J. H. Merle D'Aubigné - History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin (Vol. 1-8)

The duchess as she entered Spain felt her heart deeply agitated. The very day she had heard of the battle of Pavia, she had courageously taken this heavy cross upon her shoulders; but at times she fainted under the burden. Impatient to reach her brother, burning with desire to save him, fearing lest she should find him dying, trembling lest the persecutors should take advantage of her absence to crush the Gospel and religious liberty in France, she found no rest but at the feet of the Saviour. Many evangelical men wept and prayed with her; they sought to raise her drooping courage under the great trial which threatened to weigh her down, and bore a noble testimony to her piety. ‘There are various stations in the christian life,’ said one of these reformers, Capito. ‘You have now entered upon that commonly called the Way of the Cross . 426... Despising the theology of men, you desire to know only Jesus Christ and Him crucified.’ 427

Margaret crossing in her litter (September 1525) the plains of Catalonia, Arragon, and Castile, exclaimed:

I cast my eyes around,

I look and look in vain ...

The loved one cometh not;

And on my knees again

I pray unceasing to my God

To heal the king—to spare the rod.

The loved one cometh not ...

Tears on my eyelids sit:

Then to this virgin page

My sorrows I commit:—

Such is to wretched me

Each day of misery. 428

She sometimes fancied that she could see in the distance a messenger riding hastily from Madrid and bringing her news of her brother.... But alas! her imagination had deceived her, no one appeared. She then wrote:

O Lord, awake, arise!

And let thine eyes in mercy fall

Upon the king—upon us all.

Once or twice a day she halted at some inn on the road to Madrid, but it was not to eat. ‘I have supped only once since my departure from Aigues-Mortes,’ she said. 429As soon as she entered the wretched chamber, she began to write to her brother at the table or on her knees. ‘Nothing to do you service,’ she wrote: ‘nothing, even to casting the ashes of my bones to the wind, will be strange or painful to me; but rather consolation, repose, and honour.’ 430

The defeat of Pavia and the excessive demands of Charles V. had given the king such shocks that he had fallen seriously ill; the emperor had therefore gone to Madrid to be near him. On Wednesday, September 19, 1525, Margaret arrived in that capital. Charles received her surrounded by a numerous court, and respectfully approaching her, this politic and phlegmatic prince kissed her on the forehead and offered her his hand. Margaret, followed by the noble dames and lords of France who had accompanied her, and wearing a plain dress of black velvet without any ornament, passed between two lines of admiring courtiers. The emperor conducted her as far as the door of her brother’s apartments, and then withdrew.

Margaret rushed in; but alas! what did she find? a dying man, pale, worn, helpless. Francis was on the brink of the grave, and his attendants seemed to be waiting for his last breath. The duchess approached the bed softly, so as not to be heard by the sick man; unobserved she fixed on him a look of the tenderest solicitude, and her soul, strengthened by an unwavering faith, did not hesitate; she believed in her brother’s cure, she had prayed so fervently. She seemed to hear in the depths of her heart an answer from God to her prayers; and while all around the prince, who was almost a corpse, bowed their heads in dark despair, Margaret raised hers with hope towards heaven.

Prudent, skilful, decided, active, a Martha as well as a Mary, she established herself at once in the king’s chamber, and took the supreme direction. ‘If she had not come he would have died,’ said Brantôme. 431‘I know my brother’s temperament,’ she said, ‘better than the doctors.’ In spite of their resistance, she had the treatment changed; then she sat down at the patient’s bedside, and left him no more. While the king slept, she prayed; when he awoke, she spoke to him in encouraging language. The faith of the sister gradually dispelled the brother’s dejection. She spoke to him of the love of Christ; she proposed to him to commemorate his atoning death by celebrating the holy eucharist. Francis consented. He had hardly communicated when he appeared to wake up as if from a deep sleep; he sat up in his bed, fixed his eyes on his sister, and said: ‘God will heal me body and soul.’ Margaret in great emotion answered: ‘Yes, God will raise you up again and make you free.’ From that hour the king gradually recovered his strength, and he would often say: ‘But for her, I was a dead man.’ 432

