HISTORY OF FRANCE
BY GUIZOT
VOLUME V.
CONTENTS
[ CHAPTER XXXV.] HENRY IV., PROTESTANT KING. (1589-1593.)
[ CHAPTER XXXVI.] HENRY IV., CATHOLIC KING. (1593-1610.)
[ CHAPTER XXXVII.] REGENCY OF MARY DE’ MEDICI. (1610-1617.)
[ CHAPTER XXXVIII.] LOUIS XIII., CARDINAL RICHELIEU, AND THE COURT.
[ CHAPTER XXXIX.] LOUIS XIII., CARDINAL RICHELIEU, AND THE PROVINCES.
[ CHAPTER XL.] LOUIS XIII., RICHELIEU--CATHOLICS AND PROTESTANTS.
[ CHAPTER XLI.] LOUIS XIII., CARDINAL RICHELIEU, AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS.
[ CHAPTER XII.] LOUIS XIII., RICHELIEU, AND LITERATURE.
[ CHAPTER XLIII.] LOUIS XIV., THE FRONDE--CARDINAL MAZARIN.
[ CHAPTER XLIV.] LOUIS XIV., HIS WARS AND HIS CONQUESTS. 1661-1697.
[ CHAPTER XLV.] LOUIS XIV., HIS WARS AND HIS REVERSES. (1697-1713.)
[ CHAPTER XLVI.] LOUIS XIV. AND HOME ADMINISTRATION.
[ CHAPTER XLVII.] LOUIS XIV. AND RELIGION.
[ CHAPTER XLVIII.] LOUIS XIV., LITERATURE AND ART.ILLUSTRTIONS
[ “Do Not Lose Sight of My White Plume.”——30 ]
[ Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma——32 ]
[ Charles de Lorraine, Duke of Mayenne——35 ]
[ Lemaitre, Mayenne, and the Archbishop of Lyons——53 ]
[ Henry IV.‘s Abjuration——56 ]
[ The Castle of Monceaux——91 ]
[ The Castle of St. Germain in the Reign Of Henry IV.—107 ]
[ The Castle of Fontainbleau——124 ]
[ Henry IV. And his Ministers——138 ]
[ The Arsenal in the Reign of Henry IV.——143 ]
[ Concini, Leonora Galigai, and Mary De’ Medici——149 ]
[ Louis XIII. And Albert de Luynes——154 ]
[ Murder of Marshal D’Ancre——155 ]
[ “Tapping With his Finger-tips on the Window-pane.”——191 ]
[ Henry, Duke of Montmorency, at Castelnaudary——199 ]
[ The King and the Cardinal——204 ]
[ Cinq-Mars and de Thou Going to Execution——215 ]
[ The Parliament of Paris Reprimanded——217 ]
[ The Abbot of St. Cyran——234 ]
[ Demolishing the Fortifications——244 ]
[ The Harbor of La Rochelle—-248 ]
[ The King and Richelieu at La Rochelle——250 ]
[ The Defile of Suza Pass——278 ]
[ Richelieu and Father Joseph——280 ]
[ Death of Gustavus and his Page——290 ]
[ The Tomb of Richelieu——308 ]
[ Descartes at Amsterdam——316 ]
[ The Representation of “The Cid.”——335 ]
[ Corneille at the Hotel Rambouillet—-342 ]
[ “Ah, Wretch, if Thy Father Saw Thee!”——354 ]
[ The Great Mademoiselle——373 ]
[ Anne of Austria and Cardinal Mazarin——394 ]
[ Louis XIV. Dismissing Fouquet——407 ]
[ William III., Prince of Orange——434 ]
[ An Exploit of John Bart’s——446 ]
[ Duquesne Victorious over Ruyter—446a ]
[ Battle of St. Vincent 465a ]
[ The Battle of Neerwinden——465 ]
[ “Here is the King of Spain.”——475 ]
[ News for William III.——481 ]
[ Bivouac of Louis XIV.——503 ]
[ Marshal Villars and Prince Eugene——512 ]
[ Colonnade of the Louvre 525a ]
[ Misery of the Peasantry——543 ]
[ The Torture of the Huguenots—552 ]
[ Revocation of the Edict Of Nantes——556 ]
[ Death of Roland the Camisard——569 ]
[ Fenelon and the Duke of Burgundy——610 ]
[ La Rochefoucauld and his Fair Friends——629 ]
[ Corneille Reading to Louis XIV.——642 ]
[ La Fontaine, Boileau, Moliere, and Racine——657 ]
A POPULAR HISTORY OF FRANCE
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES.
CHAPTER XXXV.
HENRY IV., PROTESTANT KING. (1589-1593.)
On the 2d of August, 1589, in the morning, upon his arrival in his quarters at Meudon, Henry of Navarre was saluted by the Protestants King of France. They were about five thousand in an army of forty thousand men. When, at ten o’clock, he entered the camp of the Catholics at St. Cloud, three of their principal leaders, Marshal d’Aumont, and Sires d’Humieres and de Givry, immediately acknowledged him unconditionally, as they had done the day before at the death-bed of Henry III., and they at once set to work to conciliate to him the noblesse of Champagne, Picardy, and Ile-de-France. “Sir,” said Givry, “you are the king of the brave; you will be deserted by none but dastards.” But the majority of the Catholic leaders received him with such expressions as, “Better die than endure a Huguenot king!” One of them, Francis d’O, formally declared to him that the time had come for him to choose between the insignificance of a King of Navarre and the grandeur of a King of France; if he pretended to the crown, he must first of all abjure. Henry firmly rejected these threatening entreaties, and left their camp with an urgent recommendation, to them to think of it well before bringing dissension into the royal army and the royal party which were protecting their privileges, their property, and their lives against the League. On returning to his quarters, he noticed the arrival of Marshal de Biron, who pressed him to lay hands without delay upon the crown of France, in order to guard it and save it. But, in the evening of that day and on the morrow, at the numerous meetings of the lords to deliberate upon the situation, the ardent Catholics renewed their demand for the exclusion of Henry from the throne if he did not at once abjure, and for referring the election of a king to the states-general. Biron himself proposed not to declare Henry king, but to recognize him merely as captain-general of the army pending his abjuration. Harlay de Sancy vigorously maintained the cause of the Salic law and the hereditary rights of monarchy. Biron took him aside and said, “I had hitherto thought that you had sense; now I doubt it. If, before securing our own position with the King of Navarre, we completely establish his, he will no longer care for us. The time is come for making our terms; if we let the occasion escape us, we shall never recover it.” “What are your terms?” asked Sancy. “If it please the king to give me the countship of Perigord, I shall be his forever.” Sancy reported this conversation to the king, who promised Biron what he wanted.
Though King of France for but two days past, Henry IV. had already perfectly understood and steadily taken the measure of the situation. He was in a great minority throughout the country as well as the army, and he would have to deal with public passions, worked by his foes for their own ends, and with the personal pretensions of his partisans. He made no mistake about these two facts, and he allowed them great weight; but he did not take for the ruling principle of his policy and for his first rule of conduct the plan of alternate concessions to the different parties and of continually humoring personal interests; he set his thoughts higher, upon the general and natural interests of France as he found her and saw her. They resolved themselves, in his eyes, into the following great points: maintenance of the hereditary rights of monarchy, preponderance of Catholics in the government, peace between Catholics and Protestants, and religious liberty for Protestants. With him these points became the law of his policy and his kingly duty, as well as the nation’s right. He proclaimed them in the first words that he addressed to the lords and principal personages of state assembled around him. “You all know,” said he, “what orders the late king my predecessor gave me, and what he enjoined upon me with his dying breath. It was chiefly to maintain my subjects, Catholic or Protestant, in equal freedom, until a council, canonical, general, or national, had decided this great dispute. I promised him to perform faithfully that which he bade me, and I regard it as one of my first duties to be as good as my word. I have heard that some who are in my army feel scruples about remaining in my service unless I embrace the Catholic religion. No doubt they think me weak enough for them to imagine that they can force me thereby to abjure my religion and break my word. I am very glad to inform them here, in presence of you all, that I would rather this were the last day of my life than take any step which might cause me to be suspected of having dreamt of renouncing the religion that I sucked in with my mother’s milk, before I have been better instructed by a lawful council, to whose authority I bow in advance. Let him who thinks so ill of me get him gone as soon as he pleases; I lay more store by a hundred good Frenchmen than by two hundred who could harbor sentiments so unworthy. Besides, though you should abandon me, I should have enough of friends left to enable me, without you and to your shame, with the sole assistance of their strong arms, to maintain the rights of my authority. But were I doomed to see myself deprived of even that assistance, still the God who has preserved me from my infancy, as if by His own hand, to sit upon the throne, will not abandon me. I nothing doubt that He will uphold me where He has placed me, not for love of me, but for the salvation of so many souls who pray, without ceasing, for His aid, and for whose freedom He has deigned to make use of my arm. You know that I am a Frenchman and the foe of all duplicity. For the seventeen years that I have been King of Navarre, I do not think that I have ever departed from my word. I beg you to address your prayers to the Lord on my behalf, that He may enlighten me in my views, direct my purposes, bless my endeavors. And in case I commit any fault or fail in any one of my duties,—for I acknowledge that I am a man like any other,—pray Him to give me grace that I may correct it, and to assist me in all my goings.”
On the 4th of August, 1589, an official manifesto of Henry IV.‘s confirmed the ideas and words of this address. On the same day, in the camp at St. Cloud, the majority of the princes, dukes, lords, and gentlemen present in the camp expressed their full adhesion to the accession and the manifesto of the king, promising him “service and obedience against rebels and enemies who would usurp the kingdom.” Two notable leaders, the Duke of Epernon amongst the Catholics, and the Duke of La Tremoille amongst the Protestants, refused to join in this adhesion; the former saying that his conscience would not permit him to serve a heretic king, the latter alleging that his conscience forbade him to serve a prince who engaged to protect Catholic idolatry. They withdrew, D’Epernon into Angoumois and Saintonge, taking with him six thousand foot and twelve thousand horse; and La Tremoille into Poitou, with nine battalions of Reformers. They had an idea of attempting, both of them, to set up for themselves independent principalities. Three contemporaries, Sully, La Force, and the bastard of Angouleme, bear witness that Henry IV. was deserted by as many Huguenots as Catholics. The French royal army was reduced, it is said, to one half. As a make-weight, Saucy prevailed upon the Swiss, to the number of twelve thousand, and two thousand German auxiliaries, not only to continue in the service of the new king, but to wait six months for their pay, as he was at the moment unable to pay them. From the 14th to the 20th of August, in Ile-de-France, in Picardy, in Normandy, in Auvergne, in Champagne, in Burgundy, in Anjou, in Poitou, in Languedoc, in Orleanness, and in Touraine, a great number of towns and districts joined in the determination of the royal army. The last instance of such adherence had a special importance. At the time of Henry III.‘s rupture with the League, the Parliament of Paris had been split in two; the royalists had followed the king to Tours, the partisans of the League had remained at Paris. After the accession of Henry IV., the Parliament of Tours, with the president, Achille de Harlay, as its head, increased from day to day, and soon reached two hundred members, whilst the Parliament of Paris, or Brisson Parliament, as it was called from its leader’s name, had only sixty-eight left. Brisson, on undertaking the post, actually thought it right to take the precaution of protesting privately, making a declaration in the presence of notaries “that he so acted by constraint only, and that he shrank from any rebellion against his king and sovereign lord.” It was, indeed, on the ground of the heredity of the monarchy and by virtue of his own proper rights that Henry IV. had ascended the throne; and M. Poirson says quite correctly, in his learned Histoire du Regne d’Henri IV. [t. i. p. 29, second edition, 1862], “The manifesto of Henry IV., as its very name indicates, was not a contract settled between the noblesse in camp at St. Cloud and the claimant; it was a solemn and reciprocal acknowledgment by the noblesse of Henry’s rights to the crown, and by Henry of the nation’s political, civil, and religious rights. The engagements entered into by Henry were only what were necessary to complete the guarantees given for the security of the rights of Catholics. As touching the succession to the throne, the signataries themselves say that all they do is to maintain and continue the law of the land.”
There was, in 1589, an unlawful pretender to the throne of France; and that was Cardinal Charles de Bourbon, younger brother of Anthony de Bourbon, King of Navarre, and consequently uncle of Henry IV., sole representative of the elder branch. Under Henry III., the cardinal had thrown in his lot with the League; and, after the murder of Guise, Henry III. had, by way of precaution, ordered him to be arrested and detained him in confinement at Chinon, where he still was when Henry III. was in his turn murdered. On becoming king, the far-sighted Henry IV. at once bethought him of his uncle and of what he might be able to do against him. The cardinal was at Chinon, in the custody of Sieur de Chavigny, “a man of proved fidelity,” says De Thou, “but by this time old and blind.” Henry IV. wrote to Du Plessis-Mornay, appointed quite recently governor of Saumur, “bidding him, at any price,” says Madame de Mornay, “to get Cardinal de Bourbon away from Chinon, where he was, without sparing anything, even to the whole of his property, because he would incontinently set himself up for king if he could obtain his release.” Henry IV. was right. As early as the 7th of August, the Duke of Mayenne had an announcement made to the Parliament of Paris, and written notice sent to all the provincial governors, “that, in the interval until the states-general could be assembled, he urged them all to unite with him in rendering with one accord to their Catholic king, that is to say, Cardinal de Bourbon, the obedience that was due to him.” The cardinal was, in fact, proclaimed king under the name of Charles X.; and eight months afterwards, on the 5th of March, 1590, the Parliament of Paris issued a decree “recognizing Charles X. as true and lawful king of France.” Du Plessis-Mornay, ill though he was, had understood and executed, without loss of time, the orders of King Henry, going bail himself for the promises that had to be made and for the sums that had to be paid to get the cardinal away from the governor of Chinon. He succeeded, and had the cardinal removed to Fontenay-le-Comte in Poitou, “under the custody of Sieur de la Boulaye, governor of that place, whose valor and fidelity were known to him.” “That,” said Henry IV. on receiving the news, “is one of the greatest services I could have had rendered me; M. du Plessis does business most thoroughly.” On the 9th of May, 1590, not three months after the decree of the Parliament of Paris which had proclaimed him true and lawful King of France, Cardinal de Bourbon, still a prisoner, died at Fontenay, aged sixty-seven. A few weeks before his death he had written to his nephew Henry IV. a letter in which he recognized him as his sovereign.
The League was more than ever dominant in Paris; Henry IV. could not think of entering there. Before recommencing the war in his own name, he made Villeroi, who, after the death of Henry III., had rejoined the Duke of Mayenne, an offer of an interview in the Bois de Boulogne to see if there were no means of treating for peace. Mayenne would not allow Villeroi to accept the offer. “He had no private quarrel,” he said, “with the King of Navarre, whom he highly honored, and who, to his certain knowledge, had not looked with approval upon his brothers’ death; but any appearance of negotiation would cause great distrust amongst their party, and they would not do anything that tended against the rights of King Charles X.” Renouncing all idea of negotiation, Henry IV. set out on the 8th of August from St. Cloud, after having told off his army in three divisions. Two were ordered to go and occupy Picardy and Champagne; and the king kept with him only the third, about six thousand strong. He went and laid the body of Henry III. in the church of St. Corneille at Compiegne, took Meulan and several small towns on the banks of the Seine and Oise, and propounded for discussion with his officers the question of deciding in which direction he should move, towards the Loire or the Seine, on Tours or on Rouen. He determined in favor of Normandy; he must be master of the ports in that province in order to receive there the re-enforcements which had been promised him by Queen Elizabeth of England, and which she did send him in September, 1589, forming a corps of from four to five thousand men, Scots and English, “aboard of thirteen vessels laden with twenty-two thousand pounds sterling in gold and seventy thousand pounds of gunpowder, three thousand cannon-balls, and corn, biscuits, wine, and beer, together with woolens and even shoes.” They arrived very opportunely for the close of the campaign, but too late to share in Henry IV.‘s first victory, that series of fights around the castle of Arques which, in the words of an eye-witness, the Duke of Angouleme, “was the first gate whereby Henry entered upon the road of his glory and good fortune.”
After making a demonstration close to Rouen, Henry IV., learning that the Duke of Mayenne was advancing in pursuit of him with an army of twenty-five thousand foot and eight thousand horse, thought it imprudent to wait for him and run the risk of being jammed between forces so considerable and the hostile population of a large city; so he struck his camp and took the road to Dieppe, in order to be near the coast and the re-enforcements from Queen Elizabeth. Some persons even suggested to him that in case of mishap he might go thence and take refuge in England; but at this prospect Biron answered, “There is no King of France out of France;” and Henry IV. was of Biron’s opinion. At his arrival before Dieppe, he found as governor there Aymar de Chastes, a man of wits and honor, a very moderate Catholic, and very strongly in favor of the party of policists. Under Henry III. he had expressly refused to enter the League, saying to Villars, who pressed him to do so, “I am a Frenchman, and you yourself will find out that the Spaniard is the real head of the League.” He had organized at Dieppe four companies of burgess-guards, consisting of Catholics and Protestants, and he assembled about him, to consider the affairs of the town, a small council, in which Protestants had the majority. As soon as he knew, on the 26th of August, that the king was approaching Dieppe, he went with the principal inhabitants to meet him, and presented to him the keys of the place, saying, “I come to salute my lord and hand over to him the government of this city.” “Ventre-saint-gris!” answered Henry IV., “I know nobody more worthy of it than you are!” The Dieppese overflowed with felicitations. “No fuss, my lads,” said Henry: “all I want is your affections, good bread, good wine, and good hospitable faces.” When he entered the town, “he was received,” says a contemporary chronicler, “with loud cheers by the people; and what was curious, but exhilarating, was to see the king surrounded by close upon six thousand armed men, himself having but a few officers at his left hand.” He received at Dieppe assurance of the fidelity of La Verune, governor of Caen, whither, in 1589, according to Henry III.‘s order, that portion of the Parliament of Normandy which would not submit to the yoke of the League at Rouen, had removed. Caen having set the example, St. Lo, Coutances, and Carentan likewise sent deputies to Dieppe to recognize the authority of Henry IV. But Henry had no idea of shutting himself up inside Dieppe: after having carefully inspected the castle, citadel, harbor, fortifications, and outskirts of the town, he left there five hundred men in garrison, supported by twelve or fifteen hundred well-armed burgesses, and went and established himself personally in the old castle of Arques, standing, since the eleventh century, upon a barren hill; below, in the burgh of Arques, he sent Biron into cantonments with his regiment of Swiss and the companies of French infantry; and he lost no time in having large fosses dug ahead of the burgh, in front of all the approaches, enclosing within an extensive line of circumvallation both burgh and castle. All the king’s soldiers and the peasants that could be picked up in the environs worked night and day. Whilst they were at work, Henry wrote to Countess Corisande de Gramont, his favorite at that time, “My dear heart, it is a wonder I am alive with such work as I have. God have pity upon me and show me mercy, blessing my labors, as He does in spite of a many folks! I am well, and my affairs are going well. I have taken Eu. The enemy, who are double me just now, thought to catch me there; but I drew off towards Dieppe, and I await them in a camp that I am fortifying. Tomorrow will be the day when I shall see them, and I hope, with God’s help, that if they attack me they will find they have made a bad bargain. The bearer of this goes by sea. The wind and my duties make me conclude. This 9th of September, in the trenches at Arques.”
All was finished when the scouts of Mayenne appeared. But Mayenne also was an able soldier: he saw that the position the king had taken and the works he had caused to be thrown up rendered a direct attack very difficult. He found means of bearing down upon Dieppe another way, and of placing himself, says the latest historian of Dieppe, M. Vitet, between the king and the town, “hoping to cut off the king’s communications with the sea, divide his forces, deprive him of his re-enforcements from England, and, finally, surround him and capture him,” as he had promised the Leaguers of Paris, who were already talking of the iron cage in which the Bearnese would be sent to them. “Henry IV.,” continues M. Vitet, “felt some vexation at seeing his forecasts checkmated by Mayenne’s manoeuvre, and at having had so much earth removed to so little profit; but he was a man of resources, confident as the Gascons are, and with very little of pig-headedness. To change all his plans was with him the work of an instant. Instead of awaiting the foe in his intrenchments, he saw that it was for him to go and feel for them on the other side of the valley, and that, on pain of being invested, he must not leave the Leaguers any exit but the very road they had taken to come.” Having changed all his plans on this new system, Henry breathed more freely; but he did not go to sleep for all that: he was incessantly backwards and forwards from Dieppe to Arques, from Arques to Dieppe and to the Faubourg du Pollet. Mayenne, on the contrary, seemed to have fallen into a lethargy; he had not yet been out of his quarters during the nearly eight and forty hours since he had taken them. On the 17th of September, 1589, in the morning, however, a few hundred light-horse were seen putting themselves in motion, scouring the country and coming to fire their pistols close to the fosses of the royal army. The skirmish grew warm by degrees. “My son,” said Marshal de Biron to the young count of Auvergne [natural son of Charles IX. and Mary Touchet], “charge: now is the time.” The young prince, without his hat, and his horsemen charged so vigorously that they put the Leaguers to the rout, killed three hundred of them, and returned quietly within their lines, by Biron’s orders, without being disturbed in their retreat. These partial and irregular encounters began again on the 18th and 19th of September, with the same result. The Duke of Mayenne was nettled and humiliated; he had his prestige to recover. He decided to concentrate all his forces right on the king’s intrenchments, and attack them in front with his whole army. The 20th of September passed without a single skirmish. Henry, having received good information that he would be attacked the next day, did not go to bed. The night was very dark. He thought he saw a long way off in the valley a long line of lighted matches; but there was profound silence; and the king and his officers puzzled themselves to decide if they were men or glow-worms. On the 21st, at five A. M., the king gave orders for every one to be ready and at his post. He himself repaired to the battle-field. Sitting in a big fosse with all his officers, he had his breakfast brought thither, and was eating with good appetite, when a prisoner was brought to him, a gentleman of the League, who had advanced too far whilst making a reconnaissance. “Good day, Belin,” said the king, who recognized him, laughing: “embrace me for your welcome appearance.” Belin embraced him, telling him that he was about to have down upon him thirty thousand foot and ten thousand horse. “Where are your forces?” he asked the king, looking about him. “O! you don’t see them all, M. de Belin,” said Henry: “you don’t reckon the good God and the good right, but they are ever with me.”
The action began about ten o’clock. The fog was still so thick that there was no seeing one another at ten paces. The ardor on both sides was extreme; and, during nearly three hours, victory seemed to twice shift her colors. Henry at one time found himself entangled amongst some squadrons so disorganized that he shouted, “Courage, gentlemen; pray, courage! Can’t we find fifty gentlemen willing to die with their king?” At this moment Chatillon, issuing from Dieppe with five hundred picked men, arrived on the field of battle. The king dismounted to fight at his side in the trenches; and then, for a quarter of an hour, there was a furious combat, man to man. At last, “when things were in this desperate state,” says Sully, “the fog, which had been very thick all the morning, dropped down suddenly, and the cannon of the castle of Arques getting sight of the enemy’s army, a volley of four pieces was fired, which made four beautiful lanes in their squadrons and battalions. That pulled them up quite short; and three or four volleys in succession, which produced marvellous effects, made them waver, and, little by little, retire all of them behind the turn of the valley, out of cannon-shot, and finally to their quarters.” Mayenne had the retreat sounded. Henry, master of the field, gave chase for a while to the fugitives, and then returned to Arques to thank God for his victory. Mayenne struck his camp and took the road towards Amiens, to pick up a Spanish corps which he was expecting from the Low Countries.
For six months, from September, 1589, to March, 1590, the war continued without any striking or important events. Henry IV. tried to stop it after his success at Arques; he sent word to the Duke of Mayenne by his prisoner Belin, whom he had sent away free on parole, “that he desired peace, and so earnestly, that, without regarding his dignity or his victory, he made him these advances, not that he had any fear of him, but because of the pity he felt for his kingdom’s sufferings.” Mayenne, who lay beneath the double yoke of his party’s passions and his own ambitious projects, rejected the king’s overtures, or allowed them to fall through; and on the 21st of October, 1589, Henry, setting out with his army from Dieppe, moved rapidly on Paris, in order to effect a strategic surprise, whilst Mayenne was rejecting at Amiens his pacific inclinations. The king gained three marches on the Leaguers, and carried by assault the five faubourgs situated on the left bank of the Seine. He would perhaps have carried terror-stricken Paris itself, if the imperfect breaking up of the St. Maixent bridge on the Somme had not allowed Mayenne, notwithstanding his tardiness, to arrive at Paris in time to enter with his army, form a junction with the Leaguers amongst the population, and prevail upon the king to carry his arms elsewhither. “The people of Paris,” says De Thou, “were extravagant enough to suppose that this prince could not escape Mayenne. Already a host of idle and credulous women had been at the pains of engaging windows, which they let very dear, and which they had fitted up magnificently, to see the passage of that fanciful triumph for which their mad hopes had caused them to make every preparation—before the victory.” Henry left some of his lieutenants to carry on the war in the environs of Paris, and himself repaired, on the 21st of November, to Tours, where the royalist Parliament, the exchequer-chamber, the court of taxation, and all the magisterial bodies which had not felt inclined to submit to the despotism of the League, lost no time in rendering him homage, as the head and the representative of the national and the lawful cause. He reigned and ruled, to real purpose, in the eight principal provinces of the North and Centre—Ile-de-France, Picardy, Champagne, Normandy, Orleanness, Touraine, Maine, and Anjou; and his authority, although disputed, was making way in nearly all the other parts of the kingdom. He made war not like a conqueror, but like a king who wanted to meet with acceptance in the places which he occupied and which he would soon have to govern. The inhabitants of Le Mans and of Alencon were able to reopen their shops on the very day on which their town fell into his hands, and those of Vendome the day after. He watched to see that respect was paid by his soldiers, even the Huguenots, to Catholic churches and ceremonies. Two soldiers, having made their way into Le Mans, contrary to orders, after the capitulation, and having stolen a chalice, were hanged on the spot, though they were men of acknowledged bravery. He protected carefully the bishops and all the ecclesiastics who kept aloof from political strife. “If minute details are required,” says a contemporary pamphleteer, “out of a hundred or a hundred and twenty archbishops or bishops existing in the realm of France not a tenth part approve of the counsels of the League.” It was not long before Henry reaped the financial fruits of his protective equity; at the close of 1589 he could count upon a regular revenue of more than two millions of crowns, very insufficient, no doubt, for the wants of his government, but much beyond the official resources of his enemies. He had very soon taken his proper rank in Europe: the Protestant powers which had been eager to recognize him—England, Scotland, the Low Countries, the Scandinavian states, and Reformed Germany—had been joined by the republic of Venice, the most judiciously governed state at that time in Europe, but solely on the ground of political interests and views, independently of any religious question. On the accession of Henry IV., his ambassador, Hurault de Maisse, was received and very well treated at Venice; he was merely excluded from religious ceremonies: the Venetian people joined in the policy of their government; the portrait of the new King of France was everywhere displayed and purchased throughout Venice. Some Venetians went so far as to take service in his army against the League. The Holy Inquisition commenced proceedings against them for heresy; the government stopped the proceedings, and even, says Count Daru, had the Inquisitor thrown into prison. The Venetian senate accredited to the court of Henry IV. the same ambassador who had been at Henry III.‘s; and, on returning to Tours, on the 21st of November, 1589, the king received him to an audience in state. A little later on he did more; he sent the republic, as a pledge of his friendship, his sword—the sword, he said in his letter, which he had used at the battle of Ivry. “The good offices were mutual,” adds M. de Daru; “the Venetians lent Henry IV. sums of money which the badness of the times rendered necessary to him; but their ambassador had orders to throw into the fire, in the king’s presence, the securities for the loan.”
