The king was in his counting-house, counting

According to a statement made to Thomas Bourbon, who would gladly have shaken off Boleyn by the Emperor Charles V., the oc- his new allegiance, and began to sound Engcasional cause of Bourbon's eventual rup- land, whether his services would be better ture with Francis arose as follows. The appreciated and better paid in that tight Constable happened to be in the queen's little island. Give him one poor month's room one day, when she was dining all subsidy, and he would levy a band, burst alone. Whether, meanwhile, on France, carry all before him, and make Henry VIII. King of the French. When he plied this offer, he was still sore at the failure of his aggression on Provence, and that forced retreat from Marseilles which disconcerted all his plans. Curious to tell, it was by Renzo, or Rance (Orsini), an Italian, and his valiant legion of proscrits italiens, that France, on this occasion, was successfully defended against an assailing Frenchman.

out his money,

deponent saith not, any more than whether

The queen was in her parlor eating bread and honey,

66

Quand Bourbon vit Marscille,
Il a dit à ses gens:

Vray Dieu! quel capitaine
Trouverons-nous dedans?
Il ne m'en chaut d'un blanc
D'homme qui soit en France,
Mais que ne soit dedans
Le capitaine Rance."

But so it chanced that le capitaine Rance
was within, and succeeded in keeping Bour-
bon out. Experiences at home and abroad

or what other traditionally regal regale formed her noontide repast. So it was, however, that she bade the Constable be seated, and go shares in the dinner. He must oblige her by taking "pot luck" (a phrase that excludes the bread-and-honey hypothesis): she could take no refusal, and would make no stranger of him. Down sat the Bourbon, accordingly, and, we suppose, began to exhibit his prowess as a trencherman. But all of a sudden the king makes his appearance. The Constable rises, and is for leaving the table. "No, no, monseigneur," cries His Majesty, "keep your seat. Well, now, is it true what I hear, of this description, would hardly improve that you are going to get married?" "No, sire." "But I know it to be true, I'm sure of it. I know of all your traffickings with the emperor.... Keep well in mind, you had better, what I tell you on that matter." "Sire, that is a menace! I have not deserved treatment like this." After dinner, the Constable retired; and to Boleyn's expression of surprise that the king, after allowing those threatening words to escape him, should have permitted Bourbon to get away, Charles V. answered, that the king, could not prevent him-all the grands personnages being for Bourbon.

the best of tempers; and Bourbon's was neither second-best, nor anything approaching thereto. Some dissatisfaction with himself, must have constantly embittered the dissatisfaction he felt with his imperial associates. Now and then some precious piece of compensation would make him, no doubt,

"grin horribly a ghastly smile," as when he waited on the captured King of France, the Pavia prisoner. Not that he let Francis, or any one else, see any token of exultation. And Francis himself is complimented by Michelet on his self-control, and It did not take long to render the renegade mastery of countenance, mien, and accent, ill at ease in the imperial service. He found at this trying interview: "His [the king's] that service anything but perfect freedom. perfect dissimulation appeared that evening, He felt that Charles slighted and counter- in the bitter moment of his having to receive checked him. The emperor for whom he managed to raise an army, and a victorious one, that emperor who, at the period of Bourbon's defection, was without forces and without funds, showed his gratitude by subordinating the ex-Constable of France to one of his own valets, Lannoy, one of the Croy family, viceroy of Naples, a Fleming void of talent. Pescara, too, was hateful to

the Constable Bourbon. The latter behaved modestly, presented his duty, and offered his services. The king bore with him, and showed no ungracious visage. One author even assures us that he invited him to his table, with the other generals."

Every day tended to widen the breach between Bourbon and the emperor. Charles *Michelet, Réforme, ch. xiii.

near and far,

All gallant hearts that wished to try the noble

art of war.

Their teeth were clean, their purses lean; but thereat nothing loth,

They trusted well that Bourbon would find provender for both.

"Whither they went they could not tell, nor But well they knew their man, nor more a soleke the why or wherefore;

dier needs to care for;

had no sort of wish to constitute so ambi- | Beardless boy and withered cheek gathered from tious an adventurer the absolute conqueror of France, yet was desirous of retaining, encouraging, and making the most of him as a perturber in ordinary, or general makebate extraordinary, a faction-leader, a live spark of anarchy and civil war. In short, just what Philip II. afterwards had in the Duke of Guise, Philip's father wished to have, and to hold, in Charles de Bourbon. The latter had no notion of being so had, and held, for any sovereign's will and pleasure. He had a will of his own, and was apt to consult it, and give it the preference to any potentate's sic volo. Mortifications abounded in his anomalous position; even the mildest synonymes with "traitor" or "renegade," "apostate or "rebel," are apt to grate on a sensitive ear; and in oblique narration, or otherwise, he would often be hearing some such sounds.

