ote: The king's necessities.]

[Sidenote: A despotic course suggested.]

Meantime the revenues of the royal domain, having during the late wars
been subjected to a long and unremitting drain, had proved utterly
inadequate to meet the extraordinary demand of treasure for the
resumption of the hostilities following close upon Francis's release.
Recourse must be had to the purses of the king's subjects. The right to
levy taxes resided in the States General alone, and Francis was
reluctant, at so critical a juncture, to trample on a time-hallowed
principle. He did not, indeed, hesitate to admit that he had been
gravely counselled by some of his advisers to resort to a more despotic
course; for they maintained that, in so praiseworthy an undertaking as
the effort to recover the young princes, the king was warranted by all
laws, divine and human, in laying under contribution every one of his
subjects, of whatever rank or condition.[277] But, as the same ends
might be attained by methods more agreeable to law and precedent,
Francis preferred to have recourse to them.

[Sidenote: An assembly of notables.]

On the sixteenth of December, 1527, one of those anomalous political
bodies was convened in the palace of the Parisian parliament to which
the name of an assembly of notables is given. All the orders of the
state were represented; but the form of a meeting of the States General
(as we have seen, most distasteful to the despotic monarch) was
studiously avoided.[278] In reply to a very full exposition of the
present condition of the kingdom and of the incidents of his capture,
made by Francis in person to the assembled clergymen, nobles, jurists,
and burgesses of Paris, each order in turn gave its opinion. All united
in approving the refusal of the king to surrender Burgundy to the
emperor, and in expressing their unwillingness to allow his Majesty to
return to Spain and thus redeem the promise he had given in case the
treaty failed to be carried into effect. All likewise professed their
readiness to contribute, according to their ability, to the necessities
of the crown.

The first president, M. de Selve, in the name of parliament, delivered a
discourse which the clerk of the assembly, no doubt aptly, describes as
"_crammed_ with Latin and with quotations from Scripture, to prove that
the treaty of Madrid was null and void."[279] His grounds were that the
king could neither dispose of his own person, which belonged to the