by Will Durant
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, fool
ish 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.