Then again, as a well-disposed biographer has remarked, the roving and unsettled life he had led since his revolt, helped to produce in him something of the recklessness, and even ferocity, of the brigands he commanded, and to give to his natural ambition much of the genuine character of wholesale robbery. "It was in the complex state of mind, made up of such elements as these, that he came to the resolution of acting independently of the emperor, and commencing business as king on his own account. Fortune seemed to throw in his way one means of accomplishing this object, in attaching to himself by the allurement of an immense booty, the army which the emperor did not pay." Those "jolly companions every one" wanted work, and so did their captain. And that captain was the man of men to cut out work for them, and keep them to it.

""Twas after Pavia's stricken field, while Fran-
cis was in Spain,
That Bourbon sent a message round, and took
the field again;
The flap of his broad banner was heard in
Germany.

And set the smiths a sweating both in Spain and

Italy.

And soon he saw around him, of men a goodly force,

For nobles pledged their fattest fields to raise a troop of horse;

The fighting men of every land, the gentlemen and yeomen.

The cavalier and hagbutteer, the spearmen and the bowmen;

They knew that France's chivalry had sunk be-
neath his star;

And Tremouille and Bayard, who taught him
the art of war;
And, if he found his soldiers work, he also
made them fat,

out in that:

And Milan's honest burghers would bear them Wherefore their hearts exulted when the pleasant spring had come,

And the lilies were unfolded at the sound of trump and drum."

Tentimus in Latium, was their leader's device now. He would take his merry, merry men to Rome itself, and let them plunder at pleasure the Eternal City. Rome was not built in a day, but it might be sacked in one, under leadership and by mettlesome companions like his. "Le voici en Toscane. The rains and snows of spring have not withheld. Not even revolts withhold him. His life is in danger; dead or alive, go he will; he resembles a stone hurled by fatality." Rage, hatred, lust of pillage lend wings to his followers. The Germans are panting to force an entry into Babylon, and to lay their heavy hands on the very person of AntiChrist; and the Spaniards are no less impatient to seize on treasures that have been accumulating for a thousand years, and to rifle the spoils of the wide world. The pope begins to take fright, and sets about arming the people. The youth of Rome, the servants of the prelates, the cardinals' grooms, the painters and artists too, receive weapons of war. Swaggering Benvenuto Cellini gets ready his arquebuse. But money, where can that be had? The rich conceal theirs, when about to lose it all. One among them does not blush to offer a few ducats. An offer he was to weep for, anon; if he paid not, his daughters did, and at the dearest price that daughters could pay-de leur honte et du plus indigne supplice.

"On the fifth of May," writes the most

* Michelet, t. viii. ch. xv.

.

Leave not a rack behind."

But although meditations of this kind are awakened in the modern French historian, by the sack of Rome in 1527, he is constrained to own-chose étrange, inattendue!

picturesque of French historians, Bourbon, -the great globe itself encamped in the meadows before Rome, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve . . . . sent a derisive message demanding leave to pass through the city; he was going to Naples, he said. On the 6th, a fog favored his approach; he gave the word for the assault. The Germans went fairly to work. As for himself, who, in a crime like this, must at least be successful,—he seizes a ladder, and ascends it. A ball strikes him, and he is conscious the stroke is death. Cover me,' he said to Jonas, a native of Auvergne who had never left him. The man flung his cloak over Bourbon. But though Bourbon was fallen, the city was nevertheless carried by storm, with a great massacre of the youth of Rome. Guillaume Du Bellay, our envoy at Florence, who was come post to warn the Pope, took his stand on the bridge of St. Angelo, together with Renzo de Ceri, sword in hand, and so gave Clement VII., time to escape from the Vatican into the castle. From the long hanging gallery which formed the communication, he was an eye-witness of the frightful execution that was going on, seven or eight thousand Romans killed by blows with pike and halberd.

"Never was there a scene of greater atrocity, a more shocking carnival of death. Women, pictures, stoles, dragged away, thrown together pell-mell, torn, soiled, violated. Cardinals on the strappado, princesses in the arms of the soldiery: a chaos, a bizarre medley of blood-stained obscenities, hideous comedies. The Germans, who did a deal of killing at first, and made SaintBartholomews of images, Saints, Virgins, were gradually swallowed up in the cellars of the city, and there appeased." The sober Spaniards, coldly cruel, and the Abruzzo mountaineers, agreed neither with them, nor with each other: the three nations had no fellow-feeling, no intercommunication; and for this, the Romans only suffered the more; ruined and ransomed by the one, they fell into the hands of the other." Altogether, it was "a tragedy, like the burning of Moscow, or the earthquake at Lisbon. Every time that one of these great capitals, which concentrate a world of civilization, is thus struck with ruin, one is led to muse on the universal death that awaits empires, the future cataclysmes which shall make this aged earth

06

herself evanish," —when

* Michelet, t. viii. ch. xv.

