This monarch is predestined for great things. He is educated in letters, which is unusual with our kings, and also possesses a natural eloquence, wit, tact, and an easy pleasant manner; nature, in short, has endowed him with the rarest gifts of body and mind. He likes to admire and to praise princes of old who have distinguished themselves by their lofty intellects and brilliant deeds, and he is fortunate to have as much wealth as any king in the world, which he gives more liberally than anyone.
Guillaume Budé, the king’s librarian, to Erasmus of Rotterdam
IT MAY OR may not have struck readers of this book that of the many kings who have succeeded each other over the preceding pages, few have been particularly colourful characters. There have been among them some excellent rulers and one or two remarkable men – Philip Augustus, St Louis, Philip the Fair perhaps, Louis XI certainly – but few to make the heart beat faster. To some extent this is obviously due to the period in which they lived: the Middle Ages, dominated as they were by war and religion, were not, frankly, very much fun. Even so, it is hard to deny that England did rather better in this regard: Henry II, Edward II, Edward III, Henry V, Richard III – the last two admittedly much assisted by Shakespeare – may not have been better monarchs than their French counterparts, but as human beings they were a good deal more interesting.
But now we come to Francis I – and Francis I hit France like a rocket. The country had never seen anything like him before. Nor had it ever expected him to be king. Louis XII had been called the Father of his People, but despite three wives he had fathered little else and died without a male heir; it was Francis, his first cousin once removed, who on 25 January 1515 at the age of twenty-one was crowned and anointed in Reims Cathedral as his country’s fifty-seventh king. His subjects cheered him to the echo. Here at last was a proper king: a young man of colossal charm, bounding with all the energy of youth. He was not, perhaps, strictly handsome – his perfectly enormous nose was to earn him the name of le roi grand-nez – but it hardly seemed to matter: he made up for it with his grace and elegance, and with the glorious silks and velvets that he wore with such swagger. Moreover it was clear from the outset that he really loved being king: loved the hunting, the feasting and jousting, and loved above all the ready availability of beautiful women.
But all that was only the beginning: Francis was, in every fibre of his being, a man of the Renaissance: it could almost be said that in France he was the Renaissance. Not only did he show a genuine passion for art; he also possessed the wealth to indulge it. Long before he was thirty, he was famous as the greatest patron of his time. It was entirely typical of him that he should have brought Leonardo da Vinci from Italy, settling him in the magnificent apartments at Amboise in which the great man lived in comfort until his death. He was also a compulsive builder; Amboise was very largely his creation, as were Blois and Chambord and, best-loved of all his châteaux, Fontainebleau, where he gave his favourite painter Francesco Primaticcio a free hand and which still bears his character – as well as his salamander emblem – in every room.
Books, too, he loved and revered. His mother, Louise of Savoy, had seen that he was fluent in Spanish and Italian, both of which he read with ease. He was a personal friend of François Rabelais, for whose happy giant Pantagruel he is said to have provided the inspiration. All over northern Italy he employed special agents to seek out manuscripts and the still relatively rare printed books for his library, which in the fullness of time was to provide the nucleus of the Bibliothèque Nationale; at the time of his death it was to contain over three thousand volumes, and was open to any scholar who wished to use it.
Francis’s greatest intellectual triumph came in 1529 when, to the fury of the Sorbonne, he founded the Collège des Lecteurs Royaux, the future Collège de France. In short, it seems hardly too much to say that modern French culture as we know it was virtually his creation. The Middle Ages were past. For a nobleman of the sixteenth century hunting and fighting were no longer enough: education and culture were now equally necessary. War might still be important – Francis himself, as we shall see, was a fearless fighter on the battlefield – but the art of elegant living was more important still. And so it comes as no surprise that, of all their kings, it is Francis whom – with Henry IV – the French most love today. They love him for his swagger and his braggadocio; for his courage in war and his prowess in the bedchamber; for the colour and opulence with which he surrounded himself; and for the whole new civilisation that he left behind. They pass over with a shrug his financial recklessness; only his increasing persecution of the Protestants in the last decade of his reign do they find hard to forgive.
