Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886)/Chapter 5
(1524–1525).
SEQUELS.
Hélas, La Palice est mort,
Il est mort devant Pavie;
Hélas, s'il n'estoit pas mort
Il seroit encore en vie.
Quand le roi partit de France
À la malheur il partit,
Il en partit le dimanche
Et le Lundi il fust pris.
Francis was not satisfied that he had preserved his kingdom, and secured his crown. A second time he determined to reconquer Milan. Against Louisa's earnest prayers he crossed the Alps again, to fight for that Milanese which her bitterness had lost him; and across the Alps with him went many a gallant gentleman who never should return. Bayard and Bonnivet and La Palice should fall upon the field; Alençon return to die of a broken spirit; Montmorency and young Navarre, with the King himself, should fall into a long captivity. But these were all impatient then to fight the Emperor, because the traitor Bourbon was sheltered in his army.
The presence of Bourbon in the Imperial camp was, indeed, the strongest motive that Francis had to continue the campaign. For the situation was in the highest degree difficult and desperate. Germany, Spain, and England were banded together against France; which, after a definite success against the Emperor's army under Bourbon and Pescara, might with all honour have proposed an advantageous peace. But Francis could not rest till the traitor was punished—till the traitor was punished and beautiful Milan reconquered.
So, in an evil moment, he led his armies south. Louisa, who strongly disapproved of this rash venture; Margaret, anxious and grave, with her husband and her brother both in Italy, remained at Lyons with the poor consumptive Queen. Claude was dying in great resignation at twenty-five years of age. Before the armies reached Milan, the King received the news that she was dead. He who had neglected her living, felt a genuine pang at her death. "I had not thought," he cried in naive remorse, "that the bonds of marriage were so hard and difficult to break. Could I buy her life with mine, she should live again." But Claude was beyond all care and kindness. She left her three little boys, François, Henri, and Charles, and her three little daughters, the pious, loving Charlotte, beautiful Magdelaine, and wise little Marguerite, in the custody of their father's sister. Henceforth, Margaret was to them as a mother; and the most touching and charming of her letters are those written to the absent King about his motherless children.
Margaret had many troubles with this family of nephews and nieces; and, in her busy home at Lyons, eagerly she watched the distant campaign, where her husband was, and her brother, and Montmorency her life-long friend; yet the gout of Madame and the measles of the children seemed the most eventful things. Madame had injured her health with nursing the Queen. "I fear her health grows weaker and weaker," writes Margaret. And, indeed, reflecting on the dangers and disasters which her passions had brought upon the kingdom, Louisa may well have grieved and grown weak. "The extremity of sorrow which she shows for the death of the Queen is quite incredible." Yet Louisa had never been a tender mother to poor ailing Claude.
But Margaret, with her sweet dense kindness, was not the woman to discover if anything worse than mourning ailed her mother. Like all idealists, she was not very quick of insight. To her, the death of Claude was an excuse sufficient for all. And, without inquiring too deeply, she strove to heal her mother's wound by a tender care which sheltered her as far as possible from trouble and apprehension.
Just then the children took the measles. Margaret would not tell her mother, so ill and weary already; nor her brother, who needed all his heart for battle. It is only to Bishop Briçonnet (no less than heretofore a guide, philosopher and friend) that she opens her troubled heart. "It has pleased our Lord to give Madame Charlotte so grievous a malady of fever and flux after her measles, that I know not if now He will take her to Himself." This is on the 15th of September. But poor little Charlotte was not so easily released; for thirty days she was very ill. Margaret scarcely left her side. She dearly loved this tender spiritual little soul, to whom in after days she dedicated a poem of which we shall hear more than once again: Le Myrouer de l'âme pescheresse. While she stooped over the bed, tending the sick child in anxious loneliness of fear, the great affairs of the world went on outside. Milan was recaptured, siege laid to Pavia; but these battles and sieges seemed all dim and lifeless, like a figured tapestry shaken in the wind; while, alive, suffering and real, little Madame Charlotte lay upon her knees, and Margaret spoke with her of Jesus and of Paradise. At last an end came, the poor little girl succumbed to exhaustion: "delivered from a little body that could not live on earth till eight years old," and Margaret writes to Briçonnet in a strain of strange religious exultation, like to that she displayed again in later years upon the death of her only son:—
"Where the Strongest has come, he hath vanquished the armed flame, and bath commanded the sea to stop its waves, and hath left content and joyous, nor able to praise him enough, my heart and my spirit. Even (to say the truth) he hath cured and fortified my body, vainly labouring with little repose, for the space of a month, while the little lady was ill. But after her death, I suffered for the King, from whom I had concealed his daughter's illness; who yet divined her death, having dreamed three times that she said to him: 'Farewell, my King, I go to Paradise!' [Adieu, mon Roy, je voys en Paradis!] and this caused him an extreme sorrow, which (by the goodness of God) he endured patiently, And Madame, who had not heard of it, learned it all, through a captain of Adventure, and bore it in such a manner that from dinner-time till supper (one tear not waiting for the other, without uttering sighs of impatience or vexation) she did not cease to preach and undertake towards me the office of comforter which I owed to her."
