complied, and matters were moving fast, when an extreme faction among the French reformers posted in the streets of Paris, Cléans, and other cities, and even on the doors of the King’s bedchamber at Amboise, placards denouncing the Mass as idolatry, and the Pope and the Catholic clergy as “a brood of vermin... apostates, wolves... liars, blasphemers, murderers of souls” (October 18, 1534).⁴⁵ Enraged, Francis ordered an indiscriminate imprisonment of all suspects; soon the jails were full. Many printers were arrested, and for a time all printing was prohibited. Marguerite, Marot, and many moderate Protestants joined in condemning the placards. The King, his sons, ambassadors, nobles, and clergy marched in solemn silence, bearing lighted candles, to hear an expiatory Mass in Notre Dame (January 21, 1535). Francis declared that he would behead his own children if he found them harboring these blasphemous heresies. That evening six Protestants were burned to death in Paris by a method judged fit to appease the Deity: they were suspended over a fire, and were repeatedly lowered into it and raised from it so that their agony might be prolonged.⁴⁶ Between November 10, 1534, and May 5, 1535, twenty-four Protestants were burned alive in Paris. Pope Paul III reproved the King for needless severity, and ordered him to end the persecution.⁴⁷

Before the year was out Francis was again wooing the German Protestants. He himself wrote to Melanchthon (July 23, 1535), inviting him to come and “confer with some of our most distinguished doctors as to the means of re-establishing in the Church that sublime harmony which is the chief of all my desires.” ⁴⁸ Melanchthon did not come. Perhaps he suspected Francis of using him as a thorn in the Emperor’s side; or he was dissuaded by Luther or the Elector of Saxony, who said, “The French are not Evangelicals, they are Erasmians.” ⁴⁹ This was true of Marguerite, Briçonnet, Lefèvre, Roussel; not true of the placardists, or of the Calvinistic Huguenots who were beginning to multiply in southern France. After making peace with Charles (1538), Francis abandoned all efforts to conciliate his own Protestants.

The darkest disgrace of his reign was only partly his fault. The Vaudois or Waldenses, who still cherished the semi-Protestant ideas of Peter Waldo, their twelfth-century founder, had been allowed, under royal protection, to maintain their Quakerlike existence in some thirty villages along the Durance River in Provence. In 1530 they entered into correspondence with reformers in Germany and Switzerland, and two years later they drew up a profession of faith based on the views of Bucer and Oecolampadius. A papal legate set up the Inquisition among them; they appealed to Francis; he bade the prosecution cease (1533). But Cardinal de Tournon, alleging that the Waldenses were in a treasonable conspiracy against the government, persuaded the ailing, vacillating King to sign a decree (January 1, 1545) that all Waldenses found guilty of heresy should be put to death. The officers of the Parlement at Aix-en-Provence interpreted the order to mean mass extermination. The soldiers at first refused to obey the command; they were, however, induced to kill a few; the heat of murder inflamed them, and they passed into massacre. Within a week (April 12–18) several villages were burned to the ground; in one of them 800 men, women, and children were slaughtered; in two months 3,000 were killed, twenty-two villages were razed, 700 men were sent to the galleys. Twenty-five terrified women, seeking refuge in a cavern, were asphyxiated by a fire built at its mouth. Protestant Switzerland and Germany raised horrified protests; Spain sent Francis congratulations.⁵⁰ A year later a small Lutheran group was found meeting at Meaux under the leadership of Pierre Leclerc, brother of branded Jean; fourteen of the group were tortured and burned, eight after having their tongues torn out (October 7, 1546).

These persecutions were the supreme failure of Francis’ reign. The courage of the martyrs gave dignity and splendor to their cause; thousands of onlookers must have been impressed and disturbed, who, without these spectacular executions, might never have bothered to change their inherited faith. Despite the recurrent terror, clandestine “swarms” of Protestants existed in 1530 in Lyons, Bordeaux, Orléans, Reims, Amiens, Poitiers, Bourges, Nîmes, La Rochelle, Châlons, Dijon, Toulouse. Huguenot legions sprang almost out of the ground. Francis, dying, must have known that he had left his son not only the encompassing hostility of England, Germany, and Switzerland, but a heritage of hate in France herself.

V. HAPSBURG AND VALOIS: 1515–26

It was not to be expected that so volatile a monarch would be content to surrender all the hopes that had agitated his predecessors for adding Milan, and if possible Naples, as brilliants in the French crown. Louis XII had accepted the natural limits of France—had recognized, so to speak, the sovereignty of the Alps. Francis withdrew the recognition, and challenged the right of Duke Maximilian Sforza to Milan. During several months of negotiations he collected and equipped an immense force. In August 1515, he led it by a new and perilous path—blasting his way across rocky cliffs—over the Alps and down into Italy. At Marignano, nine miles from Milan, the French knights and infantry met Sforza’s Swiss mercenaries in two days (September 13–14, 1515) of such killing as Italy had not known since the barbarian invasions; 10,000 men were left dead on the ground. Time and again the French seemed defeated, when the King himself charged to the front and rallied his troops by the example of his daring. It was customary for a ruler victorious in battle to reward special bravery by creating new knights on the field; but before doing this Francis, in an unprecedented but characteristic gesture, knelt before Pierre, Seigneur de Bayard, and asked to be knighted by the hand of the famous Chevalier sans peur et sans reproche. Bayard protested that the King was ex officio the knight of knights and needed no dubbing, but the young sovereign, still only twenty-one, insisted. Bayard went through the traditional motions magnificently, and then put away his sword, saying: “Assuredly, my good sword, thou shalt be well guarded as a relic, and honored above all others, for having this day conferred upon so handsome and puissant a king the order of chivalry; and never will I wear thee more except against Turks, Moors, and Saracens!”⁵¹ Francis entered Milan as its master, sent its deposed Duke to France with a comfortable pension, took also Parma and Piacenza, and signed with Leo X, in splendid ceremonies at Bologna, a treaty and Concordat that allowed both Pope and King to claim a diplomatic victory.