Francis had two wives. His first was Claude, Louis XII’s only surviving child, daughter of Anne of Brittany. Her name is still remembered in the Reine Claude plum, or greengage, but in not much else. She did her duty by bearing her husband seven children; but since she was ‘very small and strangely corpulent’, with a limp and a pronounced squint, she never interested him much. She died in 1524, in her twenty-fifth year. The king’s second wife, whom he married after six years of riotous bachelorhood, was Eleanor of Austria, sister of the Emperor Charles V; for three brief years she had been the third wife of King Manuel I of Portugal. Alas, she proved to be no great improvement on her predecessor: tall and sallow, with the jutting Habsburg chin and a curious absence of personality. A lady-in-waiting was subsequently to report that ‘when undressed she was seen to have the trunk of a giantess, so long and big was her body, yet going lower she seemed a dwarf, so short were her thighs and legs’. Already four years before her wedding to Francis it was reported that she had grown corpulent, heavy of feature, with red patches on her face. Francis largely ignored her; there were no children. She was certainly no match for her husband’s regiment of mistresses – of whom the loveliest of all was Anne, one of the thirty children of Guillaume d’Heilly, Sieur de Pisseleu (‘worse than a wolf’) in Picardy. Later the king was to make her Duchesse d’Etampes. Highly cultured and ravishingly beautiful, she was, he used to say, ‘la plus belle des savants, la plus savante des belles’.*
Francis was constantly on the move. ‘Never,’ wrote a Venetian ambassador, ‘during the whole of my embassy, was the court in the same place for fifteen consecutive days.’ Yet the logistical demands for such mobility were immense. When the court was complete, it took no fewer than 18,000 horses to move it; when the king visited Bordeaux in 1526, stabling was ordered for 22,500 horses and mules. The baggage train normally included furniture, tapestries (for warmth) and silver plate by the ton. And, as may be imagined, the finding of suitable accommodation was a constant nightmare. Often there were rooms only for the king and his ladies; everyone else was obliged to find what shelter they could, often five or six miles away or even under canvas. But whatever hardships the court was called upon to suffer, it was always expected to be ready for the elaborate ceremonies that were staged by the major cities and towns through which it passed. These royal visits did not go without a hitch: in 1518 the captain of Brest was obliged to pay one hundred gold écus ‘following artillery accidents during the King’s entry … as indemnity to the wounded and to the widows of the deceased’.
It would have been an excellent thing for France if the Valois kings had been able to keep their hands off Italy. Alas, they could not. Francis had taken care that his claim to Milan was included in his coronation oath, and the loss of Milan after Novara in 1513 rankled badly. He wasted no time. Less than nine months after his coronation, he took his revenge on Sforza and his Swiss pikemen. He met them on 13 September 1515 at Marignano – now Melegnano – some ten miles south-east of Milan. The battle was long and hard: beginning in mid-afternoon, it raged throughout the night until the morning sun was high in the sky. The king fought with his usual courage, and had himself knighted on the battlefield by Bayard, that almost legendary chevalier sans peur et sans reproche. At last, on 11 October, he rode triumphantly into Milan, beside himself with joy and pride.
But there were other prizes to be won, greater far than Milan; and the greatest of all was the Holy Roman Empire. It was elective; the present emperor, Maximilian of Habsburg, was already in his late fifties, an old man in those days; and the seven Electors – the Archbishops of Mainz, Trier and Cologne, the King of Bohemia, the Duke of Saxony, the Margrave of Brandenburg and the Count Palatine of the Rhine – would, Francis suspected, probably not be averse to a little gentle bribery. There were strategic reasons too: Maximilian’s grandson Charles – his principal rival – already had title to Spain, the Low Countries, Austria and Naples; were he to acquire all the imperial territories as well, he would hold France in a vice, virtually surrounding it. The king was well aware, of course, that Charles would be equally determined on his own election, for precisely the converse reason – that were he, Francis, to be successful, the imperial dominions would be split down the middle. Francis did his best, but the odds were stacked against him. The Electors – all German – hated the idea of a French emperor as much as Charles himself; the Fuggers, that colossally rich and influential banking family from Augsburg, lined as many pockets as was necessary; and in 1519 Charles was elected – unanimously.
