Burgundy, and England. But the conflict again terminated in favour of Louis; Francis was deprived of the county of Vertus, and swore new allegiance with peculiar solemnities. After the accession of Charles VIII., under the regency of his sister, the lady of Beaujeu, a number of the Breton nobles, discontented with the policy of the duke and his minister, Landais, formed a French party, and agreed in the treaty of Montargis that the fief should revert to the crown at the death of Francis. Hostilities followed, and in 1488 a disastrous battle destroyed the last hope of maintaining the independence of the duchy. Ultimately the marriage of Anne, the duke's eldest daughter and heir, with the French king, added the states of her deceased father to the ascendant monarchy.—W. B.
Francis I., Duke of Lorraine, born in 1517, was educated at the court of France, and succeeded his father Antonio in 1544. He was employed in negotiating a peace betwixt Charles V. and the French king, when he was struck with apoplexy, from the effects of which he died in 1545.—W. B.
Francis II., Duke of Lorraine, grandson of the preceding, inherited the duchy in 1624, after his father, Charles III., and his brother Henry; but in the course of the same year he resigned it to his son, Charles IV. He had previously acted as commander of the Venetian army against the pope. His second son, Nicolas, held the ducal sceptre after Charles; and one of his daughters was married to Gaston, duke of Orleans.—W. B.
Francis of Alençon. See Alençon.
Francis de Lorraine. See Guise.
ITALY.
Francis I. (Gennaro Giuseppe), King of the Two Sicilies, born in 1777, was the son of Ferdinand I. and Mary-Caroline of Austria. In early life he appeared to sympathize with liberal ideas, and to feel deeply the disgrace which his father had brought upon the kingdom by allowing it to become a prey to the ambition of Queen Caroline and her favourites. In Sicily he favoured the liberal party, and, together with Lord Bentinck, furthered the restoration of the constitution in 1812. Later, however, he offered no opposition to the absolutist system of government, which was enforced by Ferdinand under the influence of Austria; and when in 1821 the king, breaking through all his promises, returned from Laybach with an Austrian army to put down the constitutional institutions, Francis (then duke of Calabria) was persuaded to side with the reactionary party. In 1825, at the death of his father, he succeeded to the throne, but preserved unbroken the tradition of the paternal misgovernment. The annals of his short reign are infamous for the venality and the peculations which characterized all branches of public administration. He considerably increased the financial difficulties of the state by an expensive journey to Madrid, on the occasion of the marriage of his daughter, Maria Christina, with Ferdinand VII. of Spain. When he returned to Naples, his health having been long undermined by disorderly habits, gave way altogether, and he died in 1830.—A. S., O.
* Francis II., King of the Two Sicilies, was born on the 16th January, 1816, married in 1839 Maria Sophia Amelia, a Bavarian princess, and in May of the same year succeeded his father, Ferdinand II. On his accession it was hoped that the young monarch would inaugurate a new and more beneficent era of Neapolitan government. But under the influence of the Austrian party at Naples, the new king showed himself resolved to tread in the footsteps of his father. The old system of espionage and military imprisonment was resorted to, and the friends of Neapolitan and Sicilian freedom saw no escape from intolerable oppression save in an insurrectionary movement. In the spring of the present year (1860) an insurrection broke out in Sicily, and Garibaldi soon appeared upon the scene. With the successes of that patriotic chief (see Garibaldi) King Francis, wise too late, altered his system, proclaimed a general amnesty and a constitution, and summoned a liberal ministry to his councils. In vain. The continued victories of Garibaldi, and his rapid advance upon Naples, left Francis II. no choice, and on the 6th of September he abandoned his capital, which on the following day was entered by the triumphant general. The dethroned monarch issued a protesting manifesto before leaving Naples with his treasure and a portion of his troops for Gaeta, where his future policy remains to be shaped. The scathing eloquence of Lord Brougham in his opening address at the Social Science Congress at Glasgow, September 24, 1860, has pourtrayed him upon the page of history as with encaustic colours, never to be effaced. "The blood-thirsty and pitiful, though unpitying creature, composed of cruelty, falsehood, and cowardice, after the massacre of his unoffending subjects, durst not face either the vengeance of the survivors or abide the coming of their deliverer, but at the distant sound of his approach fled from the throne he had polluted and disgraced, with the booty his pillage had amassed. Young in years to have perpetrated such crimes! but Caligula died at eight-and-twenty, and Heliogabalus at eighteen."—F. E.