Francis returned to France the idol of his countrymen, and almost of Europe. He had charmed his soldiers by sharing their hardships and outbraving their bravery; and though in his triumph he had indulged his vanity, he tempered it by giving credit to others, softening all egos with words of praise and grace. In the intoxication of fame he made his greatest mistake: he entered his candidacy for the Imperial crown. He was legitimately disturbed by the prospect of having Charles I, King of Spain and Naples and Count of Flanders and Holland, become also head of the Holy Roman Empire—with all those claims to Lombardy, and therefore Milan, for which Maximilian had so repeatedly invaded Italy; within such a new Empire France would be surrounded by apparently invincible enemies. Francis bribed and lost; Charles bribed more, and won (1519). The bitter rivalry began that kept Western Europe in turmoil till within three years of the King’s death.

Charles and Francis never ran out of reasons for hostility. Even before becoming Emperor, Charles had claimed Burgundy through his grandmother Mary, daughter of Charles the Bold, and had refused to recognize the reunion of Burgundy with the French crown. Milan was formally a fief of the Empire. Charles continued the Spanish occupation of Navarre; Francis insisted that it should be returned to his vassal, Henri d’Albret. And above all these casus belli lay the question of questions: Who was to be master of Europe—Charles or Francis? The Turks answered, Suleiman.

Francis struck the first blow. Noting that Charles had on his hands a political revolution in Spain and a religious revolution in Germany, he sent an army across the Pyrenees to recapture Navarre; it was defeated in a campaign whose most important incident was the wounding of Ignatius Loyola (1521). Another army went south to defend Milan; the troops mutinied for lack of pay; they were routed at La Bicocca by Imperial mercenaries, and Milan fell to Charles V (1522). To cap these mishaps the constable of the French armies went over to the Emperor.

Charles, Duke of Bourbon, was head of the powerful family that would rule France from 1589 to 1792. He was the richest man in the country after the King; 500 nobles were among his retainers; he was the last of the great barons who could defy the monarch of the now centralized state. He served Francis well in war, fighting bravely at Marignano; less well in government, alienating the Milanese by his harsh rule. Ill supplied there with funds from the King, he laid out 100,000 livres of his own, expecting to be repaid; he was not. Francis looked with jealous misgiving upon this almost royal vassal. He recalled him from Milan, and offered him thoughtless or intentional affronts that left Bourbon his brooding enemy. The Duke had married Suzanne of Bourbon, whose extensive estates were by her mother’s will to revert to the Crown if Suzanne should die without issue. Suzanne so died (1521), but after making a will that left all her property to her husband. Francis and his mother claimed the property as the most direct descendants of the previous duke of Bourbon; Charles fought the claim; the Parlement of Paris decided against him. Francis proposed a compromise that would let the Duke enjoy the income of the property till his death; he rejected the proposal. Louise, fifty-one, offered herself as a bride to the thirty-one-year-old Duke, with a clear title to the property as her dowry; he refused. Charles V made a rival offer: the hand of his sister Eleonora in marriage, and full support, by Imperial troops, of the Duke’s claims. The Duke accepted, fled by night across the frontier, and was made lieutenant-general of the Imperial army in Italy (1523).

Francis sent Bonnivet against him. Marguerite’s lover proved incompetent; his army was overwhelmed at Romagnano by the Duke; and in the retreat the Chevalier de Bayard, commanding the dangerous rear guard, was fatally wounded by a shot from a harquebus (April 30, 1524). The victorious Bourbon found him dying under a tree, and offered him some consolatory compliments. “My lord,” answered Bayard, “there is pity for me; I die having done my duty; but I have pity for you, to see you serving against your King, your country, and your oath.” ⁵² The Duke was moved, but had burned all bridges behind him. He entered into an agreement with Charles V and Henry VIII by which all three were to invade France simultaneously, overwhelm all French forces, and divide the land among them. As his part of the bargain the Duke entered Provence, took Aix, and laid siege to Marseille; but his campaign was poorly provisioned, met unexpectedly strong resistance, and collapsed. He retreated into Italy (September 1524).

Francis thought it wise to pursue him and recapture Milan. Bonnivet, foolish to the end, advised him to take Pavia first, and then come upon Milan from the south; the King agreed, and laid siege (August 26, Í524). But here too the defense was superior to the offense; for four months the French host was held at bay, while Bourbon, Charles of Lannoy (Viceroy of Naples), and the Marquis of Pescara (husband of Vittoria Colonna) gathered a new army of 27,000 men. Suddenly this force appeared behind the French; on the same day (February 24, 1525) Francis found his men assaulted on one side by this unexpected multitude, and on the other by a sortie from Pavia. As usual, he fought in the van of the melee, and killed so many of the enemy with his own sword that he thought victory assured. But his generalship was sacrificed to his courage; his forces were poorly deployed; his infantry moved in between his artillery and the foe, making the superior French guns useless. The French faltered; the Duke of Alençon fled, taking the rear guard with him. Francis challenged his disordered army to follow him back into the battle; only the most gallant of his nobles accompanied him, and a slaughter of French chivalry ensued. Francis received wounds in the face, on the arms and legs, but struck out tirelessly; his horse collapsed under him; still he fought. His loyal knights fell one by one till he was left alone. He was surrounded by enemy soldiers, and was about to be slain when an officer recognized him, saved him, and led him to Lannoy, who with low bows of respect accepted his sword.

