all the strong tempering of his
character and of his warlike genius to keep him from giving way under so
many trials. He was beginning to feel himself near recovery: he had an
army, an army of his own; he had chosen for it men inured to labor and
fatigue, accustomed to strict discipline; and thereto he added five
hundred horsemen from Franche-Comte for whose devotion and courage he
could answer: and he gave the second command in this army to George of
Freundsberg, an old captain of lanzknechts and commandant of the
emperor's guard, the same who, three years before, on seeing Luther
boldly enter Worms, said to him, with a slap on the shoulder, "Little
monk, this is a daring step thou art going to take! Nor I, nor any
captain of us, ever did the like. If thy cause is good, and if thou have
faith in thy cause, forward! little monk, in God's name forward!" With
such comrades about him, Bourbon re-entered Milaness at the head of
twelve or thirteen thousand fighting men, three months after having left
it, alone and moneyless. His rivals about the person of Charles V.,
Lannoy, Viceroy of Naples, and the Marquis of Pescara, could not help
admiring him, and he regained in the imperial camp an ascendency which
had but lately been very much shaken.

He found the fresh campaign begun in earnest. Francis I.'s veteran
generals, Marshals La Tremoille and Chabannes, had advised him to pursue
without pause the beaten and disorganized imperial army, which was in
such plight that there was placarded on the statue of Pasquin at Rome,
"Lost--an army--in the mountains of Genoa; if anybody knows what has
become of it, let him come forward and say: he shall be well rewarded."
If the King of France, it was said, drove back northward and forced into
the Venetian dominions the remnants of this army, the Spaniards would not
be able to hold their own in Milaness, and would have to retire within
the kingdom of Naples. But Admiral Bonnivet, "whose counsel the king
made use of more than of any other," says Du Bellay, pressed Francis I.
to make himself master, before everything, of the principal strong places
in Lombardy, especially of Pavia, the second city in the duchy of Milan.
Francis followed this counsel, and on the 26th of August, 1524, twenty
days after setting out from Aix in Provence, he appeared with his army in
front of Pavia. On learning this resolution, Pescara joyously exclaimed,
"We were vanquished; a little while and we shall be