The Serpent and the Moon: Two Rivals for the Love of a Renaissance King (12 page)

To house his retinue of over five thousand on his side of the line, François I created a small city of tents and pavilions covered in cloth of gold, all flying pennants. His own pavilion, embroidered all over with gold and silver thread, was sixty feet high and topped by a life-size statue of Saint Michael, bearing the arms of France and spearing a dragon.

The occupants of both camps preened and postured, but achieved little. The two young sovereigns behaved like overgrown schoolboys. Early one morning François, accompanied by only a few attendants, invaded Henry’s camp and, to the surprise of the English king, insisted on acting as his valet and helping him to dress. It was a dangerous prank, as Henry could have imprisoned François, but the French king wanted to win the trust “of the most distrustful of men.” Henry was charmed and presented generous gifts, reciprocating the gesture by arriving in the French camp unannounced and challenging “my good brother of France” to a wrestling match. Some Bretons and Yeomen of the Guard had been wrestling earlier and a crowd gathered. The French king, according to an eyewitness report by Robert III de La Marck, François’ childhood friend Fleurange, was lighter and quicker, and threw Henry with a
tour de Bretagne
grip so that he hit the ground heavily. Henry demanded another bout, but François refused. Although it was June, the atmosphere was icy thereafter, and with cool
politesse
the two monarchs parted.

Henry VIII, however, did not cross the Channel and return to England. He had always planned a second meeting with Charles of Spain, the new Holy Roman Emperor, and now he secretly concluded with Charles a friendly alliance against France.

One of the gentlemen presented to Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of Gold—as the extravagant meeting between the English and French sovereigns came to be called—was the rich and powerful Constable
of France, Charles, duc de Bourbon. When Henry VIII heard that Bourbon sported an immensely valuable pearl during the festivities and discovered the full extent of the power and wealth of the Constable, it is said that the English king remarked shrewdly that had Bourbon been one of
his
nobles, he would not have risked leaving his head on his shoulders.

Charles de Bourbon inspired true loyalty and love among his followers. Serious and reserved, he was another who was the opposite of the French king. His portrait by the court painter Jean Clouet shows us a delicate, well-bred, thin face, with intelligent, sad eyes. King Louis XII said of him: “I wish he had a more open, a gayer, a less taciturn spirit—stagnant water frightens me.”

Although François I had no reason to distrust his Constable, who had served him well in Milan, he had appointed Admiral Bonnivet to replace him there as his viceroy. Brantôme wrote that Bonnivet “was so loved and favored by King François that, while he lived, he ruled everything to do with war.…” Charles de Bourbon already lacked self-confidence and had a tendency to imagine slights. This was a slight the Constable of France would not forget.

Bourbon adored his wife, Suzanne, and about half of his vast land-holdings came to him with their marriage. Once her son had died and she realized she could have no more children, Suzanne went to enormous lengths to ensure that her inheritance remained with her husband and his family. Suzanne died in 1521, and both she and her mother, who was still alive, willed everything they possessed to Charles de Bourbon.

Nonetheless, Bourbon, the richest man in the kingdom after the sovereign, faced ruin. Because he had no direct heir, it was possible for the crown to make a claim on Suzanne’s inheritance: her mother was a Princess of France and part of her property had come to her from
her royal father. There were also other properties of Suzanne’s claimed for the crown by the avaricious Louise de Savoie, first cousin of Suzanne’s mother, Anne de Beaujeu. Time had faded Louise de Savoie’s beauty, and power had turned her head; then, at age forty-five, she lost her heart. As the king’s mother, Louise had had no shortage of candidates to console her in widowhood, and she took full advantage of her position. Soon after Suzanne’s death, the object of her overwhelming desire became none other than the Constable of France—the recently widowed, attractive, and considerably younger Charles de Bourbon.

Darkly handsome at thirty-two, extremely proud, and grieving for his wife whom he had loved sincerely, Charles was not at all interested in the overtures made to him by the king’s mother. The duc de Bourbon needed to produce an heir to his vast possessions and title; otherwise, with his death, everything he owned would revert to the crown. Louise was, of course, too old for childen, and she would have realized all this, but she was madly in love and desired desperately to marry the richest and most powerful nobleman in France.

The king pushed his mother’s suit, and his chancellor, Antoine Duprat, a mutual friend of their youth at Amboise, made it clear to Bourbon that he really had no choice. If he did not marry Louise de Savoie, then the case concerning his inheritance would go to the
Parlement
, which would surely find in her favor for her claim on his property. Piqued to anger when the king congratulated him on his forthcoming nuptials, Charles is said to have retorted that “having been married to the best of women, he would surely not now marry the worst.” Louise went out of her mind with thwarted love and hurt pride (she was reported to have torn her hair), and demanded that her son come to her support against his Constable and put pressure on him to marry her by threatening to seize his property. Naturally, the king wanted to defend his mother’s honor as well as her claims, but it is probable that his envy of Charles’ wealth was a significant factor in the equation. Were his mother to inherit the Bourbon lands, with her death this vast inheritance would revert to the throne.