The fallen King was confined in the fortress of Pizzighettone near Cremona, whence he was allowed to send his oft quoted, oft misquoted letter to his mother, who was ruling France in his absence:

He sent a similar note to Marguerite, who answered both:

To the Emperor at Madrid Francis wrote a very humble letter telling him that “if it please you to have so much honorable pity as to answer for the safety which a captive king of France deserves to find... you may be sure of obtaining an acquisition instead of a useless prisoner, and of making a king of France your slave forever.” ⁵⁵ Francis had not been trained to misfortune.

Charles received the news of his victory calmly, and refused to celebrate it, as many suggested, with a splendid festival. He retired into his bedroom (we are told), and knelt in prayer. To Francis and Louise he sent what seemed to him moderate terms for peace and the liberation of the King. (1) France must give up Burgundy and all claims to Flanders, Artois, and Italy. (2) All lands and dignities claimed by the Duke of Bourbon must be surrendered to him. (3) Provence and Dauphiné should be made an independent state. (4) France must restore to England all French territory formerly held by Britain—i.e., Normandy, Anjou, Gascony, and Guienne. (5) Francis must sign an alliance with the Emperor, and join him in a campaign against the Turks. Louise answered that France would not yield an inch of territory, and was prepared to defend itself to the last man. The Regent acted now with an energy, resolution, and intelligence that made the French people forgive her headstrong faults. She arranged at once for the organization and equipment of new armies, and set them to guard all points of possible invasion. To keep the Emperor’s mind off France, she urged Suleiman of Turkey to defer his attack on Persia and undertake instead a westward campaign; we do not know what part her plea played in the Sultan’s decision, but in 1526 he marched into Hungary, and inflicted so disastrous a defeat upon the Christian army at Mohács that any invasion of France by Charles would have been deemed treason to Christendom. Meanwhile Louise pointed out to Henry VIII and Clement VII how both England and the papacy would be reduced to bondage if the Emperor were allowed all the territory that he demanded. Henry wavered; Louise persisted, and offered him an “indemnity” of 2,000,000 crowns; he signed a defensive and offensive alliance with France (August 30, 1525). This female diplomacy opened male eyes, and shattered Charles’s confidence.

By agreement among Louise, Lannoy, and the Emperor, the captive King was transported to Spain. When Francis reached Valencia (July 2, 1525), Charles sent him a courteous letter, but his treatment of his prisoner went no further toward chivalry. Francis was assigned a narrow room in an old castle in Madrid, under rigorous vigilance; the sole freedom allowed him was to ride on a mule near the castle, under watch of armed and mounted guards. He asked Charles for an interview; Charles put it off, and allowed two weeks of fretting confinement to incline Francis toward paying a heavy price for liberty. Louise offered to meet the Emperor and negotiate, but he thought it better to play upon his prisoner than have a woman charm him into lenience. She informed him that her daughter Marguerite, now a widow, “would be happy if she could be agreeable to his Imperial Majesty,” but he preferred Isabella of Portugal, who, with a dowry of 900,000 crowns, could provide him at once with bed and board. After two months of anxious imprisonment, Francis fell dangerously ill. The Spanish people, regretting the Emperor’s severity, went to their churches to pray for the French King. Charles prayed too, for a dead ruler would be worthless as a political pawn. He visited Francis briefly, promised him an early release, and sent permission to Marguerite to come and comfort her brother.

Marguerite sailed from Aiguesmortes (August 27, 1525) to Barcelona, and thence was carried by slow and tortuous litter through half the length of Spain to Madrid. She consoled herself with writing poetry, and sending characteristically fervent messages to the King. “Whatever may be required of me, though it be to fling to the winds the ashes of my bones to do you service, nought will be strange or difficult or painful to me, but will be solace, ease of mind, honor.” ⁵⁶ When at last she reached the bedside of her brother she found him apparently recovering; but on September 25 he had a relapse, fell into a coma, and seemed to be dying. Marguerite and the household knelt and prayed, and a priest administered the sacrament. A tedious convalescence followed. Marguerite stayed with Francis a month, then went to Toledo to appeal to the Emperor. He received her pleas coldly; he had learned of Henry’s league with France, and longed to punish the duplicity of his late ally, and the audacity of Louise.

