Читать книгу The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France - R. Knecht J. - Страница 57

Francis’s captivity lasted just over a year, until 17 March 1526. In his absence France was governed by his mother from the abbey of Saint-Just, near Lyon, assisted by Duprat and by Robertet. Their first task was to provide for the kingdom’s defence. Pavia had not ended the war. France continued to be threatened with invasion for several months, mainly from England. ‘Now is the time’, Henry VIII wrote, ‘for the emperor and myself to devise means of getting full satisfaction from France. Not an hour is to be lost.’ He sent an embassy to Spain with proposals for the dismemberment of France. Henry hoped to be crowned in Paris and to recover all that was his ‘by just title of inheritance’. At the very least, he expected to acquire Normandy or Picardy and Boulogne.

Henry assessed the situation correctly: France had been largely denuded of troops, armaments and supplies in the interest of Francis’s Italian campaign. Such troops as remained in the north were unpaid and lived off the countryside, striking terror in villages and even in the suburbs of Paris. In the south the situation was less critical, as remnants of the royal army drifted back across the Alps. In April, Albany’s troops returned home by sea almost intact. But the regent could only pay some of them; the rest she sent north to swell the marauding bands. A joint invasion by Henry VIII and Charles V would almost certainly have brought the kingdom to its knees; but Henry failed to get the co-operation of Charles, who had to cope with many urgent problems in various corners of Europe. His troops in Italy were unpaid and mutinous, if they had not already deserted. In Germany the Peasants’ War was threatening the very fabric of society, while further east the Turkish threat loomed large. The Sultan Suleiman, having conquered Rhodes in 1522, was preparing to attack Hungary whose king, Louis II, was Charles V’s brother-in-law.

In providing for the defence of France, Louise of Savoy concentrated her efforts on Burgundy. She posted lookouts along the River Saône and sent the comte de Guise to inspect the province’s fortifications. However, in June 1525 her cousin Margaret of Savoy, governor of the Netherlands, renewed the truce neutralizing the frontier dividing the two Burgundies. In the north, Louise relied on help from the parlement. It purchased and sent grain to towns in Picardy and persuaded the Parisian authorities to send arms and ammunition.

Perhaps the most important task facing the regent was to maintain the king’s authority. Some people believed that the regency should be exercised by the king’s nearest adult male kinsman and an attempt was apparently made to put the duc de Vendôme in Louise’s place, but he refused to act in a way likely to divide the kingdom. In March 1525 the parlement assured Louise of its support, but it was keen to reverse the trend towards a more absolute, less consultative, monarchy.

On 23 March the parlement set up a commission to draw up remonstrances for presentation to the regent. Normally, remonstrances were concerned with a particular piece of legislation, but the commissioners chose to examine a wide range of royal policies. They saw the hand of God in the misfortunes that had befallen the kingdom. Penitence and prayer were needed to put matters right, but also measures to root out heresy. Here the parlement was tilting at Marguerite d’Angoulême’s protection of the Cercle de Meaux and at royal interference with the Berquin trial. The parlement also called for the annulment of the Concordat with the Holy See and for a return to the Pragmatic Sanction. It objected to the government’s use of évocations whereby lawsuits were referred to the Grand conseil, which was under the king’s immediate influence. Another area of concern was the fiscal administration. The parlement believed that fiscal officials were thieves and that public money was being wasted. It deplored alienations of the royal demesne regardless of the ‘fundamental law’ that forbade the practice.

When the regent received the remonstrances on 10 April she described them as ‘to the honour of God, exaltation of the faith, and very useful and necessary to the good of the king and commonwealth’. She explained that the Concordat could be revoked only by the king, but promised to satisfy the parlement’s other demands. However, Louise never again spoke about the remonstrances, and only in respect of heresy did she go some way towards meeting the parlement’s wishes. Recent disturbances at Meaux had alarmed the parlement. Bishop Briçonnet was ordered to set up a tribunal comprising two parlementaires and two theologians to try heresy cases. Its competence, which was at first limited to his diocese, was soon extended to include all dioceses within the parlement’s ressort or area of jurisdiction, in effect removing heresy cases from the episcopal courts which had traditionally judged them. The parlement also wanted the new court to try bishops suspected of heresy, but this required papal consent. On 29 April, Louise asked Clement VII for the necessary rescript, which he duly conceded. As the new judges thus exercised papal jurisdiction, they became known as the juges délégués (delegated judges). An appeals procedure was set up from them to the parlement, which consequently achieved overall control of heresy cases.

The parlement took advantage of the king’s absence to launch an attack on religious dissenters. In February 1526 heresy was defined so broadly as to take in even the smallest deviation from religious orthodoxy. The censorship of books was tightened up, printers and booksellers being forbidden to publish or stock religious works in French. The parlement was particularly anxious to seize copies of Lefèvre d’Etaples’ Epitres et évangiles des cinquante et deux dimanches which had been published anonymously. However, books were not the only victims of the persecution. The juges délégués were asked to prosecute Lefèvre, Caroli, Mazurier and Roussel. This attack on the Cercle de Meaux prompted Francis’s only known intervention in the domestic affairs of his kingdom during his captivity. In November 1525 he ordered the parlement to suspend proceedings against Lefèvre, Caroli and Roussel, holding them to be innocent victims of persecution by the ‘Sorbonne’. But the parlement stuck to its guns: on 29 November the juges délégués were instructed by the court to press on with their activities regardless. Lefèvre and Caroli fled to Strassburg, while Mazurier recanted. As for Briçonnet, he decided to fall into line with orthodoxy. Another victim was Berquin, who was rearrested in January 1526, found guilty of heresy and sent to the parlement to be sentenced, but the court desisted when it learned that Francis was about to come home.

A serious bone of contention between the regent and the parlement was the Concordat. On 24 February 1525, Etienne Poncher, archbishop of Sens and abbot of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, died. In response to a request from Chancellor Duprat, who had recently taken holy orders, Louise appointed him to both benefices. However, both Sens and Saint-Benoît were exempt from the Concordat’s provisions and the chapters proceeded to elect their superiors: Jean de Salazar at Sens and François Poncher (Etienne’s nephew) at Saint-Benoît. Duprat promptly appealed to the papacy which quashed the elections; the chapters appealed to the parlement. A protracted legal struggle ensued which was inflamed when Duprat sent an armed force to occupy Saint-Benoît, and the parlement tried to dislodge it. The regent evoked both lawsuits to the Grand conseil which consequently found itself in dispute with the parlement. On 24 June the two courts were ordered to hand over the lawsuits to a special commission appointed by Louise. At the same time she sent troops to Paris, presumably to force the parlement’s compliance.

The quarrel was given a dangerous new twist in July, when the parlement mounted an attack on Duprat, whom it had never forgiven for his part in securing the Concordat. He was summoned to Paris to answer certain charges, but the regent would not let him go. She asked for an explanation of the parlement’s conduct and kept its representatives waiting several weeks before granting them an audience. Her procrastination paid off. The parlement dropped its attack on the chancellor and agreed not to judge the affairs of Sens and Saint-Benoît if the Grand conseil would do likewise. This satisfied Louise, who allowed matters to rest there until her son’s return.