Although twelve years later Charles and Francis were to find themselves brothers-in-law and there were to be moments of cordiality between them, geography alone meant that they could never be true friends. Friendship, however, seemed a good deal more possible with Francis’s neighbour to the north, Henry VIII of England. The two were of much the same age – Henry was just three years older – and of much the same character: they shared the same boisterous energy, the same love of the arts. A degree of jealousy was inevitable; but of mistrust too, because Henry had already shown, with a brief invasion in 1513, that he had not renounced any of his French ambitions. Clearly a meeting between the two could not be long delayed; and so, from 7 to 24 June 1520 they met – at the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
It was a magnificent name and the occasion was more magnificent still, with each of the two protagonists determined to outdo the other in splendour. Henry brought with him a suite of well over five thousand, and employed some six thousand artisans and craftsmen to transform the modest little castle of Guînes and to surround it with temporary structures so elaborate and fantastical they seemed to have come straight out of a fairy tale. At dawn on the appointed day, a great gong was sounded as the two kings spurred on their horses and rode at full gallop towards each other. At the last moment they reined in, embraced, dismounted and walked arm in arm to a sumptuously decorated tent where toasts were drunk and various presentations made. There were no political discussions: that was not the point. The Field of the Cloth of Gold was planned simply so that the two kings should become acquainted with each other; it was the most extravagant getting-to-know-you party in history. Presents were exchanged, in a quantity and of a quality that neither side could afford; there was seemingly endless jousting, banqueting, dancing and mutual embracing. It was all great fun, but when Henry and Francis separated at last, the old suspicions still lingered: they got on well enough together, but neither monarch trusted the other an inch.
For the Emperor Charles V, Francis’s seizure of Milan was a serious danger signal; and in 1521, to strengthen his hand against him, he had signed a secret treaty with Pope Leo, as the result of which a combined papal and imperial force had expelled the French once again from Lombardy, restoring the house of Sforza. This had committed the Pope fairly and squarely to the imperial side; and when in 1523 Leo was succeeded* by his cousin – who took the name of Clement VII – the emperor naturally assumed that he would follow the same policy. Instead, Clement tried to make peace between the two parties – an attempt that failed utterly, just as everyone had told him it would. Charles was adamant: he would yield Milan only in exchange for Burgundy. Francis, meanwhile, was determined to return at once to Italy and, with an army even larger than before, to establish his supremacy once and for all. In the absence of any clear papal opposition the way seemed clear for him to go ahead; and in the early summer of 1524, for the second time, he led 20,000 men over the Mont Cenis Pass into Italy. In late October he duly recovered Milan.
He then turned south to Pavia. The city proved a tougher nut to crack than he had expected; its imperial garrison of 6,000 Germans and Spaniards made it clear that they proposed to give as good as they got. With winter approaching, the king’s most sensible course would have been to retire to Milan until the spring; but that was not his way. Instead, he and his men besieged Pavia for four unusually cold and uncomfortable months without any apparent effect, and they were still there in late February when an imperial army appeared on the horizon. The two armies met in the great hunting preserve of Mirabello Castle, just outside the walls of Pavia; and on the morning of Tuesday 24 February 1525 – it happened to be the emperor’s twenty-fifth birthday – battle was joined. The ensuing engagement was one of the most decisive in European history. It was also the first to prove conclusively the superiority of firearms over pikes. The Swiss pike men, who were this time fighting for Francis, struggled valiantly; but their weapons, fearsome as they were, were no match for Spanish bullets. When the fighting was over, the French army had been virtually annihilated; some fourteen thousand soldiers – French and Swiss, German and Spanish – lay dead on the field. Francis himself had shown, as always, exemplary courage; after his horse had been killed under him he had continued to fight on foot until at last, overcome by exhaustion, he had allowed himself to be captured. ‘All is lost,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘save honour, and my skin.’ Having sustained nothing more than a bruised leg and a scratched hand and cheek, he was indeed lucky: the best estimates suggest that of the fourteen-hundred-odd French men-at-arms on the field, not more than four hundred survived.
Francis was taken first to the castle of Pizzighettone on the Adda river, where he remained for some three months. The emperor, when the news of his capture was brought to him in Madrid, ordered services of thanksgiving for the victory and then withdrew to pray alone. Having decided that his prisoner should be held in Naples, he also – characteristically – sent orders to the imperial viceroy, Charles de Lannoy, ordering him to take good care of him and to send regular reports to his mother on his health and well-being. Francis, however, was so dispirited at the thought of a Neapolitan prison that he begged Lannoy to send him instead to Madrid. One is mildly surprised that the viceroy should have dared to disobey his master’s orders; more remarkable still is the fact that he did not even report to Charles that he had done so: it was purely by chance that the emperor heard of his prisoner’s arrival in Spain. He showed, however, no sign of anger, simply sending a message of welcome and expressing the hope that peace would soon follow.