Francis had one card left to play, though it would almost certainly mean his lifelong imprisonment. Having warned his sister to leave Spain as quickly as possible, he signed (November 1525) a formal letter of abdication in favor of his eldest son; and since this second Francis was a boy of only eight years, he named Louise—and, in case of her death, Marguerite—as regent of France. Charles saw at once that a king without a kingdom, with nothing to surrender, would be useless. But Francis had more physical than moral courage. On January 14, 1526, he signed with Charles the Treaty of Madrid. Its terms were essentially those that the Emperor had proposed to Louise; they were even more severe, for they required that the two oldest sons of the King should be handed over to Charles as hostages for the faithful execution of the agreement. Francis further consented to marry the Emperor’s sister Eleonora, Queen-Dowager of Portugal; and he swore that if he should fail to carry out the terms of the treaty he would return to Spain to resume imprisonment.⁵⁷ However, on August 22, 1525, he had deposited with his aides a paper nullifying in advance “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”; and on the eve of signing the treaty he repeated this statement to his French negotiators, and declared that “it was through force and constraint, confinement, and length of imprisonment that he was signing; and that all that was contained in it was and should remain null and of no effect.” ⁵⁸

On March 17, 1526, Viceroy Lannoy delivered Francis to Marshal Lautrec on a barge in the Bidassoa River, which separates Spanish Irun from French Hendaye; and in return Lannoy received Princes Francis and Henry. Their father gave them a blessing and a tear, and hurried on to French soil. There he leaped upon a horse, cried joyfully, “I am a king again!” and rode on to Bayonne, where Louise and Marguerite awaited him. At Bordeaux and Cognac he spent three months in sports to recover his health, and indulged in a little love; had he not been a monk for a year? Louise, who had quarreled with the Comtesse de Chateaubriand, had brought with her a pretty, blonde-haired maid of honor, eighteen years old, Anne de Heilly de Pisselieu, who, as planned, struck the King’s famished eye. He wooed her in haste, and soon won her as his mistress; and from that moment till death parted them the new favorite shared with Louise and Marguerite the heart of the King. She put up patiently with his marriage to Eleonora, and with his incidental liaisons. To save appearances he gave her a husband, Jean de Brosse, made him Due, and her Duchesse, d’Etampes, and smiled appreciatively when Jean retired to a distant estate in Britanny.

VI. WAR AND PEACE: 1526–47

When the terms of the Treaty of Madrid became generally known they aroused almost universal hostility to Charles. The German Protestants trembled at the prospect of facing so strengthened an enemy. Italy resented his claim to suzerainty in Lombardy. Clement VII absolved Francis from the oath he had sworn at Madrid, and joined France, Milan, Genoa, Florence, and Venice in forming the League of Cognac for common defense (May 22, 1526). Charles called Francis “no gentleman,” bade him return to his Spanish prison, ordered a harsher confinement for the King’s sons, and gave free rein to his generals to discipline the Pope.

An Imperial army collected in Germany and Spain poured down through Italy, scaled the walls of Rome (the Duke of Bourbon dying in the process), sacked the city more thoroughly than any Goths or Vandals had ever done, killed 4,000 Romans, and imprisoned Clement in Sant’ Angelo. The Emperor, who had remained in Spain, assured a scandalized Europe that his starving army had exceeded his instructions; nevertheless his representatives in Rome kept the Pope shut up in Sant’ Angelo from May 6 to December 7, 1527, and exacted from an almost bankrupt papacy an indemnity of 368,000 crowns. Clement appealed to Francis and Henry for aid. Francis dispatched

Lautrec to Italy with an army that sacked Pavia in reckless revenge for its resistance two years before, and Italy wondered whether French friends were any better than German enemies. Lautrec by-passed Rome and besieged Naples, and the city began to starve. But meanwhile Francis had offended Andrea Doria, head of the Genoese navy. Doria called his fleet from the siege of Naples, went over to the side of the Emperor, and provisioned the besieged. Lautrec’s army starved in turn; Lautrec himself died, and his army melted away (1528).

The comedy of the rulers hardly relieved the tragedy of the people. When the emissaries of Francis and Henry appeared at Burgos to make a formal declaration of war, Charles retorted to the French envoy: “The King of France is not in a position to address to me such a declaration; he is my prisoner.... Your master acted like a dastard and a scoundrel in not keeping his word that he gave me touching the Treaty of Madrid; if he likes to say the contrary I will maintain my words against him with my body to his.”⁵⁹ This challenge to a duel was readily accepted by Francis, who sent a herald to tell Charles, “You have lied in your throat.” Charles responded grandly, naming a place for the encounter and asking Francis to name the time; but French nobles intercepted the messenger, and judicious delays put off the match to the Greek kalends. Nations had grown so large that their differences of economic or political interest could not be settled by private combat, or by the small mercenary armies that had been playing the game of war in Renaissance Italy. The modern method of decision by competitive destruction took form in this Hapsburg-Valois debate.*

It took two women to teach the potentates the art and wisdom of peace. Louise of Savoy communicated with Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands, and suggested that Francis, anxious for the return of his sons, would abandon all claim to Flanders, Artois, and Italy, and would pay a ransom of 2,000,000 gold crowns for his children, but would never cede Burgundy. Margaret persuaded her nephew to defer his claim to Burgundy, and to forget the claims of the Duke of Bourbon, now conveniently dead. On August 3, 1529, the two women and their diplomatic aides signed La Paix des Dames—the “Ladies Peace” of Cambrai. The ransom was raised out of the commerce, industry, and blood of France, and the royal princes, after four years of captivity, returned to freedom with stories of cruel treatment that enraged Francis and France. While the two able women found lasting peace—Margaret in 1530, Louise in 1531—the kings prepared to renew their war.

