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monarchs could have fallen under the same indictment. One of Edward’s predecessors took Jane Shore, a commoner, as his favorite mistress, and in that role she served as a friend at court for many good Englishmen in need of royal favors. Across the Channel Francis I (r. 1515–1547), le roi grand nez—a long nose was thought to signify virility, and he had both—seemed bent on outperforming Don Juan. Francis’s most memorable royal concubines were Françoise de Foix, comtesse de Chateaubriant, and Anne de Pisselieu, whom he created duchesse d’Étampes. But he always had other irons, so to speak, in the fire. According to one legend, he invested Milan, not to take the city, but to pursue a pair of lovely eyes he had once glimpsed there. In France his exercise of his droit du seigneur was not as popular as he assumed it to be. The husband of la belle Ferroniere, a lawyer’s wife who had been chosen to share the royal bed, deliberately infected himself with syphilis and gave it to her so that she might pass it along to the king. Still another mistress-in-waiting disfigured herself in the hope that Francis would find her too repulsive to mount. It didn’t work. She had been under the impression that the king was interested in her face.

These two, however, were exceptional. Most young Frenchwomen are said to have been delighted when conscripted to receive the king in all his manly glory, and in their appearances at court they competed for his attention. Opening their bodices, they displayed swelling bosoms down to, and sometimes below, their nipples (unless the bosoms were inadequate, in which case padding had been inserted under the stays). Their backs had been cut down to the last vertebra, sleeves billowed, gowns were pinched at the waist and tightened under the breasts, hidden wires spread out the skirt, and high heels gave each hopeful candidate a prancing, sexy

King Francis I of France (1494–1547)

walk. In his last years Francis moved to Fontainebleau and surrounded himself with what he called his petite bande of lovely maidens, whom he deflowered while watched by those waiting their turn. On his deathbed, where he finally slept alone, he summoned his sole heir and warned him not to be dominated by a woman. But the youth, who ascended to the throne as Henry II, had already established the format of his domestic life. France would be ruled by a ménage à trois: the king himself; his queen, Catherine de’ Medici, whose parents had died of syphilis three weeks after her birth; and the king’s mistress, Diane de Poitiers.

Various reasons have been advanced to explain why, as medieval shadows receded, European morals declined. This much seems certain: behavior had become so abandoned that family ties were loosened; impudicity threatened to overflow the channels within which the institution of marriage sought to confine it, if only for the sake of the social order. To be sure, there were laws against lascivious behavior, but governments lacked both the manpower and the will. In such times they generally do. Divorce, which might have brought the problem under control, was rejected by all authorities. The pope, Luther, Henry VIII, and Erasmus agreed that bigamy was preferable to divorce. After the great split in Christendom, Protestant theologians moved hesitantly toward the acceptance of divorce, but only in the case of adultery. “Probably the basic cause in the moral loosening in Western Europe,” a modern historian argues, “was the growth of wealth.” Nevertheless, the religious revolution played a role. There were no theological villains here. Martin Luther agreed that depravity increased in his Protestant congregations after the Reformation, but lechery and sexual license had also run amok in Catholic Spain and Catholic Italy, and Francis, whatever his private sympathies, ruled a Catholic France. Yet the shocking attacks on Rome and by Rome clearly led to a decline of respect for all vows and inhibitions. “Nobody cares about either heaven or hell,” wrote Andreas Musculus, a Lutheran preacher, sadly; “nobody gives a thought to either