Francis I and Sixteenth-Century France by Robert J. Knecht;

Author:Robert J. Knecht;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2015-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

After delivering his message, the prévôt de Paris appointed three commissioners to collect the subsidy without further delay and the quarteniers were called to the Hôtel de Ville to receive lists of the amounts due from the residents of each district. The money, once collected, was to be deposited with the Receveur-général des parties casuelles. The quarteniers, however, met with so much resistance from the citizens that, on 18 February 1529, they were instructed not to visit recalcitrant houses more than two or three times ‘but to send garrisons there’. Yet even the municipal troops could not be relied upon to enter houses ‘to pick the moneys given to the king’. Those who refused were to lose their uniform or hocqueton. In April, the captain of the arquebusiers resigned rather than accompany his men on their rounds.53 Whether, in view of these difficulties, the king ever got all that he had asked for is uncertain. But it may be assumed that he did, for on 2 July he informed the citizens that his sons had been set free. He wanted them to be among the first to know ‘as those who, we believe, will have more pleasure than any others of our subjects’.54

In March 1528, Francis informed the bureau de la ville of his intention ‘henceforth to reside for the most part in his good town and city of Paris’.55 In fact, he did nothing of the kind: he continued to lead a largely nomadic life till the end of his reign. But he did transfer the main centre of his building activities from the Loire valley to the Paris region. He began to modernize the Louvre, demolishing the famous keep built by Philip-Augustus, and in the Bois de Boulogne erected the small palace, popularly called Madrid. Other royal châteaux built at this time were Villers-Cotterêts and, most important of all, Fontainebleau, which became Francis’s favourite residence.56 A reason for this shift in the king’s building ventures may have been the desire to live closer to his chief minister, Anne de Montmorency, whose principal estates lay north and east of the capital. Though Montmorency had always been the king’s friend, his political preeminence did not begin in earnest till 1526.

Montmorency, who was nicknamed ‘l’impérial’ by his enemies at court, favoured a rapprochement between Francis and Charles V, but their differences were too deep, and in 1536 they again went to war. As Charles prepared to invade Provence, Francis moved south with the flower of his army. In July, however, Henry of Nassau, the emperor’s lieutenant in the Netherlands, invaded Picardy and Paris was once again thrust into the front line. On 13 July, Charles, duc de Vendôme, gouverneur of Picardy, sent an urgent appeal to the bureau de la ville. He explained that he had raised 12,000 infantry but could not pay them without aid from the capital ‘given that the king is far away from me and has not yet made provision’. The Parisians agreed to lend him 40,000 livres in exchange for a letter of obligation which Vendôme readily supplied.

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