adversary. His first demands were that Francis should restore the dutchy of Burgundy, which, as we have seen, was dishonorably wrested from his ancestors by Louis XI.; that Provence and Dauphine should be erected into an independent kingdom for the constable of Bourbon; that satisfaction should be made to the king of England for his claims on France; and that all the pretensions of France to territories in Italy should be renounced for ever. Francis was so indignant at being required to make such ignominious concessions, that he drew his dagger, and made an attempt to commit suicide; he was, of course, prevented, and it was hinted that a personal interview with the emperor would lead to the offer of more equitable conditions. Francis himself was of the same opinion. He was sent in a Spanish galley to Barcelona, whence he was removed to Madrid; but on reaching that city, he was sent to the Alcazar, and guarded more carefully than ever: and it ap peared evident that the king's reliance on the emperor's generosity had been wholly misplaced.

But this triumph, which seemed to have made Charles master of Italy and arbiter of Europe, so far from yielding the substantial advantages which might reasonably have been expected, served only to array against him the jealousy of England, of the Italian states, and of the protestant princes of Germany. At the same time, the disorganized condition of his finances, and the consequent difficulty of finding pay, subsistence, or the munitions of war, for his soldiers, reduced his Italian armies to inactivity in the very moment of victory. Henry VIII. was the first of the imperial allies to set the example of defection; he entered into a defensive alliance with Louise, the queen-regent of France, in which all the differences between him and her son were adjusted; at the same time he engaged that he would employ his best offices in order to deliver his new ally from a state of captivity. Imprisonment soor began to produce such injurious effects on the mental and bodily health of Francis, that Charles began to fear that all his plans might be frustrated by the death of his captive, and he therefore sought a personal interview with him, in which he held out a hope of milder conditions of liberation.

The chief obstacle that stood in the way of Francis's liberty was the emperor's continuing to insist so peremptorily on the restitution of Burgundy as a preliminary to that event. But the history of Burgundy while an independent dutchy, as detailed in preceding sections, sufficiently proves that compliance with such a demand would have reduced the monarch of France to a state of complete dependance on his nominal vassals. Francis often declared that he would never consent to dismember his kingdom; and that, if even he should so far forget the duties of a monarch as to come to such a resolution, the fundamental laws of the kingdom would prevent its taking effect. Finding that the emperor was inflexible on the point, he suddenly took the resolution of resigning his crown, with all its rights and prerogatives, to his son the dauphin, determining rather to end his days in prison than to purchase his freedom by concessions unworthy of a king.

Charles was so alarmed by this resolution, that he consented to modify his demands so far as not to insist on the restitution of Burgundy until the king was set at liberty. The remaining conditions of the

treaty were sufficiently onerous; but a few hours before signing them, Francis assembled such of his counsellors as happened to be in Madrid, and having exacted from them a solemn oath of secresy, he made a long enumeration in their presence of the dishonorable acts as well as unprincely rigor which the emperor had employed in order to ensnare or intimidate him. For that reason, he took a formal protest in the hands of notaries that his consent to the treaty should be considered as an involuntary deed, and be deemed null and void. By this disingenuous artifice, for which the treatment he had received was no apology, Francis endeavored to satisfy his honor and conscience in signing the treaty, and to provide at the same time a pretext on which to break it.

About a month after the signing of the treaty, the regent's ratification of it was brought from France, and two princes of the blood sent as hostages for its execution. At last Francis took leave of the emperor, whose suspicion of the king's sincerity increasing as the time of putting it to the proof approached, he attempted to bind him still faster by exacting new promises, which, after those he had already made, the French monarch was not slow to grant. He set out from Madrid, a place which the remembrance of so many afflicting circumstances rendered peculiarly odious to him, with the joy natural on such an occasion, and began the long-wished-for journey toward his own dominions. He was escorted by a body of horse, under the command of Alarçon, who, as the king drew near the frontiers of France, guarded him with more scrupulous exactness than ever. When he arrived at the river Andaye, which separates the two kingdoms, Lautrec, one of his favorite gene«als, appeared on the opposite bank, with a guard equal in number to Alarçon's. An empty bark was moored in the middle of the stream; <he attendants drew up in order on the opposite banks; at the same instant Launoy put off with eight gentlemen from the Spanish, and Lautrec with the same number from the French side of the river; the former had the king in his boat; the latter the two princely hostages, the dauphin and the duke of Orleans; they met in the empty vessel; the exchange was made in a moment; Francis, after a short embrace of his children, leaped into Lautrec's boat, and reached the French shore. He mounted at that instant a Turkish horse, waved his hand over his head, and, with a joyous voice, cried aloud several times, “I am yet a king!" then, putting spurs to his horse, he galloped at full speed to St. Jean de Luz, and thence to Bayonne. This event, no less impatiently desired by the French people than their monarch, happened on the 18th of March, 1526, a year and twenty-two days after the fatal battle of Pavia.

