he Lombard population was
sometimes harsh, but always judicious and efficient. Nevertheless, in
the spring of 1516, eight months after the victory of Melegnano and but
two months after he had driven Emperor Maximilian from Milaness, the Duke
of Bourbon was suddenly recalled, and Marshal de Lautrec was appointed
governor in his place. When the constable arrived at Lyons, where the
court then happened to be, "the king," says Fleuranges in his Memoires,
"gave him marvellously good welcome;" but kings are too ready to imagine
that their gracious words suffice to hide or make up for their acts of
real disfavor; and the Duke of Bourbon was too proud to delude himself.
If he had any desire to do so, the way in which the king's government
treated him soon revealed to him his real position: the advances he had
made and the debts he had contracted for the service of the crown in
Milaness, nay, his salary as constable and his personal pensions, were
unpaid. Was this the effect of secret wrath on the part of the
queen-mother, hurt because he seemed to disdain her good graces, or an
act arising may be from mistrust and may be from carelessness on the
king's part, or merely a result of the financial disorder into which the
affairs of Francis I. were always falling? These questions cannot be
solved with certainty. Anyhow the constable, though thus maltreated,
did not cry out; but his royal patroness and mother-in-law, Anne of
France, daughter of Louis XI., dowager-duchess of the house of Bourbon,
complained of these proceedings to the king's mother, and uttered the
word ingratitude. The dispute between the two princesses grew rancorous;
the king intervened to reconcile them; speedy payment was promised of
all that was due to the constable, but the promise was not kept. The
constable did not consider it seemly to wait about; so he quitted the
court and withdrew into his own duchy, to Moulins, not openly disgraced,
but resolved to set himself, by his proud independence, above the reach
of ill-will, whether on the king's part or his mother's.

Moulins was an almost kingly residence. "The dukes," said the Venetian
traveller Andrew Navagero, in 1528, "have built there fortress-wise a
magnificent palace, with beautiful gardens, groves, fountains, and all
the sumptuous appliances of a prince's dwelling." No sooner did the
constable go to reside there than numbers of the nobility flocked thither
around him. The feudal splendor of this