Throughout the journey to Madrid, Francis found himself treated like the king he was. In Barcelona he attended Mass at the cathedral and even touched for the king’s evil. At Valencia he was so mobbed by the populace that the Spanish captain responsible for his safety had to take him to a comfortable villa outside the city. The last stage of his journey to the capital was more than ever like a royal progress. There were banquets; there were bullfights; there were visits to hospitals and universities. But in Madrid a bitter disappointment awaited him: he was accommodated in the deeply gloomy tower of the Alcázar, standing on the site of the present royal palace. The Duc de Saint-Simon, who visited it two centuries later, describes it in his memoirs:
The room was not big, and had only one door … It was made a little larger by an embrasure on the right as one came in, facing the window. The latter was wide enough to give some daylight, it was glazed and could be opened, but it had a double iron grill, strong and stiff, which was welded into the wall … There was enough room for chairs, coffers, a few tables and a bed.
From the window, the duke added, there was a drop of more than a hundred feet, and the tower was guarded day and night by two companies of troops. Here Francis – having made one unsuccessful attempt to escape disguised as a black servant – was made to wait, his only exercise the occasional mule ride under heavy escort, while preparations were begun for peace talks.
These began in Toledo in July 1525, and were attended on the French side by both Francis’s mother – Louise of Savoy, now Regent of France – and by his sister Margaret of Alençon. With Burgundy remaining as always the principal bone of contention, negotiations did not get very far and were still dragging on by 11 September when Francis suddenly fell ill – so ill that his life was despaired of. For twenty-three days he lay inert and for most of the time unconscious; the emperor, who till now had shown no desire to meet his fellow-monarch, came hurrying to his bedside; it was their first encounter. According to the doctors, the root of the trouble was ‘an abscess in the head’, but sixteenth-century diagnoses were far from reliable. In any event the king eventually began to recover, and as soon as he was well enough was moved to the capital, where he was gradually restored to health.
The first thing to be said about the resulting Treaty of Madrid, which a convalescent Francis signed on 14 January 1526 and by which, in return for his own liberation, he surrendered Burgundy, Naples and Milan, was that he had not the faintest intention of observing it – despite the fact that he had agreed to leave his two sons as hostages for his good behaviour. He had even taken the precaution of signing another, secret, declaration, nullifying the surrender of Burgundy as having been extracted from him by force. He was still far from well: on Sunday 29 January he had to be carried to church on a litter. The next day, however, he was sufficiently recovered to attend a luncheon given in his honour – and even, afterwards, to visit a convent where he touched thirty scrofulous nuns.
On 13 February the emperor joined him in Madrid. It had been arranged as part of the treaty that Francis should marry Charles’s sister Eleanor; and Charles now introduced the pair for the first time. She tried to kiss his hand, but he – characteristically – insisted as her husband on a proper kiss on the lips. (All too few, alas, were to follow.) Two days later the two sovereigns separated – Charles to Lisbon, there to marry his own Portuguese princess, King Manuel’s daughter (and Eleanor’s stepdaughter) Isabella; Francis to return to Paris, whither it was arranged that his new bride should follow him in due course.
But there was one unhappy little ceremony to be completed first. It occurred on the Bidasoa river, which constituted – as it still does – part of the frontier between France and Spain. There was no bridge; early on the morning of 17 March 1526, two rowing boats made their way from opposite sides to a pontoon in mid-stream. One carried the king, together with the Viceroy of Naples; the other bore two little boys, the eight-year-old dauphin and his brother Henry, Duke of Orléans, aged seven. Both still recovering from serious attacks of measles, they were on their way to Spain for an indefinite period as hostages for their father’s good behaviour. When the two boats reached the pontoon they changed passengers, while a tearful Francis made the sign of the cross over his children and promised – with how much hope, one wonders – to send for them as soon as he could. The exchange completed, the boats then returned to their original moorings.
Francis spent a delightful summer riding gently through his realm and arrived in Paris only in the autumn, by which time some of the initial indignation at the terms of the Treaty of Madrid had begun to die down – though the Estates of Burgundy were still vociferously protesting that the king had no right to alienate a province of his kingdom without the consent of its people. Francis replied, quite simply, that he had no intention of doing so: everyone knew, surely, that promises extorted in prison had no binding force. He had no wish to antagonise Charles more than necessary; apart from anything else, he was anxious to recover his sons. At the same time the balance of power had become seriously upset: the emperor was once again too powerful, and it was clear that something must be done to cut him back to size.
