Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564
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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." `062256 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. `062257 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." `062258
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 Duc, 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." `062259
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. *06050
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 Medicis in marriage
to Francis' son Henry, Duke of Orleans. 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. `062260 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 - "a
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
Orleans, 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." `062261 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 (1539), 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. `062262 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 Crepy (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 Muhlberg; 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. `062263 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. `062264 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." `062265 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 Angouleme, 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." `062266 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 Nerac 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:
-
Seigneur, quand viendra le jour,
Tant desiree,
Que je serai par amour
A vous tire?...
Essuyez les tristes yeux
Le long gemir,
Et me donnez pour le mieux
Un doux dormir.
-
Lord, when will come the day,
Wished ardently,
That I shall be by love
Drawn close to Thee?...
Still then my parting sighs,
Let me not weep;
Give the best gift of all,
Sweet boon of sleep.
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 Medicis, 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 Medicis, 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