Instead of continuing a more and more free and legal regimen, Francis I.and his chancellor, Duprat, loudly proclaimed and practised the maxims of absolute power; in the church, the Pragmatic Sanction was abolished; and in the state, Francis I., during a reign of thirty-two years, did not once convoke the States General, and labored only to set up the sovereign right of his own sole will.

The church was despoiled of her electoral autonomy; and the magistracy, treated with haughty and silly impertinence, was vanquished and humiliated in the exercise of its right of remonstrance.

The Concordat of 1516 was not the only, but it was the gravest pact of alliance concluded between the papacy and the French kingship for the promotion mutually of absolute power.
Whilst this question formed the subject of disputes in France between the great public authorities, there was springing up, outside of France, between the great European powers another not more grave in regard to a distant future, but more threatening in regard to the present peace of nations.

King Ferdinand the Catholic had died on the 23d of January, 1516; and his grandson and successor, Archduke Charles, anxious to go and take possession of the throne of Spain, had hastily concluded with Francis I., on the 13th of August, 1516, at Noyon, a treaty intended to settle differences between the two crowns as to the kingdoms of Naples and Navarre.

The French and Spanish plenipotentiaries, Sires de Boisy and de Chievres, were still holding meetings at Montpellier, trying to come to an understanding about the execution of this treaty, when the death of Emperor Maximilian at Wels, in Austria, on the 12th of January, 1519, occurred to add the vacant throne of a great power to the two second-rate thrones already in dispute between two powerful princes.
Three claimants, Charles of Austria, who was the new King of Spain, Francis I., and Henry VIII., King of England, aspired to this splendid heritage.