As the government of Henry IV. went on growing in strength and extent, two facts, both of them natural, though antagonistic, were being accomplished in France and in Europe. The moderate Catholics were beginning, not as yet to make approaches towards him, but to see a glimmering possibility of treating with him and obtaining from him such concessions as they considered necessary at the same time that they in their turn made to him such as he might consider sufficient for his party and himself. It has already been remarked with what sagacity Pope Sixtus V. had divined the character of Henry IV., at the very moment of condemning Henry III. for making an alliance with him. When Henry IV. had become king, Sixtus V. pronounced strongly against a heretic king, and maintained, in opposition to him, his alliance with Philip II. and the League. “France,” said he, “is a good and noble kingdom, which has infinity of benefices and is specially dear to us; and so we try to save her; but religion sits nearer than France to our heart.” He chose for his legate in France Cardinal Gaetani, whom he knew to be agreeable to Philip II. and gave him instructions in harmony with the Spanish policy. Having started for his post, Gaetani was a long while on the road, halting at Lyons, amongst other places, as if he were in no hurry to enter upon his duties. At the close of 1589, Henry IV., king for the last five months and already victorious at Arques, appointed as his ambassador at Rome Francis de Luxembourg, Duke of Pinei, to try and enter into official relations with the pope. On the 6th of January, 1590, Sixtus V., at his reception of the cardinals, announced to them this news. Badoero, ambassador of Venice at Rome, leaned forward and whispered in his ear, “We must pray God to inspire the King of Navarre. On the day when your Holiness embraces him, and then only, the affairs of France will be adjusted. Humanly speaking, there is no other way of bringing peace to that kingdom.” The pope confined himself to replying that God would do all for the best, and that, for his own part, he would wait. On arriving at Rome, “the Duke of Luxembourg repaired to the Vatican with two and twenty carriages occupied by French gentlemen; but, at the palace, he found the door of the pope’s apartments closed, the sentries doubled, and the officers on duty under orders to intimate to the French, the chief of the embassy excepted, that they must lay aside their swords. At the door of the Holy Father’s closet, the duke and three gentlemen of his train were alone allowed to enter. The indignation felt by the French was mingled with apprehensions of an ambush. Luxembourg himself could not banish a feeling of vague terror; great was his astonishment when, on his introduction to the pontiff, the latter received him with demonstrations of affection, asked him news of his journey, said he would have liked to give him quarters in the palace, made him sit down,—a distinction reserved for the ambassadors of kings, —and, lastly, listened patiently to the French envoy’s long recital. In fact, the receptions intra et, extra muros bore very little resemblance one to the other, but the difference between them corresponded pretty faithfully with the position of Sixtus V., half engaged to the League by Gaetani’s commission and to Philip II. by the steps he had recently taken, and already regretting that he was so far gone in the direction of Spain.” [Sixtus V, by Baron Hubner, late ambassador of Austria at Paris and at Rome, t. ii. pp. 280-282.]
Unhappily Sixtus V. died on the 27th of August, 1590, before having modified, to any real purpose, his bearing towards the King of France and his instructions to his legate. After Pope Urban VIII.‘s apparition of thirteen days’ duration, Gregory XIV. was elected pope on the 5th of December, 1590; and, instead of a head of the church able enough and courageous enough to comprehend and practise a policy European and Italian as well as Catholic in its scope, there was a pope humbly devoted to the Spanish policy, meekly subservient to Philip II.; that is, to the cause of religious persecution and of absolute power, without regard for anything else. The relations of France with the Holy See at once felt the effects of this; Cardinal Gaetani received from Rome all the instructions that the most ardent Leaguers could desire; and he gave his approval to a resolution of the Sorbonne to the effect that Henry de Bourbon, heretic and relapsed, was forever excluded from the crown, whether he became a Catholic or not. Henry IV., had convoked the states-general at Tours for the month of March, and had summoned to that city the archbishops and bishops to form a national council, and to deliberate as to the means of restoring the king to the bosom of the Catholic church. The legate prohibited this council, declaring, beforehand, the excommunication and deposition of any bishops who should be present at it. The Leaguer Parliament of Paris forbade, on pain of death and confiscation, any connection, any correspondence, with Henry de Bourbon and his partisans. A solemn procession of the League took place at Paris, on the 14th of March, and a few days afterwards the union was sworn afresh by all the municipal chiefs of the population. In view of such passionate hostility, Henry IV., a stranger to any sort of illusion at the same time that he was always full of hope, saw that his successes at Arques were insufficient for him, and that, if he were to occupy the throne in peace, he must win more victories. He recommenced the campaign by the siege of Dreux, one of the towns which it was most important for him to possess in order to put pressure on Paris, and cause her to feel, even at a distance, the perils and evils of war.
On Wednesday, the 14th of March, 1590, was fought the battle of Ivry, a village six leagues from Evreux, on the left bank of the Eure. “Starting from Dreux on the 12th of March” [Poirson, Histoire du Regne d’Henri IV., t. i. p. 180], “the royal army had arrived the same day at Nonancourt, marching with the greatest regularity by divisions and always in close order, through fearful weather, frost having succeeding rain; moreover, it traversed a portion of the road during the shades of evening. The soldier was harassed and knocked up. But scarcely had he arrived at his destination for the day, when he found large fires lighted everywhere, and provisions in abundance, served out with intelligent regularity to the various quarters of cavalry and infantry. He soon recovered all his strength and daring.” The king, in concert with the veteran Marshal de Biron, had taken these prudent measures. All the historians, contemporary and posterior, have described in great detail the battle of Ivry, the manoeuvres and alternations of success that distinguished it; by rare good fortune, we have an account of the affair written the very same evening in the camp at Rosny by Henry IV. himself, and at once sent off to some of his principal partisans who were absent, amongst others to M. de la Verune, governor of Caen. We will content ourselves here with the king’s own words, striking in their precision, brevity, and freedom from any self-complacent gasconading on the narrator’s part, respecting either his party or himself.
LETTER OF KING HENRY IV. TOUCHING THE BATTLE OF IVRY.
“It hath pleased God to grant me that which I had the most desired, to have means of giving battle to mine enemies; having firm confidence that, having got so far, God would give me grace to obtain the victory, as it hath happened this very day. You have heretofore heard how that, after the capture of the town of Honfleur, I went and made them raise the siege they were laying to the town of Meulan, and I offered them battle, which it seemed that they ought to accept, having in numbers twice the strength that I could muster. But in the hope of being able to do so with more safety, they made up their minds to put it off until they had been joined by fifteen hundred lances which the Duke of Parma was sending them; which was done a few days ago. And then they spread abroad everywhere that they would force me to fight, wheresoever I might be; they thought to have found a very favorable opportunity in coming to encounter me at the siege I was laying before the town of Dreux; but I did not give them the trouble of coming so far; for, as soon as I was advertised that they had crossed the river of Seine and were heading towards me, I resolved to put off the siege rather than fail to go and meet them. Having learned that they were six leagues from the said Dreux, I set out last Monday, the 12th of this month, and went and took up my quarters at the town of Nonancourt, which was three leagues from them, for to cross the river there. On Tuesday, I went and took the quarters which they meant to have for themselves, and where their quarter-masters had already arrived. I put myself in order of battle, in the morning, on a very fine plain, about a league from the point which they had chosen the day before, and where they immediately appeared with their whole army, but so far from me that I should have given them a great advantage by going so forward to seek them; I contented myself with making them quit a village they had seized close by me; at last, night constrained us both to get into quarters, which I did in the nearest villages.
“To-day, having had their position reconnoitered betimes, and after it had been reported to me that they had shown themselves, but even farther off than they had done yesterday, I resolved to approach so near to them that there must needs be a collision. And so it happened between ten and eleven in the morning; I went to seek them to the very spot where they were posted, and whence they never advanced a step but what they made to the charge; and the battle took place, wherein God was pleased to make known that His protection is always on the side of the right; for in less than an hour, after having spent all their choler in two or three charges which they made and supported, all their cavalry began to take its departure, leaving their infantry, which was in large numbers. Seeing which, their Swiss had recourse to my compassion, and surrendered, colonels, captains, privates, and all their flags. The lanzknechts and French had no time to take this resolution, for they were cut to pieces, twelve hundred of one and as many of the other; the rest prisoners and put to the rout in the woods, at the mercy of the peasants. Of their cavalry there are from nine hundred to a thousand killed, and from four to five hundred dismounted and prisoners; without counting those drowned in crossing the River Eure, which they crossed to Ivry for to put it between them and us, and who are a great number. The rest of the better mounted saved themselves by flight, in very great disorder, having lost all their baggage. I did not let them be until they were close to Mantes. Their white standard is in my hands, and its bearer a prisoner; twelve or fifteen other standards of their cavalry, twice as many more of their infantry, all their artillery; countless lords prisoners, and of dead a great number, even of those in command, whom I have not yet been able to find time to get identified. But I know that amongst others Count Egmont, who was general of all the forces that came from Flanders, was killed. Their prisoners all say that their army was about four thousand horse, and from twelve to thirteen thousand foot, of which I suppose not a quarter has escaped. As for mine, it may have been two thousand horse and eight thousand foot. But of this cavalry, more than six hundred horse joined me after I was in order of battle, on the Tuesday and Wednesday; nay, the last troop of the noblesse from Picardy, brought up by Sire d’Humieres, and numbering three hundred horse, came up when half an hour had already passed since the battle began.
“It is a miraculous work of God’s, who was pleased, first of all, to give me the resolution to attack them, and then the grace to be able so successfully to accomplish it. Wherefore to Him alone is the glory; and so far as any of it may, by His permission, belong to man, it is due to the princes, officers of the crown, lords, captains, and all the noblesse, who with so much ardor rushed forward, and so successfully exerted themselves, that their predecessors did not leave them more beautiful examples than they will leave to their posterity. As I am greatly content and satisfied with them, so I think that they are with me, and that they have seen that I had no mind to make use of them anywhere without I had also shown them the way. I am still following up the victory with my cousins the princes of Conti, Duke of Montpensier, Count of St. Paul, Marshal-duke of Aumont, grand prior of France, La Tremoille, Sieurs de la Guiche and de Givry, and several other lords and captains. My cousin Marshal de Biron remains with the main army awaiting my tidings, which will go on, I hope, still prospering. You shall hear more fully in my next despatch, which shall follow this very closely, the particulars of this victory, whereof I desired to give you these few words of information, so as not to keep you longer out of the pleasure which I know that you will receive therefrom. I pray you to impart it to all my other good servants yonder, and, especially, to have thanks given therefor to God, whom I pray to have you in His holy keeping.
“HENRY.
“From the camp at Rosny, this 14th day of March, 1590.”
History is not bound to be so reserved and so modest as the king was about himself. It was not only as able captain and valiant soldier that Henry IV. distinguished himself at Ivry; there the man was as conspicuous for the strength of his better feelings, as generous and as affectionate as the king was farsighted and bold. When the word was given to march from Dreux, Count Schomberg, colonel of the German auxiliaries called reiters, had asked for the pay of his troops, letting it be understood that they would not fight if their claims were not satisfied. Henry had replied harshly, “People don’t ask for money on the eve of a battle.” At Ivry, just as the battle was on the point of beginning, he went up to Schomberg. “Colonel,” said he, “I hurt your feelings. This may be the last day of my life. I can’t bear to take away the honor of a brave and honest gentleman like you. Pray forgive me and embrace me.” “Sir,” answered Schomberg, “the other day your Majesty wounded me, to-day you kill me.” He gave up the command of the reiters in order to fight in the king’s own squadron, and was killed in action. As he passed along the front of his own squadron, Henry halted; and, “Comrades,” said he, “if you run my risks, I also run yours. I will conquer or die with you. Keep your ranks well, I beg. If the heat of battle disperse you for a while, rally as soon as you can under those three pear trees you see up yonder to my right; and if you lose your standards, do not lose sight of my white plume; you will always find it in the path of honor, and, I hope, of victory too.”
Having galloped along the whole line of his army, he halted again, threw his horse’s reins over his arm, and clasped his hands, exclaiming, “O God, Thou knowest my thoughts, and Thou dost see to the very bottom of my heart; if it be for my people’s good that I keep the crown, favor Thou my cause and uphold my arms. But if Thy holy will have otherwise ordained, at least let me die, O God, in the midst of these brave soldiers who give their lives for me!” When the battle was over and won, he heard that Rosny had been severely wounded in it; and when he was removed to Rosny Castle, the king, going close up to his stretcher, said, “My friend, I am very glad to see you with a much better countenance than I expected; I should feel still greater joy if you assure me that you run no risk of your life or of being disabled forever; the rumor was, that you had two horses killed under you; that you had been borne to earth, rolled over and trampled upon by the horses of several squadrons, bruised and cut up by so many blows that it would be a marvel if you escaped, or if, at the very least, you were not mutilated for life in some limb. I should like to hug you with both arms. I shall never have any good fortune or increase of greatness but you shall share it. Fearing that too much talking may be harmful to your wounds, I am off again to Mantes. Adieu, my friend; fare you well, and be assured that you have a good master.”
Henry IV. had not only a warm but an expansive heart; he could not help expressing and pouring forth his feelings. That was one of his charms, and also one of his sources of power.
The victory of Ivry had a great effect in France and in Europe. But not immediately and as regarded the actual campaign of 1590. The victorious king moved on Paris, and made himself master of the little towns in the neighborhood with a view of investing the capital. When he took possession of St. Denis [on the 9th of July, 1590], he had the relics and all the jewelry of the church shown to him. When he saw the royal crown, from which the principal stones had been detached, he asked what had become of them. He was told that M. de Mayenne had caused them to-be removed. “He has the stones, then,” said the king; “and I have the soil.” He visited the royal tombs, and when he was shown that of Catherine de’ Medici, “Ah!” said he smiling, “how well it suits her!” And, as he stood before Henry III.‘s he said, “Ventre-saint-gris! There is my good brother; I desire that I be laid beside him.” As he thus went on visiting and establishing all his posts around Paris, the investment became more strict; it was kept up for more than three months, from the end of May to the beginning of September, 1590; and the city was reduced to a severe state of famine, which would have been still more severe if Henry IV. had not several times over permitted the entry of some convoys of provisions and the exit of the old men, the women, the children, in fact, the poorest and weakest part of the population. “Paris must not be a cemetery,” he said; “I do not wish to reign over the dead.” “A true king,” says De Thou, “more anxious for the preservation of his kingdom than greedy of conquest, and making no distinction between his own interests and the interests of his people.” Two famous Protestants, Ambrose Pare and Bernard Palissy, preserved, one by his surgical and the other by his artistic genius, from the popular fury, were still living at that time in Paris, both eighty years of age, and both pleading for the liberty of their creed and for peace. “Monseigneur,” said Ambrose Pare one day to the Archbishop of Lyons, whom he met at one end of the bridge of St. Michael, “this poor people that you see here around you is dying of sheer hunger-madness, and demands your compassion. For God’s sake show them some, as you would have God’s shown to you. Think a little on the office to which God hath called you. Give us peace or give us wherewithal to live, for the poor folks can hold out no more.” The Italian Danigarola himself, Bishop of Asti and attache to the embassy of Cardinal Gaetani, having publicly said that peace was necessary, was threatened by the Sixteen with being sewn up in a sack and thrown into the river if he did not alter his tone. Not peace, but a cessation of the investment of Paris, was brought about, on the 23d of August, 1590, by Duke Alexander of Parma, who, in accordance with express orders from Philip II., went from the Low Countries, with his army, to join Mayenne at Meaux and threaten Henry IV. with their united forces if he did not retire from the walls of the capital.
Henry IV. offered the two dukes battle, if they really wished to put a stop to the investment; but “I am not come so far,” answered the Duke of Parma, “to take counsel of my enemy; if my manner of warfare does not please the King of Navarre, let him force me to change it, instead of giving me advice that nobody asks him for.” Henry in vain attempted to make the Duke of Parma accept battle. The able Italian established himself in a strongly intrenched camp, surprised Lagny, and opened to Paris the navigation of the Marne, by which provisions were speedily brought up. Henry decided upon retreating; he dispersed the different divisions of his army into Touraine, Normandy, Picardy, Champagne, Burgundy, and himself took up his quarters at Senlis, at Compiegne, in the towns on the banks of the Oise. The Duke of Mayenne arrived on the 18th of September at Paris; the Duke of Parma entered it himself with a few officers, and left it on the 13th of November with his army on his way back to the Low Countries, being a little harassed in his retreat by the royal cavalry, but easy, for the moment, as to the fate of Paris and the issue of the war, which continued during the first six months of the year 1591, but languidly and disconnectedly, with successes and reverses see-sawing between the two parties and without any important results.
Then began to appear the consequences of the victory of Ivry and the progress made by Henry IV., in spite of the check he received before Paris and at some other points in the kingdom. Not only did many moderate Catholics make advances to him, struck with his sympathetic ability and his valor, and hoping that he would end by becoming a Catholic, but patriotic wrath was kindling in France against Philip II. and the Spaniards, those fomenters of civil war in the mere interest of foreign ambition. We quoted but lately the words used by the governor of Dieppe, Aymar de Chastes, when he said to Villars, governor of Rouen, who pressed him to enter the League, “You will yourself find out that the Spaniard is the real head of this League.” On the 5th of August, 1590, during the investment of Paris, a placard was pasted all over the city. “Poor Parisians,” it said, “I deplore your misery, and I feel even greater pity towards you for being still such simpletons. See you not that this son of perdition of a Spanish ambassador [Bernard de Mendoza], who had our good king murdered, is making game of you, cramming you so with pap that he would fain have had you burst before now in order to lay hands on your goods and on France if he could? He alone prevents peace and the repose of desolated France, as well as the reconciliation of the king and the princes in real amity. Why are ye so tardy to cast him in a sack down stream, that he may return the sooner to Spain?” On the 6th of August, there was found written with charcoal, on the gate of St. Anthony, the following eight lines:—
|
“Some folks, for Holy League bear more Than the prodigal son in the Bible bore; For he, together with his swine, On bean, and root, and husk would dine; Whilst they, unable to procure Such dainty morsels, must endure Between their skinny lips to pass Offal and tripe of horse or ass.” |
“These,” said a Latin inscription on the awnings of the butchers’ shops, “are the rewards of those who expose their lives for Philip” [Haec sunt munera pro iis qui vitam pro Philippo proferunt: Memoires de L’Estoile, t. ii. pp. 73, 74]. In 1591 these public sentiments, reproduced and dilated upon in numerous pamphlets, imported dissension into the heart of the League itself, which split up into two parties, the Spanish League and the French League. The Committee of Sixteen labored incessantly for the formation and triumph of the Spanish League; and its principal leaders wrote, on the 2d of September, 1591, a letter to Philip II., offering him the crown of France, and pledging their allegiance to him as his subjects. “We can positively assure your Majesty,” they said, “that the wishes of all Catholics are to see your Catholic Majesty holding the sceptre of this kingdom and reigning over us, even as we do throw ourselves right willingly into your arms as into those of our father, or at any rate establishing one of your posterity upon the throne.” These ringleaders of the Spanish League had for their army the blindly fanatical and demagogic populace of Paris, and were, further, supported by four thousand Spanish troops whom Philip II. had succeeded in getting almost surreptitiously into Paris. They created a council of ten, the sixteenth century’s committee of public safety; they proscribed the policists; they, on the 15th of November, had the president, Brisson, and two councillors of the Leaguer Parliament arrested, hanged them to a beam and dragged the corpses to the Place de Grove, where they strung them up to a gibbet with inscriptions setting forth that they were heretics, traitors to the city and enemies of the Catholic princes. Whilst the Spanish League was thus reigning at Paris, the Duke of Mayenne was at Laon, preparing to lead his army, consisting partly of Spaniards, to the relief of Rouen, the siege of which Henry IV. was commencing. Being summoned to Paris by messengers who succeeded one another every hour, he arrived there on the 28th of November, 1591, with two thousand French troops; he armed the guard of Burgesses, seized and hanged, in a ground-floor room of the Louvre, four of the chief leaders of the Sixteen, suppressed their committee, re-established the Parliament in full authority, and, finally, restored the security and preponderance of the French League, whilst taking the reins once more into his own hands. But the French League before long found itself, in its turn, placed in a situation quite as embarrassing, if not so provocative of odium, as that in which the Spanish League had lately been; for it had become itself the tool of personal and unlawful ambition. The Lorraine princes, it is true, were less foreign to France than the King of Spain was; they had even rendered her eminent service; but they had no right to the crown. Mayenne had opposed to him the native and lawful heir to the throne, already recognized and invested with the kingly power by a large portion of France, and quite capable of disputing his kingship with the ablest competitors. By himself and with his own party alone, Mayenne was not in a position to maintain such a struggle; in order to have any chance he must have recourse to the prince whose partisans he had just overthrown and chastised.
On the 11th of November, 1591, Henry IV. had laid siege to Rouen with a strong force, and was pushing the operations on vigorously. In order to obtain the troops and money without which he could not relieve this important place, the leader of the French League treated humbly with the patron of the Spanish League. “In the conferences held at La Fere and at Lihom-Saintot, between the 10th and the 18th of January, 1592,” says M. Poirson, “the Duke of Parma, acting for the King of Spain, and Mayenne drew up conventions which only awaited the ratification of Philip II. to be converted into a treaty. Mayenne was to receive four millions of crowns a year and a Spanish army, which together would enable him to oppose Henry IV. He had, besides, a promise of a large establishment for himself, his relatives, and the chiefs of his party. In exchange, he promised, in his own name and that of the princes of his house and the great lords of the League, that Philip II.‘s daughter, the Infanta Isabella (Clara Eugenia), should be recognized as sovereign and proprietress of the throne of France, and that the states-general, convoked for that purpose, should proclaim her right and confer upon her the throne. It is true,” adds M. Poirson, “that Mayenne stipulated that the Infanta should take a husband, within the year, at the suggestion of the councillors and great officers of the crown, that the kingdom should be preserved in its entirety, and that its laws and customs should be maintained. . . . It even appears certain that Mayenne purposed not to keep any of these promises, and to emend his infamy by a breach of faith. . . . But a conviction generally prevailed that he recognized the rights of the Infanta, and that he would labor to place her on the throne. The lords of his own party believed it; the legate reported it everywhere; the royal party regarded it as certain. During the whole course of the year 1592, this opinion gave the most disastrous assistance to the intrigues and ascendency of Philip II., and added immeasurably to the public dangers.” [Poirson, Histoire du Regne d’Henri IV., t. i. pp. 304-306.]
Whilst these two Leagues, one Spanish and the other French, were conspiring thus persistently, sometimes together and sometimes one against the other, to promote personal ambition and interests, at the same time national instinct, respect for traditional rights, weariness of civil war, and the good sense which is born of long experience, were bringing France more and more over to the cause and name of Henry IV. In all the provinces, throughout all ranks of society, the population non-enrolled amongst the factions were turning their eyes towards him as the only means of putting an end to war at home and abroad, the only pledge of national unity, public prosperity, and even freedom of trade, a hazy idea as yet, but even now prevalent in the great ports of France and in Paris. Would Henry turn Catholic? That was the question asked everywhere, amongst Protestants with anxiety, but with keen desire, and not without hope, amongst the mass of the population. The rumor ran that, on this point, negotiations were half opened even in the midst of the League itself, even at the court of Spain, even at Rome, where Pope Clement VIII., a more moderate man than his predecessor, Gregory XIV., “had no desire,” says Sully, “to foment the troubles of France, and still less that the King of Spain should possibly become its undisputed king, rightly judging that this would be laying open to him the road to the monarchy of Christendom, and, consequently, reducing the Roman pontiffs to the position, if it were his good pleasure, of his mere chaplains.” [OEconomies royales, t. ii. p. 106.] Such being the existing state of facts and minds, it was impossible that Henry IV. should not ask himself roundly the same question, and feel that he had no time to lose in answering it.
