ed for eighteen months without a penny, and
likewise the Swiss, who forced me to fight at a disadvantage, which they
would never have done if they had received their pay." "I sent you four
hundred thousand crowns when you asked for them." "I received the
letters in which your Majesty notified me of this money, but the money
never." The king sent at once for the superintendent-general of finance,
James de Beaune, Baron of Semblancay, who acknowledged having received
orders on the subject from the king, but added that at the very moment
when he was about to send this sum to the army, the queen-mother had come
and asked him for it, and had received it from him, whereof he was ready
to make oath. Francis I. entered his mother's room in a rage,
reproaching her with having been the cause of losing him his duchy of
Milan. "I should never have believed it of you," he said, "that you would
have kept money ordered for the service of my army." The queen-mother,
somewhat confused at first, excused herself by saying, that "those were
moneys proceeding from the savings which she had made out of her
revenues, and had given to the superintendent to take care of."
Semblancay stuck to what he had said. The question became a personal one
between the queen-mother and the minister; and commissioners were
appointed to decide the difference. Chancellor Duprat was the docile
servant of Louise of Savoy and the enemy of Semblancay, whose authority
in financial matters he envied; and he chose the commissioners from
amongst the mushroom councillors he had lately brought into Parliament.
The question between the queen-mother and the superintendent led to
nothing less than the trial of Semblancay. The trial lasted five years,
and, on the 9th of April, 1527, a decree of Parliament condemned
Semblancay to the punishment of death and confiscation of all his
property; not for the particular matter which had been the origin of the
quarrel, but "as attained and convicted of larcenies, falsifications,
abuses, malversations, and maladministration of the king's finances,
without prejudice as to the debt claimed by the said my lady, the mother
of the king." Semblancay, accordingly, was hanged on the gibbet of
Montfaucon, on the 12th of August. In spite of certain ambiguities which
arose touching some acts of his administration and some details of his
trial, public feeling was generally and very strongly in his favor. He
was an old and faithful serva