Francis turned everywhere for help. To Henry VIII he sent a money appeasement for having almost ignored him in the Cambrai settlement; and Henry, furious at Charles for opposing his “divorce,” pledged his support to France. Within a year or so Francis negotiated alliances with the Protestant princes of Germany, with the Turks, and with the Pope. The vacillating Pontiff, however, soon made peace with Charles, and crowned him emperor (1530)—the last coronation of a Holy Roman Emperor by a pope. Then, frightened by a monarch who had in effect made Italy a province of his realm, Clement sought a new bond with France by offering his niece Catherine de Médicis in marriage to Francis’ son Henry, Duke of Orléans. King and Pope met at Marseille (October 28, 1533), and the marriage, pregnant with history, was performed by the Pope himself. A year later Clement died, not yet having made up his mind about anything.

The Emperor, already old at thirty-five, shouldered his self-imposed burdens with weary fortitude. He was shocked to learn—on the word of the Sultan’s vizier to Ferdinand of Austria—that the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1529 had been undertaken in response to an appeal from Francis, Louise, and Clement VII for help against the encompassing Empire.⁶⁰ Moreover, Francis had allied himself with the Tunisian chieftain Khair ed-Din Barbarossa, who was harassing Christian commerce in the western Mediterranean, raiding coastal towns, and carrying captive Christians into slavery. Charles collected another army and navy, crossed to Tunis (1535), captured it, freed 10,000 Christian slaves, and rewarded his unpaid troops by letting them loot the city and massacre the Moslem population. Leaving garrisons in Bona and La Goleta, Charles returned to Rome (April 5, 1536) as the triumphant defender of Christendom against Islam and the King of France. Francis had meanwhile renewed his claim to Milan, and in March 1536, he had conquered the duchy of Savoy to clear his road into Italy. Charles was furious. In a passionate address before the new pope, Paul III, and the full consistory of cardinals, he recounted his efforts for peace, the French King’s violations of the treaties of Madrid and Cambrai, and the alliances of his “Most Christian Majesty” (as Francis was called) with the enemies of the Church in Germany, and of Christianity in Turkey and Africa; and he ended by again challenging Francis to a duel: “Let us not continue wantonly to shed the blood of our innocent subjects; let us decide the quarrel man to man, with what arms he pleases to choose... and after that let the united forces of Germany, Spain, and France be employed to humble the power of the Turk, and to exterminate heresy out of Christendom.”

It was a subtle speech, for it compelled the Pope to align himself with the Emperor; but no one took seriously its proposal for a duel; fighting by proxy was much safer. Charles invaded Provence (July 25, 1536) with 50,000 men, hoping to flank or divert the French in Savoy by moving up the Rhone. But Constable Anne de Montmorency ordered the weak French forces to burn in their retreat everything that could supply the Imperial troops; soon Charles, always lacking money, and unable to feed his men, abandoned the campaign. Paul III, anxious to free Charles for an attack on the Turks or the Lutherans, persuaded the crippled Titans to meet with him—in jealously separate rooms—at Nice, and to sign a ten-year truce (June 17, 1538). A month later Eleonora, wife to one, sister to the other, brought King and Emperor together in a personal meeting at Aiguesmortes. There they ceased to be royal, and became human; Charles knelt to embrace the King’s youngest children; Francis gave him a costly diamond set in a ring which was inscribed Dilectionis testis et exemplum—“ witness and token of love”; and Charles transferred from his own neck to the King’s the collar of the Golden Fleece. They went together to hear Mass, and the townspeople, rejoicing in peace, cried, “The Emperor! The King!”

When Ghent rebelled against Charles (1539) and joined Bruges and Ypres in offering themselves to Francis, the King resisted the temptation; and when Charles, in Spain, found the seaways closed by rebel vessels or mal de mer, Francis granted his request for passage through France. His councilors advised the King to force the Emperor, en route, to sign the cession of Milan to the Duke of Orléans, but Francis refused. “When you do a generous thing,” he said, “you must do it completely and boldly.” He found his court fool writing in a “Fool’s Diary” the name of Charles V; for, said Tribouillet, “he’s a bigger fool than I am if he comes through France.” “And what will you say if I let him pass?” asked the King. “I will rub out his name and put yours in his place.” ⁶¹ Francis let Charles pass unhindered, and ordered every town on the way to receive the Emperor with royal honors and feasts.

This precarious friendship was ended when Spanish soldiers near Pavia captured French emissaries bearing new offers of alliance from Francis to Suleiman (July 1541). At this time Barbarossa was again raiding the coastal towns of Italy. Charles sailed from Mallorca with another armada to destroy him, but storms so buffeted the fleet that it was compelled to return empty handed to Spain. The Emperor’s fortunes were ebbing. His young wife, whom he had learned to love, had died 0539), and his own health was worsening. In 1542 Francis declared war on him over Milan; the King’s allies now included Sweden, Denmark, Gelderland, Cleves, Scotland, the Turks, and the Pope; only Henry VIII supported Charles, for a price; and the Spanish Cortes refused additional subsidies for the war. A Turkish fleet combined with a French fleet to besiege Nice, which was now Imperial territory (1543); the siege failed, but Barbarossa and his Moslem troops were allowed to winter at Toulon, where they openly sold Christian slaves.⁶² The Emperor patiently retrieved the situation. He found means of pacifying the Pope; he won Philip of Hesse to his side by winking at his bigamy; he attacked and vanquished the Duke of Cleves; he effected a junction with his English allies, and faced France with so strong a force that Francis retreated and yielded him the honors of the campaign (October 1543). Again too poor to further provision his army, Charles welcomed an offer of peace, and signed with Francis the Treaty of Crépy (September 18, 1544). The King withdrew his claims to Flanders, Artois, and Naples; Charles no longer demanded Burgundy; a Hapsburg princess would marry a French prince, and bring him Milan as her dowry. (Most of this could have been peaceably arranged in 1525.) Charles was now free to overwhelm the Protestants at Mühlberg; Titian pictured him there without the arthritis, proud and triumphant, worn and weary after a thousand vicissitudes, a hundred turns of fortune’s ironic wheel.