At the beginning of February, 1593, he sent for Rosny, one evening very late. “And so,” says Rosny, “I found his Majesty in bed, having already wished every one a good night; who, as soon as he saw me come in, ordered a hassock to be brought and me to kneel thereon against his bed, and said to me, ‘My friend, I have sent for you so late for to speak with you about the things that are going on, and to hear your opinions thereon; I confess that I have often found them better than those of many others who make great show of being clever. If you continue to leave me the care of that which concerns you, and yourself to take continual care of my affairs, we shall both of us find it to our welfare. I do not wish to hide any longer that for a long time past I have had my eye upon you in order to employ you personally in my most important affairs, especially in those of my finances, for I hold you to be honest and painstaking. For the present, I wish to speak with you about that large number of persons of all parties, all ranks, and different tempers, who would be delighted to exert themselves for the pacification of the kingdom, especially if I can resolve to make some arrangement as regards religion. I am quite resolved not to hear of any negotiation or treaty, save on these two conditions, that some result may be looked for tending both to the advantage of the people of my kingdom and to the real re-establishment of the kingly authority. I know that it is your custom, whenever I put anything before you, to ask me for time to think well thereon before you are disposed to tell me your opinion; in three or four days I shall send for you to tell me what has occurred to you touching all these fine hopes that many would have me anticipate from their interventions; all of them persons very diverse in temper, purposes, interests, functions, and religion.”
“Whereupon,” says Rosny, “the king having dismissed me with a good evening, he did not fail to send for me again three days afterwards, in order that I should go and see him again in bed, near the which having made me kneel as before, he said, ‘Come, now, tell me this moment, and quite at leisurely length, all your foolish fancies, for so you have always called the best counsels you have ever given me, touching the questions I put to you the other evening. I am ready to listen to you right on to the end, without interrupting you.’”
“Sir,” said Rosny, “I have reflected not only on what your Majesty was pleased to tell me three days ago, but also on what I have been able to learn, as to the same affairs, from divers persons of all qualities and religions, and even women who have talked to me in order to make me talk, and to see if I knew any particulars of your private intentions. . . . As it seems to me, sir, all these goings, comings, writings, letters, journeys, interventions, parleys, and conferences cannot be better compared than to that swarming of attorneys at the courts, who take a thousand turns and walks about the great hall, under pretence of settling cases, and all the while it is they who give them birth, and would be very sorry for a single one to die off. In the next place, not a single one of them troubles himself about right or wrong, provided that the crowns are forthcoming, and that, by dint of lustily shouting, they are reputed eloquent, learned, and well stocked with inventions and subtleties. Consequently, sir, without troubling yourself further with these treaty-mongers and negotiators, who do nothing but lure you, bore you, perplex your mind, and fill with doubts and scruples the minds of your subjects, I opine, in a few words, that you must still for some time exercise great address, patience, and prudence, in order that there may be engendered amongst all this mass of confusion, anarchy, and chimera, that they call the holy catholic union, so many and such opposite desires, jealousies, pretensions, hatreds, longings, and designs, that, at last, all the French there are amongst them must come and throw themselves into your arms, bit by bit, recognize your kingship alone as possible, and look to nothing but it for protection, prop, or stay. Nevertheless, sir, that your Majesty may not regard me as a spirit of contradiction for having found nothing good in all these proposals made to you by these great negotiators, I will add to my suggestions just one thing; if a bit of Catholicism were quite agreeable to you, if it were properly embraced and accepted accordingly, in honorable and suitable form, it would be of great service, might serve as cement between you and all your Catholic subjects; and it would even facilitate your other great and magnificent designs whereof you have sometimes spoken to me. Touching this, I would say more to you about it if I were of such profession as permitted me to do so with a good conscience; I content myself, as it is, with leaving yours to do its work within you on so ticklish and so delicate a subject.”
“I quite understand your opinions,” said the king; “they resolve themselves almost into one single point: I must not allow the establishment of any association or show of government having the least appearance of being able to subsist, by itself or by its members, in any part of my kingdom, or suffer dismemberment in respect of any one of the royal prerogatives, as regards things spiritual as well as temporal. Such is my full determination.”
“I answered the king,” continues Rosny, “that I was rejoiced to see him taking so intelligent a view of his affairs, and that, for the present, I had no advice to give him but to seek repose of body and mind, and to permit me likewise to seek the same for myself, for I was dead sleepy, not having slept for two nights; and so, without a word more, the king gave me good night, and, as for me, I went back to my quarters.”
A few days before this conversation between the king and his friend Rosny, on the 26th of January, 1593, the states-general of the League had met in the great hall of the Louvre, present the Duke of Mayenne, surrounded by all the pomp of royalty, but so nervous that his speech in opening the session was hardly audible, and that he frequently changed color during its delivery. On leaving, his wife told him that she was afraid he was not well, as she had seen him turn pale three or four times. A hundred and twenty-eight deputies had been elected; only fifty were present at this first meeting. They adjourned to the 4th of February. In the interval, on the 28th of January, there had arrived, also, a royalist trumpeter, bringing, “on behalf of the princes, prelates, officers of the crown, and principal lords of the Catholic faith, who were with the King of Navarre, an offer of a conference between the two parties, for to lay down the basis of a peace eagerly desired.” On hearing this message, Cardinal Pelleve, Archbishop of Sens, one of the most fiery prelates of the League, said, “that he was of opinion that the trumpeter should be whipped, to teach him not to undertake such silly errands for the future;” “an opinion,” said somebody, “quite worthy of a thick head like his, wherein there is but little sense.”
The states-general of the League were of a different opinion. After long and lively discussion, the three orders decided, each separately, on the 25th of February, to consent to the conference demanded by the friends of the King of Navarre. On the 4th of February, when they resumed session, Cardinal Philip de Sega, Bishop of Placencia (in Spain) and legate of Pope Clement VIII., had requested to be present at the deliberation of the assembly, but his request was refused; the states confined themselves to receiving his benediction and hearing him deliver an address.
The different fate of these two proposals was a clear indication of the feelings of the assembly; they were very diverse in the three orders which constituted it; almost all the clergy, prelates, and popular preachers were devoted to the Spanish League; the noblesse were not at all numerous at these states. “The most brilliant and most active members of it,” says M. Picot correctly, “had ranged themselves behind Henry IV.; and it covered itself with eternal honor by having been the first to discern where to look for the hopes and the salvation of France.” The third estate was very much divided; it contained the fanatical Leaguers, at the service of Philip II. and the court of Rome, the partisans, much more numerous, of the French League, who desired peace, and were ready to accept Henry IV., provided that he turned Catholic, and a small band of political spirits, more powerful in talent than number.
Regularly as the deputies arrived, Mayenne went to each of them, saying privately, “Gentlemen, you see what the question is; it is the very chiefest of all matters (res maxima rerum agitur). I beg you to give your best attention to it, and to so act that the adversaries steal no march on us and get no advantage over us. Nevertheless, I mean to abide by what I have promised them.” Mayenne was quite right: it was certainly the chiefest of all matters. The head of the Protestants of France, the ally of all the Protestants in Europe—should he become a Catholic and King of France? The temporal head of Catholic Europe, the King of Spain —should he abolish the Salic law in France, by placing upon it his daughter as queen, and dismember France to his own profit and that of the leaders of the League, his hirelings rather than his allies? Or, peradventure, should one of these Leaguer-chiefs be he who should take the crown of France, and found a new dynasty there? And which of these Leaguer-chiefs should attain this good fortune? A half-German or a true Frenchman? A Lorraine prince or a Bourbon? And, if a Lorraine prince, which? The Duke of Mayenne, military head of the League, or his uterine brother, the Duke of Nemours, or his nephew the young Duke of Guise, son of the Balafre? All these questions were mooted, all these pretensions were on the cards, all these combinations had their special intrigue. And in the competition upon which they entered with one another, at the same time that they were incessantly laying traps for one another, they kept up towards one another, because of the uncertainty of their chances, a deceptive course of conduct often amounting to acts of downright treachery committed without scruple, in order to preserve for themselves a place and share in the unknown future towards which they were moving. It was in order to have his opinion upon a position so dark and complicated, and upon the behavior it required, that Henry IV., then at Mantes, sent once more for Rosny, and had a second conversation, a few weeks later, with him.
“Well! my friend,” said the king, “what say you about all these plots that are being projected against my conscience, my life, and my kingdom? Since the death of the Duke of Parma [on the 2d of December, 1592, in the Abbey of St. Waast at Arras, from the consequences of a wound received in the preceding April at the siege of Caudebec], it seems that deeds of arms have given place to intrigues and contests of words. I fancy that such gentry will never leave me at rest, and will at last, perhaps, attempt my liberty and my life. I beg you to tell me your opinion freely, and what remedies, short of cruelty and violence, I might now employ to get rid of all these hinderances and cabals (monopoles) that are going on against the rights which have come to me by the will of God, by birth, and by the laws of the realm.”
“Sir,” said Rosny, “I do not fancy that deferments and temporizations, any more than long speeches, would now be seasonable; there are, it seems to me, but two roads to take to deliver yourself from peril, but not from anxiety, for from anxiety kings and princes, the greater they are, can the less secure themselves if they wish to reign successfully. One of the two roads is to accommodate yourself to the desires and wishes of those of whom you feel distrust; the other, to secure the persons of those who are the most powerful, and of the highest rank, and most suspected by you, and put them in such place as will prevent them from doing you hurt; you know them pretty nearly all; there are some of them very rich; you will be able for a long while to carry, on war. As for advising you to go to mass, it is a thing that you ought not, it seems to me, to expect from me, who am of the religion; but frankly will I tell you that it is the readiest and the easiest means of confounding all these cabals (monopoles), and causing all the most mischievous projects to end in smoke.”
The King: “But tell me freely, I beg of you, what you would do if you were in my place.”
Rosny: “I can assure you honestly, sir, that I have never thought about what I should feel bound to do for to be king, it having always seemed to me that I had not a head able or intended to wear a crown. As to your Majesty it is another affair; in you, sir, that desire is not only laudable, but necessary, as it does not appear now this realm can be restored to its greatness, opulence, and splendor but by the sole means of your eminent worth and downright kingly courage. But whatever right you have to the kingdom, and whatever need it has of your courage and worth for its restoration, you will never arrive at complete possession and peaceable enjoyment of this dominion but by two sole expedients and means. In case of the first, which is force and arms, you will have to employ strong measures, severity, rigor, and violence, processes which are all utterly opposed to your temper and inclination: you will have to pass through an infinity of difficulties, fatigues, pains, annoyances, perils, and labors, with a horse perpetually between your legs, harness [halecret, a species of light cuirass] on back, helmet on head, pistol in fist, and sword in hand. And, what is more, you will have to bid adieu to repose, pleasure, pastime, love, mistress, play, hunting, hawking, and building; for you will not get out of such matters but by multiplicity of town-takings, quantity of fights, signal victories, and great bloodshed. By the other road, which is to accommodate yourself, as regards religion, to the wish of the greatest number of your subjects, you will not encounter so many annoyances, pains, and difficulties in this world, but as to the next, I don’t answer for you; it is for your Majesty to take a fixed resolution for yourself, without adopting it from any one else, and less from me than from any other, as you well know that I am of the religion, and that you keep me by you not as a theologian and councillor of church, but as a man of action and councillor of state, seeing that you have given me that title, and for a long space employed me as such.”
The king burst out laughing, and, sitting up in his bed, said, after scratching his head several times, to Rosny,—
“All you say to me is true; but I see so many thorns on every side that it will go very hard but some of them will prick me full sore. You know well enough that my cousins, the princes of the blood, and ever so many other lords, such as D’Epernon, Longueville, Biron, d’O, and Vitry, are urging me to turn Catholic, or else they will join the League. On the other hand, I know for certain that Messieurs de Turenne, de la Tremoille, and their lot, are laboring daily to have a demand made, if I turn Catholic, on behalf of them of the religion, for an assembly to appoint them a protector and an establishment of councils in the provinces; all things that I could not put up with. But if I had to declare war against them to prevent it, it would be the greatest annoyance and trouble that could ever happen to me: my heart could not bear to do ill to those who have so long run my risks, and have employed their goods and their lives in my defence.”
At these last words, Rosny threw himself upon his knees, with his eyes full of tears, and, kissing the king’s hands, he said, “Sir, I am rejoiced beyond measure to see you so well disposed towards them of the religion. I have always been afraid that, if you came to change your religion, as I see full well that you will have to do, you might be persuaded to hate and maltreat those of us others, of the towns as well as of the noblesse, who will always love you heartily and serve you faithfully. And be assured that the number thereof will be so great that, if there rise up amongst them any avaricious, ambitious, and factious, who would fain do the contrary, these will be constrained by the others to return to their duty. What would, in my opinion, be very necessary, would be to prevail upon the zealous Catholics to change that belief which they are so anxious to have embraced by all the rest, to wit, that they of the religion are all damned. There are certainly, also, some ministers and other obtrusive spirits amongst the Huguenots who would fain persuade us of the same as regards Catholics; for my own part, I believe nothing of the kind; I hold it, on the contrary, as indisputable that, of whatever religion men make outward profession, if they die keeping the Decalogue and believing in the Creed (Apostles’), if they love God with all their heart and are charitable towards their neighbor, if they put their hopes in God’s mercy and in obtaining salvation by the death, merits, and justice of Jesus Christ, they cannot fail to be saved, because they are then no longer of any erroneous religion, but of that which is most agreeable to God. If you were pleased to embrace it and put it in practice all the days of your life, not only should I have no doubt of your salvation, but I should remain quite assured that, not regarding us as execrable and damned, you would never proceed to the destruction or persecution of those of our religion who shall love you truly and serve you faithfully. From all such reflections and discourse I conclude that it will be impossible for you ever to reign in peace so long as you make outward profession of a religion which is held in such great aversion by the majority of both great and small in your kingdom, and that you cannot hope to raise it to such general splendor, wealth, and happiness as I have observed you often projecting. Still less could you flatter yourself with the idea of ever arriving at the accomplishment of your lofty and magnificent designs for the establishment of a universal most Christian republic, composed of all the kings and potentates of Europe who profess the name of Christ; for, in order to bring about so great a blessing, you must needs have tranquil possession of a great, rich, opulent, and populous kingdom, and be in a condition to enter into great and trustworthy foreign associations.” [OEconomies royales, or Memoires de Sully, t. ii. pp. 81-100.] One is inclined to believe that, even before their conversations, Henry IV. was very near being of Rosny’s opinion; but it is a long stride from an opinion to a resolution. In spite of the breadth and independence of his mind, Henry IV. was sincerely puzzled. He was of those who, far from clinging to a single fact and confining themselves to a single duty, take account of the complication of the facts amidst which they live, and of the variety of the duties which the general situation or their own imposes upon them. Born in the Reformed faith, and on the steps of the throne, he was struggling to defend his political rights whilst keeping his religious creed; but his religious creed was not the fruit of very mature or very deep conviction; it was a question of first claims and of honor rather than a matter of conscience; and, on the other hand, the peace of France, her prosperity, perhaps her territorial integrity, were dependent upon the triumph of the political rights of the Bearnese. Even for his brethren in creed his triumph was a benefit secured, for it was an end of persecution and a first step towards liberty. There is no measuring accurately how far ambition, personal interest, a king’s egotism, had to do with Henry’s IV.‘s abjuration of his religion; none would deny that those human infirmities were present; but all this does not prevent the conviction that patriotism was uppermost in Henry’s soul, and that the idea of his duty as king towards France, a prey to all the evils of civil and foreign war, was the determining motive of his resolution. It cost him a great deal. To the Huguenot gentry and peasantry who had fought with him he said, “You desire peace; I give it you at my own expense; I have made myself anathema for the sake of all, like Moses and St. Paul.” He received with affectionate sadness the Reformed ministers and preachers who came to see him. “Kindly pray to God for me,” said he to them, “and love me always; as for me, I shall always love you, and I will never suffer wrong to be done to you, or any violence to your religion.” He had already, at this time, the Edict of Nantes in his mind, and he let a glimpse of it appear to Rosny at their first conversation. When he discussed with the Catholic prelates the conditions of his abjuration, he had those withdrawn which would have been too great a shock to his personal feelings and shackled his con duct tod much in the government, as would have been the case with the promise to labor for the destruction of heresy. Even as regarded the Catholic faith, he demand of the doctors who were preparing him for it some latitude for his own thoughts, and “that he should not have such violence done to his conscience as to be bound to strange oaths, and to sign and believe rubbish which he was quite sure that the majority of them did not believe.” [Memoires de L’Estoile, t. ii. p. 472.] The most passionate Protestants of his own time reproached him, and some still reproach him, with having deserted his creed and having repaid with ingratitude his most devoted comrades in arms and brothers in Christ. Perhaps there is some ingratitude also in forgetting that after four years of struggling to obtain the mastery for his religious creed and his political rights simultaneously, Henry IV., convinced that he could not succeed in that, put a stop to religious wars, and founded, to last for eighty-seven years, the free and lawful practice of the Reformed worship in France, by virtue of the Edict of Nantes, which will be spoken of presently.
Whilst this great question was thus discussed and decided between Henry IV. in person and his principal advisers, the states-general of the League and the conference of Suresnes were vainly bestirring themselves in the attempt to still keep the mastery of events which were slipping away from them. The Leaguer states had an appearance of continuing to wish for the absolute proscription of Henry IV., a heretic king, even on conversion to Catholicism, so long as his conversion was not recognized and accepted by the pope; but there was already great, though timidly expressed, dissent as to this point in the assembly of the states and amongst the population in the midst of which it was living. Nearly a year previously, in May, 1592, when he retired from France after having relieved Rouen from siege and taken Caudebec, the Duke of Parma, as clear-sighted a politician as he was able soldier, had said to one of the most determined Leaguers, “Your people have abated their fury; the rest hold on but faintly, and in a short time they will have nothing to do with us.” Philip II. and Mayenne perceived before long the urgency and the peril of this situation: they exerted themselves, at one time in concert and at another independently, to make head against this change in the current of thoughts and facts. Philip sent to Paris an ambassador extraordinary, the Duke of Feria, to treat with the states of the League and come to an understanding with Mayenne; but Mayenne considered that the Duke of Feria did not bring enough money, and did not introduce enough soldiers; the Spanish army in France numbered but four thousand three hundred men, and Philip had put at his ambassador’s disposal but two hundred thousand crowns, or six hundred thousand livres of those times; yet had he ordered that, in respect of the assembly, the pay should not come until after the service was rendered, i.e. after a vote was given in favor of his election or that of his daughter the Infanta Isabella to the throne. It was not the states-general only who had to be won over; the preachers of the League were also, at any rate the majority of them, covetous as well as fiery; both the former and the latter soon saw that the Duke of Feria had not wherewith to satisfy them. “And such as had come,” says Villeroi, “with a disposition to favor the Spaniards and serve them for a consideration, despised them and spoke ill of them, seeing that there was nothing to be gained from them.” The artifices of Mayenne were scarcely more successful than the stingy presents of Philip II.; when the Lorrainer duke saw the chances of Spain in the ascendant as regarded the election of a King of France and the marriage of the Infanta Isabella, he at once set to work—and succeeded without much difficulty—to make them a failure; at bottom, it was always for the house of Lorraine, whether for the marriage of his nephew the Duke of Guise with the Infanta Isabella or for the prolongation of his power, that Mayenne labored; he sometimes managed to excite, for the promotion of this cause, a favorable movement amongst the states-general or a blast of wrath on the part of the preachers against Henry IV.; but it was nothing but a transitory and fruitless effort; the wind no longer sat in the sails of the League; on the 27th of May, 1593, a deputation of a hundred and twenty burgesses, with the provost of tradesmen at their head, repaired to the house of Count de Belin, governor of Paris, begging him to introduce them into the presence of the Duke of Mayenne, to whom they wished to make a demand for peace, and saying that their request would, at need, be signed by ten thousand burgesses. Next day, two colonels of the burgess-militia spoke of making barricades; four days afterwards, some of the most famous and but lately most popular preachers of the League were hooted and insulted by the people, who shouted at them as they passed in the streets that drowning was the due of all those deputies in the states who prevented peace from being made. The conference assembled at Suresnes, of which mention has already been made, had been formed with pacific intentions, or, at any rate, hopes; accordingly it was more tranquil than the states-general, but it was not a whit more efficacious. It was composed of thirteen delegates for the League and eight for the king, men of consideration in the two parties. At the opening of its sessions, the first time the delegates of the League repaired thither, a great crowd shouted at them, “Peace! Peace! Blessed be they who procure it and demand it! Malediction and every devil take all else!” In the villages they passed through, the peasantry threw themselves upon their knees, and, with clasped hands, demanded of them peace. The conference was in session from the 4th of May to the 11th of June, holding many discussions, always temperately and with due regard for propriety, but without arriving at any precise solution of the questions proposed. Clearly neither to this conference nor to the states-general of the League was it given to put an end to this stormy and at the same time resultless state of things; Henry IV. alone could take the resolution and determine the issue which everybody was awaiting with wistfulness or with dread, but without being able to accomplish it. D’Aubigne ends his account of the conference at Suresnes with these words: “Those who were present at it reported to the king that there were amongst the Leaguers so many heart-burnings and so much confusion that they were all seeking, individually if not collectively, some pretext for surrendering to the king, and consequently, that one mass would settle it entirely.” [Histoire Universelle, bk. iii. chap. xx. p. 386.]
Powers that are conscious of their opportuneness and utility do not like to lose time, but are prompt to act. Shortly after his conversations with Rosny, whose opinion was confirmed by that of Chancellor de Chiverny and Count Gaspard de Schomberg, Henry IV. set to work. On the 26th of April, 1593, he wrote to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand de’ Medici, that he had decided to turn Catholic “two months after that the Duke of Mayenne should have come to an agreement with him on just and suitable terms;” and, foreseeing the expense that would be occasioned to him by “this great change in his affairs,” he felicitated himself upon knowing that the grand duke was disposed to second his efforts towards a levy of four thousand Swiss, and advance a year’s pay for them. On the 28th of April, he begged the Bishop of Chartres, Nicholas de Thou, to be one of the Catholic prelates whose instructions he would be happy to receive on the 15th of July, and he sent the same invitation to several other prelates. On the 16th of May, he declared to his council his resolve to become a convert. Next day, the 17th, the Archbishop of Bourges announced it to the conference at Suresnes. This news, everywhere spread abroad, produced a lively burst of national and Bourbonic feeling even where it was scarcely to be expected; at the states-general of the League, especially in the chamber of the noblesse, many members protested “that they would not treat with foreigners, or promote the election of a woman, or give their suffrages to any one unknown to them, and at the choice of his Catholic Majesty of Spain.” At Paris, a part of the clergy, the incumbents of St. Eustache, St. Merri, and St. Sulpice, and even some of the popular preachers, violent Leaguers but lately, and notably Guincestre, boldly preached peace and submission to the king if he turned Catholic. The principal of the French League, in matters of policy and negotiation, and Mayenne’s adviser since 1589, Villeroi, declared “that he would not bide in a place where the laws, the honor of the nation, and the independence of the kingdom were held so cheap;” and he left Paris on the 28th of June. Finally, on this same day, the Parliament of Paris, all chambers assembled, issued a decree known by the name of the decree of President Lemaitre, who had the chief hand in it, and conceived as follows:—
“The court, having, as it has always had, no intention but to maintain the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion, and the state and crown of France, under the protection of a most Christian, Catholic, and French king, hath ordained and doth ordain that representations shall be made, this afternoon, by President Lemaitre, assisted by a proper number of councillors of the said court, to the Duke of Mayenne, lieutenant-general of the state and crown of France, to the end that no treaty be made for the transfer of the crown to the hands of foreign princes or princesses, and that the fundamental laws of the realm be observed. . . . And from the present moment, the said court hath declared and doth declare all treaties made or hereafter to be made for the setting up of foreign prince or princess null and of no effect or value, as being made to the prejudice of the Salic law and other fundamental laws of this realm.”
It was understood that this decree excluded from the crown of France not only Philip II., the Infanta Isabella, Archduke Ernest, and all the Spanish and Austrian princes, but also all the princes of the house of Guise, “because the qualification of foreigners applied to all the princes who were not of the blood royal and who were issue of foreign houses, even though they might have been born in France and were regnicoles.”
Mayenne refused, it is not known on what pretext, to receive the communication of this decree on the same day on which it was voted by the Parliament. When President Lemaitre presented it to him the next day before a large attendance, Mayenne kept his temper, and confined himself to replying gruffly, “My first care has always been to defend the Catholic religion and maintain the laws of the realm. It seems now that I am no longer necessary to the state, and that it will be easy to do without me. I could have wished, considering my position, that the Parliament had not decided anything in a matter of such importance without consulting me. However, I will do all that I find possible for me and that appears reasonable as to the two points of your representations.” On the following day, 30th of June, Mayenne was dining with the Archbishop of Lyons, Peter d’Espinac; President Lemaitre was sent for, and the wrath of the lieutenant-general burst forth. “The insult put upon me is too palpable for me to be quiet under it; since I am played fast and loose with in that way, I have resolved to quash the decree of the Parliament. The Archbishop of Lyons is about to explain to you my feelings and my motives.”
The archbishop spoke long and bitterly, dwelling upon the expression that “the Parliament had played fast and loose” with the prince. President Lemaitre interrupted him. “I cannot unmoved hear you repeating, sir, that to which my respect made me shut my eyes when the prince spoke. Looking upon me as an individual, you might speak to me in any way, you thought proper; but so soon as the body I represent here is injured by insulting terms, I take offence, and I cannot suffer it. Know then, sir, that the Parliament does not deceive or play fast and loose with anybody, and that it renders to every man his due.” The conversation was continued for some moments in this warm and serious tone; but the quarrel went no further; from the account they received of it, the Parliament applauded the premier president’s firmness, and all the members swore that they would suffer anything rather than that there should be any change in the decree. It remained intact, and Mayenne said no more about it.
