ng 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.

After Bourbon's precipitate retreat,