Margaret, seeing her brother restored to life, thought only of restoring him to liberty. She departed for Toledo, where Charles V. was staying; the seneschal and seneschaless of Poitou, the Bishop of Senlis, the Archbishop of Embrun, the president De Selves, and several other nobles, accompanied her. What a journey! Will she succeed in touching her brother’s gaoler, or will she fail? This question was continually before her mind. Hope, fear, indignation moved her by turns; at every step her agitation increased. The emperor went out courteously to meet her; he helped her to descend from her litter, and had his first conversation with her in the Alcazar, that old and magnificent palace of the Moorish kings. Charles V. was determined to take advantage of his victory. Notwithstanding the outward marks of politeness, exacted by the etiquette of courts, he wrapped himself up in imperturbable dignity, and was cold, nay, almost harsh. Margaret, seeing that her brother’s conqueror kept the foot upon his neck, and was determined not to remove it, could no longer contain herself. ‘She broke out into great anger:’ 433like a lioness robbed of her cubs, full of majesty and fury, she startled the cold and formal Charles, says Brantôme. Yet he restrained himself, preserved his icy mien, made no answer to the duchess, and busying himself with showing her the honours due to her rank, he conducted her, accompanied by the Archbishop of Toledo and several Spanish noblemen, to the palace of Don Diego de Mendoza, which had been prepared for her.

Alone in her chamber the princess gave free vent to her tears; she wrote to Francis: ‘I found him very cold.’ 434She reminded him that the King of heaven ‘has placed on his throne an ensign of grace ; that we have no reason to fear the majesty of heaven will reject us; and that he stretches out his hand to us, even before we seek for it.’ And being thus strengthened, she prepared for the solemn sitting at which she was to plead her brother’s cause. She quitted the palace with emotion to appear before the council extraordinary, at which the emperor and his ministers sat with all the grandeur and pride of Castile. Margaret was not intimidated, and though she could not perceive the least mark of interest on the severe and motionless faces of her judges, ‘she was triumphant in speaking and pleading.’ But she returned bowed down with sorrow: the immovable severity of the emperor and of his councillors dismayed her. ‘The thing is worsened,’ she said, ‘far more than I had imagined.’ 435

The Duchess of Alençon, firmer than her brother, would not agree to the cession of Burgundy. The emperor replied with irritation: ‘It is my patrimonial estate—I still bear the name and the arms.’ The duchess, confounded by Charles’s harshness, threw herself into the arms of God. ‘When men fail, God does not forget,’ she said. She clung to the rock; ‘she leant,’ says Erasmus, ‘upon the unchangeable rock which is called Christ.’ 436

She soon regained her courage, asked for another audience, returned to the attack, and her agitated soul spoke with new eloquence to the emperor and his ministers. Never had the Escurial or the Alcazar seen a petitioner so ardent and so persevering. She returned to her apartments in alternations of sorrow and joy. ‘Sometimes I get a kind word,’ she wrote, ‘and then suddenly all is changed. I have to deal with the greatest of dissemblers.’ 437This beautiful and eloquent ambassadress filled the Spaniards with admiration. They talked at court of nothing but the sister of Francis I. Letters received in France and Germany from Madrid and Toledo extolled her sweetness, energy, and virtues. The scholars of Europe felt their love and respect for her increase, and were proud of a princess whom they looked upon as their Mæcenas. What charmed them was something more than that inquiring spirit which had led Margaret in her earliest years towards literature and divinity, and had made her learn Latin and Hebrew; 438Erasmus enthusiastically exclaimed when he heard of the wonders she was doing in Spain: ‘How can we help loving, in God, such a heroine, such an amazon?’ 439The courage with which the Duchess of Alençon had gone to Spain to save her brother led some christians to imagine that she would display the same heroism in delivering the Church from her long captivity.