During these disputes amongst the civil functionaries, and continuing all the while to make proposals for a general truce, Henry IV. vigorously resumed warlike operations, so as to bring pressure upon his adversaries and make them perceive the necessity of accepting the solution he offered them. He besieged and took the town of Dreux, of which the castle alone persisted in holding out. He cut off the provisions which were being brought by the Marne to Paris. He kept Poitiers strictly invested. Lesdiguieres defeated the Savoyards and the Spaniards in the valleys of Dauphiny and Piedmont. Count Mansfeld was advancing with a division towards Picardy; but at the news that the king was marching to encounter him, he retired with precipitation. From the military as well as the political point of view, there is no condition worse than that of stubbornness mingled with discouragement. And that was the state of Mayenne and the League. Henry IV. perceived it, and confidently hurried forward his political and military measures. The castle of Dreux was obliged to capitulate. Thanks to the four thousand Swiss paid for him by the Grand Duke of Florence, to the numerous volunteers brought to him by the noblesse of his party, “and to the sterling quality of the old Huguenot phalanx, folks who, from father to son, are familiarized with death,” says D’Aubigne, Henry IV. had recovered, in June, 1593, so good an army that “by means of it,” he wrote to Ferdinand de’ Medici, “I shall be able to reduce the city of Paris in so short a time as will cause you great contentment.” But he was too judicious and too good a patriot not to see that it was not by an indefinitely prolonged war that he would be enabled to enter upon definitive possession of his crown, and that it was peace, religious peace, that he must restore to France in order to really become her king. He entered resolutely, on the 15th of July, 1593, upon the employment of the moral means which alone could enable him to attain this end; he assembled at Mantes the conference of prelates and doctors, Catholic and Protestant, which he had announced as the preface to his conversion. He had previously, on the 13th of May, given assurance to the Protestants as to their interests by means of a declaration on the part of eight amongst the principal Catholic lords attached to his person who undertook, “with his Majesty’s authorization, that nothing should be done in the said assemblies to the prejudice of friendly union between the Catholics who recognized his Majesty and them of the religion, or contrary to the edicts of pacification.” On the 21st of July, the prelates and doctors of the conference transferred themselves from Mantes to St. Denis. On Friday, July 23, in the morning, Henry wrote to Gabriel le d’Estrees, “Sunday will be the day when I shall make the summerset that brings down the house” (le, saut perilleux). A few hours after using such flippant language to his favorite, he was having a long conference with the prelates and doctors, putting to them the gravest questions about the religion he was just embracing, asking them for more satisfactory explanations on certain points, and repeating to them the grounds of his resolution. “I am moved with compassion at the misery and calamities of my people; I have discovered what they desire; and I wish to be enabled, with a safe conscience, to content them.” At the end of the conference, “Gentlemen,” he said, “I this day commit my soul to your keeping; I pray you, take heed to it, for, wheresoever you are causing me to enter, I shall never more depart till death; that I swear and protest to you;” and, in a voice of deep emotion, his eyes dim with tears, “I desire no further delay; I wish to be received on Sunday and go to mass; draw up the profession of faith you think I ought to make, and bring it to me this evening;” when the Archbishop of Bourges and the Bishops of Le Mans and Evreux brought it to him on the Saturday morning, he discussed it apart with them, demanding the cutting out of some parts which struck too directly at his previous creed and life; and Chancellor de Chiverny and two presidents of the Parliament, Harlay and Groulart, used their intervention to have him satisfied. The profession of faith was modified. Next day, Sunday, the 25th of July, before he got up, Henry conversed with the Protestant minister Anthony de la Faye, and embraced him two or three times, repeating to him the words already quoted, “I have made myself anathema for the sake of all, like Moses and St. Paul.” A painful mixture of the frivolous and the serious, of sincerity and captious reservations, of resolution and weakness, at which nobody has any right to be shocked who is not determined to be pitiless towards human nature, and to make no allowance in the case of the best men for complication of the facts, ideas, sentiments, and duties, under the influence of which they are often obliged to decide and to act.
On Sunday the 25th of July, 1593, Henry IV. repaired in great state to the church of St. Denis. On arriving with all his train in front of the grand entrance, he was received by Reginald de Beaune, Archbishop of Bourges, the nine bishops, the doctors and the incumbents who had taken part in the conferences, and all the brethren of the abbey. “Who are you?” asked the archbishop who officiated. “The king.” “What want you?” “To be received into the bosom of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church.” “Do you desire it?” “Yes, I will and desire it.” At these words the king knelt and made the stipulated profession of faith. The archbishop gave him absolution together with benediction; and, conducted by all the clergy to the choir of the church, he there, upon the gospels, repeated his oath, made his confession, heard mass, and was fully reconciled with the church. The inhabitants of Paris, dispensing with the passports which were refused them by Mayenne, had flocked in masses to St. Denis and been present at the ceremony. The vaulted roof of the church resounded with their shouts of Hurrah for the king! There was the same welcome on the part of the dwellers in the country when Henry repaired to the valley of Montmorency and to Montmartre to perform his devotions there. Here, then, was religious peace, a prelude to political reconciliation between the monarch and the great majority of his subjects.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
HENRY IV., CATHOLIC KING. (1593-1610.)
During the months, weeks, nay, it might be said, days immediately mediately following Henry IV.‘s abjuration, a great number of notable persons and important towns, and almost whole provinces, submitted to the Catholic king. Henry was reaping the fruits of his decision; France was flocking to him. But the general sentiments of a people are far from satisfying and subduing the selfish passions of the parties which have taken form and root in its midst. Religious and political peace responded to and sufficed for the desires of the great majority of Frenchmen, Catholic and Protestant; but it did not at all content the fanatics, Leaguer or Huguenot. The former wanted the complete extirpation of heretics; the latter the complete downfall of Catholicism. Neither these nor those were yet educated up to the higher principle of religious peace, distinction between the civil and the intellectual order, freedom of thought and of faith guaranteed by political liberty. Even at the present day, the community of France, nation and government, all the while that they proclaim this great and salutary truth, do not altogether understand and admit its full bearing. The sixteenth century was completely ignorant of it; Leaguers and Huguenots were equally convinced that they possessed, in the matter of religion, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and that they were in their right to propagate its empire at any price. Thence arose, in respect of religious peace, and of Henry IV., who naturally desired it as the requirement and the wish of France, a great governmental difficulty.
It is honorable to human nature that it never submits freely and sincerely to anything but what it considers not only useful, but essentially true and just; its passions bow to principles only; wherever the higher principle is wanting, there also is wanting the force that compels respect from passion. Now the fanatics, Leaguer and Huguenot, had a fixed principle; with the former, it was the religious sovereignty of the pope, as representative and depositary of the unity of the Christian church; with the others, it was the negation of this sovereignty and the revindication of the free regimen of the primitive Christian church. To these fixed and peremptory principles the government of Henry IV. had nothing similar to oppose; it spoke in the name of social interests, of the public peace, and of mutual toleration; all excellent reasons, but with merits consisting in their practical soundness, not in their logical connection with the superior principle to which the sixteenth century had not yet attained. It was all very well for Henry IV. to maintain the cause and to have the support of the great majority in France; but outside of this majority he was incessantly encountering and incessantly having to put down or to humor two parties, or rather factions, full of discontent and as irreconcilable with him as among themselves, for it was not peace and tolerance that they demanded of him, but victory and supremacy in the name of absolute right.
This, then, was the scene; on one side a great majority of Catholics and Protestants favorable for different practical reasons to Henry IV. turned Catholic king; on the other, two minorities, one of stubborn Catholics of the League, the other of Protestants anxious for their creed and their liberty; both discontented and distrustful. Such, after Henry IV.‘s abjuration, was the striking feature in the condition of France and in the situation of her king. This triple fact was constantly present to the mind of Henry IV., and ruled his conduct during all his reign; all the acts of his government are proof of that.
His first embarrassments arose from the faction of Catholics to the backbone. After his abjuration just as much as at his accession, the League continued to exist and to act against him. The legate, Gaetani, maintained that the bishops of France had no right, without the pope’s approval, to give an excommunicated prince absolution; he opposed the three months’ truce concluded by Mayenne, and threatened to take his departure for Rome. Mayenne, to appease him and detain him, renewed the alliance between the League and Spain, prevailed upon the princes and marshals to renew also the oath of union, caused the states-general of the League to vote the adoption of the Council of Trent, and, on proroguing them, August 8, 1593, received from them a promise to return at the expiration of the truce. For the members of that assembly it was not a burdensome engagement; independently of the compensation they had from their provinces, which was ten livres (thirty-six francs, sixty centimes) a day during each session, they received from the King of Spain a regular retainer, which raised it, for the five months from June to October, to seventy-two thousand one hundred and forty-four francs, which they divided between themselves. “It was presumed,” said Jehan l’Huillier, provost of tradesmen, to one of his colleagues who was pressing him to claim this payment from the ambassador of Spain, “that the money came from M. de Mayenne, not from foreigners;” but honest people, such as Du Vair and Thielement, did not content themselves with this presumption, and sent to the Hotel-Dieu, for maintenance of the poor, the share which was remitted to them. [Poirson, Histoire du Regne de Henry IV., t. i. p. 463. Picot, Histoire des Etats generaux, t. iii. p. 249.]
The states-general of the League did not appear again; their prorogation was their death. The year 1594, which came after them, was for Henry IV. a year of home conquests, some pacific and due to the spontaneous movement of the inhabitants, others obtained after resistance and purchased with gold. The town of Lyons set the example of the first. A rumor spread that the Spaniards were preparing an expedition against it; some burgesses met to consult, and sent a private message to Alphonse d’Ornano, who was conducting the war for the king in Dauphiny, pressing him to move forward, on a day appointed, to the faubourg de la Guillotiere. A small force sent by Ornano arrived, accordingly, on the 7th of February, about daybreak, at the foot of the bridge over the Rhone, in the faubourg, and, after a stubborn resistance, dislodged the outpost on duty there. At sound of the fighting, excitement broke out in the town; and barricades were thrown up, amidst shouts of “Hurrah for French liberty!” without any mention of the king’s name. The archbishop, Peter d’Espignac, a stanch Leaguer, tried to intimidate the burgesses, or at any rate to allay the excitement. As he made no impression, he retired into his palace. The people arrested the sheriffs and seized the arsenal. The king’s name resounded everywhere. “The noise of the cheering was such,” says De Thou, “that there was no hearing the sound of the bells. Everybody assumed the white scarf with so much zeal that by evening there was not a scrap of white silk left at the tradesmen’s. Tables were laid in the streets; the king’s arms were put up on the gates and in the public thoroughfares.” Ornano marched in over the barricades; royalist sheriffs were substituted for the Leaguer sheriffs, and hastened to take the oath of allegiance to the king, who had nothing to do but thank the Lyonnese for having been the first to come over to him without constraint or any exigency, and who confirmed by an edict all their municipal liberties. At the very moment when the Lyonnese were thus springing to the side of their king, there set out from Lyons the first assassin who raised a hand against Henry IV., Peter Parriere, a poor boatman of the Loire, whom an unhappy passion for a girl in the household of Marguerite de Valois and the preachings of fanatics had urged on to this hateful design. Assassin we have called him, although there was not on his part so much as an attempt at assassination; but he had, by his own admission, projected and made preparations for the crime, to the extent of talking it over with accomplices and sharpening the knife he had purchased for its accomplishment. Having been arrested at Melun and taken to Paris, he was sentenced to capital punishment, and to all the tortures that ingenuity could add to it. He owned to everything, whilst cursing those who had assured him that “if he died in the enterprise, his soul, uplifted by angels, would float away to the bosom of God, where he would enjoy eternal bliss.” Moved by his torments and his repentance, the judge who presided at his execution took upon himself to shorten it by having him strangled. The judge was reported to the king for this indulgence. Henry praised him for it, adding that he would have pardoned the criminal if he had been brought before him. Thus commenced, at the opening of his reign, the series of attempts to which he was destined to succumb, after seventeen years of good, able, generous, and mild government.
In Normandy, at Rouen, the royalist success was neither so easy nor so disinterested as it had been at Lyons. Andrew de Brancas, Lord of Villars, an able man and valiant soldier, was its governor; he had served the League with zeal and determination; nevertheless, “from the month of August, 1593, immediately after the king’s conversion, he had shown a disposition to become his servant, and to incline thereto all those whom he had in his power.” [Histoire du Parlement de Normandi, by M. Floquet, t. iii. pp. 611-617.] Henry IV. commissioned Rosny to negotiate with him; and Rosny went into Normandy, to Louviers first and then to Rouen itself. The negotiation seemed to be progressing favorably, but a distrustful whim in regard to Villars, and the lofty pretensions he put forward, made Rosny hang back for a while, and tell the whole story to the king, at the same time asking for his instructions. Henry replied,—
“My friend, you are an ass to employ so much delay and import so many difficulties and manoeuvres into a business the conclusion of which is of so great importance to me for the establishment of my authority and the relief of my people. Do you no longer remember the counsels you have so many times given to me, whilst setting before me as an example that given by a certain Duke of Milan to King Louis XI., at the time of the war called that of the Common Weal? It was to split up by considerations of private interest all those who were leagued against him on general pretexts. That is what I desire to attempt now, far preferring that it should cost twice as much to treat separately with each individual as it would to arrive at the same results by means of a general treaty concluded with a single leader, who, in that way, would be enabled to keep up still an organized party within my dominions. You know plenty of folks who wanted to persuade me to that. Wherefore, do not any longer waste your time in doing either so much of the respectful towards those whom you wot of, and whom we will find other means of contenting, or of the economical by sticking at money. We will pay everything with the very things given up to us, the which, if they had to be taken by force, would cost us ten times as much. Seeing, then, that I put entire trust in you and love you as a good servant, do not hesitate any longer to make absolute and bold use of your power, which I further authorize by this letter, so far as there may be further need for it, and settle as soon as possible with M. de Villars. But secure matters so well that there may be no possibility of a slip, and send me news thereof promptly, for I shall be in constant doubt and impatience until I receive it. And then, when I am peaceably king, we will employ the excellent manoeuvres of which you have said so much to me; and you may rest assured that I will spare no travail and fear no peril in order to raise my glory and my kingdom to the height of splendor. Adieu, my friend. Senlis, this 18th day of March, 1594.”
Amongst the pretensions made by Villars there was one which could not be satisfied without the consent of a man still more considerable than he, and one with whom Henry IV. was obliged to settle—Biron. Villars had received from Mayenne the title and office of admiral of France, and he wished, at any price, to retain them on passing over to the king’s service. Now Henry IV. had already given this office to Biron, who had no idea of allowing himself to be stripped of it. It was all very fine to offer him in exchange the baton of a marshal of France, but he would not be satisfied with it. “It was necessary,” says M. Floquet [Histoire du Parlement de Normandie, t. iii. pp. 613-616], “for the king’s sister (Princess Catherine) to intervene. At last, a promise of one hundred and twenty thousand crowns won Biron over, though against the grain.” But he wanted solid securities. Attention was then turned to the Parliament of Caen, always so ready to do anything and sacrifice anything. Saldaigne d’Incarville, comptroller-general of finance, having been despatched to Caen, went straight to the palace and reported to the Parliament the proposals and conditions of Villers and Biron. “The king,” said he, “not having been able to bring Rouen to reason by process of arms, and being impatient to put some end to these miseries, wishes now to try gentle processes, and treat with those whom he has not yet been able to subdue; but co-operation on the part of the sovereign bodies of the provinces is necessary.” “To that which is for the good of our service is added your private interest,” wrote Henry IV. to the Parliament of Caen; and his messenger D’Incarville added, “I have left matters at Rouen so arranged as to make me hope that before a fortnight is over you will be free to return thither and enter your homes once more.” At the first mention of peace and the prospect of a reconciliation between the royalist Parliament of Caen and the leaguer Parliament of Rouen, the Parliament, the exchequer-chamber, and the court of taxation, agreed to a fresh sacrifice and a last effort. The four presidents of the Parliament lost no time in signing together, and each for all, an engagement to guarantee the hundred and twenty thousand crowns promised to Biron. . . . The members of the body bound themselves all together to guarantee the four presidents, in their turn, in respect of the engagement they were contracting, and a letter was addressed on the spot to Henry IV., “to thank the monarch for his good will and affection, and the honor he was doing the members of his Parliament of Normandy, by making them participators in the means and overtures adopted for arriving at the reduction of the town of Rouen.” [M. Floquet, Histoire du Parlement de Normandi, t. iii. pp. 613-616.]
Here is the information afforded, as regards the capitulation of Villars to Henry IV., by the statement drawn up by Sully himself, of “the amount of all debts on account of all the treaties made for the reduction of districts, towns, places, and persons to obedience unto the king, in order to the pacification of the realm.”
“To M. Villars, for himself, his brother, Chevalier d’Oise, the towns of Rouen and Havre and other places, as well as for compensation which had to be made to MM. de Montpensier, Marshal de Biron, Chancellor de Chiverny, and other persons included in his treaty . . . three millions four hundred and forty-seven thousand eight hundred livres.” [Poirson, Histoire du Regne de Henry IV., t. i. p. 667.]
These details have been entered into without hesitation because it is important to clearly understand by what means, by what assiduous efforts, and at what price Henry IV. managed to win back pacifically many provinces of his kingdom, rally to his government many leaders of note, and finally to confer upon France that territorial and political unity which she lacked under the feudal regimen, and which, in the sixteenth century, the religious wars all but put it beyond her power to acquire. To the two instances just cited of royalist reconciliation—Lyons and the spontaneous example set by her population, and Rouen and the dearly purchased capitulation of her governor Villars—must be added a third, of a different sort. Nicholas de Neufville, Lord of Villeroi, after having served Charles IX. and Henry III., had become, through attachment to the Catholic cause, a member of the League, and one of the Duke of Mayenne’s confidants. When Henry IV. was King of France, and Catholic king, Villeroi tried to serve his cause with Mayenne, and induce Mayenne to be reconciled with him. Meeting with no success, he made up his mind to separate from the League, and go over to the king’s service. He could do so without treachery or shame; even as a Leaguer and a servant of Mayenne’s he had always been opposed to Spain, and devoted to a French, but, at the same time, a faithfully Catholic policy. He imported into the service of Henry IV. the same sentiments and the same bearing; he was still a zealous Catholic, and a partisan, for king and country’s sake, of alliance with Catholic powers. He was a man of wits, experience, and resource, who knew Europe well and had some influence at the court of Rome. Henry IV. saw at once the advantage to be gained from him, and, in spite of the Protestants’ complaints, and his sister Princess Catherine’s prayers, made him, on the 25th of September, 1594, secretary of state for foreign affairs. This acquisition did not cost him so dear as that of Villars: still we read in the statement of sums paid by Henry IV. for this sort of conquest, “Furthermore, to M. de Villeroi, for himself, his son, the town of Pontoise, and other individuals, according to their treaty, four hundred and seventy-six thousand five hundred and ninety-four livres.” It is quite true that this statement was drawn up by Sully, the unwavering supporter of Protestant alliances in Europe, and, as such, Villeroi’s opponent in the council of Henry IV.; but the other contemporary documents confirm Sully’s assertion. Villeroi was a faithful servant to Henry, who well repaid him by stanchness in supporting him against the repeated attacks of violent Reformers. In 1594, when he became minister of foreign affairs, the following verse was in vogue at the Louvre:—
|
“The king could never beat the League; ‘Twas Villeroi who did the thing; So well he managed his intrigue, That now the League hath got the king.” |
It is quite certain, however, that Henry IV. was never of the opinion expressed in that verse; for, ten years later, in 1604, Villeroi having found himself much compromised by the treachery of a chief clerk in his department, who had given up to the Spanish government some important despatches, the king, though very vexed at this mishap, “the consequences of which rankled in his heart far more than he allowed to appear openly, nevertheless continued to look most kindly on Villeroi, taking the trouble to call upon him, to console and comfort him under this annoyance, and not showing him a suspicion of mistrust because of what had happened, any more than formerly; nay, even less.” [Journal de L’Estoile, t. iii. pp. 85-441.] Never had prince a better or nobler way of employing confidence in his proceedings with his servants, old or new, at the same time that he made clear-sighted and proper distinctions between them.
Henry IV., with his mind full of his new character as a Catholic king, perceived the necessity of getting the pope to confirm the absolution which had been given him, at the time of his conversion, by the French bishops. It was the condition of his credit amongst the numerous Catholic population who were inclined to rally to him, but required to know that he was at peace with the head of their church. He began by sending to Rome non-official agents, instructed to quietly sound the pope, amongst others Arnold d’Ossat, a learned professor in the University of Paris, who became, at a later period, the celebrated cardinal and diplomat of that name. Clement VIII. [Hippolytus Aldobrandini] was a clever man, moderate and prudent to the verge of timidity, and, one who was disinclined to take decisive steps as to difficult questions or positions until after they had been decided by events. He refused to have any communication with him whom he still called the Prince of Bearn, and only received the agents of Henry IV. privately in his closet. But whilst he was personally severe and exacting in his behavior to then, he had a hint given them by one of his confidants not to allow themselves to be rebuffed by any obstacle, for the pope would, sooner or later, welcome back the lost child who returned to him. At this report, and by the advice of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand de’ Medici, Henry IV. determined to send a solemn embassy to Rome, and to put it under the charge of a prince of Italian origin, Peter di Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers. But either through the pope’s stubborn resolve or the ambassador’s somewhat impatient temper, devoted as he was, however, to the Holy See, the embassy had no success. The Duke of Nevers could not obtain an official reception as ambassador of the King of France. It was in vain that he had five confidential audiences of the pope; in vain that he represented energetically to him all the progress Henry IV. had already made, all the chances he had of definitive success, all the perils to which the papacy exposed itself by rejecting his advances; Clement VIII. persisted in his determination. Philip II. and Mayenne still reigned in his ideas, and he dismissed the Duke of Nevers on the 13th of January, 1594, declaring once more that he refused to the Navarrese absolution at the inner bar of conscience, absolution at the outer bar, and confirmation in his kingship.
Henry IV. did not put himself out, did not give himself the pleasure of testifying to Rome his discontent; he saw that he had not as yet sufficiently succeeded—sufficiently vanquished his enemies, or won to himself his kingdom with sufficient completeness and definitiveness—to make the pope feel bound to recognize and sanction his triumph. He set himself once more to work to grow still greater in France, and force the gates of Rome without its being possible to reproach him with violence or ill temper.
He had been absolved and crowned at St. Denis by the bishops of France; he had not been anointed at Rheims, according to the religious traditions of the French monarchy. At Rheims he could not be; for it was still in the power of the League. Researches were made, to discover whether the ceremony of anointment might take place elsewhere; numerous instances were found, and in the case of famous kings: Pepin the Short had been anointed first of all at Mayence, Charlemagne and Louis the Debonnair at Rome, Charles the Bald at Mayence, several emperors at Aix-la-Chapelle and at Cologne. The question of the holy phial (ampoule) was also discussed; and it was proved that on several occasions other oils, held to be of miraculous origin, had been employed instead. These difficulties thus removed, the anointment of Henry IV. took place at Chartres on the 27th of February, 1594; the Bishop of Chartres, Nicholas de Thou, officiated, and drew up a detailed account of all the ceremonies and all the rejoicings; thirteen medals, each weighing fifteen gold crowns, were struck, according to custom; they bore the king’s image, and for legend, Invia virtuti nulla est via (To manly worth no road is inaccessible). Henry IV., on his knees before the grand altar, took the usual oath, the form of which was presented to him by Chancellor de Chiverny. With the exception of local accessories, which were acknowledged to be impossible and unnecessary, there was nothing wanting to this religious hallowing of his kingship.