The states of Burgundy afforded Francis the first opportunity of refusing to fulfil the conditions of his liberation. They represented to the monarch that he had no right to make a transfer of their allegiance without their consent, and that they would rather assert their independence than submit to a foreign dominion. Upon this, Francis, turning toward the imperial ambassadors, represented to them the impossibility of performing what he had undertaken, and offered, in lieu of Burgundy, to pay the emperor two millions of crowns. The ambassadors, who were well aware that the entire scene had been concerted between the

king and the states, refused to admit any modification of the treaty, they returned to Madrid, and Charles, who perceived that he had been overreached, exclaimed in the most public manner and in the harshest terms against Francis, as a prince void of faith and honor. The French king, on the other hand, asserted that no promise obtained by force was binding, and easily obtained from the pope a full absolution from all the obligations which he had contracted.

During this period, Germany was cruelly harassed by insurrections of the peasants, goaded to madness by the oppressions of their lords. In Thuringia, where a great part of the population had been converted to Lutheranism, Muncer, a wild fanatic, became the leader of the insurgents, and by stimulating their ignorant zeal, added religious bigotry to the horrors of civil war. Luther sincerely lamented the scandal that these disturbances brought on the cause of the reformation; but his own marriage with a nun who had broken her vows, gave such general offence, that his influence, for a season, was greatly diminished.

Francis was not long at liberty before he not only protested against the treaty of Madrid and refused to fulfil any of its stipulations, but organized a new league against Charles, which was named "Holy," because the pope was its nominal head. The Venetians, the duke of Milan, and the English king, joined the confederacy; but their operations were so slow and feeble, that the imperialists easily maintained their ascendency in the north of Italy. The constable of Bourbon, irritated by the vacillating conduct of the pope, marched against Rome, heedless of the truce that had been granted to the pontiff by the viceroy of Naples. "The eternal city" was taken by assault, and suffered more severely from the soldiers of a catholic king than from the barbarous pagans of an earlier age. Bourbon fell in the assault; but the command of the imperialists devolved on the prince of Orange, who be sieged the pope in the castle of St. Angelo, and compelled him to yield himself a prisoner (A. D. 1527). Charles received the intelligence of this success with contemptible hypocrisy; he professed the most sincere sorrow for the captivity of the holy pontiff, and ordered prayers to be offered for his deliverance in all the Spanish churches, instead of sending orders for his liberation. So great was the indignation excited by the harsh treatment of the pope, that Francis was enabled to invade Ita.y and penetrate to the very walls of Naples. But here his prosperity ended; the pope, liberated from captivity, resolved to conciliate the emperor; the Venetians became jealous of the French power, and, finally, the Gencese hero, Andrew Doria, roused by the wrongs which Francis had inflicted on himself and his country, revolted to the emperor, and turned the scale of the war by making the imperialists superior at sea. Doria's first care was to restore the republic of Genoa; and such was the opinion entertained of his patriotism and disinterestedness, that he was universally called "THE FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY AND THE RESTORER OF ITS LIBERTY" (A. D. 1528). These circumstances, and the defeat of his army in the Milanese, inclined Francis to peace; a treaty was negotiated at Cambray by the emperor's aunt and the king's mother, but the fair diplomatists left enough of disputable points unsettled to furnish grounds for a future war.

Charles having thus prevailed over France, resolved to make a vigorous

struggle to crush the reformation in Germany, but the protestant princes, undismayed by his power, formed a league for their mutual protection at Smalkald (A. D. 1530), and applied to the kings of France and England to patronise their confederacy. Henry VIII. was eager to grant them support; he was desirous to be divorced from his wife, Catharine of Aragon, the emperor's aunt, and attributed the pope's reluctance to the intrigues of Charles. Hostilities were for a time averted by the emperor's making some important concessions, for he was anxious to have his brother Ferdinand chosen as his successor, with the title of king of the Romans, and the progress of the Turks, on his eastern frontiers, could only be resisted by the united strength of the empire.

