between anger and shame.  Almost as he quitted this scene he heard that Francis I. was advancing towards Provence with an army.  The king had suddenly decided to go to the succor of Marseilles, which was making so good a defence.  Nothing could be a bitterer pill for Bourbon than to retire before Francis I., whom he had but lately promised to dethrone; but his position condemned him to suffer everything, without allowing him the least hesitation; and on the 28th of September, 1524, he raised the siege of Marseilles and resumed the road to Italy, harassed even beyond Toulon by the French advance-guard, eager in its pursuit of the traitor even more than of the enemy.

In the course of this year, 1524, whilst Bourbon was wandering as a fugitive, trying to escape from his country, then returning to it, after a few months, as a conqueror, and then leaving it again at the end of a few weeks of prospective triumph, pursued by the king he had betrayed, his case and that of his accomplices had been inquired into and disposed of by the Parliament of Paris, dispassionately and almost coldly, probably because of the small esteem in which the magistrates held the court of Francis I., and of the wrong which they found had been done to the constable.  The Parliament was not excited by a feeling of any great danger to the king and the country; it was clear that, at the core, the conspiracy and rebellion were very circumscribed and impotent; and the accusations brought by the court party or their servants against the conspirators were laughable from their very outrageousness and unlikelihood; according to them, the accomplices of the constable meant not only to dethrone, and, if need were, kill the king, but “to make pies of the children of France.”  Parliament saw no occasion to proceed against more than a half score of persons in confinement, and, except nineteen defaulters who were condemned to death together with confiscation of their property, only one capital sentence was pronounced, against John of Poitiers, Lord of Saint-Vallier, the same who had exerted himself to divert the constable from his plot, but who had nevertheless not refrained from joining it, and was the most guilty of all the accomplices in consequence of the confidential post he occupied near the king’s person.  The decree was not executed, however; Saint-Vallier received his reprieve on the scaffold itself.  Francis I. was neither rancorous nor cruel; and the entreaties, or, according to some evil-speakers of the day, the kind favors, of the Lady de Brew, Saint-Vallier’s daughter and subsequently the celebrated Diana of Poitiers, obtained from the king her father’s life.

Francis I., greatly vexed, it is said, at the lenity of the Parliament of Paris, summoned commissions chosen amongst the Parliaments of Rouen, Dijon, Toulouse, and Bordeaux, and made them reconsider the case.  The provincial Parliaments decided as that of Paris had.  The procedure against the principal culprit was several times suspended and resumed according to the course of events, and the decree was not pronounced so long as the Duke of Bourbon lived.  It was abroad and in his alliance with foreign sovereigns that all his importance lay.