But one other thing, more important than the anointment at Chartres, was wanting. He did not possess the capital of his kingdom the League were still masters of Paris. Uneasy masters of their situation; but not so uneasy, however, as they ought to have been. The great leaders of the party, the Duke of Mayenne, his mother the Duchess of Nemours, his sister the Duchess of Montpensier, and the Duke of Feria, Spanish ambassador, were within its walls, a prey to alarm and discouragement. “At breakfast,” said the Duchess of Montpensier, “they regale us with the surrender of a hamlet, at dinner of a town, at supper of a whole province.” The Duchess of Nemours, who desired peace, exerted herself to convince her son of all their danger. “Set your affairs in order,” she said;—“if you do not begin to make your arrangements with the king before leaving Paris, you will lose this capital. I know that projects are already afoot for giving it up, and that those who can do it, and in whom you have most confidence, are accomplices and even authors of the plot.” Mayenne himself did not hide from his confidants the gravity of the mischief and his own disquietude. “Not a day,” he wrote on the 4th of February, 1594, to the Marquis of Montpezat, “but brings some trouble because of the people’s yearning for repose, and of the weakness which is apparent on our side. I stem and stop this forment with as much courage as I can; but the present mischief is overwhelming; the King of Navarre will in a few days have an army of twenty thousand men, French as well as foreigners. What will become of us, if we have not wherewithal not only to oppose him, but to make him lose the campaign? I can tell you of a verity that, save for my presence, Paris would have already been lost because of the great factions there are in it, which I take all the pains in the world to disperse and break up, and also because of the small aid, or rather the gainsaying, I meet with from the ministers of the King of Spain.” Mayenne tried to restore amongst the Leaguers both zeal and discipline; he convoked on the 2d of March, a meeting of all that remained of the faction of the Sixteen; he calculated upon the presence of some twelve hundred; scarcely three hundred came; he had an harangue delivered to them by the Rev. John Boucher, charged them to be faithful to the old spirit of the League, promised them that he would himself be faithful even to death, and exhorted them to be obedient in everything to Brissac, whom he had just appointed governor of the city, and to the provost of tradesmen. On announcing to them his imminent departure for Soissons, to meet some auxiliary troops which were to be sent to him by the King of Spain, “I leave to you,” he said, “what is dearest to me in the world—my wife, my children, my mother, and my sister.” But when he did set out, four days afterwards, on the 6th of March, 1594, he took away his wife and his children; his mother had already warned him that Brissac was communicating secretly, by means of his cousin, Sieur de Rochepot, with the royalists, and that the provost of tradesmen, L’Huillier, and three of the four sheriffs were agreed to bring the city back to obedience to the king. When the Sixteen and their adherents saw Mayenne departing with his wife and children, great were their alarm and wrath. A large band, with the incumbent of St. Cosmo (Hamilton) at their head, rushed about the streets in arms, saying, “Look to your city; the policists are brewing a terrible business for it.” Others, more violent, cried, “To arms! Down upon the policists! Begin! Let us make an end of it!” The policists, that is, the burgesses inclined to peace, repaired on their side to the provost of tradesmen to ask for his authority to assemble at the Palace or the Hotel de Ville, and to provide for security in case of any public calamity. The provost tried to elude their entreaties by pleading that the Duke of Mayenne would think ill of their assembling. “Then you are not the tradesmen’s but M. de Mayenne’s provost?” said one of them. “I am no Spaniard,” answered the provost; “no more is M. de Mayenne; I am anxious to reconcile you to the Sixteen.” “We are honest folks, not branded and defamed like the Sixteen; we will have no reconciliation with the wretches.” The Parliament grew excited, and exclaimed against the insolence and the menaces of the Sixteen. “We must give place to these sedition-mongers, or put them down.” A decree, published by sound of trumpet on the 14th of March, 1594, throughout the whole city, prohibited the Sixteen and their partisans from assembling on pain of death. That same day, Count de Brissac, governor of Paris, had an interview at the abbey of St. Anthony, with his brother-in-law, Francis d’Epinay, Lord of St. Luc, Henry IV.‘s grand-master of the ordnance; they had disputes touching private interests, which they wished, they said, to put right; and on this pretext advocates had appeared at their interview. They spent three hours in personal conference, their minds being directed solely to the means of putting the king into possession of Paris. They separated in apparent dudgeon. Brissac went to call upon the legate Gaetani, and begged him to excuse the error he had committed in communicating with a heretic; his interest in the private affairs in question was too great, he said, for him to neglect it. The legate excused him graciously, whilst praising him for his modest conduct, and related the incident to the Duke of Feria, the Spanish ambassador. “He is a good fellow, M. de Brissac,” said the ambassador; “I have always found him so; you have only to employ the Jesuits to make him do all you please. He takes little notice, otherwise, of affairs; one day, when we were holding council in here, whilst we were deliberating, he was amusing himself by catching flies.” For four days the population of Paris was occupied with a solemn procession in honor of St. Genevieve, in which the Parliament and all the municipal authorities took part. Brissac had agreed with his brother-in-law D’Epinay that he would let the king in on the 22d of March, and he had arranged, in concert with the provost of tradesmen, two sheriffs, and several district captains, the course of procedure. On the 21st of March, in the evening, some Leaguers paid him a visit, and spoke to him warmly about the rumors current on the subject in the city, calling upon him to look to it. “I have received the same notice,” said Brissac, coolly; “and I have given all the necessary orders. Leave me to act, and keep you quiet, so as not to wake up those who will have to be secured. To-morrow morning you will see a fine to-do and the policists much surprised.” During all the first part of the night between the 21st and 22d of March, Brissac went his rounds of the city and the guards he had posted, “with an appearance of great care and solicitude.” He had some trouble to get rid of certain Spanish officers, “whom the Duke of Feria had sent him to keep him company in his rounds, with orders to throw themselves upon him and kill him at the first suspicious movement; but they saw nothing to confirm their suspicions, and at two A. M., Brissac brought them back much fatigued to the duke’s, where he left them.” Henry IV., having started on the 21st of March from Senlis, where he had mustered his troops, and arrived about midnight at St. Denis, immediately began his march to Paris. The night was dark and stormy; thunder rumbled; rain fell heavily; the king was a little behind time. At three A. M.. the policists inside Paris had taken arms and repaired to the posts that had been assigned to them. Brissac had placed a guard close to the quarters of the Spanish ambassador, and ordered the men to fire on any who attempted to leave. He had then gone in person, with L’Huillier, the provost of tradesmen, to the New Gate, which he had caused to be unlocked and guarded. Sheriff Langlois had done the same at the gate of St. Denis. On the 22d of March, at four A. M., the king had not yet appeared before the ramparts, nor any one for him. Langlois issued from the gate, went some little distance to look out, and came in again, more and more impatient. At last, between four and five o’clock, a detachment of the royal troops, commanded by Vitry, appeared before the gate of St. Denis, which was instantly opened. Brissac’s brother-in-law, St. Luc, arrived about the same time at the New Gate, with a considerable force. The king’s troops entered Paris. They occupied the different districts, and met with no show of resistance but at the quay of L’Ecole, where an outpost of lanzknechts tried to stop them; but they were cut in pieces or hurled into the river. Between five and six o’clock Henry IV., at the head of the last division, crossed the drawbridge of the New Gate. Brissac, Provost L’Huillier, the sheriffs, and several companies of burgesses advanced to meet him. The king embraced Brissac, throwing his own white scarf round his neck, and addressing him as “Marshal.” “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” said Brissac, as he called upon the provost of tradesmen to present to the king the keys of the city. “Yes,” said L’Huillier, “render them, not sell them.” The king went forward with his train, going along Rue St. Honore to the market of the Innocents and the bridge of Notre-Dame; the crowd increased at every step. “Let them come near,” said Henry; “they hunger to see a king.” At every step, too, at sight of the smallest incident, the character of Henry, his natural thoughtful and lovable kindliness, shone forth. He asked if his entry had met with resistance anywhere; and he was told that about fifty lanzknechts had been killed at the quay of L’Ecole. “I would willingly give fifty thousand crowns,” said he, “to be able to say that I took Paris without costing the life of one single man.” As he marched along the Rue St. Honore, he saw a soldier taking some bread by force from a baker’s; he rushed at him, and would have struck him with his sword. As he passed in front of the Innocents, he saw at a window a man who was looking at him, and pointedly keeping his hat on; the man perceived that the king’ observed him, and withdrew, shutting down the window. Henry said, “Let nobody enter this house to vex or molest any one in it.” He arrived in front of Notre-Dame, followed by five or six hundred men-at-arms, who trailed their pikes “in token of a victory that was voluntary on the people’s part,” it was said. There was no uproar, or any hostile movement, save on the left bank of the Seine, in the University quarter, where the Sixteen attempted to assemble their partisans round the gate of St. Jacques; but they were promptly dispersed by the people as well as by the royal troops. On leaving Notre-Dame, Henry repaired to the Louvre, where he installed royalty once more. At ten o’clock he was master of the whole city; the districts of St. Martin, of the Temple, and St. Anthony alone remained still in the power of three thousand Spanish soldiers under the orders of their leaders, the Duke of Feria and Don Diego d’Ibarra. Nothing would have been easier for Henry than to have had them driven out by his own troops and the people of Paris, who wanted to finish the day’s work by exterminating the foreigners; but he was too judicious and too far-sighted to embitter the general animosity by pushing his victory beyond what was necessary. He sent word to the Spaniards that they must not move from their quarters and must leave Paris during the day, at the same time promising not to bear arms any more against him, in France. They eagerly accepted these conditions. At three o’clock in the afternoon, ambassador, officers, and soldiers all evacuated Paris, and set out for the Low Countries. The king, posted at a window over the gate of St. Denis, witnessed their departure. They, as they passed, saluted him respectfully; and he returned their salute, saying, “Go, gentlemen, and commend me to your master; but return no more.”
After his conversion to Catholicism, the capture of Paris was the most decisive of the issues which made Henry IV. really King of France. The submission of Rouen followed almost immediately upon that of Paris; and the year 1594 brought Henry a series of successes, military and civil, which changed very much to his advantage the position of the kingship as well as the general condition of the kingdom. In Normandy, in Picardy, in Champagne, in Anjou, in Poitou, in Brittany, in Orleanness, in Auvergne, a multitude of important towns, Havre, Honfleur, Abbeville, Amiens, Peronue, Montdidier, Poitiers, Orleans, Rheims, Chateau-Thierry, Beauvais, Sens, Riom, Morlaix, Laval, Laon, returned to the king’s authority, some after sieges and others by pacific and personal arrangement, more or less burdensome for the public treasury, but very effective in promoting the unity of the nation and of the monarchy. In the table drawn up by Sully of expenses under that head, he estimated them at thirty-two millions, one hundred and forty-two thousand, nine hundred and eighty-one livres, equivalent at the present day, says M. Poirson, to one hundred and eighteen millions of francs. The rendition of Paris, “on account of M. de Brissac, the city itself and other individuals employed on his treaty,” figures in this sum total at one million, six hundred and forty-five thousand, four hundred livres. Territorial acquisitions were not the only political conquests of this epoch; some of the great institutions which had been disjointed by the religious wars, for instance, the Parliaments of Paris and Normandy, recovered their unity and resumed their efficacy to the advantage of order, of the monarchy, and of national independence; their decrees against the League contributed powerfully to its downfall. Henry IV. did his share in other ways besides warfare; he excelled in the art of winning over or embarrassing his vanquished foes. After the submission of Paris, the two princesses of the house of Lorraine who had remained there, the Duchesses of Nemours and of Montpensier, one the mother and the other the sister of the Duke of Mayenne, were preparing to go and render homage to the conqueror; Henry anticipated them, and paid them the first visit. As he was passing through a room where hung a portrait of Henry de Guise, he halted and saluted it very courteously. The Duchess of Montpensier, who had so often execrated him, did not hesitate to express her regret that “her brother Mayenne had not been there to let down for him the drawbridge of the gate by which he had entered Paris.” “Ventre-saint-gris,” said the king, “he might have made me wait a long while; I should not have arrived so early.” He knew that the Duchess of Nemours had desired peace, and when she allowed some signs of vexation to peep out at her not having been able to bring her sons and grandsons to that determination, “Madame,” said he, “there is still time if they please.” At the close of 1594, he imported disorganization into the household of Lorraine by offering the government of Provence to the young Duke Charles of Guise, son of the Balafre; who eagerly accepted it; and he from that moment paved the way, by the agency of President Jeannin, for his reconciliation with Mayenne, which he brought to accomplishment at the end of 1595.
The close of this happy and glorious year was at hand. On the 27th of September, between six and seven P.M., a deplorable incident occurred, for the second time, to call Henry IV.‘s attention to the weak side of his position. He was just back from Picardy, and holding a court-reception at Schomberg House, at the back of the Louvre. John Chastel, a young man of nineteen, son of a cloth-merchant in the city, slipped in among the visitors, managed to approach the king, and dealt him a blow with a knife just as he was stooping to raise and embrace Francis de la Grange, Sieur de Montigny, who was kneeling before him. The blow, aimed at the king’s throat, merely slit his upper lip and broke a tooth. “I am wounded!” said the king. John Chastel, having dropped his knife, had remained on the spot, motionless and confused. Montigny, according to some, but, according to others, the Count of Soissons, who happened to be near him, laid hands upon him, saying, “Here is the assassin, either he or I.” Henry IV., always prone to pass things over, pooh-poohed the suspicion, and was just giving orders to let the young man go, when the knife, discovered on the ground close to Chastel, became positive evidence. Chastel was questioned, searched, and then handed, over to the grand provost of the household, who had him conveyed to prison at For-l’Eveque. He first of all denied, but afterwards admitted his deed, regretting that he had missed his aim, and saying he was ready to try again for his own salvation’s sake and that of religion. He declared that he had been brought up amongst the Jesuits in Rue St. Jacques, and he gave long details as to the education he had received there and the maxims he had heard there. The rumor of his crime and of the revelations he had made spread immediately over Paris and caused passionate excitement. The people filled the churches and rendered thanks to God for having preserved the king. The burgesses took up arms and mustered at their guard-posts. The mob bore down on the college of Jesuits in Rue St. Jacques with threats of violence. The king and the Parliament sent a force thither; Brizard, councillor in the high chamber, captain of the district, had the fathers removed, and put them in security in his own house. The inquiry was prosecuted deliberately and temperately. It brought out that John Chastel had often heard repeated at his college “that it was allowable to kill kings, even the king regnant, when they were not in the church or approved of by the pope.” The accused formally maintained this maxim, which was found written out and dilated upon under his own hand in a note-book seized at his father’s. “Was it necessary, pray,” said Henry IV., laughing, “that the Jesuits should be convicted by my mouth?” John Chastel was sentenced to the most cruel punishment; and he underwent it on the 20th of December, 1594, by torch-light, before the principal entrance of Notre-Dame, without showing any symptom of regret. His mother and his sisters were set at liberty. His father, an old Leaguer, had been cognizant of his project, and had dissuaded him from it, but without doing anything to hinder it; he was banished from the kingdom for nine years, and from Paris forever. His house was razed to the ground; and on the site was set up a pyramid with the decree of the Parliament inscribed upon it.
The proceedings did not stop there. At the beginning of this same year, and on petition from the University of Paris, the Parliament had commenced a general prosecution of the order of Jesuits, its maxims, tendencies, and influence. Formal discussions had taken place; the prosecution and the defence had been conducted with eloquence, and a decree of the court had ordained that judgment should be deferred. Several of the most respected functionaries, notably President Augustin de Thou, had pronounced against this decree, considering the question so grave and so urgent that the Parliament should make it their duty to decide upon the point at issue. When sentence had to be pronounced upon John Chastel, President de Thou took the opportunity of saying, “When I lately gave my opinion in the matter of the University and the Jesuits, I never hoped, at my age and with my infirmities, that I should live long enough to take part in the judgment we are about to pass to-day. It was that which led me, in the indignation caused me by the course at that time adopted, to lay down an opinion to which I to-day recur with much joy. God be praised for having brought about an occasion whereon we have nothing to do but felicitate ourselves for that the enterprise which our foes did meditate against the state and the life of the king hath been without success, and which proves clearly at the same time how much the then opinion of certain honest men was wiser than that of persons who, from a miserable policy, were in favor of deferment!” The court, animated by the same sentiments as President do Thou, “declared the maxims maintained in the Jesuits’ name to be rash, seditious, contrary to the word of God, savoring of heresy and condemned by the holy canons; it expressly forbade them to be taught publicly or privately, on pain, in case of contraveners, of being treated as guilty of treason against God and man. It decreed, further, that the priests of the college in Rue St. Jacques, their pupils, and, generally, all members of that society, should leave Paris and all the towns in which they had colleges three days after this decree had been made known to them, and the kingdom within a fortnight, as corrupters of youth, disturbers of the public peace, and enemies of the king and of the state. In default of obedience on their part, their property, real and personal, should be confiscated and employed for pious purposes. The court, besides, prohibited all subjects of the king from sending their children as students to any Jesuits out of the kingdom, on pain of being declared enemies of the state.” This decree was issued on the 29th of December, 1594. And as if to leave no doubt about the sense and bearing of this legislation, it was immediately applied in the case of a Jesuit father, John Guignard, a native of Chartres; his papers were examined, and there were found in his handwriting many propositions and provocatives of sedition, such as, “That a great mistake had been made at the St. Bartholomew in not having opened the basilic vein, that is, in not having murdered Henry IV. and the Prince of Conde, who were of the blood royal; 2. That the crown might have been, and ought to have been, transferred to a family other than that of the Bourbons; 3. That the Bearnese, in spite of his pretended conversion, ought to consider himself only too lucky if it were considered sufficient to shave his head and shut him up in a convent to do penance there; that if the crown could not betaken from him without war, then war must be made on him; and that if the state of things did not admit of making war on him, he ought to be got rid of at any price and in any way whatsoever.” For having, not published, but thought and with his own hand written out all this, and probably taught it to his pupils, Father Guignard was obliged to retract, and was afterwards hanged in the Place de Greve on the 7th of January, 1595.
The task of honest men and of right minds is greater and more difficult in our day than it was in the sixteenth century, for we have to reconcile the laws and the requirements of moral and social order with far broader principles and sentiments, as regards right and liberty, than were those of President Augustin de Thou and the worthy functionaries of his time.
It was one of Henry IV.‘s conspicuous qualities that no event, auspicious or inauspicious, affected the correctness of his judgment, and that he was just as much a stranger to illusion or intoxication in the hour of good fortune as to discouragement in the hour of ill. He had sense enough to see, in any case, things as they really were, and to estimate at the proper value the strength they brought or the obstacles they formed to his government. He saw at a glance all the importance there was for him in the submission of Paris, and what change in his conduct was required by that in his position. Certain local successes of the Spaniards at some points in his kingdom, the efforts of Mayenne to resuscitate the dying League, and John Chastel’s attempt at assassination did not for a moment interfere with his confidence in his progress, or cause him to hesitate as to the new bearing he had to assume. He wrote on the 17th of December, 1594, to the estates of Artois and Hainault, “I have hitherto lacked neither the courage nor the power to repel the insults offered me, and to send recoiling upon the head of the King of Spain and his subjects the evils of which he was the author. But just as were the grounds I had for declaring war against him, motives more powerful and concerning the interests of all Christendom restrained me. At the present time, when the principal leaders of the factious have returned to their duty and submitted to my laws, Philip still continues his intrigues to foster troubles in the very heart of my kingdom. After maturely reflecting, I have decided that it is time for me to act. Nevertheless, as I cannot forget the friendship my ancestors always felt for your country, I could not but see with pain that, though you have taken no share in Philip’s acts of injustice, on you will fall the first blows of a war so terrible, and I thought it my duty to warn you of my purpose before I proceed to execute it. If you can prevail upon the King of Spain to withdraw the army which he is having levied on the frontier, and to give no protection for the future to rebels of my kingdom, I will not declare war against him, provided that I have certain proof of your good intentions, and that you give me reasonable securities for them before the 1st of January in the approaching year.” [Lettres missives de Henri IV, p. 280—De Thou, Histoire universelle, t. xii. pp. 328-342.]
These letters, conveyed to Arras by one of the king’s trumpeters, received no answer. The estates of Flanders, in assembly at Brussels, somewhat more bold than those of Artois and Hainault, in vain represented to their Spanish governor their plaints and their desires for peace; for two months Henry IV. heard not a word on the subject. Philip II. persisted in his active hostility, and continued to give the King of France no title but that of Prince of Bearn. On the 17th of January, 1595, Henry, in performance of what he had proclaimed, formally declared war against the King of Spain, forbade his subjects to have any commerce with him or his allies, and ordered them to make war on him for the future just as he persisted in making it on France. This able and worthy resolve was not approved of by Rosny, by this time the foremost of Henry’s IV.‘s councillors, although he had not yet risen in the government, or, probably, in the king’s private confidence, to the superior rank that he did attain by the eminence of his services and the courageous sincerity of his devotion. In his OEconomies royales it is to interested influence, on the part of England and Holland, that he attributes this declaration of war against Philip II., “into which,” he says, “the king allowed himself to be hurried against his own feelings.” It was assuredly in accordance with his own feelings and of his own free will that Henry acted in this important decision; he had a political order of mind greater, more inventive, and more sagacious than Rosny’s administrative order of mind, strong common sense and painstaking financial abilities. To spontaneously declare war against Philip after the capitulation of Paris and the conquest of three quarters of France was to proclaim that the League was at death’s door, that there was no longer any civil war in France, and that her king had no more now than foreign war to occupy him. To make alliance, in view of that foreign war, with the Protestant sovereigns of England, Holland, and Germany, against the exclusive and absolutist patron of Catholicism, was on the part of a king but lately Protestant, and now become resolutely Catholic, to separate openly politics from religion, and to subserve the temporal interests of the realm of France whilst putting himself into the hands of the spiritual head of the church as regarded matters of faith. Henry IV., moreover, discovered another advantage in this line of conduct; it rendered possible and natural the important act for which he was even then preparing, and which will be spoken of directly, the edict of Nantes in favor of the Protestants, which was the charter of religious tolerance and the securities for it, pending the advent of religious liberty and its rights, that fundamental principle, at this day, of moral and social order in France. Such were Henry IV.‘s grand and premonitory instincts when, on the 17th of January, 1595, he officially declared against Philip II. that war which Philip had not for a moment ceased to make on him.
The conflict thus solemnly begun between France and Spain lasted three years and three months, from the 17th of January, 1595, to the 1st of May, 1598, from Henry IV.‘s declaration of war to the peace of Vervins, which preceded by only four months and thirteen days the death of Philip II. and the end of the preponderance of Spain in Europe. It is not worth while to follow step by step the course of this monotonous conflict, pregnant with facts which had their importance for contemporaries, but are not worthy of an historical resurrection. Notice will be drawn only to those incidents in which the history of France is concerned, and which give a good idea of Henry IV.‘s character, the effectiveness of his government, and the rapid growth of his greatness in Europe, contrasted with his rival’s slow decay.
Four months and a half after the declaration of war, and during the campaign begun in Burgundy between the French and the Spaniards, on the 5th of June, 1595, near Fontaine-Francaise, a large burgh a few leagues from Dijon, there took place an encounter which, without ending in a general battle, was an important event, and caused so much sensation that it brought about political results more important than the immediate cause of them. Henry IV. made up his mind to go and reconnoitre in person the approaches of Dijon, towards which the enemy were marching. He advanced, with about a hundred and fifty men-at-arms and as many mounted arquebusiers, close up to the burgh of Saint-Seine; from there he sent the Marquis of Mirebeau with fifty or sixty horse to “go,” says Sully, “and take stock of the enemy;” and he put himself on the track of his lieutenant, marching as a simple captain of light-horse, with the purpose of becoming better acquainted with the set of the country, so as to turn it to advantage if the armies had to encounter. But he had not gone more than a league when he saw Mirebeau returning at more than a foot-pace and in some disorder; who informed him “that he had been suddenly charged by as many as three or four hundred horse, who did not give him leisure to extend his view as he could have desired, and that he believed that the whole army of the Constable of Castille was marching in a body to come and quarter themselves in the burgh of Saint-Seine.” Marshal de Biron, who joined the king at this moment, offered to go and look at the enemy, and bring back news that could be depended upon; but scarcely had he gone a thousand paces when he descried, on the top of a little valley, some sixty horse halted there as if they were on guard; he charged them, toppled them over, and taking their ground, discovered the whole Spanish army marching in order of battle and driving before them a hundred of the king’s horse, who were flying in disorder. Biron halted and showed a firm front to the enemy’s approach; but he was himself hard pressed at many points, and was charged with such impetuosity that he was obliged to begin a retreat which changed before long to a sort of flight, with a few sword-cuts about the ears. Thus he arrived within sight of the king, who immediately detached a hundred horse to support Biron and stop the fugitives; but the little re-enforcement met with the same fate as those it went to support; it was overthrown and driven pell-mell right up to the king, who suddenly found himself with seven or eight hundred horse on his hands, without counting the enemy’s main army, which could already be discerned in the distance. Far from being dumbfounded, the king, “borrowing,” says Sully, “increase of judgment and courage from the greatness of the peril,” called all his men about him, formed them into two squadrons of a hundred and fifty men each, gave one to M. de la Tremoille with orders to go and charge the Spanish cavalry on one flank, put himself at the head of the other squadron, and the two charges of the French were “so furious and so determined,” says Sully, the king mingling in the thickest of the fight and setting an example to the boldest, “that the Spanish squadrons in dismay tumbled one over another, and retired half-routed to the main body of Mayenne’s army; who, seeing a dash made to the king’s assistance by some of his bravest officers with seven or eight hundred horse, thought all the royal army was there, and, fearing to attack those gentry of whose determination he had just made proof, he himself gave his troops the order to retreat, Henry going on in pursuit until he had forced them to recross the Sane below Gray, leaving Burgundy at his discretion.”
A mere abridgment has been given of the story relating to this brilliant affair as it appears in the OEconomies Royales of Sully [t. ii. pp. 377-387], who was present and hotly engaged in the fight. We will quote word for word, however, the account of Henry IV. himself, who sent a report four days afterwards to his sister Catherine and to the Constable Anne de Montmorency. To the latter he wrote on the 8th of June, 1595, from Dijon, “I was informed that the Constable of Castile, accompanied by the Duke of Mayenne, was crossing the River Sane with his army to come and succor the castle of this town. I took horse the day after, attended by my cousin Marshal de Biron and from seven to eight hundred horse, to go and observe his plans on the spot. Whence it happened that, intending to take the same quarters without having any certain advices about one another, we met sooner than we had hoped, and so closely that my cousin the marshal, who led the first troop, was obliged to charge those who had advanced, and I to support him. But our disadvantage was, that all our troops had not yet arrived and joined me, for I had but from two to three hundred horse, whereas the enemy had all his cavalry on the spot, making over a thousand or twelve hundred drawn up by squadrons and in order of battle. However, my said cousin did not haggle about them; and, seeing that they were worsting him, because the game was too uneven, I determined to make one in it, and joined in it to such a purpose and with such luck, thank God, together with the following I had, that we put them to the rout. But I can assure you that it was not at the first charge, for we made several; and if the rest of my forces had been with me, I should no doubt have defeated all their cavalry, and perhaps their foot who were in order of battle behind the others, having at their head the said Constable of Castile. But our forces were so unequal that I could do no more than put to flight those who would not do battle, after having cut in pieces the rest, as we had done; wherein I can tell you, my dear cousin, that my said cousin Marshal de Biron and I did some good handiwork. He was wounded in the head by a blow from a cutlass in the second charge, for he and I had nothing on but our cuirasses, not having had time to arm ourselves further, so surprised and hurried were we. However, my said cousin did not fail, after his wound, to return again to the charge three or four times, as I too did on my side. Finally we did so well that the field and their dead were left to us to the number of a hundred or six score, and as many prisoners of all ranks. Whereat the said Constable of Castile took such alarm that he at once recrossed the Sane; and I have been told that it was not without reproaching the Duke of Mayenne with having deceived him in not telling him of my arrival in this country.”
