Charles VIII. was wise to treat his brave men well; for the day was at hand when he would need them and all their bravery. It was in the duchy of Parma, near the town of Fornovo, on the right bank of the Taro, an affluent of the Po, that the French and Italian armies met, on the 5th of July, 1495. The French army was nine or ten thousand strong, with five or six thousand camp followers, servants or drivers; the Italian army numbered at least thirty thousand men, well supplied and well rested, whereas the French were fatigued with their long march, and very badly off for supplies. During the night between the 5th and 6th of July, a violent storm burst over the country, “rain, lightnings, and thunder so mighty,” says Commynes, “that none could say more; seemed that heaven and earth would dissolve, or that it portended some great disaster to come.” Next day, at six in the morning, Charles VIII. heard mass, received the communion, mounted on horseback, and set out to join his own division. “I went to him,” says Commynes, “and found him armed at all points, and mounted upon the finest horse I had ever seen in my life, called Savoy; Duke Charles of Savoy (the Duchess of Savoy,? v. p. 288) had given it him; it was black, and had but one eye; it was a middle-sized horse, of good height for him who was upon it. Seemed that this young man was quite other than either his nature, his stature, or his complexion bespoke him, for he was very timid in speaking, and is so to this day. That horse made him look tall; and he had a good countenance, and of good color, and speech bold and sensible.” On perceiving Commynes, the king said to him, “Go and see if yonder folks would fain parley.” “Sir,” answered Commynes, “I will do so willingly; but I never saw two so great hosts so near to one another, and yet go their ways without fighting.” He went, nevertheless, to the Venetian advanced posts, and his trumpeter was admitted to the presence of the Marquis of Mantua, who commanded the Italian army; but skirmishing had already commenced in all quarters, and the first boom of the cannon was heard just as the marquis was reading Commynes’ letter. “It is too late to speak of peace,” said he; and the trumpeter was sent back. The king had joined the division which he was to lead to battle. “Gentlemen,” said he to the men-at-arms who pressed around him, “you will live or die here with me, will you not?” And then raising his voice that he might be heard by the troops, “They are ten times as many as we,” he said; “but you are ten times better than they; God loves the French; He is with us, and will do battle for us. As far as Naples I have had the victory over my enemies; I have brought you hither without shame or blame; with God’s help I will lead you back into France, to our honor and that of our kingdom.” The men-at-arms made the sign of the cross; the foot-soldiers kissed the ground; and the king made several knights, according to custom, before going into action. The Marquis of Mantua’s squadrons were approaching. “Sir,” said the bastard of Bourbon, “there is no longer time for the amusement of making knights; the enemy is coming on in force; go we at him.” The king gave orders to charge, and the battle began at all points.
It was very hotly contested, but did not last long, with alternations of success and reverse on both sides. The two principal commanders in the king’s army, Louis de la Tremoille and John James Trivulzio, sustained without recoiling the shock of troops far more numerous than their own. “At the throat! at the throat!!” shouted La Tremoille, after the first onset, and his three hundred men-at-arms burst upon the enemy and broke their line. In the midst of the melley, the French baggage was attacked by the Stradiots, a sort of light infantry composed of Greeks recruited and paid by the Venetians. “Let them be,” said Trivulzio to his men; “their zeal for plunder will make them forget all, and we shall give the better account of them.” At one moment, the king had advanced before the main body of his guard, without looking to see if they were close behind him, and was not more than a hundred paces from the Marquis of Mantua, who, seeing him scantily attended, bore down at the head of his cavalry. “Not possible is it,” says Commynes, “to do more doughtily than was done on both sides.” The king, being very hard pressed, defended himself fiercely against those who would have taken him; the bastard Matthew of Bourbon, his brother-in-arms and one of the bravest knights in the army, had thrown himself twenty paces in front of him to cover him, and had just been taken prisoner by the Marquis of Mantua in person, when a mass of the royal troops came to their aid, and released them from all peril. Here it was that Peter du Terrail, the Chevalier de Bayard, who was barely twenty years of age, and destined to so glorious a renown, made his first essay in arms; he had two horses killed under him, and took a standard, which he presented to the king, who after the battle made him a present of five hundred crowns.
Charles VIII. remained master of the battle-field. “There were still to be seen,” says Commynes, “outside their camp, a great number of men-at-arms, whose lances and heads only were visible, and likewise foot-soldiers. The king put it to the council whether he ought to give chase to them or not; some were for marching against them; but the French were not of this opinion; they said that enough had been done, that it was late, and that it was time to get lodged. Night was coming on; the host which had been in front of us withdrew into their camp, and we went to get lodged a quarter of a league from where the battle had been. The king put up at a poorly-built farm-house, but he found there an infinite quantity of corn in sheaves, whereby the whole army profited. Some other bits of houses there were hard by, which did for a few; and every one lodged as he could, without making any cantonment, I know well enough that I lay in a vineyard, at full length on the bare ground, without anything else and without cloak, for the king had borrowed mine in the morning. Whoever had the wherewith made a meal, but few had, save a hunch of bread from a varlet’s knapsack. I went to see the king in his chamber, where there were some wounded whom he was having dressed; he wore a good mien, and every one kept a good face; and we were not so boastful as a little before the battle, because we saw the enemy near us.” Six days after the battle, on the 12th of July, the king wrote to his sister, the Duchess Anne of Bourbon, “Sister, my dear, I commend myself to you right heartily. I wrote to my brother how that I found in my way a big army that Lord Ludovic, the Venetians, and their allies, had got ready against me, thinking to keep me from passing. Against which, with God’s help, such resistance was made, that I am come hither without any loss. Furthermore, I am using the greatest diligence that can be to get right away, and I hope shortly to see you, which is my desire, in order to tell you at good length all about my trip. And so God bless you, sister, my dear, and may He have you in His keeping!”