As for Francis, he was finished, and France nearly so. In one sense he had lost nothing but honor; he had preserved his country by scuttling the ideals of chivalry. Yet the Turks would have come without his call, and their coming helped Francis to check an Emperor who, unresisted, might have spread the Spanish Inquisition into Flanders, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. Francis had found France peaceful and prosperous; he left it bankrupt and on the brink of another war. A month before his death, while swearing friendship with Charles, he sent 200,000 crowns to the Protestants of Germany to support them against the Emperor.⁶³ He—and in slightly less degree Charles—agreed with Machiavelli that statesmen, whose task is to preserve their countries, may violate the moral code which they require from their citizens, whose task is only to preserve their lives. The French people might have forgiven him his wars, but they lost relish for the splendor of his ways and his court when they perceived the cost. He was already unpopular in 1535.

He consoled himself with beauty living and dead. In his later years he made Fontainebleau his favorite residence, rebuilt it, and rejoiced in the graceful feminine art with which the Italians were adorning it. He surrounded himself with a Petite Bande of young women who pleased him with their good looks and gaiety. In 1538 a disease injured his uvula, and thereafter he stammered shamefully. He tried to cure what was probably his syphilis with mercury pills recommended by Barbarossa, but they had no success.⁶⁴ A persistent and ill-smelling abscess broke his spirit, gave a dull and plaintive look to his once keen eyes, and moved him to an uncongenial piety. He had to watch his food, for he suspected that some courtiers who expected to rise under his successor were seeking to poison him. He noted sadly that the court now pivoted around his son, who was already distributing offices and impatiently awaiting his turn at the resources of France. To his deathbed at Rambouillet he called his sole heir and warned him not to be dominated by a woman—for Henry was already devoted to Diane de Poitiers. The King confessed his sins in hurried summary, and, breathing painfully, welcomed death. Francis, Duke of Guise, at the door, whispered to those in the next room, Le vieux gallant s’en va—” The old gallant is going.” ⁶⁵ He went, whispering the name of Jesus. He was fifty-three, and had reigned thirty-two years. France felt that it was too much; but when it had recovered from him it forgave him everything, because he had sinned gracefully, he had loved beauty, he had been incarnate France.

In that same year Henry VIII died, and two years later, Marguerite. She had been too long away from Francis, and too far, to realize that death was stalking him. When word came to her, in a convent at Angoulême, that he was seriously ill, she almost lost her reason. “Whosoever shall come to my door,” she said, “and announce to me the recovery of the King my brother, such a courier, should he be tired and worn out, muddy and dirty, I will go and kiss and embrace as if he were the sprucest prince and gentleman in France; and should he be in want of a bed... I would give him mine, and I would gladly lie on the ground for the good news he brought me.” ⁶⁶ She sent couriers to Paris; they returned and lied to her; the King, they assured her, was quite well; but the furtive tears of a nun betrayed the truth. Marguerite stayed in the convent for forty days, acting as abbess, and singing the old sacred chants with the nuns.

Back in Pau or Nérac she resigned herself to austerities, to her husband’s infidelities, and to her daughter’s wandering willfulness. She found comfort, after all her brave, half-Protestant years, in the color and incense and hypnotic music of Catholic ritual; the Calvinism that was capturing southern France chilled her, and frightened her back to her childhood piety. In December 1549, while watching a comet in the skies, she caught a fever that proved strong enough to break a frame and spirit already weakened by life’s inclemencies. Years before she had written lines as if half in love with the anesthesia of death:

VII. DIANE DE POITIERS

The “old gallant” had had seven children, all by Claude. The eldest son, Francis, was like his father, handsome, charming, gay. Henry, born in 1519, was quiet, shy, a bit neglected; he matched his brother only in misfortune. Their four years of hardship and humiliation in Spain had marked them indelibly. Francis died six years after liberation. Henry grew more taciturn than before, turned within himself, shunned the frolics of the court; he had companions, but they rarely saw him smile. Men said that he had become Spanish in Spain.

It was not his choice to marry Catherine de Médicis, nor hers to marry him. She too had had tribulations. Both her parents had died of syphilis within twenty-two days of her birth (1519); and from that time till her marriage she was shifted from place to place, helpless and unasked. When Florence expelled its Medici rulers (1527) it kept Caterina as a hostage for their good behavior, and when these exiles returned to besiege the city she was threatened with death to deter them. Clement VII used her as a pawn to win France to papal policies; she went obediently to Marseille, a girl of fourteen, and married a boy of fourteen who hardly spoke to her during all the festival. When they arrived in Paris she met a cold reception because she brought too many Italians with her; she became to the Parisians “the Florentine”; and though she tried hard to charm them, neither they nor her husband ever warmed to her. Despite many efforts she remained barren for ten years, and the doctors suspected some evil inheritance from her infected parents. Losing hope of offspring, Catherine de Médicis, as she was called in France, went to Francis weeping, and offered to submit to a divorce and retire to a convent. The King graciously refused the sacrifice. At last the gates of motherhood burst, and children came in almost annual succession. Ten in all, they were chiefly Francis II, who would marry Mary Stuart; Elizabeth, who would marry Philip II; Charles IX, who would give the order for the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; Edward, who became the tragic Henry III; and Marguerite of Valois, who would marry and harry Henry of Navarre. Through all but the first four of these barren or fertile years her husband, while begetting children on her body, gave his love to Diane de Poitiers.