The day before, June 7, Henry had written to his sister Catherine de Bourbon, “My dear sister, the more I go on, the more do I wonder at the grace shown me by God in the fight of last Monday, wherein I thought to have defeated but twelve hundred horse; but they must be set down at two thousand. The Constable of Castile was there in person with the Duke of Mayenne; and they both of them saw me and recognized me quite well; they sent to demand of me a whole lot of Italian and Spanish captains of theirs, the which were not prisoners. They must be amongst the dead who have been buried, for I requested next day that they should be. Many of our young noblemen, seeing me with them everywhere, were full of fire in this engagement, and showed a great deal of courage; amongst whom I came across Gramont, Termes, Boissy, La Curse, and the Marquis of Mirebeau, who, as luck would have it, found themselves at it without any armor but their neck-pieces and gaillardets (front and back plates), and did marvels. There were others who did not do so well, and many who did very ill. Those who were not there ought to be sorry for it, seeing that I had need of all my good friends, and I saw you very near becoming my heiress.” [Lettres missives de Henri IV., t. iv. pp. 363-369; in the Collection des Documents inedits sur l’Histoire de France.]
This fight, so unpremeditated, at Fontaine-Francaise, and the presence of mind, steady quicksightedness, and brilliant dash of Henry IV., led off this long war gloriously. Its details were narrated and sought after minutely; people were especially struck with the sympathetic attention that in the very midst of the strife the king bestowed upon all his companions in arms, either to give them directions or to warn them of danger. “At the hottest of the fight,” says the contemporary historian Peter Matthieu, “Henry, seizing Mirebeau by the arm, said, ‘Charge yonder!’ which he did: and that troop began to thin off and disappear.” A moment afterwards, seeing one of the enemy’s men-at-arms darting down upon the French, Henry concluded that the attack was intended for Gilbert, de la Cure, a brave and pious Catholic lord, whom he called familiarly Monsieur le Cure, and shouted to him from afar, “Look out, La Curee!” which warned him and saved his life. The roughest warriors were touched by this fraternal solicitude of the king’s, and clung to him with passionate devotion.
It was at Rome, and in the case of an ecclesiastical question that Henry IV.‘s steady policy, his fame for ability as well as valor, and the glorious affair of Fontaine-Francaise bore their first fruits. Mention has already been made of the formal refusal the king had met with from Pope Clement VIII. in January, 1594, when he had demanded of him, by the embassy extraordinary of the Duke of Nevers, confirmation of the absolution granted him by the French bishops after his conversation at St. Denis and his anointment at Chartres. The pope, in spite of his refusal, had indirectly given the royal agents to understand that they were not to be discouraged; and the ablest of them, Arnold d’Ossat, had remained at Rome to conduct this delicate and dark commission. When Clement VIII. saw Henry IV.‘s government growing stronger and more extensive day by day, Paris returned to his power, the League beaten and the Gallican church upheld in its maxims by the French magistracy, fear of schism grew serious at Rome, and the pope had a hint given by Cardinal de Gondi to Henry that, if he were to send fresh ambassadors, they might be favorably listened to. Arnold d’Ossat had acquired veritable weight at the court of Rome, and had paved the way with a great deal of art towards turning to advantage any favorable chances that might offer themselves. Villeroi, having broken with the League, had become Henry IV.‘s minister of foreign affairs, and obtained some confidence at Rome in return for the good will he testified towards the papacy. By his councillor’s advice, no doubt, the king made no official stir, sent no brilliant embassy; D’Ossat quietly resumed negotiations, and alone conducted them from the end of 1594 to the spring of 1595; and when a new envoy was chosen to bring them to a conclusion, it was not a great lord, but a learned ecclesiastic, Abbot James du Perron, whose ability and devotion Henry IV. had already, at the time of his conversion, experienced, and whom he had lately appointed Bishop of Evreux. Even when Du Perron had been fixed upon to go to Rome and ask for the absolution which Clement VIII. had seven or eight months before refused, he was in no hurry to repair thither, and D’Ossat’s letters make it appear that he was expected there with some impatience. He arrived there on the 12th of July, 1595, and, in concert with D’Ossat, he presented to the pope the request of the king, who solicited the papal benediction, absolution from any censure, and complete reconciliation with the Roman church. Clement VIII., on the 2d of August, assembled his consistory, whither went all the cardinals, save two partisans of Spain who excused themselves on the score of health. Parleys took place as to the form of the decree which must precede the absolution. The pope would have liked very much to insert two clauses, one revoking as null and void the absolution already given to the king by the French bishops at the time of his conversion, and the other causing the absolution granted by the pope to be at the same time considered as re-establishing Henry IV. in his rights to the crown, whereof it was contended that he was deprived by the excommunication and censures of Sixtus V. and Gregory XIV., which this absolution was to remove. The two French negotiators rejected these attempts, and steadily maintained the complete independence of the king’s temporal sovereignty, as well as the power of intervention of the French episcopate in his absolution. Clement VIII. was a judicious and prudent pope; and he did not persist. The absolution was solemnly pronounced on the 17th of September, 1595, by the pope himself, from a balcony erected in St. Peter’s Square, and in presence of the population. The gates of the church were thrown open and a Te Deum was sung. A grand ceremony took place immediately afterwards in the church of St. Louis of the French. Rome was illuminated for three days, and, on the 7th of November following, a pope’s messenger left for Paris with the bull of absolution drawn up in the terms agreed upon.
Another reconciliation, of less solemnity, but of great importance, that between the Duke of Mayenne and Henry IV., took place a week after the absolution pronounced by the pope. As soon as the civil war, continued by the remnants of the dying League, was no more than a disgraceful auxiliary to the foreign war between France and Spain, Mayenne was in his soul both grieved and disgusted at it. The affair of Fontaine-Francaise gave him an opportunity of bringing matters to a crisis; he next day broke with the Constable of Castile, Don Ferdinand de Velasco, who declined to follow his advice, and at once entered into secret negotiations with the king. Henry wrote from Lyons to Du Plessis-Mornay, on the 24th of August, 1595, “The Duke of Mayenne has asked me to allow him three months for the purpose of informing the enemy of his determination in order to induce them to join him in recognizing me and serving me. So doing, he has also agreed to bind himself from this present date to recognize me and serve me, whatever his friends may do.” On the 23d of September following, Henry IV., still at Lyons, sent to M. de la Chatre:—
“I forward you the articles of a general truce which I have granted to the Duke of Mayenne at his pressing instance, and on the assurance he has given me that he will get it accepted and observed by all those who are still making war within my kingdom, in his name or that of the League.” This truce was, in point of fact, concluded by a preliminary treaty signed at Chalons, and by virtue of which Mayenne ordered his lieutenants to give up to the king the citadel of Dijon. The negotiations continued, and, in January, 1596, a royal edict, signed at Folembray, near Laon, regulated, in thirty-one articles and some secret articles, the conditions of peace between the king and Mayenne. The king granted him, himself and his partisans, full and complete amnesty for the past, besides three surety-places for six years, and divers sums, which, may be for payment of his debts, and may be for his future provision, amounted to three million five hundred and eighty thousand livres at that time (twelve million eight hundred and eighty-eight thousand francs of the present day). The Parliament of Paris considered these terms exorbitant, and did not consent to enregister the edict until April 9, 1596, after three letters jussory from the king. Henry IV. nobly expressed, in the preamble of the edict, the motives of policy that led to his generous arrangements; after alluding to his late reconciliation with the pope, “Our work,” he said, “would have been imperfect, and peace incomplete, if our most dear and most beloved cousin, the Duke of Mayenne, chief of his party, had not followed the same road, as he resolved to do so soon as he saw that our holy father had approved of our reunion. This hath made us to perceive better than heretofore the aim of his actions, to accept and take in good part all that he hath exhibited against us of the zeal he felt for religion, and to commend the anxiety he hath displayed to preserve the kingdom in, its entirety, whereof he caused not and suffered not the dismemberment when the prosperity of his affairs seemed to give him some means of it; the which he was none the more inclined to do when he became weakened, but preferred to throw himself into our arms rather than betake himself to other remedies, which might have caused the war to last a long while yet, to the great damage of our people. This it is which hath made us desire to recognize his good intent, to love him and treat him for the future as our good relative and faithful subject.” [Memoires de la Ligue, t. vi. p. 349.]
To a profound and just appreciation of men’s conduct Henry IV. knew how to add a winning grace and the surprising charm of a familiar manner. After having signed the edict of Folembray, he had gone to rest a while at Monceaux. Mayenne went to visit him there on the 31st of January, 1596. There is nothing to be added to or taken from the account given by Sully of their interview. “The king, stepping forward to meet Mayenne, embraced him thrice, assuring him that he was welcome, and that he embraced him as cordially as if there had never been anything between them. M. de Mayenne put one knee on the ground, embraced the king’s thigh, and assured him that he was his very humble servant and subject, saying that he considered himself greatly bounden to him, as well for having with so much, of gentleness, kindness, and special largesses restored him to his duty, as for having delivered him from Spanish arrogance and Italian crafts and wiles. Then the king, having raised him up and embraced him once more, told him that he had no doubt at all of his honor and word, for a man of worth and of good courage held nothing so dear as the observance thereof. Thereupon he took him by the hand and began to walk him about at a very great pace, showing him the alleys and telling all his plans and the beauties and conveniences of this mansion. M. de Mayenne, who was incommoded by a sciatica, followed as best he could, but some way behind, dragging his limbs after him very heavily. Which the king observing, and that he was mighty red, heated, and was puffing with thickness of breath, he turned to Rosny, whom he held, with the other hand, and said in his ear, ‘If I walk this fat carcass here about much longer, then am I avenged without much difficulty for all the evils he hath done us, for he is a dead man.’ And thereupon pulling up, the king said to him, ‘Tell the truth, cousin, I go a little too fast for you; and I have worked you too hard.’ ‘By my faith, sir,’ said M. de Mayenne, slapping his hand upon his stomach, ‘it is true; I swear to you that I am so tired and out of breath that I can no more. If you had continued walking me about so fast, for honor and courtesy did not permit me to say to you, “Hold! enough!” and still less to leave you, I believe that you would have killed me without a thought of it.’ Then the king embraced him, clapped him on the shoulder, and said with a laughing face, open glance, and holding out his hand, ‘Come, take that, cousin, for, by God, this is all the injury and displeasure you shall ever have from me; of that I give you my honor and word with all my heart, the which I never did and never will violate.’ ‘By God, sir,’ answered M. de Mayenne, kissing the king’s hand and doing what he could to put one knee upon the ground, ‘I believe it and all other generous things that may be expected from the best and bravest prince of our age. And you said it, too, in so frank a spirit and with so kindly a grace that my feelings and my obligations are half as deep again. However, I swear to you over again, sir, by the living God, on my faith, my honor, and my salvation, that I will be to you, all my life long, loyal subject and faithful servant; I will never fail you nor desert you; I will have while I live no desires or designs of importance which are not suggested by your Majesty himself; nor will I ever be cognizant of them in the case of others, though they were my own children, without expressly opposing them and giving you notice of them at once.’ ‘There, there, cousin,’ rejoined the king, ‘I quite believe it; and that you may be able to love me and serve me long, go rest you, refresh you, and drink a draught at the castle. I have in my cellars some Arbois wine, of which I will send you two bottles, for well I know that you do not dislike it. And here is Rosny, whom I will lend you to accompany you, to do the honors of the house and to conduct you to your chamber: he is one of my oldest servants, and one of those who have been most rejoiced to see that you would love me and serve me cordially.’” [OEconomies royales, t. iii. pp. 7-10.]
Mayenne was as good as his word. After the edict of Folembray, he lived fourteen years at the court of Henry IV., whom he survived only about sixteen months [for he died on the 4th of October, 1611, and Henry IV. was assassinated by Ravaillac on the 13th of May, 1610], and during all that time he was loyal and faithful to him, never giving him any but good counsels and sometimes rendering him useful services. A rare example of a party-chief completely awakened and tamed by experience: it made him disgusted with fanaticism, faction, civil war, and complicity with the foreigner. He was the least brilliant but the most sensible, the most honest, and the most French of the Guises. Henry IV., when seriously ill at Fontainebleau in 1608, recommended him to Queen Mary de’ Medici as one of the men whom it was most important to call to the councils of state; and, at the approach of death, Mayenne, weary and weak in the lap of repose, could conscientiously address those who were around him in such grand and Christian language as this: “It is no new thing to know that I must die; for twelve years past my lingering and painful life has been for the most part an apprenticeship thereto. My sufferings have so dulled the sting of death that I rather count upon it than dread it; happy to have had so long a delay to teach me to make a good end, and to rid me of the things which formerly kept me from that knowledge. Happy to meet my end amongst mine own people and to terminate by a peaceful death the sufferings and miseries of my life. I formerly sought death amidst arms; but I am better pleased, for my soul’s salvation, to meet it and embrace it on my bed than if I had encountered it in battle, for the sake of the glory of the world.”
Let, us return to Henry IV. Since his declaration of war against Philip II. he had gained much ground. He had fought gloriously, in his own person, and beaten the Spaniards at Fontaine-Francaise. He had obtained from Pope Clement VIII. the complete and solemn absolution which had been refused to him the year before. Mayenne had submitted to him, and that submission had been death to the League. Some military reverses were intermingled with these political successes. Between the 25th of June, 1595, and the 10th of March, 1597, the Spanish armies took, in Picardy and Artois, Le Catelet, Doullens, Cambrai, Ardres, Ham, Guines and two towns of more importance, Calais, still the object of English ambition and of offers on the part of Queen Elizabeth to any one who could hand it over to her, and Amiens, one of the keys to France on the frontier of the north. These checks were not without compensation. Henry invested and took the strong place of La Fere; and he retook Amiens after a six months’ struggle. A Spanish plot for getting possession of Marseilles failed; the young Duke of Guise, whom Henry had made governor of Provence, entered the city amidst shouts of Hurrah for the king! “Now I am king!” cried Henry, on receiving the news, so generally was Marseilles even then regarded as the queen of the Mediterranean. The Duke of Epernon, who had attempted to make of Provence an independent principality for himself, was obliged to leave it and treat with the king, ever ready to grant easy terms to those who could give up to him or sell him any portion of his kingdom. France was thus being rapidly reconstituted. “Since the month of January, 1596, Burgundy, parts of Forez, Auvergne, and Velay, the whole of Provence, half Languedoc, and the last town of Poitou had been brought back to their allegiance to the king. French territory and national unity had nothing more to wait for, to complete their re-establishment, than a portion of Brittany and four towns of Picardy still occupied by the Spaniards.” [Poirson, Histoire du Regne de Henri IV., t. ii. p. 159.]
But these results were only obtained at enormous expense and by means of pecuniary sacrifices, loans, imposts, obligations of every sort, which left the king in inextricable embarrassment, and France in a condition of exhaustion still further aggravated by the deplorable administration of the public finances. On the 15th of April, 1596, Henry IV. wrote from Amiens to Rosny, “My friend, you know as well as any of my servants what troubles, labors, and fatigues I have had to go through to secure my life and my dignity against so many sorts of enemies and perils. Nevertheless I swear to you that all these traverses have not caused me so much affliction and bitterness of spirit as the sorrow and annoyance I now feel at finding thyself in continual controversies with those most in authority of my servants, officers, and councillors of state, when I would fain set about restoring this kingdom to its highest splendor, and relieving my poor people, whom I love as my dear children (God having at present granted me no others), from so many talliages, subsidies, vexations, and oppressions whereof they daily make complaints to me. . . . Having written to them who are of my council of finance how that I had a design of extreme importance in hand for which I had need of a fund of eight hundred thousand crowns, and therefore I begged and conjured them, by their loyalty and sincere affection towards me and France, to labor diligently for the certain raising of that sum, all their answers, after several delays, excuses, and reasons whereof one destroyed another, had finally no other conclusion than representations of difficulties and impossibilities. Nay, they feared not to send me word that so far from being able to furnish me with so notable a sum, they found great trouble in raising the funds to keep my household going. . . . I am resolved to know truly whether the necessities which are overwhelming me proceed from the malice, bad management, or ignorance of those whom I employ, or, good sooth, from the diminution of my revenues and the poverty of my people. And to that end, I mean to convoke the three orders of my kingdom, for to have of them some advice and aid, and meanwhile to establish among those people some loyal servant of mine, whom I will put in authority little by little, in order that he may inform me of what passes in my council, and enlighten me as to that which I desire to know. I have, as I have already told you, cast my eyes upon you to serve me in this commission, not doubting at all that I shall receive contentment and advantage from your administration. And I wish to tell you the state to which I am reduced, which is such that I am very near the enemy, and have not, as you may say, a horse to fight on or a whole suit of harness to my back. My shirts are all torn, my doublets out at elbows; my cupboard is often bare, and for the last two days I have been dining and supping with one and another; my purveyors say they have no more means of supplying my table, especially as for more than six months they have had no money. Judge whether I deserve to be so treated, and fail not to come. I have on my mind, besides, two or three other matters of consequence on which I wish to employ you the moment you arrive. Do not speak of all this to anybody whatsoever, not even to your wife. Adieu, my friend, whom well I love.”
Henry IV. accomplished all that, when he wrote to Rosny, he had showed himself resolved to undertake. External circumstances became favorable to him. Since his conversion to Catholicism, England and her queen, Elizabeth, had been colder in the cause of the French alliance. When, after his declaration of war against Philip II., Henry demanded in London the support on which he had believed that he might rely, Elizabeth answered by demanding in her turn the cession of Calais as the price of her services. Quite determined not to give up Calais to England, Henry, without complaining of the demand, let the negotiation drag, confining himself to saying that he was looking for friends, not for masters. When in April, 1596, it was known in London that Calais had been taken by the Spaniards, Elizabeth sent word to Henry, then at Boulogne, that she would send him prompt assistance if he promised, when Calais was recovered from the Spaniards, to place it in the hands of the English. “If I must be despoiled,” answered Henry, “I would rather it should be by my enemies than by my friends. In the former case it will be a reverse of fortune, in the latter I might be accused of poltroonery.” Elizabeth assured the French ambassador, Harlay de Sancy, “that it had never been her intention to keep Calais, but simply to take care that, in any case, this important place should not remain in the hands of the common enemy whilst the king was engaged in other enterprises; anyhow,” she added, “she had ordered the Earl of Essex, admiral of the English fleet raised against Spain, to arm promptly in order to go to the king’s assistance.” There was anxiety at that time in England about the immense preparations being made by Philip for the invasion he proposed to attempt against England, and for the putting to sea of his fleet, the Grand Armada. In conversation with the high treasurer, Lord Burleigh, Elizabeth’s chief minister, Sancy found him even colder than his queen; Burleigh laid great stress upon all that the queen had already done for France, and on the one million five hundred thousand gold crowns she had lent to the king. “It would be more becoming,” he said, “in the king’s envoys to thank the queen for the aid she had already furnished than to ask for more; by dint of drawing water the well had gone dry; the queen could offer the king only three thousand men, on condition that they were raised at his own expense.” “If the king,” replied Sancy, “must expect neither alliance nor effectual aid on your part, he will be much obliged to the queen to let him know what course she takes, because he, on his side, will take that which will be most expedient for his affairs.” Some of the king’s councillors regarded it as possible that he should make peace with the King of Spain, and did not refrain from letting as much be understood. Negotiations in London seemed to be broken off; the French ambassadors had taken leave of Elizabeth. The news that came from Spain altered the tone of the English government; threats of Spanish invasion became day by day more distinct and the Grand Armada more dreaded. Elizabeth sent word to the ambassadors of France by some of her confidants, amongst others Sir Robert Cecil, son of the high treasurer, that she was willing to give them a last audience before their departure. The result of this audience was the conclusion of a treaty of alliance offensive and defensive between France and England against the King of Spain, with a mutual promise not to make, one without the other, either peace or truce, with precise stipulations as to the number and pay of the troops which the Queen of England should put in the field for the service of the King of France, and, further, with a proviso establishing freedom of trade between the two states. The treaty was drawn up in London on the 24th of May, 1596, ratified at Rouen by Henry IV. on the 19th of October following, and on the 31st of October the States-General of Holland acceded to it, whilst regulating, accordingly, the extent of their engagements.
Easy as to the part to be played by his allies in the war with Spain, Henry IV. set to work upon the internal reforms and measures of which he strongly felt the necessity. They were of two kinds; one administrative and financial, the other political and religious; he wished at one and the same time to consolidate the material forces of his government and to give his Protestant subjects, lately his own brethren, the legal liberty and security which they needed for their creed’s sake, and to which they had a right.
He began, about the middle of October, 1596, by bringing Rosny into the council of finance, saying to him, “You promise me, you know, to be a good manager, and that you and I shall lop arms and legs from Madame Grivelee, as you have so often told me could be done.” Madame Grivelee (Mrs. Pickings) was, in the language of the day, she who presided over illicit gains made in the administration of the public finances. Rosny at once undertook to accomplish that which he had promised the king. He made, in person, a minute examination of four receiver-generals’ offices, in order, with that to guide him, to get a correct idea of the amount derived from imposts and the royal revenues, and of what became of this amount in its passage from collection to employment for the defrayal of the expenses of the state. “When he went on his inspection, the treasurers of France, receivers, accountants, comptrollers, either absented themselves or refused to produce him any register; he suspended some, frightened others, surmounted the obstacles of every kind that were put in his way, and he proved, from the principal items of receipt and expenditure at these four general offices, so much and such fraudulence that he collected five hundred thousand crowns (one million five hundred thousand livres of those times, and about five million four hundred and ninety thousand francs of the present date), had these sums placed in seventy carts, and drove them to Rouen, where the king was and where the Assembly of Notables had just met.”
It was not the states-general properly so called that Henry IV. had convoked; he had considered that his authority was still too feebly constituted, and even too much disputed in a portion of the kingdom, to allow him to put it to such a test; and honest and sensible patriots had been of the same opinion D’Aubigne himself, the most independent and fault-finding spirit amongst his contemporaries, expressly says, “The troubles which were not yet extinguished in France did not admit of a larger convocation; the hearts of the people were not yet subdued and kneaded to obedience, as appeared from the excitement which supervened.” [Histoire universelle, t. iii. p. 526.] Besides, Henry himself acknowledged, in the circular which he published on the 25th of July, 1596, at this juncture, the superior agency of the states-general. “We would gladly have brought them together in full assembly,” he said, “if the armed efforts of our enemies allowed of any longer delay in finding a remedy for the plague which is racking us so violently; our intent is, pending the coming of the said states, to put a stop to all these disorders in the best and quickest way possible.” “The king, moreover,” says Sully, “had no idea of imitating the kings his predecessors in predilection for, and appointment of, certain deputies for whom he had a particular fancy; but he referred the nomination thereof to them of the church, of the noblesse, and of the people; and when they were assembled, he prescribed to them no rules, forms, or limits, but left them complete freedom of their opinions, utterances, suffrages, and deliberations.” [OEconomies royales, t. iii. p. 29.] The notables met at Rouen to the number of eighty, nine of the clergy, nineteen of the noblesse, fifty-two of the third estate. The king opened the assembly on the 4th of November, 1596, with these words, full of dignity, and powerful in their vivid simplicity: “If I desired to win the title of orator, I would have learned by rote some fine, long speech, and would deliver it to you with proper gravity. But, gentlemen, my desire prompts me towards two more glorious titles, the names of deliverer and restorer of this kingdom. In order to attain whereto I have gathered you together. You know to your cost, as I to mine, that when it pleased God to call me to this crown, I found France not only all but ruined, but almost entirely lost to Frenchmen. By the divine favor, by the prayers and the good counsels of my servants who are not in the profession of arms, by the sword of my brave and generous noblesse, from whom I single out not the princes, upon the honor of a gentleman, as the holders of our proudest title, and by my own pains and labors, I have preserved her from perdition. Let us now preserve her from ruin. Share, my dear subjects, in this second triumph as you did in the first. I have not summoned you, like my predecessors, to get your approbation of their own wills. I have had you assembled in order to receive your counsels, put faith in them, follow them, in short, place myself under guardianship in your hands; a desire but little congenial to kings, graybeards, and conquerors. But the violent love I feel towards my subjects, and the extreme desire I have to add those two proud titles to that of king, make everything easy and honorable to me.”
L’Estoile relates that the king’s favorite, Gabrielle d’Estrees, was at the session behind some tapestry, and that, Henry IV. having asked what she thought of his speech, she answered, “I never heard better spoken; only I was astonished that you spoke of placing yourself under guardianship.” “Ventre saint-gris,” replied the king, “that is true; but I mean with my sword by my side.” [Journal de Pierre l’Estoile, t. iii. p. 185.]
The assembly of notables sat from November 4, 1596, to January 29, 1597, without introducing into the financial regimen any really effective reforms; the rating board (conseil de raison), the institution of which they had demanded of the king, in connection with the fixing of imposts and employment of public revenues, was tried without success, and was not long before, of its own accord, resigning its power into the king’s hands; but the mere convocation of this assembly was a striking instance of the homage paid by Henry IV. to that fundamental maxim of free government, which, as early as under Louis XI., Philip de Commynes expressed in these terms: “There is no king or lord on earth who hath power, over and above his own property, to put a single penny on his subjects without grant and consent of those who have to pay, unless by tyranny and violence.” The ideas expressed and the counsels given by the assembly of notables were not, however, without good effect upon the general administration of the state; but the principal and most salutary result of its presence and influence was the personal authority which Sully drew from it, and of which he did not hesitate to make full use. Having become superintendent-general of finance and grand master of the ordnance, he exerted all his power to put in practice, as regarded the financial department, a system of receipts and expenses, and as regarded materials for the service of war, the reforms and maxims of economy, accountability, and supervision, which were suggested to him by his great good sense, and in which Henry IV. supported him with the spirit of one who well appreciated the strength they conferred upon his government, civil and military.