Soon Margaret had to comfort her mother for a far heavier sorrow. The easy success of Milan was not followed up before Pavia. Yet, the 3rd of February 1525, Francis despatched to his mother a letter three quarto pages long, with a plan of Pavia enclosed, showing her how certain the French army was of taking the town by assault. Ten days later the battle took place; the French army was routed with disaster, all the great soldiers of France killed or captive, the King himself a prisoner. So ran the dreadful news. Worse still for the weeping mother and daughter at Lyons, it was soon known that the cowardice and incapacity of the Duke of Alençon was the cause of the worst disaster. He, the leader of the vanguard, had failed to come to the rescue of the King, abandoned by his Swiss. Not even Bourbon, the triumphant traitor, was more execrable that day in France than he.
On the evening after the battle, Francis in his captive's tent, drew off his ring and sent it to Soliman. By a less secret messenger he sent a letter to his mother: "Of all things I have none left but honour, and life, which is safe." Yet he beseeches them not to give way to too extreme a sorrow: "For still I hope that in the end God will not forsake me." And so, like true comforters, Margaret and her mother hide their desperate grief from him; writing cheerfully about little things; beseeching him not to fast, it is bad for the health; thanking God that his honour and life are safe; and hiding from him the dreadful task they have, poor women, to keep order in the panic-stricken realm when the full extent of defeat is known. Bayard was killed in the autumn, and now Bonnivet is slain. Lescun de Foix, Ls Palice, the great marshal—they are all dead, with many others who were as a tower of strength. And Montmorency, the wise and cold, he and the young King of Navarre, and Brion, the brilliant Admiral Chabot, are prisoners with the King of France.
But Alençon, the disgraced, the hated, the shameful, he is neither dead nor in prison. Sick at heart, leading the miserable remainder of his troops, he makes his way to Lyons where his wife awaits him. As he marched along he must have heard the bitter words, and angry songs of the resentful populace. The length and breadth of the land was sore against les fuyards de Pavie. "I hate more than poison," cries Rabelais, "a man who flies when sword-play comes into fashion. Why am I not King of France for eighty or a hundred years? My God! I would crop the tails of the curs who fled from Pavia." And in every village the labourers sang the first Chanson de Pavie with its melancholy close:—
Mais par gens deshonnestes
Fust laissé lachement.
Another ballad was sung to the air Que dites-vous ensemble. Through the streets, and along the lanes where the voices of the ploughers echoed gravely, the miserable Duke must have heard the same monotonous chant:—
Qui vit jamais au monde
Ung roy si courageux
De se mettre en battaille ;
Et délaissé de ceulx,
En qui toute fiance
Et qui tenoit asseur,
L'ont laissé en souffrance !
Veez là le malheur !
By the time the troops reached Lyons, the unhappy man was ill with despair and remorse. It was now April, two months after the disaster. But France had not yet begun to forgive him. Even his wife, the gentle Margaret, would not see him. The man she had never really loved was odious to her since he had ruined the brother she adored. But when she learned how seriously the poor defeated general took his failure to heart, how he was actually dying of his disgrace and her resentment, then pity and duty came to her aid. She wrote to Francis:—
"As for your poor sister, she writes this letter to you sitting at the foot of M. d'Alençon's bed; he has prayed me to present you, with my own, his very humble recommendation, and to say that had he seen you ere he died he would go more happily towards Paradise. I do not know what to say to you, my Lord. All is in the hand of God. Only, I beseech you not to sorrow, either for him or for me; and be sure that whatever comes, I hope that God will give me strength to keep my trouble from Madame."
On the 11th April, the mediocre, luckless, unhappy Alençon breathed his last. Margaret, drawn close to him by these last days of shame, and pity, and sorrow, sorrowed for the death she scarcely could regret. "Those first two days," she writes, "made me forget all reason, but since then, my Lord, my mother has never seen me with a tear in the eye, or a mournful face, for I should hold myself too much more than miserable if I, who can do you service in nothing, were the cause of hindrance to her courage, who does so much for you and for all yours. But whatever I can do to give her recreation, believe, my Lord, I do it; for I desire so much to see you both happy together, that, hoping in God to have this blessing, I neither will nor can think of any other thing."