News of the treaty had left Pope Clement aghast: without a French presence anywhere in Italy, how could he hope to defend himself against imperial pressure? Hastily he recruited Milan, Venice and Florence to form an anti-imperialist league for the defence of a free and independent Italy – and invited France to join. Though the ink was scarcely dry on the Treaty of Madrid, and though he and the Pope held widely differing views on Milan – the Pope favouring the Sforzas while Francis still wanted the city for himself – on 22 May 1526 the king, with his usual flourish, signed his name to what was to be called the League of Cognac. It meant, he knew, that it would be a long time – perhaps another three or four years, unless he could persuade Charles to accept a cash ransom – before he saw his sons again, but there: they would be well looked after, would learn beautiful Spanish and would doubtless make a number of contacts which might be of use to them in the future.
For the emperor, this was nothing less than a betrayal. There could now be no question of a ransom, if indeed there ever had been. Francis’s breach of faith horrified him, and shocked him deeply: crowned heads simply could not behave so shamelessly. He had been planning to go to Italy for his coronation by the Pope; that journey would now have to be indefinitely postponed. ‘He is full of dumps’, reported an English envoy, ‘and solitary, musing sometimes alone three or four hours together. There is no mirth or comfort with him.’ To the French ambassador he did not conceal his anger:
I will not deliver them [the two princes] for money. I refused money for the father; still less will I take money for the sons. I am content to render them upon reasonable treaty; but not for money, nor will I trust any more the King’s promise; for he has deceived me, and that like no noble prince. And where he protests that he cannot fulfil some things without grudge of his subjects, let him fulfil that that is in his power, which he promised by the honour of a prince to fulfil; that is to say, that if he could not bring all of his promise to pass he would return again hither into prison.
But Francis still felt threatened. Charles and his brother Ferdinand seemed determined to control the whole of Europe; his own kingdom was already surrounded by potentially hostile territory. If it were to survive unconquered, its best hope lay in finding a new ally to the east – and that could only be the Ottoman Sultan. It was a wild, outlandish idea, unthinkable in former years, but the regent had had it before her son: the first French diplomatic mission to Suleiman the Magnificent had set out early in 1525 – immediately after Pavia, and even before the king’s return from captivity.
But how would the news of such an alliance be received? To the rest of Christian Europe, the Sultan was the Antichrist, Satan’s representative on earth; one did not form alliances with him, one went on Crusades against him. Did Francis not bear the papal title of ‘the Most Christian King’? How then could he contemplate dealings with the infidel personified? But, as Thomas Cromwell once remarked, no Christian scruple would deter the King of France from bringing the Turk and the Devil into the heart of Christendom if this could help him recover Milan. And Francis himself cheerfully admitted as much: ‘I cannot deny that I keenly desire the Turk powerful and ready for war, not for himself, because he is an infidel and we are Christians, but to undermine the Emperor’s power, to force heavy expenses upon him and to reassure all other governments against so powerful an enemy.’
None the less, he found himself on a tightrope. He was obliged to keep Europe persuaded of his loyalty to the Christian cause; at the same time it was essential that the Sultan should be constantly reassured, and persuaded that such public statements as he was obliged to make from time to time were of no real significance. He knew too that he needed Suleiman far more than Suleiman needed him: without the Sultan’s help what hope had he of resisting the immense power of the Empire, which hemmed him in both east and west? And how else was he ever to achieve the old Valois dream of ruling Italy?
Peace between France and the Empire, when it came at last, was the result of negotiations begun during the winter of 1528–9 between Francis’s mother, Louise of Savoy, and her sister-in-law (and the emperor’s aunt), Margaret of Austria. The two met at Cambrai on 5 July 1529, and the resulting treaty was signed in the first week of August. The Ladies’ Peace, as it came to be called, was a surprisingly long and complicated document, but it effectively confirmed imperial rule in Italy. Francis renounced all his claims to Milan, Genoa and Naples, for which he and his predecessors had struggled so hard for the best part of forty years; Charles ransomed the king’s sons after all – though he demanded no less than a million ducats – and promised not to press his claims to Burgundy, Provence and the Languedoc. For Francis and his allies in the League of Cognac it was a sad and shameful settlement. But Italy was at peace, and that long and agonising chapter in her history, a chapter that had brought her nothing but devastation and destruction, was over at last.