Francis had concluded peace at Cambray, because he was no longer able to maintain war. He sought the earliest opportunity of renewing hostilities, and secured the friendship of the pope, by uniting his son, the duke of Orleans, to the pontiff's niece, Catherine de Medicis. But, though he thus gained one ally, he lost others. Henry VIII., inflamed by love of Anne Boleyn, and enraged by the pope's confirmation of his marriage with Catharine, no longer kept any measures with the court of Rome; his subjects seconded his resentment; an act of parliament was passed, abolishing the papal power and jurisdiction in England (A. D. 1534); by another act, the king was declared supreme head of the church, and all the authority of which the popes were deprived, was vested in him. Henry was thus disinclined to support the pope's ally, and the protestant princes of Germany viewed Francis with some suspicion, because he persecuted the reformed in his own dominions. The death of Clement VII., and the election of Paul III., an adherent of the emperor, suddenly deprived Francis of the papal aid, on which he had confidently calculated, and compelled him to delay his projects for troubling the peace of Europe.

The insurrection of the anabaptists, a new set of fanatics in Germany, and the emperor's expedition against the piratical states of Barbary, employed men's minds for a season. The suppression of the fanatics, and the conquest of Tunis, crowned the emperor with glory, yet it was at this moment that Francis chose to renew the war (A. D. 1535). Savoy was immediately overrun by the French troops, and its unfortunate duke in vain implored the aid of the emperor, whose resources had been exhausted in the African war. It was on this occasion that Charles challenged his rival to single combat, in which proposal he only imitated the former follies of Francis. On the other hand, the death of the dauphin, amid the joy occasioned by the repulse of the imperialists, who had invaded Provence, was absurdly attributed to poison, administered by emissaries of Charles. To complete the exhibition of folly, Francis summoned Charles, as count of Flanders, to appear before the parliament of Paris, and on his refusal, he was declared to have forfeited the Low Countries to his feudal superior. The war itself was languidly conducted, but the pope, alarmed by the progress of the Turks, personally interfered, and a truce for ten years was concluded between the two sovereigns at Nice (A. D. 1538).

The religious disputes in Germany between the princes of the protestant and those of the catholic league, the struggles made by the pope to prevent the meeting of a general council, unless under circum

stances that would give him complete control over its deliberations, filled Charles with anxiety, which was not a little increased by the turbulent disposition of his Flemish subjects, and the success of the Turks in Hungary. Notwithstanding all these difficulties, he undertook an expedition against Algiers (A. D. 1541), but his fleet was shattered by a storm, his army wasted by a pestilential disease, and his stores of provision rendered unavailing. He was compelled to return, overwhelmed with loss and disgrace, and his defeat raised the courage of his enemies so high that he had to encounter a new war in Europe.

Francis was eager to take advantage of his rival's distress, and the crime of the imperial governor of the Milanese furnished him with a derent pretext. This imprudent functionary seized two ambassadors, sent from the Parisian court to Turkey, and put them to death, in direct violation of the law of nations. Francis now changed his plan of operations; acting on the defensive in Italy, he invaded the Netherlands and Rousillon (A. D. 1542), but failed to make any permanent impression. Charles found an ally in the king of England: the death of his aunt nad removed the great source of enmity between the emperor and Henry, and the close alliance between France and Scotland, recently cemented by the marriage of the Scotch king, James V., to a French princess, Mary of Guise, had excited great jealousy and alarm in England. Henry, with his usual, impetuosity, having introduced the reformation into England, became anxious that Scotland should also withdraw its allegiance from the pope, and endeavored to win his nephew James to adopt his plan, by the most advantageous offers. The influence of the Scottish clergy prevailed over that of the English monarch, and Henry in his fury proclaimed war against Scotland. In the midst of these troubles, James V. died leaving his dominions to his infant daughter Mary, the celebrated and unfortunate queen of Scots. This changed all Henry's plans; he aimed at uniting the two kingdoms, by effecting a marriage between his son Edward and Mary, but he knew that this could only be affected by crushing the French party in Scotland, and eager to accomplish this object he readily entered into the alliance against Francis.

The French monarch, on the other hand, entered into close union with the Turks, and courted the support of the German protestants; but the princes of the empire refused to join so bitter a persecutor of the reformed doctrines, and his only ally, the duke of Cleves, was forced to submit to Charles. The sultan afforded him more effective support; he invaded Hungary in person, and sent the celebrated admiral and pirate, Barbarossa, to join the French in invading Italy. Nice was besieged by their united forces; to the astonishment and scandal of all Christendom, the lilies of France and the crescent of Mohammed appeared in conjunction against a fortress, on which the cross of Savoy was displayed. The allies were finally compelled to raise the siege, and Francis had not even the poor consolation of success, in return for the infainy of having taken as auxiliaries the deadly enemies of Christianity. The battle of Cerisoles (A. D. 1544) gave his arms the fame of useless victory, but it did not prevent the contemporary invasion of France by the emperor on the side of Lorraine, and the English through Calais. Had Charles and Henry acted in concert, Francis must have