His relations with the Protestants gave him embarrassments to surmount and reforms to accomplish of quite a different sort, and more difficult still. At his accession, their satisfaction had not been untinged by disquietude; they foresaw the sacrifices the king would be obliged to make to his new and powerful friends the Catholics. His conversion to Catholicism threw into more or less open opposition the most zealous and some of the ambitious members of his late church. It was not long before their feelings burst forth in reproaches, alarms, and attacks. In 1597, a pamphlet, entitled The Plaints of the Reformed Churches of France [Memoires de la Ligue, t. vi. pp. 428-486], was published and spread prodigiously. “None can take it ill,” said the anonymous author, “that we who make profession of the Reformed religion should come forward to get a hearing for our plaints touching so many deeds of outrage, violence, and injustice which are daily done to us, and done not here or there, but in all places of the realm; done at a time, under a reign in which they seemed less likely, and which ought to have given us better hopes. . . . We, sir, are neither Spaniards nor Leaguers; we have had such happiness as to see you, almost born and cradled, at any rate brought up, amongst us; we have employed our properties, our lives, in order to prevent the effects of ill will on the part of those who, from your cradle, sought your ruin; we have, with you and under your wise and valiant leadership, made the chiefest efforts for the preservation of the crown, which, thank God, is now upon your head. . . . We do beseech you, sir, to give us permission to have the particulars of our grievances heard both by your Majesty and all your French, for we do make plaint of all the French. Not that in so great and populous a kingdom we should imagine that there are not still to be found some whose hearts bleed to see indignities so inhuman; but of what avail to us is all they may have in them of what is good, humane, and French? A part of them are so soft, so timorous, that they would not so much as dare to show a symptom of not liking that which displeases them; and if, when they see us so maltreated, they do summon up sufficient boldness to look another way, and think that they have done but their duty, still do they tremble with fear of being taken for favorers of heretics.”
The writer then enters upon an exposition of all the persecutions, all the acts of injustice, all the evils of every kind that the reformers have to suffer. He lays the blame of them, as he has just said, upon the whole French community, the noblesse, the commons, the magistracy, as well as the Catholic priests and monks; he enumerates a multitude of special facts in support of his plaints. “Good God!” he cries, “that there should be no class, no estate in France, from which we can hope for any relief! None from which we may not fear lest ruin come upon us!” And he ends by saying, “Stem, then, sir, with your good will and your authority, the tide of our troubles. Direct your counsels towards giving us some security. Accustom your kingdom to at least endure us, if it will not love us. We demand of your Majesty an edict which may give us enjoyment of that which is common to all your subjects, that is to say, of far less than you have granted to your enemies, your rebels of the League.”
We will not stop to inquire whether the matters stated in these plaints are authentic or disputable, accurate or exaggerated; it is probable that they contain a great deal of truth, and that, even under Henry IV., the Protestants had many sufferings to endure and disregarded rights to recover. The mistake they made and the injustice they showed consisted in not taking into, account all the good that Henry IV. had done them and was daily doing them, and in calling upon him, at a moment’s notice, to secure to them by an edict all the good that it was not in his power to do them. We purpose just to give a brief summary of the ameliorations introduced into their position under him, even before the edict of Nantes, and to transfer the responsibility for all they still lacked to the cause indicated by themselves in their plaints, when they take to task all the French on the Catholic side, who, in the sixteenth century, disregarded in France the rights of creed and of religious life, just as the Protestants themselves disregarded them in England so far as the Catholics were concerned.
One fact immediately deserves to be pointed out; and that is the number and the practical character of meetings officially held at this period by the Protestants: an indisputable proof of the liberty they enjoyed. These meetings were of two sorts; one, the synods, were for the purpose of regulating their faith, their worship, their purely religious affairs. Between 1594 and 1609, under the sway of Henry IV., Catholic king, seven national synods of the Protestant church in France held their sessions in seven different towns, and discussed with perfect freedom such questions of religious doctrine and discipline as were interesting to them. At the same epoch, between 1593 and 1608, the French Protestants met at eleven assemblies, specially summoned to deliberate, not in these cases upon questions of faith and religious discipline, but upon their temporal and political interests, upon their relations towards the state, and upon the conduct they were to adopt under the circumstances of their times. The principle to which minds, and even matters, to a certain extent, have now attained, the deep-seated separation between the civil and the religious life, and their mutual independence, this higher principle was unknown to the sixteenth century; the believer and the citizen were then but one, and the efforts of laws and governments were directed towards bringing the whole nation entire into the same state of unity. And as they did not succeed therein, their attempts produced strife instead of unity, war instead of peace. When the French Protestants of the sixteenth century met in the assemblies which they themselves called political, they acted as one nation confronting another nation, and labored to form a state within state. We will borrow from the intelligent and learned Histoire d’Henri IV., by M. Poirson, (t. ii. pp. 497-500), a picture of one of those assemblies and its work. “After the king’s abjuration, and at the end of the year 1593, the French Huguenots renewed at Mantes their old union, and swore to live and die united in their profession of faith. Henry was in hopes that they would stop short at a religious demonstration; but they made it a starting-point for a new political and military organization on behalf of the Calvinistic party. They took advantage of a general permission granted them by Henry, and met, not in synod, but in general assembly, at the town of Sainte Foy, in the month of June, 1594. Thereupon they divided all France into nine great provinces or circles, composed each of several governments or provinces of the realm. Each circle had a separate council, composed of from five to seven members, and commissioned to fix and apportion the separate imposts, to keep up a standing army, to collect the supplies necessary for the maintenance and defence of the party. The Calvinistic republic had its general assemblies, composed of nine deputies or representatives from each of the nine circles. These assemblies were invested with authority to order, on the general account, all that the juncture required, that is to say, with a legislative power distinct from that of the crown and nation. . . . If the king ceased to pay the sums necessary to keep up the garrisons in the towns left to the Reformers, the governors were to seize the talliages in the hands of the king’s receivers, and apply the money to the payment of the garrisons. And in case the central power should attempt to repress these violent procedures, or to substitute as commandant in those places a Catholic for a Protestant, all the Calvinists of the locality and the neighboring districts were to unite and rise in order to give the assistance of the strong hand to the Protestant governors so attacked. Independently of the ordinary imposts, a special impost was laid on the Calvinists, and gave their leaders the disposal of a yearly sum of one hundred and twenty thousand livres (four hundred and forty thousand francs of the present day). The Calvinistic party had thus a territorial area, an administration, finances, a legislative power and an executive power independent of those of the country; or, in other words, the means of taking resolutions contrary to those of the mass of the nation, and of upholding them by revolt. All they wanted was a Huguenot stadtholder to oppose to the King of France, and they were looking out for one.”
Henry IV. did not delude himself as to the tendency of such organization amongst those of his late party. “He rebuffed very sternly (and wisely),” says L’Estoile, “those who spoke to him of it. ‘As for a protector,’ he told them, ‘he would have them to understand that there was no other protector in France but himself for one side or the other; the first man who should be so daring as to assume the title would do so at the risk of his life; he might be quite certain of that.’” Had Henry IV. been permitted to read the secrets of a not so very distant future, he might have told the Huguenots of his day that the time was not so far off when their pretension to political organization and to the formation of a state within the state, would compromise their religious liberty and furnish the absolute government of Louis XIV. with excuses for abolishing the protective edict which Henry IV.‘s sympathy was on the point of granting them, and which, so far as its purely religious provisions went, was duly respected by the sagacity of Cardinal Richelieu.
After his conversion to Catholicism, and during the whole of his reign, it was one of Henry IV.‘s constant anxieties to show himself well-disposed towards his old friends, and to do for them all he could do without compromising the public peace in France, or abdicating in his own person the authority he needed to maintain order and peace. Some of the edicts published by his predecessors during the intervals of civil war, notably the edict of Poitiers issued by Henry III., had granted the Protestants free exercise of their worship in the castles of the Calvinistic lords who had jurisdiction, to the number of thirty-five hundred, and in the faubourgs of one town or borough of each bailiwick of the realm, except the bailiwick of Paris. Further, the holding of properties and heritages, union by marriage with Catholics, and the admission of Protestants to the employments, offices, and dignities of the realm, were recognized by this edict. These rights, in black and white, had often been violated by the different authorities, or suspended during the wars; Henry IV. maintained them or put them in force again, and supported the application of them or decreed the extension of them. It was calculated that there were in France eight hundred towns and three hundred bailiwicks or seneschalties; the treaties concluded with the League had expressly prohibited the exercise of Protestant worship in forty towns and seventeen bailiwicks; Henry IV. tolerated it everywhere else. The prohibition was strict as regarded Paris and ten leagues round; but, as early as 1594, three months after his entry into Paris, Henry aided the Reformers in the unostentatious celebration of their own form in the Faubourg St. Germain; and he authorized the use of it at court for religious ceremonies, especially for marriages. Three successive edicts, two issued at Mantes in 1591 and 1593, and the third at St. Germain in 1597, confirmed and developed these signs of progress in the path of religious liberty.
The Parliaments had in general refused to enregister these decrees a fact which gave them an incomplete and provisional character; but equitable and persistent measures on the king’s part prevailed upon the Parliament of Paris to enregister the edict of St. Germain; and the Parliament of Dijon and nearly all the other Parliaments of the kingdom followed this example. One of the principal provisions of this last edict declared Protestants competent to fill all the offices and dignities of the kingdom. It had many times been inserted in preceding edicts, but always rejected by the Parliaments or formally revoked. Henry IV. brought it into force and credit by putting it extensively in practice, without entering upon discussion of it and without adding any comment upon it. In 1590 he had given Palleseuil the government of Neuchatel in Normandy; he had introduced Hurault Dufay, Du Plessis-Mornay and Rosny into the council of state; in 1594 he had appointed the last a member of the council of finance; Soffray de Colignon, La Force, Lesdiguieres, and Sancy were summoned to the most important functions; Turenne, in 1594, was raised to the dignity of marshal of France; and in 1595 La Tremoille was made duke and peer. They were all Protestants. Their number and their rank put the matter beyond all dispute; it was a natural consequence of the social condition of France; it became an habitual practice with the government.
Nevertheless the complaints and requirements of the malcontent Protestants continued, and became day by day more vehement; in 1596 and 1597 the assemblies of Saumur, Loudun, and Vendome became their organs of expression; and messengers were sent with them to the camp before La Fere, which Henry IV. was at that time besieging. He deferred his reply. Two of the principal Protestant leaders, the Dukes of Bouillon and La Tremoille, suddenly took extreme measures; they left the king and his army, carrying off their troops with them, one to Auvergne and the other to Poitou. The deputies from the assembly of Loudun started back again at the same time, as if for the purpose of giving the word to arm in their provinces. Du Plessis-Mornay and his wife, the most zealous of the Protestants who were faithful at the same time to their cause and to the king, bear witness to this threatening crisis. “The deputies,” says Madame du Mornay in her Memoires, “returned each to his own province, with the intention of taking the cure of their evils into their own hands, whence would infallibly have ensued trouble enough to complete the ruin of this state had not the king, by the management of M. du Plessis, been warned of this imminent danger, and by him persuaded to send off and treat in good earnest with the said assembly.” “These gentry, rebuffed at court,” says Du Plessis-Mornay himself in a letter to the Duke of Bouillon, “have resolved to take the cure into their own hands; to that end they have been authorized, and by actions which do not seem to lead them directly thither they will find that they have passed the Rubicon right merrily.” It was as it were a new and a Protestant League just coming to a head. Henry IV. was at that time engaged in the most important negotiation of his reign. After a long and difficult siege he had just retaken. Amiens. He thought it a favorable moment at which to treat for peace with Spain, and put an end to an onerous war which he had been for so long sustaining. He informed the Queen of England of his intention, “begging her, if the position of her affairs did not permit her to take part in the treaty he was meditating with Spain, to let him know clearly what he must do to preserve amity and good understanding between the two crowns, for he would always prefer an ally like her to reconciled foes such as the Spaniards.” He addressed the same notification to the Dutch government. Elizabeth on one hand and the states-general on the other tried to dissuade him from peace with Spain, and to get him actively re-engaged in the strife from which they were not disposed to emerge. He persisted in his purpose whilst setting before them his reasons for it, and binding himself to second faithfully their efforts by all pacific means. A congress was opened in January, 1598, at Vervins in Picardy, through the mediation of Pope Clement VIII., anxious to become the pacificator of Catholic Europe. The French plenipotentiaries, Pomponne de Bellievre and Brulart de Silleri, had instructions to obtain the restoration to the king of all towns and places taken by the Spaniards from France since the treaty of peace of Cateau-Cambresis, and to have the Queen of England and the United Provinces, if they testified a desire for it, included in the treaty, or, at any rate, to secure for them a truce. After three months’ conferences the treaty of peace was concluded at Vervins on the 2d of May, 1598, the principal condition being, that King Philip II. should restore to France the towns of Calais, Ardres, Doullens, Le Catelet, and Blavet; that he should re-enter upon possession of the countship of Charolais; and that, if either of the two sovereigns had any claims to make against one of the states their allies in this treaty, “he should prosecute them only by way of law, before competent judges, and not by force, in any manner whatever.” The Queen of England took no decisive resolution. When once the treaty was concluded, Henry IV., on signing it, said to the Duke of Epernon, “With this stroke of my pen I have just done more exploits than I should have done in a long while with the best swords in my kingdom.”
A month before the conclusion of the treaty of peace at Vervins with Philip II., Henry IV. had signed and published at Paris on the 13th of April, 1598, the edict of Nantes, his treaty of peace with the Protestant malcontents. This treaty, drawn up in ninety-two open and fifty-six secret articles, was a code of old and new laws regulating the civil and religious position of Protestants in France, the conditions and guarantees of their worship, their liberties, and their special obligations in their relations whether with the crown or with their Catholic fellow-countrymen. By this code Henry IV. added a great deal to the rights of the Protestants and to the duties of the state towards them. Their worship was authorized not only in the castles of the lords high-justiciary, who numbered thirty-five hundred, but also in the castles of simple noblemen who enjoyed no high-justiciary rights, provided that the number of those present did not exceed thirty. Two towns or two boroughs, instead of one, had the same religious rights in each bailiwick or seneschalty of the kingdom. The state was charged with the duty of providing for the salaries of the Protestant ministers and rectors in their colleges or schools, and an annual sum of one hundred and sixty-five thousand livres of those times (four hundred and ninety-five thousand francs of the present day) was allowed for that purpose. Donations and legacies to be so applied were authorized. The children of Protestants were admitted into the universities, colleges, schools, and hospitals, without distinction between them and Catholics. There was great difficulty in securing for them, in all the Parliaments of the kingdom, impartial justice; and a special chamber, called the edict-chamber, was instituted for the trial of all causes in which they were interested. Catholic judges could not sit in this chamber unless with their consent and on their presentation. In the Parliaments of Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Grenoble, the edict-chamber was composed of two presidents, one a Catholic and the other a Reformer, and of twelve councillors, of whom six were Reformers. The Parliaments had hitherto refused to admit Reformers into their midst; in the end the Parliament of Paris admitted six, one into the edict-chamber and five into the appeal-chamber (enquetes). The edict of Nantes retained, at first for eight years and then for four more, in the hands of the Protestants the towns which war or treaties had put in their possession, and which numbered, it is said, two hundred. The king was bound to bear the burden of keeping up their fortifications and paying their garrisons; and Henry IV. devoted to that object five hundred and forty thousand livres of those times, or about two million francs of our day. When the edict thus regulating the position and rights of Protestants was published, it was no longer on their part, but on that of the Catholics, that lively protests were raised. Many Catholics violently opposed the execution of the new law; they got up processions at Tours to excite the populace against the edict, and at Le Mans to induce the Parliament of Normandy to reject it. The Parliament of Paris put in the way of its registration retardations which seemed to forebode a refusal. Henry summoned to the Louvre deputies from all the chambers. “What I have done,” he said to them, “is for the good of peace. I have made it abroad; I wish to make it at home. Necessity forced me to this decree. They who would prevent it from passing would have war. You see me in my closet. I speak to you, not in royal robe, or with sword and cape, as my predecessors did, nor as a prince receiving an embassy, but as a father of a family in his doublet conversing familiarly with his children. It is said that I am minded to favor them of the religion; there is a mind to entertain some mistrust of me. . . . I know that cabals have been got up in the Parliament, that seditious preachers have been set on. . . . The preachers utter words by way of doctrine for to build up rather than pull down sedition. That is the road formerly, taken to the making of barricades, and to proceeding by degrees to the parricide of the late king. I will cut the roots of all these factions; I will make short work of those who foment them. I have scaled the walls of cities; you may be sure I shall scale barricades. You must consider that what I am doing is for a good purpose, and let my past behavior go bail for it.”
Parliaments and Protestants, all saw that they had to do not only with a strong-willed king, but with a judicious and clearsighted man, a true French patriot, who was sincerely concerned for the public interest, and who had won his spurs in the art of governing parties by making for each its own place in the state. It was scarcely five years ago that the king who was now publishing the edict of Nantes had become a Catholic; the Parliaments enregistered the decree. The Protestant malcontents resigned themselves to the necessity of being content with it. Whatever their imperfections and the objections that might be raised to them, the peace of Vervins and the edict of Narrtes were, amidst the obstacles and perils encountered at every step by the government of Henry IV., the two most timely and most beneficial acts in the world for France.
Four months after the conclusion of the treaty of Vervins, on the 13th of September, 1598, Philip II. died at the Escurial, “prison, cloister, and tomb all in one,” as M. Rosseau St. Hilaire very well remarks [Histoire d’Espagne, t. x. pp. 335-363], situated eight leagues from Madrid. Philip was so ill, and so cruelly racked by gout and fever, that it was doubted whether he could be removed thither; “but a collection of relics, amassed by his orders in Germany, had just arrived at the Escurial, and the festival of consecration was to take place within a few days. ‘I desire that I be borne alive thither where my tomb already is,’ said Philip.” He was laid in a litter borne by men who walked at a snail’s pace, in order to avoid all shaking. Forced to halt every instant, he took six days to do the eight leagues which separated him from his last resting-place. There he died in atrocious agonies, and after a very painful operation, endured with unalterable courage and calmness; he had ordered to be placed in front of his bed the bier in which his body was to lie and the crucifix which his father, Charles V., at his death in the monastery of Yuste, had held in his hand. During a reign of forty-two years Philip II. was, systematically and at any price, on the score of what he regarded as the divine right of the Catholic church and of his own kingship, the patron of absolute power in Europe. Earnest and sincere in his faith, licentious without open scandal in his private life, unscrupulous and pitiless in the service of the religious and political cause he had embraced, he was capable of any lie, one might almost say of any crime, without having his conscience troubled by it. A wicked man and a frightful example of what a naturally cold and hard spirit may become when it is a prey to all the temptations of despotism and to two sole passions, egotism and fanaticism.
After the death of Philip II. and during the first years of the reign of his son Philip III., war continued between Spain on one side, and England, the United Provinces, and the German Protestants on the other, but languidly and without any results to signify. Henry IV. held aloof from the strife, all the while permitting his Huguenot subjects to take part in it freely and at their own risks. On the 3d of April, 1603, a second great royal personage, Queen Elizabeth, disappeared from the scene. She had been, as regards the Protestantism of Europe, what Philip II. had been, as regards Catholicism, a powerful and able patron; but, what Philip II. did from fanatical conviction, Elizabeth did from patriotic feeling; she had small faith in Calvinistic doctrines, and no liking for Puritanic sects; the Catholic church, the power of the pope excepted, was more to her mind than the Anglican church, and her private preferences differed greatly from her public practices. Besides, she combined with the exigencies of a king’s position the instincts of a woman; she had the vanities rather than the weaknesses of one; she would fain have inspired and responded to the passions natural to one; but policy always had the dominion over her sentiments without extinguishing them, and the proud sovereign sent to the block the overweening and almost rebel subject whom she afterwards grievously regretted. These inconsistent resolutions and emotions caused Elizabeth’s life to be one of agitation, though without warmth, and devoid of serenity as of sweetness. And so, when she grew old, she was disgusted with it and weary of it; she took no pleasure any more in thing or person; she could no longer bear herself, either in her court or in her bed or elsewhere; she decked herself out to lie stretched upon cushions and there remain motionless, casting about her vague glances which seemed to seek after that for which she did not ask. She ended by repelling her physicians and even refusing nourishment. When her ministers saw her thus, almost insensible and dying, they were emboldened to remind her of what she had said to them one day at White-Hall, “My throne must be a king’s throne.” At this reminder she seemed to rouse herself, and repeated the same words, adding, “I will not have a rascal (vaurien) to succeed me.” Sir Robert Cecil asked her what she meant by that expression. “I tell you that I must have a king to succeed me; who can that be but my cousin of Scotland?” After having indicated the King of Scotland, James Stuart, son of the fair rival whom she had sent to the block, Elizabeth remained speechless. The Archbishop of Canterbury commenced praying, breaking off at intervals; twice the queen signed to him to go on. Her advisers returned in the evening, and begged her to indicate to them by signs if she were still of the same mind; she raised her arms and crossed them above her head. Then she seemed to fall into a dreamy state. At three o’clock, during the night, she quietly passed away. Some few hours afterwards, her counsellors in assembly resolved to proclaim James Stuart, King of Scotland, King of England, as the nearest of kin to the late queen, and indicated by her on her death-bed.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century Henry IV. was the only one remaining of the three great sovereigns who, during the sixteenth, had disputed, as regarded religion and politics, the preponderance in Europe. He had succeeded in all his kingly enterprises; he had become a Catholic in France without ceasing to be the prop of the Protestants in Europe; he had made peace with Spain without embroiling himself with England, Holland, and Lutheran Germany. He had shot up, as regarded ability and influence, in the eyes of all Europe. It was just then that he gave the strongest proof of his great judgment and political sagacity; he was not intoxicated with success; he did not abuse his power; he did not aspire to distant conquests or brilliant achievements; he concerned himself chiefly with the establishment of public order in his kingdom and with his people’s prosperity. His well-known saying, “I want all my peasantry to have a fowl in the pot every Sunday,” was a desire worthy of Louis XII. Henry IV. had a sympathetic nature; his grandeur did not lead him to forget the nameless multitudes whose fate depended upon his government.
He had, besides, the rich, productive, varied, inquiring mind of one who took an interest not only in the welfare of the French peasantry, but in the progress of the whole French community, progress agricultural, industrial, commercial, scientific, and literary. The conversation of an independent thinker like Montaigne had, at the least, as much attraction for him as that of his comrades in arms. Long before Henry IV. was King of France, on the 19th of December, 1584, Montaigne, wrote, “The King of Navarre came to see me at Montaigne where he had never been before, and was there two days, attended by my people without any of his own officers; he permitted neither tasting (essai) nor state-banquet (couvert), and slept in my bed.” On the 24th of October, 1587, after winning the battle of Contras, Henry stopped to dine at Montaigne’s house, though its possessor had remained faithful to Henry III., whose troops had just lost the battle; and on the 18th of January, 1590, when the King of Navarre, now become King of France, besieged and took the town of Lisieux, Montaigne wrote to him, “All the time through, sir, I have observed in you this same fortune that is now yours; and you may remember that even when I had to make confession thereof to my parish-priest I did not omit to regard your successes with a kindly eye. Now, with more reason and freedom, I hug them to my heart. Yonder they do you service by effects; but they do you no less service here by reputation. The report goes as far as the shot. We could not derive from the justice of your cause arguments so powerful in sustaining or reducing your subjects as we do from the news of the prosperity of your enterprises.”
Abroad the policy of Henry IV. was as judicious and far sighted as it was just and sympathetic at home. There has been much writing and dissertation about what has been called his grand design. This name has been given to a plan for the religious and political organization of Christendom, consisting in the division of Europe amongst three religions, the Catholic, the Calvinistic, and the Lutheran, and into fifteen states, great and small, monarchical or republican, with equal rights, alone recognized as members of the Christian confederation, regulating in concert their common affairs, and pacifically making up their differences, whilst all the while preserving their national existence. This plan is lengthily and approvingly set forth, several times over, in the OEconomies royales, which Sully’s secretaries wrote at his suggestion, and probably sometimes at his dictation. Henry IV. was a prince as expansive in ideas as he was inventive, who was a master of the art of pleasing, and himself took great pleasure in the freedom and unconstraint of conversation. No doubt the notions of the grand design often came into his head, and he often talked about them to Sully, his confidant in what he thought as well as in what he did. Sully, for his part was a methodical spirit, a regular downright putter in practice, evidently struck and charmed by the richness and grandeur of the prospects placed before his eyes by his king, and feeling pleasure in shedding light upon them whilst giving them a more positive and more complete shape than belonged to their first and original appearance. And thus came down to us the grand design, which, so far as Henry IV. was concerned, was never a definite project. His true external policy was much more real and practical. He had seen and experienced the evils of religious hatred and persecution. He had been a great sufferer from the supremacy of the house of Austria in Europe, and he had for a long while opposed it. When he became the most puissant and most regarded of European kings, he set his heart very strongly on two things—toleration for the three religions which had succeeded in establishing themselves in Europe and showing themselves capable of contending one against another, and the abasement of the house of Austria, which, even after the death of Charles V. and of Philip II., remained the real and the formidable rival of France. The external policy of Henry from the treaty of Vervins to his death, was religious peace in Europe and the alliance of Catholic France with Protestant England and Germany against Spain and Austria. He showed constant respect and deference towards the papacy, a power highly regarded in both the rival camps, though much fallen from the substantial importance it had possessed in Europe during the middle ages. French policy striving against Spanish policy, such was the true and the only serious characteristic of the grand design.
