pon, there were the seven provincial
legions, which had been formed by Francis I. for Normandy, Picardy,
Burgundy, Dauphiny, and Provence united, Languedoc, Guienne, and
Brittany; but they were not like permanent troops, drilled and always
ready; they were recruited by voluntary enlistment; they generally
remained at their own homes, receiving compensation at review time and
high pay in time of war. The Constable de Montmorency had no confidence
in these legions; he spoke of them contemptuously, and would much rather
have increased the number of the foreign corps, regularly paid and kept
up, Swiss or lanzknechts. Two systems of policy and warfare, moreover,
divided the king's council into two: Montmorency, now old and worn out in
body and mind (he was born in 1492, and so was sixty in 1552), was for a
purely defensive attitude, no adventures or battles to be sought, but
victuals and all sorts of supplies to be destroyed in the provinces which
might be invaded by the enemy, so that instead of winning victories there
he might not even be able to live there. In 1536 this system had been
found successful by the constable in causing the failure of Charles V.'s
invasion of Provence; but in 1550 a new generation had come into the
world, the court, and the army; it comprised young men full of ardor and
already distinguished for their capacity and valor; Francis de Lorraine,
Duke of Guise (born at the castle of Bar, February 17, 1519), was
thirty-one; his brother, Charles de Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine, was only
six-and-twenty (he was born at Joinville, February 17, 1524); Francis de
Scepeaux (born at Durdtal, Anjou, in 1510), who afterwards became Marshal
de Vieilleville, was at this time nearly forty; but he had contributed in
1541 to the victory of Ceresole, and Francis I. had made so much of it
that he had said, on presenting him to his son Henry, "He is no older
than you, and see what he has done already; if the wars do not swallow
him up, you will some day make him constable or marshal of France."
Gaspard de Coligny (born at Chatillon-sur-Loing, February 16, 1517) was
thirty-three; and his brother, Francis d'Andelot (born at Chatillon, in
1521), twenty-nine. These men, warriors and politicians at one and the
same time, in a high social position and in the flower of their age,
could not reconcile themselves to the Constable de Montmorency's system,
defensive solely and prudential to the verge of inertness; they thought
th