*
In the autumn of 1532, Francis congratulated himself on something of a diplomatic coup: he had persuaded Pope Clement to give his consent to the marriage between his niece Catherine de’ Medici and the king’s second son, the Duke of Orléans. What was more, the Pope had agreed to be present in person. And so it was that on 11 October 1533, as the shore batteries cannonaded their welcome, a papal fleet of sixty ships dropped anchor in the harbour of Marseille. On the following morning the Pope entered the city in state, accompanied by fourteen of his cardinals. Francis arrived on the 13th, and on the 28th, in the church of Saint-Ferréol les Augustins, Clement pronounced the pair man and wife. Both bride and groom were fourteen years old. The wedding Mass was interminable and followed by a sumptuous banquet and ball. Then at midnight, when both the children must have been utterly exhausted, they were led to the bridal bedchamber – accompanied by Francis, who is said to have remained there until the marriage was properly consummated, afterwards reporting that ‘each had shown valour in the joust’. The next morning, while they were still in bed, they received a visit from the Pope, who added his congratulations and blessings. It was, one feels, all they needed.
Such a ceremony could have been interpreted only as a sign of a Franco–papal alliance; but since no written treaty followed it is impossible to say precisely what it was that Francis and Pope Clement discussed during their many long conversations together. The king would certainly have hammered away at his old obsession of Milan; we know too that the Pope was left in no doubt as to Francis’s feelings about the Turks. ‘Not only will I not oppose the invasion of Christendom by the Turk’, the king allegedly declared, ‘but I will favour him as much as I can, in order the more easily to recover that which plainly belongs to me and my children, and has been usurped by the Emperor.’
When Pope Clement returned to Rome at the end of the year he was already a sick man; and on 25 September 1534 he died. To Francis it came as a serious blow. The new entente for which he had worked so hard was now in ruins. The magnificent marriage of which he had been so proud was suddenly seen as a mésalliance – since the Medici, for all their magnificence, had always been considered a fundamentally bourgeois family and always would be. Had Clement been succeeded by another member of his clan, all would have been well; but the election of Alexander Farnese on 13 October as Pope Paul III meant a complete reappraisal of French policy towards the Holy See. And – as if that was not enough – only five days later came l’affaire des placards.
‘ARTICLES VERITABLES SUR LES HORRIBLES, GRANDS ET IMPORTABLES ABUZ DE LA MESSE PAPALLE’ were the opening words, in large Gothic type, of the placards, or broadsheets, that appeared all over Paris on the morning of Sunday 18 October 1534. The four long paragraphs following took the form of a violent attack on the Catholic Mass, expressed in a language that terrified their readers. The city was swept by a wave of hysteria as the rumours quickly spread: all Catholic churches were to be burnt to the ground; all the Catholic faithful were to be massacred in their places of worship. The panic increased further when it was learned that the placards had not been confined to Paris; they had also been found in Orléans, Tours, Blois and Rouen. One, it was said, had even been discovered fixed to the door of the king’s bedchamber at Amboise, where he was living at the time.
The search for those responsible began at once. Countless arrests were made; several innocent unfortunates were burnt at the stake. And, sadly, Francis seems to have lost his head. What followed was nothing less than an inquisition. All new books were banned. In order, presumably, to defy the terrorists – for it was as such that they were seen – a ‘general procession’ was summoned for 21 January in Paris. The most sacred relics – they included the Crown of Thorns from the Sainte-Chapelle – were removed from the city’s churches and paraded through the streets from Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois to Notre-Dame, the Blessed Sacrament being carried by the Bishop of Paris beneath a canopy borne by the king’s three sons and the Duc de Vendôme. Immediately behind it walked Francis himself, dressed entirely in black, bare-headed and carrying a lighted torch. High Mass was celebrated in the cathedral, after which he and Queen Eleanor were entertained at the bishop’s palace. The king then addressed a large crowd, encouraging his subjects to denounce all heretics, including families and friends. The day ended with another six burnings.
And so the reign of terror continued. Why, one wonders, was there so wild an over-reaction to what had been in fact fairly slight provocation? The answer usually given is that Francis took the placard found at Amboise as a personal affront, but this is not easy to believe.* The truth, surely, is that he had no choice. The provocation seems slight enough; but it did not seem so at the time. The placards, couched as they were in violent and abusive language, attacked the Church, the Mass, the priesthood and, through them, every one of the king’s God-fearing Catholic subjects. Francis could not have ignored them, or even passed them over lightly. He may not have instigated the resulting persecutions, which were more probably ordered by the Parlement; but he could not possibly have withheld his approval.
