During the final five years of the chancellorship in the Habsburg monarchia personal elements assume greater prominence. Gattinara's correspondence with the emperor, at least until the autumn of 1527, abounds with appeals for money to meet his debts and his obligations as lord of a household and family. These letters tell us little about the chancellorship except in so far as Gattinara's debts had created so much anxiety, according to his own opinion, as to impair his service to the emperor, and that the apparent failure of repeated appeals revealed the corrosion of their relationship. In considering this period, which saw Gattinara's removal to Italy, the fall of Lalemand and the ultimate triumph of the chancellor's Italian policy, we must attend to biographical and personal elements only to the extent that they help to explain the demise of the chancellorship.

The emperor's most loyal servant might have departed Spain in the summer of 1526 had it not been for the League of Cognac and the emerging crisis over Italy. None in the imperial service had as comprehensive a grasp of Italian and European politics as he. The acceleration in the tempo of diplomatic affairs kept him apparently at the center of governmental action. Or so it seemed to Castiglione who exaggerates the paramount role played by the chancellor in the period after Pavia.