Diane was unique among the royal mistresses who played so leading a role in French history. She was not beautiful. When Henry, seventeen, fell in love with her (1536), she was already thirty-seven, her hair was turning gray, and wrinkles were beginning to score the years on her brow. Her only physical charms were grace, and a complexion kept fresh by washing with cold water at all seasons. She was not a courtesan; apparently she was faithful to her husband, Louis de Brézé, till his death; and though, like Henry, she indulged in two or three asides during her royal liaison, these were venial incidents, mere grace notes in her song of love. She was not romantic; rather she was too practical, making hay while her sun shone; France condemned not her morals but her money. She was not like Francis’ mignons—pretty heads but empty, prancing on gay feet till motherhood surprised them. Diane had good education, good sense, good manners, good wit; here was a mistress who charmed with her mind.

She came of high lineage, and was brought up at the art-loving court of the Bourbons at Moulins. Her father, Jean de Poitiers, Comte de Saint-Vallier, shared the Duke of Bourbon’s treason after trying to prevent it; he was captured and sentenced to death (1523); Diane’s husband, in favor with Francis, secured her father’s pardon.* Louis de Brézé was grandson of Charles VII by Agnès Sorel; he had ability or influence, for he became Grant’ Sénéschal and Governor of Normandy. He was fifty-six when Diane, sixteen, became his wife (1515). When he died (1531) she raised to his memory at Rouen a magnificent tomb with an inscription vowing eternal fidelity. She never married again, and wore, thereafter, only black and white.

She met Henry when, a lad of seven, he was being handed over at Bayonne as a hostage for his father. The bewildered boy wept; Diane, then twenty-seven, mothered and comforted him, whose own mother Claude was two years dead; and perhaps the memory of those pitying embraces revived in him when he met her again eleven years later. Though then four years a husband, he was still mentally immature, as well as abnormally melancholy and diffident; he wanted a mother more than a wife; and here again Diane appeared, quiet, tender, comforting. He came to her first as a son, and their relations for some time were apparently chaste. Her affection and counsel gave him confidence; under her tutelage he ceased to be a misanthrope, and prepared to be a king. Popular opinion credited them with having one child, Diane de France, whom she brought up with her two daughters by Brézé; she also adopted the daughter borne to Henry in 1538 by a Piedmontese maiden who paid for her royal moment by a lifetime as a nun. Another illegitimate child resulted from Henry’s kter affair with Mary Fleming, governess of Mary Stuart. Despite these experiments, his devotion was increasingly to Diane de Poitiers. He wrote to her poems of real excellence; he showered her with jewelry and estates. He did not entirely neglect Catherine; usually he dined and spent the evenings with her; and she, grateful for the parings of his love, accepted in silent sorrow the fact that another woman was the real dauphiness of France. She must have felt it as an added wound that Diane occasionally prodded Henry into sleeping with his wife.⁶⁸

His accession to the throne did not lower Diane’s state. He wrote to her the most abject letters, entreating her to let him be her servant for life. His infatuation made her almost as rich as the Queen. He guaranteed to Diane a fixed percentage of all receipts from the sale of appointments to office, and nearly all appointments were in her power. He gave her the crown jewels that the Duchesse d’Êtampes had worn; when the Duchess protested, Diane threatened to accuse her of Protestantism, and was bought off only by a gift of property. Henry allowed her to keep for her use 400,000 thalers that Francis had bequeathed for the secret support of the Protestant princes in Germany.⁶⁹ So dowered, Diane rebuilt, on a design by Philibert Delorme, the old Brézé mansion of Anet into an extensive chateau that became not only a second home for the King but also a museum of art, and a handsome rendezvous for poets, artists, diplomats, dukes, generals, cardinals, mistresses, and philosophers. Here in effect sat the Privy Council of the state, and Diane was prime ministress, passionless and intelligent. Every where—at Anet, Chenonceaux, Amboise, the Louvre—dishes, coats of arms, works of art, choir stalls, bore the bold symbol of the royal romance, two Ds placed back to back, with a dash between them forming the letter H. There is something touching and beautiful about this unique friendship, built on love and money, but enduring till death.

In the struggle of the Church against heresy, Diane put all her influence behind orthodoxy and suppression. She had abundant reasons for piety: her daughter was married to a son of Francis, Duke of Guise; and Francis, with his brother Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, both favorites at Anet, were the leaders of the Catholic party in France. As for Henry, his childhood piety had been intensified by his years in Spain; his love letters confused God and Diane as rivals for his heart. The Church was helpful; it gave him 3,000,000 golden crowns for canceling his father’s decree restricting the power of ecclesiastical courts.⁷⁰

Nevertheless Protestantism was growing in France. Calvin and others Were sending in missionaries whose success was alarming. Several towns-Caen, Poitiers, La Rochelle, and many in Provence—were predominantly Huguenot by 1559; a priest reckoned the French Protestants in that year at nearly a quarter of the population.⁷¹ Says a Catholic historian: “The source of the apostasy from Rome—ecclesiastical corruption—had not been removed, nay, had only been strengthened, by the... Concordat” between Leo X and Francis I.⁷² In the middle and lower classes Protestantism was in part a protest against a Catholic government that curbed municipal autonomy, taxed unbearably, and wasted revenues and lives in war. The nobility, shorn of its former political power by the kings, looked with envy at Lutheran princes victorious over Charles V; perhaps a similar feudalism could be restored in France by using widespread popular resentment against abuses in Church and state. Prominent nobles like Gasoard de Coligny, his younger brother François d’Andelot, Prince Louis de Condé, and his brother Antoine de Bourbon, took active part in organizing the Protestant revolt.