Both armies might and did claim the victory, for they had, each of them, partly succeeded in their design. The Italians wished to unmistakably drive out of Italy Charles VIII., who was withdrawing voluntarily; but to make it an unmistakable retreat, he ought to have been defeated, his army beaten, and himself perhaps a prisoner. With that view they attempted to bar his passage and beat him on Italian ground: in that they failed; Charles, remaining master of the battle-field, went on his way in freedom, and covered with glory, he and his army. He certainly left Italy, but he left it with the feeling of superiority in arms, and with the intention of returning thither better informed and better supplied. The Italian allies were triumphant, but without any ground of security or any lustre; the expedition of Charles VIII. was plainly only the beginning of the foreigner’s ambitious projects, invasions and wars against their own beautiful land. The King of France and his men of war had not succeeded in conquering it, but they had been charmed with such an abode; they had displayed in their campaign knightly qualities more brilliant and more masterful than the studied duplicity and elegant effeminacy of the Italians of the fifteenth century, and, after the battle of Fornovo, they returned to France justly proud and foolishly confident, notwithstanding the incompleteness of their success.
Charles VIII. reigned for nearly three years longer after his return to his kingdom; and for the first two of them he passed his time in indolently dreaming of his plans for a fresh invasion of Italy, and in frivolous abandonment to his pleasures and the entertainments at his court, which he moved about from Lyons to Moulins, to Paris, to Tours, and to Amboise. The news which came to him from Italy was worse and worse every day. The Count de Montpensier, whom he had left at Naples, could not hold his own there, and died a prisoner there on the 11th of November, 1496, after having found himself driven from place to place by Ferdinand II., who by degrees recovered possession of nearly all his kingdom, merely, himself also, to die there on the 6th of October, leaving for his uncle and successor, Frederick III., the honor of recovering the last four places held by the French. Charles ordered a fresh army of invasion to be formed, and the Duke of Orleans was singled out to command it; but he evaded this commission. The young dauphin, Charles Orlando, three years old, had just died, “a fine child and bold of speech,” says Commynes, “and one that feared not the things that other children are wont to fear.” Duke Louis of Orleans, having thus become heir to the throne, did not care to go and run risks at a distance. He, nevertheless, declared his readiness to obey an express command from the king if the title of lieutenant-general were given him; but “I will never send him to war on compulsion,” said Charles, and nothing more was said about it. Whilst still constantly talking of the war he had in view, Charles attended more often and more earnestly than he hitherto had to the internal affairs of his kingdom. “He had gotten it into his head,” says Commynes, “that he would fain live according to God’s commandments, and set justice and the Church in good order. He would also revise his finances, in such sort as to levy on the people but twelve hundred thousand francs, and that in form of talliage, besides his own property on which he would live, as did the kings of old.” His two immediate predecessors, Charles VII. and Louis IX., had decreed the collation and revision of local customs, so often the rule of civil jurisdiction; but the work made no progress: Charles VIII., by a decree dated March 15, 1497, abridged the formalities, and urged on the execution of it, though it was not completed until the reign of Charles IX. By another decree, dated August 2, 1497, he organized and regulated, as to its powers as well as its composition, the king’s grand council, the supreme administrative body, which was a fixture at Paris. He began even to contemplate a reformation of his own life; he had inquiries made as to how St. Louis used to proceed in giving audience to the lower orders; his intention, he said, was to henceforth follow the footsteps of the most justice-loving of French kings. “He set up,” says Commynes, “a public audience, whereat he gave ear to everybody, and especially to the poor; I saw him thereat, a week before his death, for two good hours, and I never saw him again. He did not much business at this audience; but at least it was enough to keep folks in awe, and especially his own officers, of whom he had suspended some for extortion.” It is but too often a man’s fate to have his life slip from him just as he was beginning to make a better use of it. On the 7th of April, 1498, Charles VIII. was pleased, after dinner, to go down with the queen into the fosses of the castle of Amboise, to see a game of tennis. Their way lay through a gallery the opening of which was very low; and the king, short as he was, hit his forehead. Though he was a little dizzy with the blow, he did not stop, watched the players for some time, and even conversed with several persons; but about two in the afternoon, whilst he was a second time traversing this passage on his way back to the castle, he fell backwards and lost consciousness. He was laid upon a paltry paillasse in that gallery where everybody went in and out at pleasure; and in that wretched place, after a lapse of nine hours, expired “he,” says Commynes, “who had so many fine houses, and who was making so fine an one at Amboise; so small a matter is our miserable life, which giveth us so much trouble for the things of the world, and kings cannot help themselves any more than peasants. I arrived at Amboise two days after his decease; I went to say mine orison at the spot where was the corpse; and there I was for five or six hours. And, of a verity, there was never seen the like mourning, nor that lasted so long; he was so good that better creature cannot be seen; the most humane and gentle address that ever was was his; I trow that to never a man spake he aught that could displease; and at a better hour could he never have died for to remain of great renown in histories and regretted by those that served him. I trow I was the man to whom he showed most roughness; but knowing that it was in his youth, and that it did not proceed from him, I never bore him ill-will for it.”
Probably no king was ever thus praised for his goodness, and his goodness alone, by a man whom he had so maltreated, and who, as judicious and independent as he was just, said of this same king, “He was not better off for sense than for money, and he thought of nothing but pastime and his pleasures.”