The result of that "field of honour" is sufficiently well known. Pescara, who received three wounds, though none of them serious, in the battle, considered that he was ill-used, when the royal captive Francis was taken out of his hands to Spain, and made complaints on the subject to his master Charles V., who had succeeded Ferdinand on the thrones of Spain and Naples in 1516. He was now, however, at the age of thirty-five, general-in-chief for that monarch in Lombardy, and enjoyed his perfect confidence, when circumstances arose calculated to try his fidelity severely. Whether that, almost the only virtue recognised, honoured, and professed by his own class at that day, remained altogether intact and unblemished is doubtful. But it is certain, that in any view of the case, his conduct was such as would consign him to utter infamy in any somewhat more morally enlightened age than his own, and such as any noble-hearted man, however untaught, would have instinctively shrunk from even then. [Sidenote: PESCARA'S TREACHERY.] The circumstances briefly were as follows:— Clement VII., who had succeeded to the Popedom in 1523, had, after much trimming and vacillation between Francis I. and Charles V., become, like the rest of Italy, exceedingly alarmed at the preponderating power of Charles, after the discomfiture of the French at Pavia. Now the discontent of Pescara, mentioned above, being notorious, the Pope and his counsellors, especially Giberti, Bishop of Verona, and Morone, Chancellor and Prime Minister of the Duke of Milan, thought that it might not be impossible to induce him to turn traitor to Charles, and make use of the army under his command to crush once and for ever the Spanish power in Italy. The prime mover and agent in this conspiracy was Morone, who had the reputation of being one of the profoundest and most far-sighted statesmen of his day. Guicciardini[176] has recorded, that he (the historian) had often heard Morone declare, that there did not exist a worse or more faithless man in all Italy than Pescara. The conspiring Chancellor, therefore, being empowered by the Pope to promise the malcontent general the throne of Naples as the price of his treason, thought that he might well venture to make the proposal.