DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.63221#0173
CHAPTER IX
(1504—1525)
CHARLES DE MONTPENSIER, THE CONSTABLE OF FRANCE
The battle of Pavia was a turning-point in the personal
life of the King and of Margaret. It proved to be no less
so to Louise, the third person of the trio. Francis was,
we have said, the centre of his mother’s existence; but
during one short act of the drama another figure played
the hero. This was Charles de Montpensier, Duke of Bour-
bon and Constable of France, whom she loved for a space
with all the passion of an exclusive nature. It was the
only love-story of her life; a tissue of hope and hatred,
which interwound itself strangely with the history of the
nation.
The Constable was one of those superb figures of the
sixteenth century who seem to have been invented by Shaks-
peare. He and his kind were a proof that the times the
poet lived in actually possessed the glorious peers and
princes, magnificent in their crimes as in their virtues, who
haunted his vast imagination. When Henry VIII saw the
Constable on the Field of the Cloth of Gold—“ If that man
were lord of mine,” he said, “his head should not remain
two days on his shoulders.” He outdid the King in splen-
dour, and the palace which he made for himself was the most
(1504—1525)
CHARLES DE MONTPENSIER, THE CONSTABLE OF FRANCE
The battle of Pavia was a turning-point in the personal
life of the King and of Margaret. It proved to be no less
so to Louise, the third person of the trio. Francis was,
we have said, the centre of his mother’s existence; but
during one short act of the drama another figure played
the hero. This was Charles de Montpensier, Duke of Bour-
bon and Constable of France, whom she loved for a space
with all the passion of an exclusive nature. It was the
only love-story of her life; a tissue of hope and hatred,
which interwound itself strangely with the history of the
nation.
The Constable was one of those superb figures of the
sixteenth century who seem to have been invented by Shaks-
peare. He and his kind were a proof that the times the
poet lived in actually possessed the glorious peers and
princes, magnificent in their crimes as in their virtues, who
haunted his vast imagination. When Henry VIII saw the
Constable on the Field of the Cloth of Gold—“ If that man
were lord of mine,” he said, “his head should not remain
two days on his shoulders.” He outdid the King in splen-
dour, and the palace which he made for himself was the most