Noseman
Eric Christiansen
rr wenty years ago, Mr Knecht of Birm-
ingham began writing the history of King Francis 1 of France. Mr Knecht was a lecturer in French history at the university. King Francis was a famous Frenchman of the 16th century about whom nobody had recently written a book. It was the classic conjunction of motive, opportunity and weapon. The most natural thing in the world: so natural, in fact, that while Mr Knecht was treading out the corn beneath the inspiring campanile of Birmingham's campus an equally dedicated Frenchman, M. Jacquart, was doing the same thing across the channel.
Knecht's Francis I and Jacquart's Francois Ier thus appear simultaneously to claim the attention of lovers of French history, and it is the agreeable task of this reviewer to recommend Knecht to all those who find it difficult to read French, and Jacquart to all who prefer not to read English. This may seem an un- discriminating attitude to adopt, but this reviewer has only been sent a copy of one of these books, and it took him so long to read that — well, there is a limit to the amount of information about Francis I that anyone can comfortably digest.
However, the gap has been filled. After 480 pages of Knecht no-one need suffer from night-starvation on this subject. Why anyone should want to know anything about it at all is more to the point. What is the attraction about this standard `Renaissance Prince', whose distinction lay in being a shade less awful than Henry VIII and a shade more caddish than Charles V,
his main rivals? I note that the current Dic- tionnaire de Biographie francaise gives him less space than Fouche and Fouquier- Tinville, two political mediocrities of the Revolutionary period. The days when he was called 'The Great' seem to be long over.
Yet he is remembered. Because of his ar- chitecture, and his sex-life; because he met Charles Laughton on the Field of the Cloth of Gold; because he got himself captured and then released by the Emperor Charles V; and because Rabelais may or may not have intended to idealise him in the character of Gargantua. He got a lovely tune in Rigoletto, at the price of appearing under another name. He founded the col- lection of books that became the Bibliothe- que Nationale. And above all he left pic- tures, medals, and statues that immortalis- ed his splendiferous hooter and expunged the memory of his long barge-shaped feet. He is at least a face; and the face is that of a very rich man who had a lot of fun at other people's expense.
Theoretically he could have had more, and they could have paid less, if he had not continually tried to be both rich and suc- cessful. He had an income over five times as great as Henry VIII's, and an appetite for hunting, women, dancing, books and art which could easily have absorbed the whole of it. Even in peacetime, his court needed over 22,000 horses and mules to travel round the country. But that wasn't good enough for Francis. He wanted all this, and the Duchy of Milan as well, at any price; he therefore entered the painful and, at this distance, tedious world of 16th-century in- ternational politics. For the sake of Milan, he lost battles, his own liberty, and the lives of thousands of his subjects; he even lost Boulogne to the English. He ran into debt, dishonour and disaster, and for the sake of this crass obsession he was prepared to em- bark on that most unworthy- of royal ac- tivities: reform. Taxes, army, currency, and local government all had to be messed about to bring the sovereign closer to the spaghetti heartlands.
Of course, this is what kings were like in those days, but in Francis's case the pointless activism is especially pronounced. On the evidence presented by Mr Knecht, I blame his youthful addiction to ball-games for this. The Memoirs of the Marshal de Floranges shed a most interesting light on two of these. One was called L'escaigne, in which 'a large inflated ball was hit by a bat shaped like a stool with legs filled with lead.' In the other, a ball 'as large as a bar- rel and filled with air was hit with a piece of tin lined with felt and strapped to the forearm.' Francis was particularly suc- cessful at the latter. There must have been times in later life, particularly bad times, with Henry VIII bouncing back off the wall at an unforeseen angle, and the Emperor Charles apparently having extracted the lead from the French stool-bat, when Fran- cis may have been tempted to give up the struggle and get on with promoting the study of Greek, and at such times the injunc- tion to Play up! and play the game may have been all that kept him going. He cer- tainly believed in 'playing to win', since he was prepared to make an alliance with the Turks and so endanger the whole of Christendom, rather than lose points in the Milan match.
However, a more attractive side to his sportsmanship is indicated by the entertain- ment he laid on at one of his festivals: a wrestling match between two teams of priests. This is not untypical of his dealings with the pestilent theological troublemakers who appeared in France, as elsewhere, about that time, and such matches might have been imitated in Germany and England to the great advantage of mankind, as they would have increased the popularity of the clergy and enabled them to settle differences of opinion in a public and manly fashion. Ah, the might-have- beens of history. And if Francis was crass over Milan, he was highly imaginative over Canada, which he tried to annex as a way of annoying the Emperor. He seems to have believed that up the St Lawrence river there was a land abounding in gold and spices, where the natives wore European dress, and the trees were inhabited by a species of bat-men. He sent out colonists and explorers, and im- ported Red Indians, but the fantasy wore thin, and in the end the French pulled out and poor Cartier was left unpaid.
He was luckier with the arts, because he had the money at a time when it was dif- ficult for a patron to make a mistake. The Old Masters were young, competitive and available. True, Francis kept his Titians, Leonardos and Raphaels in his bathroom, where the steam did them no good, but bathrooms were rarer than Leonardos in those days and his was quite a work of art In itself. Mr Knecht is interesting on Francis and the artists and scholars, although there is not a single reference to Rabelais in the whole book, which will infuriate students of French Lit: well done. As for the mistresses, Francis was less lucky, because he lived before penicillin, and as for his 15 million odd subjects, their fate is rapidly but effectively surveyed in this book, and it seems to have been on the whole fairly dire, but not as bad as it would later become. Francis did very well out of them.
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