What is undeniable is that after the affaire des placards France was never – from the religious point of view – the same again. On 1 June 1540 the king issued what was to become known as the Edict of Fontainebleau, which declared that Protestantism was ‘high treason against God and mankind’, and so deserved the appropriate punishments of torture, loss of property, public humiliation and death. Between 1541 and 1544 six Parisian booksellers or printers were persecuted – one was tortured and two were sent to the stake – and in 1542 the Sorbonne began to compile the first index of forbidden books. Henceforth, Protestantism was to be considered a dangerous threat to the State; French Catholics felt themselves to be under siege, and the wars of religion began to cast their shadow. The worst of the atrocities occurred in the little town of Mérindol in the Vaucluse. The victims on this occasion were not Protestants but Waldensians, a Christian sect of ancient origin still existing today who, despite a number of doctrinal differences, had embraced the Protestant Reformation. Somehow they came under the scrutiny of the authorities in Paris, as a result of which, on 18 November 1541, the Parlement issued the so-called Arrêt de Mérindol, effectively the town’s death warrant. Over the next four years several appeals were made, all of them unsuccessful; then, in 1545, there arrived an army of 2,000 men. They showed no mercy, destroying not only the town itself but two dozen neighbouring Waldensian villages. Thousands were killed, thousands more lost their homes, while hundreds of able-bodied men were sent off to the galleys. When it was over, both Francis and Pope Paul announced their enthusiastic approval, the Pope going so far as to decorate the president of the Parlement of Provence, who had been principally responsible for the atrocities.
In 1542 Sultan Suleiman was preparing to lead another of his immense expeditions into central Europe. Having no need of his fleet, he offered to lend it to Francis for the following summer for joint operations against the Empire. Some hundred and twenty vessels left Istanbul in April 1543 and ravaged the coasts of Italy and Sicily – at the king’s request, carefully avoiding the Papal States. At Gaeta the Sultan’s admiral, the former Barbary pirate Kheir-ed-din Barbarossa – now about sixty but obviously feeling a good deal younger – married the governor’s eighteen-year-old daughter: a girl, we are told, of quite startling beauty. His passion for her was said to have hastened his death – but, as many people pointed out at the time, what a way to go. After several weeks of cheerful looting and plundering, the fleet at last arrived at Marseille, where a tremendous welcome awaited it. Barbarossa, himself superbly dressed and encrusted with jewels, was received by the twenty-three-year-old François de Bourbon, Count of Enghien, who presented him with a plethora of priceless gifts, including a silver sword of honour. In return the duke received on behalf of the king a small stable of magnificent Arab horses, all superbly accoutred.
Here – if one was needed – was the perfect illustration of the importance that France attached to her friendship with the Turks; but the celebrations ended badly. Barbarossa had expected to discuss plans for the forthcoming campaign against the Emperor Charles V; he soon discovered that the French, for all their promises and solemn undertakings, had made virtually no serious preparations at all. Their ships were completely unprepared for war; few had even been provisioned. Suddenly, protocol was forgotten: Barbarossa lost his temper. ‘He became scarlet with anger’, wrote an eyewitness, ‘and tore at his beard, furious to have made such a long voyage with such a large fleet and to be condemned in advance to inaction.’ The news was immediately reported to Francis – who did his best to pacify him, ordering the immediate provisioning of several of the Turkish vessels as well as his own; but even then there was serious disagreement on their joint plan of action. Barbarossa had hoped for a direct attack on the emperor in Spain, but for Francis such an operation was clearly impossible: the reproaches of all Christendom would rain down upon his head. He proposed instead an attack on Nice, which was at that time ruled by the staunchly imperialist Duke of Savoy. This was not by any means the sort of campaign that Barbarossa had in mind; but it was the best that could be hoped for. Reluctantly, he was obliged to agree.
