by Will Durant
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:
TO THE REGENT OF FRANCE: Madame, that you may know how stands the rest of my misfortune: there is nothing in the world left to me but honor and my life, which is saved (de toute chose ne m’est demeuré que I’honneur et la vie, qui est sauvée). And in order that in your adversity this news might bring you some little comfort, I prayed for permission to write you this letter .... entreating you, in the exercise of your accustomed prudence, to do nothing rash, for I have hope, after all, that God will not forsake me....53
He sent a similar note to Marguerite, who answered both:
MY LORD: The joy we are still feeling at the kind letters which you were pleased to write yesterday to me and your mother, makes us so happy with the assurance of your health, on which our life depends, that it seems to me that we ought to think of nothing but of praising God and desiring a continuance of your good news, which is the best meat we can have to live on. And inasmuch as the Creator has given us grace that our trinity should be always united, the other two do entreat you that this letter, presented to you who are the third, may be accepted with the same affection with which it is cordially offered you by your most humble and obedient servants, your mother and sister,
LOUISE, MARGUERITE 54
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 Margue
rite 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.