wavering; the following day the same question should be put again,
away from the place of torture, to see if he stood by his answer, but he
could not be tortured again without new charges (indices) (cc. 113–14).
Running through the whole ordinance are strictures on the behaviour
of parlementaires, baillis, and court officials, who were not to take
pensions from lords or demand payments from litigants before them
(cc. 22, 33). The presidents and councillors of parlementswere told (to
their consternation) that they must be chosen openly (publiquement de
vive voix) and not by secret ballot, and be examined for sufficiency by
a committee of councillors before the king would appoint them
(cc. 30–2); revealing the secrets of courts (on the other hand) was to be
punished (c. 39). A father and son were not to sit as judges in the same
court, nor two brothers (c. 41); the lieutenants of baillismust not buy
their offices, but be doctors of laws chosen in full court (cc. 47–9); the
king’s secretaries must swear not to charge for a simple signature on
official letters (c. 138). The power assumed by royal lieutenants and
governors to grant ‘graces, remissions and pardons... ennoblements
and legitimations, and to call before them cases pending before ordinary
judges’ was revoked, because it belonged to the king as a sign of his
sovereignty (c. 70). All judges and officials were to take an oath to
enforce the Grande Ordonnance, which was to be published by the
Grand Conseil, the parlementsof Paris, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Dijon,
Grenoble, the grand sénéchalof Provence, the prévôtof Paris, and all
baillis(c. 162).
Machiavelli’s Prince(written in 1513) was in the tradition of the
treatises De regimine principumnot least in placing in the forefront
of his argument an Italian view of French government, which the
Florentine had gained on three diplomatic missions to France in the first
decade of the sixteenth century. All states (tutti li stati), all the domin-
ions over men there had ever been, were either republics or principal-
ities, and France was obviously a leading example of the latter, but its
experience showed that a kingdom was also a commonwealth which
must be ruled politically (that is, by ‘policy’) in order to survive and
flourish. As Machiavelli would say in his Discourses on Livy(1515–17),
one’s country was to be defended by any means available, and the
French should be followed in their belief that nothing could be shame-
ful in preserving the power of their kingdom. But faithlessness between
princes should not extend to faithlessness between prince and people,
and the successful ruler must avoid being hated and despised. In France
he had achieved this by calling into existence an ‘infinite number of
good institutions’ (infinite constituzione buone), above all parlement,
which restrained the nobility to the advantage of the people without the
odium falling on the king. In the Discorsi, a compendium of his (not
France as l’état monarchique 291