If the siege of Nice in August 1543 is remembered at all in the city today, it is because of the courage of its heroine. Early in the morning of the 15th, heavy bombardment from Barbarossa’s galleys opened a breach in the walls near one of the principal towers. The French and Turks poured through it, and a Turkish standard-bearer was about to plant his flag on the tower when a local washerwoman – her name was Catherine Ségurane – seized it from his hands and, with a few brave men whom she had summoned to support her, led a furious counter-attack. The invaders were beaten back, leaving three hundred dead behind them. Nice was saved, temporarily; but for all her heroism Catherine had only delayed the inevitable.* Just a week later, on the 22nd, the governor of the city formally surrendered. In doing so, he was entitled – and doubtless expected – to be offered honourable terms, but over the next two days Nice was sacked and put to the torch. Inevitably the Turks were blamed; in fact it was almost certainly the French who were responsible. Such at least was the opinion of the Marquis de Vieilleville, who dictated his memoirs shortly before his death in 1571: ‘The city of Nice was plundered and burned, for which neither Barbarossa nor the Saracens can be blamed … Responsibility for the outrage was thrown at poor Barbarossa to protect the honour and reputation of France, and indeed of Christianity itself.’
The siege and capture of Nice was the first and last joint operation of the Franco-Turkish alliance. The sight of Christians fighting Christians with the help of infidels left many deeply shocked; but that was only the beginning. Barbarossa now demanded that his entire fleet should be refitted and revictualled, and Francis had no choice but to invite him to occupy Toulon for the winter. Many of the town’s inhabitants, brought up on hideous tales of Turkish atrocities, left in terror; to the astonishment, however, of those who remained, Barbarossa imposed an iron discipline and, in the words of a French diplomat, ‘never did an army live more strictly or in better order’. The only drawback was the expense: Francis was obliged to pay 30,000 ducats a month; Provence and the whole surrounding area were savagely taxed in consequence. To make matters worse, the old ruffian did not seem in any hurry to leave; nor indeed did his men, who were predictably enchanted by what was, for most of them, their first experience of the Côte d’Azur. Finally, however, it was made clear that they were seriously outstaying their welcome, and in April 1544 Barbarossa – having at the last moment completed his revictualling operations by ransacking five French ships in the harbour – returned to a hero’s welcome in Istanbul.
In the first weeks of 1545 Francis fell desperately ill. Already in January he was suffering an agonisingly painful abscess ‘in his lower parts’. It was repeatedly opened and drained, and in early February he was sufficiently recovered to leave Paris on a litter for the Loire valley. He was, he told the imperial ambassador, quite restored to health, ‘albeit dead in respect of the ladies’. But there was more trouble in March, and as the year went on he grew steadily weaker. Not for a moment did he relax his grip on government, and foreign ambassadors seldom failed to comment on his knowledge and understanding of international affairs; but by the autumn of 1546 it was clear that he had not long to live. At the end of January 1547, when he was at Amboise, there came the news of the death of Henry VIII; Francis tried to return to Paris, where he planned a memorial service at Notre-Dame; but when he reached Rambouillet he found he could go no further. He died there, in the early afternoon of Thursday 31 March. He was fifty-two.
The funeral ceremonies lasted over two months. Perhaps their most curious feature was the continued service, for eleven days from the end of April, of meals for the dead king. While his remarkably life-like effigy – by François Clouet – lay on a bed of state in the great hall of the Château de Saint-Cloud, these were served exactly as if he were still alive: the table was laid, the courses brought in one by one, the wine poured out twice at each meal. At the end, grace was said by a cardinal. Not till 11 May was the king’s coffin taken on a wagon to Notre-Dame and thence, after a short service, to its final resting place in the Abbey of Saint-Denis. There the new king, Henry II – whose filial conscientiousness was exemplary, though Francis never liked him much – commissioned an exquisite tomb from the architect Philibert de l’Orme: Francis and Queen Claude lie together, as it were in state, on a high plinth, while their naked and worm-eaten bodies repose below.
* ‘The most beautiful of scholars, the most scholarly of beauties’.
* Clement was in fact Leo’s second successor. In between came the mildly ridiculous Adrian VI, but he need not concern us here.
* Less than two years earlier, in January 1533, three armed strangers had been found in the king’s chamber in the Louvre; Francis’s only reaction had been to ask the Parlement to show more vigilance at night.
* According to another version of the story, Catherine showed her heroism by turning her back to the Turkish forces and exposing her bare bottom, the sight of which is said to have so shocked the sensibilities of the Muslim infantry that they turned tail and fled. A memorial plaque, with an illustration in bas-relief, was erected in 1923 near the supposed location of her action; regrettably, it illustrates the first version of the story rather than the second.