CHAPTER EIGHT
RESURRECTING KING AND REFORM, 15251530
Francis I’s captivity was among the most dramatic as well as self-con- sciously dramatized episodes in Marguerite’s life. When her brother was at the lowest point of his reign and her network was being crushed, Marguerite employed her considerable creativity and guile to ‘resurrect’ them both. Extending her metaphor, one might say that aft er Francis I returned to the kingdom, evangelicals still had to wait another four years for their Pentecost. Only when the king’s children were ransomed in 1530 did they receive Marguerite’s blessing to pursue the evangelical cause more openly.
Th e King in Captivity and Reform in Exile, 1525–1526
Th e captivity of Francis I gravely endangered the royal regime and forced it to mature politically. In foreign aff airs, the crown had no alternatives and so was required to hone its crude diplomatic skills. On the home front, it had to face down the defi ance of the Parlement of Paris, which voiced years of mounting discontent with Francis’s rule. In response to the fi rst challenge, the crown quickly became adept at forming and running a multi-party alliance scheme to check Charles V’s military advantage. So, too, the crown eff ectively neutralized its domestic critics by making empty promises and by sacrifi cing on the altar of orthodoxy the heretics whom conservatives claimed had pro- voked God’s wrath. Pavia exhausted France’s military options against the Hapsburg lands and England, and, to turn Karl von Clausewitz’s dictum on its head, they turned to diplomacy as a form of war by other means. On the eve of the Valois-Hapsburg clash, although France had begun its long cul- tural and political tutelage under Italian masters, it was not yet skilled in the arts of the courtier or the ambassador.1 At the end of the 1510s,
1 Garret Mattingly argues cogently that, until the 1520s, compared with the Eng- lish or Spanish, the French were unskilled in diplomacy and had an underdeveloped 316 chapter eight
France’s diplomatic corps remained underdeveloped and was little used either to prevent war or to serve French strategy during it.2 Aft er the start of hostilities, Francis I only had resident ambassadors in Venice, Rome, and the Swiss cantons. In English aff airs, Francis I’s personal détente at the sensational Field of the Cloth of Gold (June 1520) failed to prevent Henry VIII from secretly joining the emperor in 1521.3 A fl urry of envoys sent to the German princes in 1518–1519 ended aft er Francis lost his bid for the imperial crown. Although Charles V rec- ognized that the princes of the Empire might serve as a French fi ft h column with the advent of the Luther aff air, Francis did not see their
ambassadorial corps. Th e latter assertion is certainly true, for the number of resident ambassadors and envoys sent from and to France increases markedly aft er 1525. See Garret Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1955; repr. Bal- timore: Penguin, 1964), 148–151; CAF 9, passim. Francis I had an early and abiding interest in Baldessare Castiglione’s Th e Book of the Courtier (Il libro del corteggiano), which when published in 1528 did not contain a fl attering passage that the king had earlier inspired the author to put in. Th e king’s reader, Jacques Colin, translated this work for him in 1529. See Knecht, Renaissance Warrior, 6, 8, and 473. 2 Mattingly also argues that the election of Charles V caused a fundamental, destabi- lizing shift in the political landscape of Europe by reducing the number of major powers from four (the Hapsburg lands, Spain, France, and England) to three (the Hapsburg lands now including Spain, France, and England), upsetting the “multiple balance of power” envisioned by Cardinal Wolsey in the Treaty of London (4 October 1518). On the wrong side of this imbalance, France was in desperate need of the advantages that diplomacy could aff ord against its more powerful Hapsburg rival and woefully ill-equipped to secure them. Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, 144–148. Scholars are agreed that the Valois-Hapsburg rivalry dominated international rela- tions in Western European during the fi rst half of the sixteenth century. Recent inter- preters, however, describe this battle as principally a dynastic fi ght for preponderance in Italy, rejecting an older interpretation that accepted early sixteenth-century rhetoric (Charles V as the new Charlemagne, etc.) that portrayed Charles as seeking to encircle France and achieve hegemony (monarchie or monarchia) over Western Europe. Th e following draws on Knecht, Renaissance Warrior, chapters 8, 10, and 11, and Richard Bonney, Th e European Dynastic States, 1494–1660, Th e Short Oxford History of the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 79–130, esp. 79–80, 99–104, and 109–110. For the older view, see H. G. Koenigsberger and George L. Mosse, chapter on “Empires” in idem, Europe in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), 174–211, esp. 180–182. 3 France’s exchange of resident ambassadors with England ceased in June 1522, when England joined with the Hapsburgs; see CAF 9, 17–21, 93–96. While at war with England, the French sent three envoys to Henry VIII from June 1524 to April 1525 to seek peace. Th e permanent French mission to England then recommenced in June 1525. Although Mattingly incorrectly asserts that France had no representatives in England before the war, he is certainly correct that they did little to forestall England from siding with the emperor.