Francis IV., Duke of Modena, born in 1779, son of Ferdinand, archduke of Austria, and of Beatrice d'Este, who was the last representative of her house, and who brought him as her dowry Modena, Reggio, and la Mirandola. When the French revolution of 1830 broke out, he conspired with Giro Menotti and the Italian patriots, with no less an object in view than that of becoming king of Italy. As, however, he thought himself outstripped by the liberals, he ferociously turned against them, put down with the help of an Austrian army the revolution of 1831, and having succeeded in securing Menotti, his former friend, he caused him, on his return to Modena, to be hung from the battlements of the castle in sight of the horrified citizens. Giuseppe Ricci and many others fell victims to his fury on mere suspicion, and his government continued to be one of the worst specimens of oppression. Canosa, formerly the scourge of Naples, was his chief agent and counsellor. The duke died in 1846. He had married Maria Beatrice, daughter of Victor Emmanuel I., king of Piedmont, by whom he had several children. His eldest son—
* Francis V., Duke of Modena, born in 1819, was dispossessed of his estates by the revolution of 1859. He married in 1842 the Princess Adelgonda of Bavaria. In 1848 he was driven out of Modena at the time of the Lombard insurrection, but recovered his dominions after the defeat of the Piedmontese army and the surrender of Milan to Radetzki. He ruled during the last ten years under the auspices of Austria, and proved equal to his father in everything except resolution and boldness Among other reactionary measures, he abolished civil marriage, and countenanced in all points the encroachments of the ultramontane party. When the national war of independence broke out again in 1859, he fled to the Austrian camp, where he remained an idle spectator of the struggle.—A. S., O.
FRANCIS, Saint, of Assisi, the founder of the order of Franciscans or Grey Friars, was born in 1182 at Assisi in the district of Spoleto in Italy. His father, Pietro Bernardone, was a merchant, and after giving him a good, though not a very liberal education, took him into his own business; but young Francesco was fonder of gaiety and soldiering than of trade, and for some years was regarded as the flower of the Assisian youth. A dangerous illness into which he fell proved the crisis of his life. When he recovered from it, he found himself a new man—the young gallant was changed into a devotee; and instead of the pursuits of pleasure and war he devoted himself to the care of the sick and dying. Having gone on pilgrimage to Rome, he begged for the poor at the doors of the churches, and while kneeling in prayer imagined that he heard a voice from heaven addressing him, and calling him to the mission of building up again the fallen church of God. Interpreting this miraculous voice at first too literally, he set himself, on his return to Assisi, to the work of repairing the church of Maria Portiuncula, which had fallen into ruins; and for that purpose he sold not only his own horse, but some stuffs belonging to his father—an immoral act, which revealed the morbid character of the religious excitement which had seized him, and for which he was compelled for a time to leave Assisi. But he returned again ere long; and in two years he completed the restoration of the church, which he made choice of as his abode and the centre of his influence. It was during these two years that he first assumed the function of a preacher of repentance, and began to draw around him the earliest members of the celebrated order which afterwards bore his name. It was a sermon which he heard at this time upon Matthew x. 9, 10, which gave him the first impulse. Understanding the text quite literally, he parted with purse, shoes, and staff; and assuming a gown of coarse stuff, fitted with a hood of the same, and tied at the waist with a cord instead of a girdle, he sallied forth to preach in the town and the surrounding villages, content to live upon the alms of the people—the first example of a mendicant friar, a class which soon became the most numerous and the most powerful
