see that the state of
things is such that your coming cannot be productive of the comfort you
would desire. The king would not be glad to see you. The reason that
your visit is deemed inadvisable is _the deliverance of the king's
children, which the king esteems as important as the deliverance of his
own person_."[276]

[Sidenote: Francis I. violates his pledges to Charles V.]

Here was the secret! Unfortunately for the Reformation, policy was
supposed to make it an imperative duty to conciliate the favor of the
Pope, no less after the release of Francis than while he was yet a
prisoner. There were the young princes sent by the regent as hostages
for the fulfilment of the treaty with Charles of Spain, for whose
liberation measures were to be devised. And there was the oath--to the
shame of Francis, it must be added--from the binding force of which the
king hoped to be relieved by authority of the Roman bishop; for scarcely
had Francis set foot on his own dominions, when he unblushingly
retracted all his treaty stipulations. He announced to the emperor that
the cession of Burgundy, the Viscounty of Auxonne, and other
territories, which had been made by his imperial captor the
indispensable condition of his release, was entirely out of the
question; and that his promises, extorted while he was in duress, were
of no validity! Nevertheless, he offered, in lieu thereof, the payment
of a larger ransom than had ever been proffered by a king of France.
Indignant at a perfidy somewhat flagrant, even for an age tolerably well
accustomed to breaches of faith, the emperor refused the substitute. The
arms recently laid aside were resumed. Clement the Seventh and Venice
became the allies of Francis, who for the present figured as the
champion of the papacy; while his rival, by suffering the traitor
Constable de Bourbon with an army of German soldiers to besiege the
pontiff in his capital, became responsible in the eyes of the world for
all the atrocities of the famous sack of the city of Rome. When, at
length, after three years of hard fighting, peace was concluded by the
treaty of Cambray (July, 1529), the terms agreed upon at Madrid were
virtually carried into effect; but the emperor consented to receive the
sum of two millions of Crowns--_ecus-au-soleil_--in place of Burgundy,
and on payment to restore to the French the dauphin and the Duke of
Orleans, the future Henry the Second, so long detained as hostages in
Spain.

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