that, at the time of that outrage, Europe was but slightly moved by its excesses. Nay, so far from indignant emotion being the vogue, there arose in more than one quarter outbreaks of brutal laughter, peals of savage mirth. Germany laughed: the spiritual power, the mystery of terror, was at an end, she supposed. Even the emperor, the Catholic king, laughed in his sleeve. "He disavows the deed, but his joy is seen through the disapproval; he makes no pause in the fêtes for the birth of his son. The Pope (thinks he), broken as a temporal prince, degraded and brought low, will never recover himself-but is henceforth the sport of kings." The kings of France and England are "charmed with the event: so superb an opportunity does it offer of drawing contributions from the clergy, of sanctifying the war, of accusing Charles V. In short, this unheard-of, terrible occurrence, which should have dismayed the earth beneath and shaken the heavens above, made scarcely any sensation at all." But whatever infamy there was attached to it, the memory of Charles de Bourbon had to bear. We can imagine any one that loved him, that cared for his reputation, and hoped for his well-doing and well-being, remonstrating with him beforehand in words the drift of which might be expressed in Volumnia's appeal to Caius Marcius

"Thou know'st, great son, The end of war's uncertain: but this is certain, That, if thou conquer Rome, the benefit Which thou shalt thereby reap, is such a name Whose chronicle thus writ: This man was Whose repetition will be dogg'd with curses; noble,

But with his last attempt he wiped it out-" and by the ultimate act of his life, the act in which that life was forfeited,

"his name remains

To the ensuing age abhorred.” *
Not only was Bourbon the first to mount the
walls, but, it is said, the first who fell, and
this by a shot fired, we are told, by a priest.

* Coriolanus, Act V., Sc. 3.

Benvenuto Cellini, indeed, asserts and asseverates that he it was who shot Bourbon; but what bounds can be assigned to the ipse dixits or ipse fecits of that capital I incarnate? Possibly, quite possibly, he did shoot Bourbon; probably, quite as probably, he did not. Guicciardini leaves the question undecided-so that it comes down to after ages in the same category of vexed questions as, Who murdered Begbie? Benvenuto may answer, for all time, Alone I did it! But he was not more addicted, one surmises, to the vero than to the (more or less) ben invento: he might also be called Beninvento Cellini, instead of Benvenuto, on the score of his imaginative skill. He was such a capital hand at drawing the long bow, that no wonder he was "up to" the great gun trick too.

"Mutter never prayer o'er him,
For litter ne'er halt;
But sound loud the trumpet-
Sound, sound to assault!

"Bring engine, bring ladder,
Yon old walls to scale;
All Rome, by Saint Peter,

For Bourbon shall wail!'"*

Quid Romæ faciam? must have been a question that Bourbon put to himself, and in some sort answered. What should he do in Rome, when he got inside? Byron makes his Mephistophelean Cæsar put the query to the duke, point-blank :

Cæsar.

"What would you make of Rome ? That which it was.

In Alaric's time?

No, slave! In the first Cæsar's. Whose name you bear like other curs. And kings.

'Tis a great name for bloodhounds."

Ben's autograph of the affair runs thus: "Having taken aim with my piece, where I saw the thickest crowd of the enemy, I fixed my eye on a person who seemed to be lifted Bourbon. up above the rest: but the misty weather Cæsar. prevented me from distinguishing whether Bourbon. he was on horseback, or on foot. Then turning suddenly about to Alessandro and Cecchino, I bid them fire off their pieces, and showed them how to escape every shot of the The Byronian Bourbon, indeed, looks revbesiegers. Having accordingly fired twice erently on Rome, and talks of how those for the enemy's once, I softly approached the walls have girded in great ages, and sent walls, and perceived that there was an ex-forth mighty spirits. To his eyes the prestraordinary confusion among the assail- ent phantom of imperious Rome is peopled ants, occasioned by our having shot the with those warriors, flitting along the eterDuke of Bourbon: he was, as I understood nal city's ramparts; and he even conjures afterwards, that chief personage whom I saw up a last Cato among them, who stands "and raised by the rest." It is handsome of tears his bowels rather than survive the libBen, after all, to admit of possible partners erty of that I would enslave." His views of in this feat-to confess to agents and abet- providing a better government for misgovtors, albeit himself directed the shot and erned Rome-for in fact he is an adminisgave the word of command. trative reformer, and something more-are sufficiently developed in this other bit of colloquy :

But, whoever fired the shot, it told home. The bullet had its billet to the life's blood of Bourbon. Good Catholics would descry a judgment in this doom of the first man that mounted the first ladder against Rome. How far it might have daunted the host he was leading on, had the fact of his fall been bruited among them, or had Jonas failed to cast that mantle over his dying master, cannot be determined. It seems, however, only to have stirred up those who knew him fallen, to extra energy of exertion, and resolve *Life of Benvenuto Cellini, ch. vii.

Through every change the seven-hilled | could wish. But there was plenty left of the city hath Retained her sway o'er nations, and the Cæsars