He it was who, during the first campaign in Italy, examined in person, with the shepherd who had pointed it out, an unknown passage across the Alps; and, on the 13th and 14th of September, he contributed greatly to the victory of Melegnano. “I can assure you,” wrote Francis I. to his mother, the regent, “that my brother the constable and M. de St. Pol splintered as many lances as any gentlemen of the company whosoever; and I speak of this as one who saw; they spared themselves as little as if they had been wild boars at bay.” On returning to France the king appointed the constable governor of conquered Milaness; and to give him a further mark of favor, “he granted him the noble privilege of founding trades in all the towns of the kingdom. This, when the Parliament enregistered the king’s letters patent, was expressly stated to be in consideration of Bourbon’s extraordinary worth, combined with 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,