e at home. The French
cavalry, consisting of gentlemen whose duty and honorable distinction it
was to follow the monarch in every expedition, still sustained the
reputation for the impetuous ardor and the irresistible weight of its
charges which it had won during the Middle Ages. If it had encountered
unexpected rebuffs on the fields of Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt, the
chivalry of France had been too successful in other engagements to lose
courage and enthusiasm. The nobles, both old and young, were still ready
at any time to flock to their prince's standard when unfurled for an
incursion into Naples or the Milanese. Never had they displayed more
alacrity or self-sacrificing devotion than when young Francis the First
set out upon his campaigns in Italy.[17] The French infantry was less
trustworthy. The troops raised in Normandy, Brittany, and Languedoc were
reported to be but poorly trained to military exercises; but the
foot-soldiers supplied by some of the frontier provinces were sturdy and
efficient, and the gallant conduct of the Gascons at the disastrous
battle of St. Quentin was the subject of universal admiration.[18]

[Sidenote: Foreign mercenary troops.]

What France lacked in cavalry was customarily supplied by the Reiters,
whose services were easily purchased in Germany. The same country stood
ready to furnish an abundance of Lansquenets (Lanzknechten), or pikemen,
who, together with the Swiss, in a great measure replaced the native
infantry. A Venetian envoy reported, in 1535, that the French king
could, in six weeks at longest, set on foot a force of forty-eight
thousand men, of whom twenty-one thousand, or nearly one-half, would be
foreign mercenaries. His navy, besides his great ship of sixty guns
lying in the harbor of Havre, numbered thirty galleys, and a few other
vessels of no great importance.[19]

[Sidenote: The rights of the people overlooked.]

[Sidenote: The States General an object of suspicion.]

The power gained by the crown through the consolidation of the monarchy
had been acquired at the expense of the popular liberties. In the
prolonged struggle between the king, as lord paramount, and his
insubordinate vassals, the rights of inferior subjects had received
little consideration. From the strife the former issued triumphant, with
an asserted claim to unlimited power. The voice of the masses was but
feebly heard in the States General--a convocation of all three orders
called at irregul