erved by agents who could commit a profitable atrocity
without being guilty of the annoying want of tact of waiting for his
direct orders to commit it.

For the especial business in hand, it was impossible, moreover, to have
had two more fitting agents than Bourbon and Frundsberg. It was not
every knightly general in those days who would have accepted the task,
even with direct orders, of marching to the sack of Rome, and the open
defiance of its sacred ruler. A Florentine or a Neapolitan soldier might
have had small scruple in doing so; and a Roman baron--a Colonna or an
Orsini--none at all. But there would have been found few men of such
mark as Bourbon, in either France or Spain, willing to undertake the
enterprise he was now engaged in. The unfortunate Constable, however,
was a disgraced and desperate man. He was disgraced in the face of
Europe by unknightly breach of fealty to his sovereign, despite the
intensity of the provocation which had driven him to that step. For all
the sanctions which held European society together, in the universal
bondage which alone then constituted social order, were involved in
maintaining the superstition that so branded him. And he was a desperate
man in his fortunes; for though no name in all Europe was at that day as
great a military power at the head of a host as that of Bourbon, and
though the miserable bearer of it had so shortly before been one of the
wealthiest and largest territorial nobles of France, yet the Constable
had now his sword for his fortune as barely as the rawest lad in the
rabble-rout that followed him, sent out from some landless tower of an
impoverished knight, in half-starved Galicia or poverty-stricken
Navarre, to carve his way in the world.

Even among those whose ranks he had joined, Bourbon was a disgraced and
ruined man beyond redemption. Although his well-known military capacity
had easily induced Charles to welcome and make use of him, he must have
felt that the step he had taken in breaking his allegiance and
abandoning his country had rendered him an outcast and almost a pariah
in the estimation of the chivalry of Europe. The feeling he had awakened
against himself throughout Christendom is strikingly illustrated by an
anecdote recorded of his reception at Madrid. When, shortly after
winning the battle of Pavia, Bourbon went thither to meet Charles, and
the Marquis of Villane was requested to lodge the victorious general in
his palace, the haughty