For its theology Gallic Protestantism adopted Calvin’s Institutes; its author and language were French, and its logic appealed to the French mind. After 1550 Luther was almost forgotten in France; the very name Huguenot came from Zurich through Geneva to Provence. In May 1559, the Protestants felt strong enough to send deputies to their first general synod, held secretly in Paris. By 1561 there were 2,000 “Reformed” or Calvinistic churches in France.⁷³

Henry II set himself to crush out the heresy. By his instructions the Parlement of Paris organized a special commission (1549) to prosecute dissent; those condemned were sent to the stake, and the new court came to be called le chambre ardente, “the burning room.” By the Edict of Chateaubriand (1551) the printing, sale, or possession of heretical literature was made a major crime, and persistence in Protestant ideas was to be punished with death. Informers were to receive a third of the goods of the condemned. They were to report to the Parlement any judge who treated heretics leniently, and no man could be a magistrate unless his orthodoxy was beyond doubt. In three years the chambre ardente sent sixty Protestants to a flaming death. Henry proposed to Pope Paul IV that the Inquisition should be established in France on the new Roman model, but the Parlement objected to allowing its authority to be superseded. One of its members, Anne du Bourg, boldly suggested that all pursuit of heresy should cease until the Council of Trent should complete its definitions of orthodox dogma. Henry had him arrested, and vowed to see him burned, but fate cheated the King of this spectacle.

For meanwhile he had been lured into renewing the war against the Emperor. He could never forgive the long imprisonment of his father, his brother, and himself; he hated Charles with the same intensity with which he loved Diane. When the Lutheran princes made their decisive stand against the Emperor for Christ and feudalism, they sought alliance with Henry, and invited him to seize Lorraine. So he agreed in the Treaty of Chambord (1552). In a rapid and well-directed campaign he took with little trouble Toul, Nancy, Metz, and Verdun. Charles, readier to yield victory to Protestantism in Germany than to the Valois in France, signed a humble peace with the princes at Passau, and hurried to besiege the French in Metz. Francis, Duke of Guise, made his reputation there by the skill and pertinacity of his defense. From October 19 to December 26, 1552, the siege continued; then Charles, pale, haggard, white-bearded, crippled, withdrew his disheartened troops. “I see very well,” he said, “that fortune resembles a woman; she prefers a young king to an old emperor.”⁷⁴ “Before three years are up,” he added, “I shall turn Cordelier”—i.e., a Franciscan friar.⁷⁵

In 1555–56 he resigned his power in the Netherlands and Spain to his son, signed the Truce of Vaucelles with France, and left for Spain (September 17, 1556), He thought he was bequeathing to Philip a realm at peace, but Henry felt that the situation called for another sally into Italy. Philip had no reputation as a general; he was unexpectedly plunged into war with Pope Paul IV; to Henry the opportunity seemed golden. He sent Guise to take Milan and Naples, and himself prepared to meet Philip on the ancient battlefields of northeastern France. Philip rose to the occasion. He borrowed a million ducats from Anton Fugger, and charmed Queen Mary of England into the war. At Saint-Quentin (August 10,1557) Duke Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy led Philip’s combined armies to an overwhelming victory, took Coligny and Montmorency prisoners, and prepared to march upon Paris. The city was in panic; defense seemed impossible. Henry recalled Guise and his troops from Italy; the Duke crossed France, and by remarkable celerity of movement surprised and captured Calais (1558), which England had held since 1348. Philip, hating war and anxious to return to Spain, was readily persuaded to sign the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis (April 2, 1559): Henry agreed to stay north of the Alps, and Philip consented to let him keep Lorraine and—over Mary’s tears—Calais. Suddenly the two kings became friends; Henry gave his daughter Elizabeth in marriage to Philip, and his sister Marguerite of Berry was pledged to Emmanuel Philibert, who now recovered Savoy; and a stately festival of jousts, banquets, and weddings was arranged.

So, while cautious Philip remained in Flanders, French, Flemish, and Spanish notables gathered around the royal palace of Les Tournelles in Paris; lists were fenced off in the Rue St.-Antoine, with gaily decorated stands and balconies; and all went merry as a wedding bell. On June 22 the Duke of Alva, as proxy for Philip, received Elizabeth as new Queen of Spain. Henry, now forty, insisted on entering the tournament. In such jousts victory was adjudged to the rider who, without being unhorsed, broke three lances against the armor of his foe. Henry accomplished this upon the Dukes of Guise and Savoy, who knew their proper roles in the play. But a third opponent, Montgomery, after breaking a lance against the King, awkwardly allowed the sharp-pointed stump of the weapon to pass under Henry’s visor; it pierced the King’s eye and reached the brain. For nine days he lay unconscious. On July 9 the marriage of Philibert and Marguerite was celebrated. On July 10 the King died. Diane de Poitiers retired to Anet, and survived seven years. Catherine de Médicis, who had hungered for his love, wore mourning all the rest of her life.