LITMIR.BIZ

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Amboise concentrated his efforts on the regular clergy. With the help of energetic men like Maillard, reform of religious houses in Paris was carried out promptly, often in the face of stiff resistance. This was particularly strong among the Jacobins and Cordeliers. Sometimes the legate had to impose order by armed force. As for the nunneries, where reform had marked time in the face of countless difficulties, they too were visited, reformed and repaired. The famous abbey of Fontevrault received special attention. Under Amboise, communal life was restored, visitors sent out to daughter houses and reformed nuns introduced where necessary. New rules recently adopted at Fontevrault were extended to daughter houses between 1502 and 1507. Among other important abbeys reformed at this time were Chelles, Montmartre and Roye. In 1506 it was the turn of the great abbey of Poissy. Finally, the legate fought against the isolation of monasteries. They were grouped together and placed under the control of large and wholesome ones. In 1508, for example, the Jacobins of Paris, Rouen, Blois, Compiègne and Argenton were linked to the Dutch congregation.

      Thus much was done to improve conditions in the Gallican church under Charles VIII and Louis XII. Although both kings backed reform, the initiative was mainly taken by individual churchmen, including some prelates. Georges d’Amboise, in his dual capacity of royal minister and papal legate, was a powerful force. In a large number of monasteries discipline was restored. Yet the results, as many contemporaries complained, did not go far enough. Only the surface wounds of the church had been bandaged; the real sickness within the body remained to be cured. The main cause of trouble was the government of the church itself. Although the Renaissance popes paid lip-service to the cause of church reform, they were generally far more interested in advancing their family or princely interests. The Fifth Lateran Council, which Julius II had called, was too unrepresentative of the church as a whole to be an effective vehicle of reform. It produced only half-measures aimed at reducing, not extirpating, abuses. Once the council had been dissolved, its decisions were quickly forgotten.

      Reform in France was strongly resisted and frequently overturned. Monks and nuns took refuge in endless lawsuits, piling appeal upon appeal, in defence of their exemptions. In many places they rose against the reformers, driving them out by force. At every turn, episcopal agents were obstructed, threatened or subjected to physical abuse. Among the mendicants a positive state of war existed between the Conventuals and the Observants – they fought each other in the courts, with their fists or by means of censures and pamphlets. In 1506, Julius II tried to reconcile the two branches of the Franciscan order. No sooner had this been accomplished than the effort had to begin afresh. In 1511 the convent of Saint-Pierre in Lyon was reformed by the grand prior of Cluny; two years later, royal officials noted that the abbess and the nuns had destroyed the walls, scrapped the new rules and sued the archbishop and his officials. Only by deporting the nuns could order be restored. At Saint-Sansom in Orléans, in 1514, the monks refused to live in common. Only after five years of quarrels, lawsuits and revolts was reform imposed by royal decree in January 1519. Almost everywhere reform had to fight every inch of the way. Even where it struck root, it often needed to be replanted.

      In the past the church had put its own house in order. Now the reformers were frequently obliged to seek the assistance of the secular authorities. Municipal bodies were sometimes asked to help, but they seldom wanted to be drawn into a situation likely to trigger off public disturbances. They were particularly cautious regarding the mendicants, who, even in their unreformed state, had much popular support. Nor could the parlements be depended upon to assist reform. They were traditionally suspicious of any interference by Rome, as they showed by challenging the powers of legates. They also denied bishops freedom of action. In 1486 the avocat du roi Le Maistre denied that bishops could exercise any jurisdiction over exempt churches. The parlement claimed the right to judge all suits involving privileged monasteries. In 1483 it demanded the reinstatement of the Conventual friars who had been expelled from Tours by Maillard and the Observants. In 1501 it received an appeal from the monks of Saint-Victor against the bishop of Paris who was trying to reform them. All too often, reform of the French church degenerated into a kind of police operation. By placing too much reliance on force and not enough on conversion, it created a large body of discontent among regular clergy who were forced to accept a life-style with which they had grown unfamiliar or be thrown out of their monasteries and convents.

      By 1515, therefore, much still remained to be done. The constitutional argument between conciliarism and papalism was unresolved. The Pragmatic Sanction, though still in force, was often disregarded by the king. Disputes over appointments to benefices were still coming before the parlement with undue frequency. Abuses among the clergy were still rife, offering much scope to popular satirists like Pierre Gringore. His Folles Entreprises (1505) and Abus du monde (1509) attacked the debauchery and avarice of the secular clergy, the ambition of prelates and the corruption of monks. He even accused reformers of hypocrisy. As for the theologians, they remained divided into two broad camps: the schoolmen and the humanists. While the former dispensed the dry subtleties of Scotus and Ockham, the latter tried to build a new faith on a basis of sound scriptural studies. At the same time a wave of mysticism, reaching back to Thomas à Kempis, Cusa, Lull and beyond, caused many Christians to turn away from the formal observances of the church in favour of private prayer and ecstasy. It was this partially reformed, often rebellious and ideologically divided Gallican church which was soon to be faced by the Protestant challenge.

       SIX Francis I: The first decade(1515–25)

      ‘Kingship is the dignity, not the property, of the prince.’ These words spoken by a deputy at the Estates-General of 1484 embody the theory of royal succession which prevailed in late mediaeval France. The king, however absolute he might deem himself to be, was not free to dispose of the crown; he had to be succeeded by his nearest male kinsman. It was in accordance with this principle that François duc de Valois and comte d’Angoulême, Louis XII’s cousin, succeeded to the throne on 1 January 1515 at the age of twenty-one. His right to do so was unimpeachable, for it was a clearly established principle that ‘the king never dies’; he was to be followed immediately by his lawful successor. There was no possibility of an interregnum.

      In the words of the English chronicler Edward Hall, Francis I was ‘a goodly prince, stately of countenance, merry of chere, brown coloured, great eyes, high nosed, big lipped, fair breasted and shoulders, small legs and long feet’. Ellis Griffith, a Welsh soldier in the service of Henry VIII, who was able to observe the French king closely at the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520, tells us that he was six feet tall. His head was rightly proportioned for his height, the nape of his neck was unusually broad, his hair brown, smooth and neatly combed, his beard of three months’ growth darker in colour, his nose long, his eyes hazel and bloodshot, and his complexion the colour of watered-down milk. He had muscular buttocks and thighs, but his legs below the knees were thin and bandy, while his feet were long, slender and completely flat. He had an agreeable voice and, in conversation, an animated expression marred only by the unkingly habit of continually rolling up his eyes.

      Contemporaries often remarked on Francis’s eloquence and charm. He would talk easily on almost any subject, though sometimes with more self-assurance than knowledge; he could also write well. The letters he wrote to his mother during his first Italian campaign are spontaneous and vivid; his verses display emotional sincerity. But Francis was first and foremost a man of action: he delighted in hunting, jousting and dancing. Dangerously realistic mock battles capable of inflicting serious injuries were a stock entertainment at his court. In hunting, as in war, Francis showed outstanding courage. During celebrations at Amboise in June 1515 he had to be dissuaded from engaging a wild boar in single combat.

      Francis has gone down in history as a great lover. Women certainly loomed large in his life, though many stories about his amours are pure fantasy. That is not to say that his morals were irreproachable. He was dissolute and had probably contracted syphilis before 1524. About the time of his accession he was having an affair with the wife of Jacques Disomme, a distinguished parlementaire. Truth, however, is not easily distilled from gossip. Even the king’s first official mistress, Françoise de Foix, comtesse de Châteaubriant, is a shadowy figure. She seems to have had little or no

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