Although Louise de Savoie was her cousin and nearest relative, Anne de Beaujeu was deeply shocked by the king’s injustice and the
avarice of the relation she had nurtured but always mistrusted. This “most sane” grand old lady recalled the ancient pact between the houses of Bourbon and Burgundy, from which the Emperor Charles V descended. Before dying, she uttered these fateful last words to her son-in-law, Charles de Bourbon: “… I beg and command you to make an alliance with the emperor, then I can die in peace.” This was high treason, from the mouth of a daughter of a king of France and the sister of another. The case concerning the Bourbon lands had gone to trial in the summer of 1522, and even before her death, the king granted some of Anne de Beaujeu’s lands to his mother.

Anne de Beaujeu died on November 14, 1522, just one and a half years after her daughter, Suzanne. Her position in the country was so elevated that all along the route between her château de Chantelles and the monastery of Souvigny where she would lie in state, the peasants from her lands knelt and prayed as her bier passed. The king immediately seized all the territory Anne de Beaujeu had been granted by her father, Louis XI.

Three months after Anne de Beaujeu’s death, Charles de Bourbon asked the king to halt his unjust trial. The king assured him that, should it proceed, the outcome would be just and not to his detriment. Nevertheless, François sequestered a number of the Constable’s estates for his mother, and others he placed under royal seal until the outcome of the proceedings.

Even before the treasonous deathbed request of Anne de Beaujeu, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V had been making overtures to Bourbon, and offered him as wife his sister Eleonore, the twenty-eight-year-old dowager-queen of Portugal, together with a huge dowry. But Bourbon hesitated to accept for fear of offending the king. Nevertheless, from this time, the Constable of France began to have secret talks with the emperor.

F
RANÇOIS I had no more loyal subject than Diane de Poitiers’ father, Jehan de Saint-Vallier. In July 1521, he had established himself in Lyons to recruit men for the king’s army. He then
moved these troops in stages to join the main forces in Italy; but on the way, he succumbed to an unknown fever from which he was to suffer for the rest of his life. The famous “Saint-Vallier fever” had begun in a military camp. On his return from Italy the following year, Saint-Vallier heard about the Constable’s disagreement with the king over his proposed marriage to Louise de Savoie and called on him several times to comfort and calm him.

As young blades, Saint-Vallier and the duc de Bourbon’s father had both ridden to war with Louis XII in Italy and pledged their loyalty and friendship to each other. Years later, when the duke and his eldest son died of fever in Naples, Jehan de Saint-Vallier transferred his allegiance to the heir, the twelve-year-old Charles de Bourbon-Montpensier. Though much older, Saint-Vallier was proud to be in the boy’s entourage, and had no reason not to remain a faithful adherent of his liege lord as he grew into adulthood.
⁶

On July 17, 1523, Saint-Vallier visited Charles to discuss his son’s marriage. Diane’s father also had a problem concerning monies owed to him for his military expenses in the king’s service and hoped that the Constable could address the matter with François. The two friends retired to spend the night at Bourbon’s house at Montbrison. Without warning, the Constable confronted Saint-Vallier with a relic of the True Cross and insisted he solemnly swear never to reveal what he would hear at Montbrison.

Bourbon then told Saint-Vallier of the emperor’s proposal that he
marry his widowed sister, Eleonore. The Constable went further and told Saint-Vallier that if he, Bourbon, joined forces with Henry VIII and the emperor, Bourbon would be given his own kingdom comprising the provinces of Champagne, Lyons, and Provence. This would be on condition that he allowed Burgundy to go to Charles V and the crown of France to Henry VIII, which had been worn, after all, by his predecessor Henry VI. It is true that Jehan de Saint-Vallier was not renowned for his intelligence and was also somewhat naïve, but to suggest that he would not be averse to this treacherous plan is to deny his first loyalty to the king. There can be no doubt that Saint-Vallier was astounded at the prospect of such treachery from his liege lord.

Although Saint-Vallier was in Bourbon’s debt, and had also sworn feudal allegiance to him, Saint-Vallier was not aware of the Constable’s plot until he arrived at Montbrison to discuss his personal financial concerns. He was astonished to have joined a gathering of conspirators, all loyal to the Constable. Shocked by what he heard unfolding, Saint-Vallier begged Bourbon to reconsider. The next morning, realizing that Saint-Vallier was still alarmed, Bourbon tried to reassure him that he would abandon the plot and begged him to swear again to keep his silence.
⁷
Having been forced by the Constable to swear on the Cross that he would divulge nothing, the seigneur de Saint-Vallier returned to court without the courage to denounce his liege lord.