his quality as a prince of the blood, and not because of his office of constable.” [Histoire de la Maison de Bourbon, by M. Desormeaux, t. ii. p. 437.] The constable showed that he was as capable of governing as of conquering.  He foiled all Emperor Maximilian’s attempts to recover Milaness; and, not receiving from the king money for the maintenance and pay of his troops, he himself advanced one hundred thousand livres, opened a loan-account in his own name, raised an army-working-corps of six thousand men to repair the fortifications of Milan, and obtained from the Swiss cantons permission to enlist twelve thousand recruits amongst them.  His exercise of authority over the 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.