The king's necessities.
A despotic course suggested.
Meantime the revenues of the royal domain, having during the late wars been subjected to a long and unremitting drain, had proved utterly inadequate to meet the extraordinary demand of treasure for the resumption of the hostilities following close upon Francis's release. Recourse must be had to the purses of the king's subjects. The right to levy taxes resided in the States General alone, and Francis was reluctant, at so critical a juncture, to trample on a time-hallowed principle. He did not, indeed, hesitate to admit that he had been gravely counselled by some of his advisers to resort to a more despotic course; for they maintained that, in so praiseworthy an undertaking as the effort to recover the young princes, the king was warranted by all laws, divine and human, in laying under contribution every one of his subjects, of whatever rank or condition.[277] But, as the same ends might be attained by methods more agreeable to law and precedent, Francis preferred to have recourse to them.
An assembly of notables.
On the sixteenth of December, 1527, one of those anomalous political bodies was convened in the palace of the Parisian parliament to which the name of an assembly of notables is given. All the orders of the state were represented; but the form of a meeting of the States General (as we have seen, most distasteful to the despotic monarch) was studiously avoided.[278] In reply to a very full exposition of the present condition of the kingdom and of the incidents of his capture, made by Francis in person to the assembled clergymen, nobles, jurists, and burgesses of Paris, each order in turn gave its opinion. All united in approving the refusal of the king to surrender Burgundy to the emperor, and in expressing their unwillingness to allow his Majesty to return to Spain and thus redeem the promise he had given in case the treaty failed to be carried into effect. All likewise professed their readiness to contribute, according to their ability, to the necessities of the crown.
The first president, M. de Selve, in the name of parliament, delivered a discourse which the clerk of the assembly, no doubt aptly, describes as "crammed with Latin and with quotations from Scripture, to prove that the treaty of Madrid was null and void."[279] His grounds were that the king could neither dispose of his own person, which belonged to the state, nor alienate Burgundy, which, being a fief of the first rank and a bulwark of the kingdom, was inseparable from France. But probably the whole prodigious mass of classic lore, and of scriptural quotation, even more unfamiliar to most of his hearers, which the pedantic president forced upon the digestion of the unfortunate notables, was required to prove to their satisfaction that Francis had in this affair played the part of the "gentilhomme" he boasted of being.
Speech of the Cardinal of Bourbon.
The speech of the Cardinal of Bourbon was especially important. He announced the willingness of the representatives of the French clergy cheerfully to supply the 1,300,000 livres asked of their order, although at the same time he suggested the propriety of first convoking provincial councils, in which the church might be more fully consulted. With this gracious concession, however, the cardinal coupled three requests, of which the first and third concerned the liberation of the Pope from his imprisonment and the conservation of the liberties of the Gallican church; but the second had a pointed reference to the Reformation: he prayed "that the king might be pleased to uproot and extirpate the damnable and insufferable Lutheran sect which had, not long since, secretly entered the realm, with all the other heresies that were multiplying therein." By thus acting, he assured him, Francis "would perform the duty of a good prince bearing the name of Very Christian King."
Francis promises to prove himself "Very Christian."
The gratified monarch, delighted with the complaisance of his clerical subjects, did not hesitate to accede to all the petitions the Cardinal offered, and declared that, "so far as concerned heresies, he was determined not to endure them, but would cause them to be wholly extirpated and driven from his kingdom," inflicting on any found tainted therewith such exemplary punishment as to demonstrate his right to the honorable title he bore.[280]