Four men, very unequal in influence as well as merit, Sully, Villeroi, Du Plessis-Mornay, and D’Aubigne, did Henry IV. effective service, by very different processes and in very different degrees, towards establishing and rendering successful this internal and external policy. Three were Protestants; Villeroi alone was a Catholic. Sully is beyond comparison with the other three. He is the only one whom Henry IV. called my friend; the only one who had participated in all the life and all the government of Henry IV., his evil as well as his exalted fortunes, his most painful embarrassments at home as well as his greatest political acts; the only one whose name has remained inseparably connected with that of a master whom he served without servility as well as without any attempt to domineer. There is no idea of entering here upon his personal history; we would only indicate his place in that of his king. Maximilian de Bethune-Rosny, born in 1559, and six years younger than Henry of Navarre, was barely seventeen when in 1576 he attended Henry on his flight from the court of France to go and recover in Navarre his independence of position and character. Rosny was content at first to serve him as a volunteer, “in order,” he said, “to learn the profession of arms from its first rudiments.” He speedily did himself honor in several actions. In 1580 the King of Navarre took him as chamberlain and counsellor. On becoming King of France, Henry IV., in 1594, made him secretary of state; in 1596, put him on the council of finance; in 1597, appointed him grand surveyor of France, and, in 1599, superintendent-general of finance and master of the ordnance. In 1602 he was made Marquis de Rosny and councillor of honor in the Parliament; then governor of the Bastille, superintendent of fortifications, and surveyor of Paris; in 1603, governor of Poitou. Lastly, in 1606, his estate of Sully-sur-Loire was raised to a duchy-peerage, and he was living under this name, which has become his historical name, when, in 1610, the assassination of Henry IV. sent into retirement, for thirty-one years, the confidant of all his thoughts and the principal minister of a reign which, independently of the sums usefully expended for the service of the state and the advancement of public prosperity, had extinguished, according to the most trustworthy evidence, two hundred and thirty-five millions of debts, and which left in the coffers of the state, in ready money or in safe securities, forty-three million, one hundred and thirty-eight thousand, four hundred and ninety livres.
Nicholas de Neufville, Lord of Villeroi, who was born in 1543, and whose grandfather had been secretary of state under Francis I., was, whilst Henry III. was still reigning, member of a small secret council at which all questions relating to Protestants were treated of. Though a strict Catholic, and convinced that the King of France ought to be openly in the ranks of the Catholics, and to govern with their support, he sometimes gave Henry III. some free-spoken and wise counsels. When he saw him spending his time with the brotherhoods of penitents whose head he had declared himself, “Sir,” said he, “debts and obligations are considered according to dates, and therefore old debts ought to be paid before new ones. You were King of France before you were head of the brotherhoods; your conscience binds you to render to the kingship that which you owe it rather than to the fraternity that which you have promised it. You can excuse yourself from one, but not from the other. You only wear the sackcloth when you please, but you have the crown always on your head.” When the wars of religion broke out, when the League took form and Henry de Guise had been assassinated at Blois, Villeroi, naturally a Leaguer and a moderate Leaguer, became the immediate adviser of the Duke of Mayenne. After Henry III.‘s death, as soon as he heard that Henry IV. promised to have himself instructed in the Catholic religion, he announced his intention of recognizing him if he held to this engagement; and he held to his own, for he was during five years the intermediary between Henry IV. and Mayenne, incessantly laboring to reconcile them, and to prevent the estates of the League from giving the crown of France to a Spanish princess. Villeroi was a Leaguer of the patriotically French type. And so Henry IV., as soon as he was firm upon his throne, summoned him to his councils, and confided to him the direction of foreign affairs. The late Leaguer sat beside Sully, and exerted himself to give the prevalence, in Henry IV.‘s external policy, to Catholic maxims and alliances, whilst Sully, remaining firmly Protestant in the service of his king turned Catholic, continued to be in foreign matters the champion of Protestant policy and alliances. There was thus seen, during the sixteenth century, in the French monarchy, a phenomenon which was to repeat itself during the eighteenth in the republic of the United States of America, when, in 1789, its president, Washington, summoned to his cabinet Hamilton and Jefferson together, one the stanchest of the aristocratic federalists and the other the warm defender of democratic principles and tendencies. Washington, in his lofty and calm impartiality, considered that, to govern the nascent republic, he had need of both; and he found a way, in fact, to make both of service to him. Henry IV. had perceived himself to be in an analogous position with France and Europe divided between Catholics and Protestants, whom he aspired to pacificate.
He likewise succeeded. An incomplete success, however, as generally. happens when the point attained is an adjournment of knotty questions which war has vainly attempted to cut, and the course of ideas and events has not yet had time to unravel.
Henry IV. made so great a case of Villeroi’s co-operation and influence, that, without loving him as he loved Sully, he upheld him and kept him as secretary of state for foreign affairs to the end of his reign. He precisely defined his peculiar merit when he said, “Princes have servants of all values and all sorts; some do their own business before that of their master; others do their master’s and do not forget their own; but Villeroi believes that his master’s business is his own, and he bestows thereon the same zeal that another does in pushing his own suit or laboring at his own vine.” Though short and frigidly written, the Memoires of Villeroi give, in fact, the idea of a man absorbed in his commission and regarding it as his own business as well as that of his king and country.
Philip du Plessis-Mornay occupied a smaller place than Sully and Villeroi in the government of Henry IV.; but he held and deserves to keep a great one in the history of his times. He was the most eminent and also the most moderate of the men of profound piety and conviction of whom the Reformation had made a complete conquest, soul and body, and who placed their public fidelity to their religious creed above every other interest and every other affair in this world. He openly blamed and bitterly deplored Henry IV.‘s conversion to Catholicism, but he did not ignore the weighty motives for it; his disapproval and his vexation did not make him forget the great qualities of his king or the services he was rendering France, or his own duty and his earlier feelings towards him. This unbending Protestant, who had contributed as much as anybody to put Henry IV. on the throne, who had been admitted further than anybody, except Sully, to his intimacy, who ever regretted that his king had abandoned his faith, who braved all perils and all disgraces to keep and maintain his own, this Mornay, malcontent, saddened, all but banished from court, assailed by his friends’ irritation and touched by their sufferings, never took part against the king whom he blamed, and of whom he thought he had to complain, in any faction or any intrigue; on the contrary, he remained unshakably faithful to him, incessantly striving to maintain or re-establish in the Protestant church in France some little order and peace, and between the Protestants and Henry IV. some little mutual confidence and friendliness. Mornay had made up his mind to serve forever a king who had saved his country. He remained steadfast and active in his creed, but without falling beneath the yoke of any narrow-minded idea, preserving his patriotic good sense in the midst of his fervent piety, and bearing with sorrowful constancy his friends’ bursts of anger and his king’s exhibitions of ingratitude. Between 1597 and 1605 three incidents supervened which put to the proof Henry IV.‘s feelings towards his old and faithful servant. In October, 1597, Mornay, still governor of Saumur, had gone to Angers to concert plans with Marshal de Brissac for an expedition which, by order of the king, they were to make into Brittany against the Duke of Mercoeur, not yet reduced to submission. As he was passing along the street with only three or four of his men, he was unexpectedly attacked by one Sieur de Saint-Phal, who, after calling upon him to give some explanation as to a disagreement that had taken place between them five months before, brutally struck him a blow on the head with a stick, knocked him down, immediately mounted a horse that was held all ready on the spot, and fled in haste, leaving Mornay in the hands of ten or a dozen accomplices, who dealt him several sword-thrusts as he was rising to defend himself, and who, in their turn, fled. Some passers-by hurried up; Mornay’s wounds were found to be slight; but the affair, which nobody hesitated to call murder, made a great noise; there was general indignation; the king was at once informed of it; and whilst the question was being discussed at Saumur whether Mornay ought to seek reparation by way of arms or by that of law, Henry IV. wrote to him in his own hand on the 8th of November, 1597:—
“M. du Plessis: I am extremely displeased at the outrage you have met with, wherein I participate both as king and as your friend. As the former I will do you justice and myself too. If I bore only the second title, you have none whose sword would be more ready to leap from its scabbard than mine, or who would put his life at your service more cheerfully than I. Take this for granted, that, in effect, I will render you the offices of king, master, and friend. And on this truthful assurance, I conclude, praying God to have you in His holy keeping.”
Saint-Phal remained for a long while concealed in the very district, amongst his relatives; but on the 12th of January, 1599, he was arrested and put in the Bastille; and, according to the desire of Mornay himself, the king decided that he should be brought before him, unarmed, should place one knee on the ground, should ask his pardon, and then, assuming his arms, should accordingly receive that pardon, first of all from Mornay, whom the king had not permitted to exact in another way the reparation due to him, and afterwards from the mouth of the king himself, together with a severe admonition to take heed to himself for the future. The affair having thus terminated, there was no more heard of Saint-Phal, and Mornay returned to Saumur with a striking mark of the king’s sympathy, who, in his own words, had felt pleasure “in avenging him as king and as friend.”
The second incident was of more political consequence, and neither the king nor Mornay conducted themselves with sufficient discretion and dignity. In July, 1598, Mornay published a treatise on the institution of the eucharist in the Christian church, how and by what degrees the mass was introduced in its place. It was not only an attack upon the fundamental dogma and cult of the Catholic church; the pope was expressly styled Antichrist in it. Clement VIII. wrote several times about it to Henry IV., complaining that a man of such high standing in the government and in the king’s regard should treat so insultingly a sovereign in alliance with the king, and head of the church to which the king belonged. The pope’s complaint came opportunely. Henry IV. was at this time desirous of obtaining from the court of Rome annulment of his marriage with Marguerite de Valois, that he might be enabled to contract another; he did not as yet say with whom. Mornay’s book was vigorously attacked, not only in point of doctrine, but in point of fact; he was charged with having built his foundation upon a large number of misquotations; and the Bishop of Evreux, M. du Perron, a great friend of the king’s, whom he had always supported and served, said that he was prepared to point out as such nearly five hundred. The dispute grew warm between the two theologians; Mornay demanded leave to prove the falsehood of the accusation; the bishop accepted the challenge. For all his defence of his book and his erudition, Mornay did not show any great hurry to enter upon the contest; and, on the other hand, the bishop reduced the number of the quotations against which he objected. The sum total of the quotations found fault with was fixed at sixty. A conference was summoned to look into them, and six commissioners, three Catholic and three Protestant, were appointed to give judgment; De Thou and Pithou amongst the former, Dufresne la Canaye and Casaubon amongst the latter. Erudition was worthily represented there, and there was every probability of justice. The conference met on the 4th of May, 1600, at Fontainebleau, in presence of the king and many great lords, magistrates, ecclesiastics, and distinguished spectators.
Mornay began by owning that “out of four thousand quotations made by him it was unlikely that some would not be found wherein he might have erred, as he was human, but he was quite sure that it was never in bad faith.” He then said that, being pressed for time, he had not yet been able to collate more than nineteen out of the sixty quotations specially attacked. Of these nineteen nine only were examined at this first conference, and nearly all were found to be incorrect. Next day, Mornay was taken “with a violent seizure and repeated attacks of vomiting, which M. de la Riviere, the king’s premier physician, came and deposed to.” The conference was broken off, and not resumed afterwards. The king congratulated himself beyond measure at the result, and even on the part which he had taken. “Tell the truth,” said he to the Bishop of Evreux, “the good right had good need of aid;” and he wrote, on the 6th of May to the Duke of Epernon, “The diocese of Evreux has beaten that of Saumur. The bearer was present, and will tell you that I did wonders. Assuredly it is one of the greatest hits for the church of God that have been made for some time.” He evidently had it very much at heart that the pope should be well informed of what had taken place, and feel obliged to him for it. “Haven’t you wits to see that the king, in order to gratify the pope, has been pleased to sacrifice my father’s honor at his feet?” said young Philip de Mornay to some courtiers who were speaking to him about this sad affair. This language was reported to the king, who showed himself much hurt by it. “He is a young man beside himself with grief,” they said, “and it is his own father’s case.” “Young he is not,” replied the king; “he is forty years old, twenty in age and twenty from his father’s teaching.” The king’s own circle and his most distinguished servants gladly joined in his self-congratulation. “Well,” he said to Sully, “what think you of your pope?” “I think, sir,” answered Sully, “that he is more pope than you suppose; cannot you see that he gives a red hat to M. d’Evreux? Really, I never saw a man so dumbfounded, or one who defended himself so ill. If our religion had no better foundation than his crosswise legs and arms (Mornay habitually kept them so), I would abandon it rather to-day than to-morrow.” [OEconomies royales, t. iii. p. 346.]
Sully desired nothing better than to find Mornay at fault, and to see the king fully convinced of it. Jealousy is nowhere more wide-awake and more implacable than at courts. However, amongst the grandees present at the conference of Fontainebleau there were some who did not share the general impression. “I saw there,” said the Duke of Mayenne as he went away from it, “only a very old and very faithful servant very badly paid for so many services;” and, in spite of the king’s letter, the Duke of Epernon sent word to Mornay that he still took him for a gentleman of honor, and still remained his friend. Henry IV. himself, with his delicate and ready tact, was not slow to perceive that he had gone too far and had behaved badly. Being informed that Mornay was in deep suffering, he sent to him M. de Lomenie, his cabinet-secretary, to fully assure him that the king would ever be his good master and friend. “As for master,” said Mornay, “I am only too sensible of it; as for friend, he belongs not to me: I have known men to make attempts upon the king’s life, honor, and state, nay, upon his very bed; against them, the whole of them, he never displayed so much severity as against me alone, who have done him service all my life.” And he set out on his way back to Saumur without seeing the king again.
He returned thither with all he had dearest in the world, his wife, Charlotte Arbaleste de la Borde, his worthy partner in all his trials— trials of prosperity as well as adversity. She has full right to a few lines in this History, for it was she who preserved to us, in her Memoires, the picture, so salutary to contemplate, of the life and character of Mornay, in the midst of his friends’ outbursts of passion and his adversaries’ brutal exhibitions of hatred. As intelligent as she was devoted, she gave him aid in his theological studies and labors as well as in the confronting of public events. “During this expedition to Fontainebleau, I had remained,” she says, “at Paris, in extreme apprehension, recently recovered from a severe illness, harassed by the deadlock in our domestic affairs. And, as for all that, I felt it not in comparison with the inevitable mishap of this expedition. I had found for M. du Plessis all the books of which he might possibly have need, hunted up, with great diligence considering the short time, in the libraries of all our friends, and I got them into his hands, but somewhat late in the day, because it was too late in the day when he gave me the commission.” The private correspondence of these two noble persons is a fine example of conjugal and Christian union, virtue, and affection. In 1605, their only son, Philip de Mornay, a very distinguished young man, then twenty-six years of age, obtained Henry IV.‘s authority to go and serve in the army of the Prince of Orange, Maurice of Nassau, at deadly war with Spain. He was killed in it on the 23d of October, at the assault upon the town of Gueldres. On receiving news of his death, “I have now no son,” said his father; “therefore I have now no wife.” His sorrowful prediction was no delusion; six mouths after her son’s death Madame de Mornay succumbed, unable any longer to bear the burden she was supporting without a murmur. Her Memoires concludes with this expression: “It is but reasonable that this my book should end with him, as it was only undertaken to describe to him our pilgrimage in this life. And, since it hath pleased God, he hath sooner gone through, and more easily ended his own. Wherefore, indeed, if I feared not to cause affliction to M. du Plessis, who, the more mine grows upon me, makes me the more clearly perceive his affection, it would vex me extremely to survive him.”
On learning by letter from Prince Maurice that the young man was dead, Henry IV. said, with emotion, to those present, “I have lost the fairest hope of a gentleman in my kingdom. I am grieved for the father. I must send and comfort him. No father but he could have such a loss.” “He despatched on the instant,” says Madame de Mornay herself, “Sieur Bruneau, one of his secretaries, with very gracious letters to comfort us; with orders, nevertheless, not to present himself unless he were sure that we already knew of it otherwise, not wishing to be the first to tell us such sad news.” [Memoires, t. ii. p. 107.] This touching evidence of a king’s sympathy for a father’s grief effaced, no doubt, to some extent in Mornay’s mind his reminiscences of the conference at Fontainebleau; one thing is quite certain, that he continued to render Henry IV., in the synods and political assemblies of the Protestants, his usual good offices for the maintenance or re-establishment of peace and good understanding between the Catholic king and his malcontent former friends.
A third Protestant, Theodore Agrippa d’Aubigne, grandfather of Madame de Maintenon, has been reckoned here amongst not the councillors, certainly, but the familiar and still celebrated servants of Henry IV. He held no great post, and had no great influence with the king; he was, on every occasion, a valiant soldier, a zealous Protestant, an indefatigable lover and seeker of adventure, sometimes an independent thinker, frequently an eloquent and bold speaker, always a very sprightly companion. Henry IV. at one time employed him, at another held aloof from him, or forgot him, or considered him a mischief-maker, a faction-monger who must be put in the Bastille, and against whom, if it seemed good, there would be enough to put him on his trial. Madame de Chatillon, who took an interest in D’Aubigne, warned him of the danger, and urged him to depart that very evening. “I will think about it, madame,” said he; “I will implore God’s assistance, and I will see what I have to do.” . . . “The inspiration that came to me,” says he, “was to go next morning very early to see his Majesty, and, after having briefly set before him my past services, to ask him for a pension, which up to that time I had not felt inclined to do. The king, surprised, and at the same time well pleased to observe a something mercenary behind all my proud spirit, embraced me, and granted on the spot what I asked of him.” The next day D’Aubigne went to the Arsenal; Sully invited him to dinner, and took him to see the Bastille, assuring him that there was no longer any danger for him, but only since the last twenty-four hours. [La France Protestante, by MM. Haag, t. i. p. 170.] If D’Aubigne had not been a writer, he would be completely forgotten by this time, like so many other intriguing and turbulent adventurers, who make a great deal of fuss themselves, and try to bring everything about them into a fuss as long as they live, and who die without leaving any trace of their career. But D’Aubigne wrote a great deal both in prose and in verse; he wrote the Histoire universelle of his times, personal Memoires, tales, tragedies, and theological and satirical essays; and he wrote with sagacious, penetrating, unpremeditated wit, rare vigor, and original and almost profound talent for discerning and depicting situations and characters. It is the writer which has caused the man to live, and has assigned him a place in French literature even more than in French history. We purpose to quote two fragments of his, which will make us properly understand and appreciate both the writer and the man. During the civil war, in the reign of Henry III., D’Aubigne had made himself master of the Island of Oleron, had fortified it, and considered himself insufficiently rewarded by the King of Navarre, to whom he had meant to render, and had, in fact, rendered service. After the battle of Coutras, in 1587, he was sleeping with a comrade named Jacques de Caumont la Force, in the wardrobe of the chamber in which the King of Navarre slept. “La Force,” said D’Aubigne to his bed-fellow, “our master is a regular miser, and the most ungrateful mortal on the face of the earth.” “What dost say, D’Aubigne?” asked La Force, half asleep. “He says,” repeated the King of Navarre, who had heard all, “that I am a regular miser, and the most ungrateful mortal on the face of the earth.” D’Aubigne, somewhat disconcerted, was mum. “But,” he adds, “when daylight appeared, this prince, who liked neither rewarding nor punishing, did not for all that look any the more black at me, or give me a quarter-crown more.” Thirty years later, in 1617, after the collapse of the League and after the reign of Henry IV., D’Aubigne, wishing to describe the two leaders of the two great parties, sums them up in these terms: “The Duke of Mayenne had such probity as is human, a good nature and a liberality which made him most pleasant to those about him; his was a judicious mind, which made good use of experience, took the measure of everything by the card; a courage rather steady than dashing; take him for all in all, he might be called an excellent captain. King Henry IV. had all this, save the liberality; but to make up for that item, his rank caused expectations as to the future to blossom, which made the hardships of the present go down. He had, amongst his points of superiority to the Duke of Mayenne, a marvellous gift of promptitude and vivacity, and far beyond the average. We have seen him, a thousand times in his life, make pat replies without hearing the purport of a request, and forestall questions without committing himself. The Duke of Mayenne was incommoded by his great bodily bulk, which could not support the burden either of arms or of fatigue duty. The other, having worked all his men to a stand-still, would send for hounds and horses for to begin a hunt; and when his horses could go no farther, he would run down the game afoot. The former communicated his heaviness and his maladies to his army, undertaking no enterprise that he could not support in person; the other communicated his own liveliness to those about him, and his captains imitated him from complaisance and from emulation.”
These politicians, these Christians, these warriors had, in 1600, a grave question to solve for Henry IV., and grave counsel to give him. He was anxious to separate from his wife, Marguerite de Valois, who had, in fact, been separated from him for the last fifteen years, was leading a very irregular life, and had not brought him any children. But, in order to obtain from the pope annulment of the marriage, it was first necessary that Marguerite should consent to it, and at no price would she consent so long as the king’s favorite continued to be Gabrielle d’Estrees, whom she detested, and by whom Henry already had several children. The question arose in 1598, in connection with a son lately born to Gabrielle, who was constantly spreading reports that she would be the king’s wife. To give consistency to this report she took it into her head to have her son presented at baptism as a child of France, and an order was brought to Sully “to pay what was right to the heralds, trumpeters, and hautbois players who had performed at the baptism of Alexander, Monsieur, child of France.” After looking at the order, Sully detained it, and had another made out, which made no mention of Alexander. The men complained, saying, “Sir, the sum we ought to have for our attendance at the baptism of children of France has for a long while been fixed.” “Away, away!” said Sully, in a rage; “I’ll do nothing of the sort; there are no children of France.” And he told the king about it, who said, “There’s malice in that, but I will certainly stop it; tear up that order.” And turning to some of his courtiers, “See the tricks that people play, and the traps they lay for those who serve me well and after my own heart. An order hath been sent to M. de Rosny, with the design of offending me if he honored it, or of offending the Duchess of Beaufort if he repudiated it. I will see to it. Go to her, my friend,” he said to Rosny; “tell her what has taken place; satisfy her in so far as you can. If that is not sufficient, I will speak like the master, and not like the man.” Sully went to the cloister of St. Germain, where the Duchess of Beaufort was lodged, and told her that he came by the king’s command to inform her of what was going on. “I am aware of all,” said Gabrielle, “and do not care to know any more; I am not made as the king is, whom you persuade that black is white.” “Ho! ho! madame,” replied Sully, “since you take it in that way, I kiss your hands, and shall not fail to do my duty for all your furies.” He returned to the Louvre and told the king. “Here, come with me,” said Henry; “I will let you see that women have not possession of me, as certain malignant spirits spread about that they have.” He got into Sully’s carriage, went with him to the Duchess of Beaufort’s, and, taking her by the hand, said, “Now, madame, let us go into your room, and let nobody else enter except you, and Rosny, and me. I want to speak to you both, and teach you to be good friends together.” Then, having shut the door quite close, and holding Gabrielle with one hand and Rosny with the other, he said, “Good God! madame, what is the meaning of this? So you would vex me for sheer wantonness of heart in order to try my patience? By God, I swear to you that, if you continue these fashions of going on, you will find yourself very much out in your expectations. I see quite well that you have been put up to all this pleasantry in order to make me dismiss a servant whom I cannot do without, and who has always served me loyally for five and twenty years. By God, I will do nothing of the kind, and I declare to you that if I were reduced to such a necessity as to choose between losing one or the other, I could better do without ten mistresses like you than one servant like him.”
Gabrielle stormed, was disconsolate, wept, threw herself at the king’s feet, and, “seeing him more strong-minded than had been supposed by those who had counselled her to this escapade, began to calm herself,” says Sully, “and everything was set right again on every side.”
But Sully was not at the end of his embarrassments or of the sometimes feeble and sometimes sturdy fancies of his king. On the 10th of April, 1599, Gabrielle d’Estrees died so suddenly that, according to the bias of the times, when, in the highest ranks, crimes were so common that they were always considered possible and almost probable, she was at first supposed to have been poisoned; but there seemed to be no likelihood of this. The consent of Marguerite de Valois to the annulment of her marriage was obtained; and negotiations were opened at Rome by Arnold d’Ossat, who was made a cardinal, and by Brulart de Sillery, ambassador ad hoc. But a new difficulty supervened; not for the negotiators, who knew, or appeared to know, nothing about it, but for Sully. In three or four weeks after the death of Gabrielle d’Estrees Henry IV. was paying court to a new favorite. One morning, at Fontainebleau, just as he was going out hunting, he took Sully by the hand, led him into the first gallery, gave him a paper, and, turning the other way as if he were ashamed to see it read by Sully, “Read that,” said he, “and then tell me your opinion of it.” Sully found that it was a promise of marriage given to Mdlle. Henriette d’Entraigues, daughter of Francis de Balzac, Lord of Entraigues, and Marie Touchet, favorite of Charles IX. Sully went up to the king, holding in his hand the paper folded up.
“What do you think of it?” said the king. “Now, now, speak freely; your silence offends me far more than your most adverse expressions could. I misdoubt me much that you will not give me your approval, if it were only for the hundred thousand crowns that I made you hand over with so much regret; I promise you not to be vexed at anything you can possibly say to me.” “You mean it, sir, and you promise not to be angry with me, whatever I may say or do?” “Yes, yes; I promise all you desire, since for anything you say it will be all the same, neither more nor less.” Thereupon, taking that written promise as if he would have given it back to the king, Sully, instead of that, tore it in two, saying, a “There, sir, as you wish to know, is what I think about such a promise.” “Ha! morbleu, what are you at? Are you mad?” “It is true, sir; I am a madman and fool; and I wish I were so much thereof as to be the only one in France.” “Very well, very well: I understand you,” said the king, “and will say no more, in order to keep my word to you; but give me back that paper.” “Sir,” replied Sully, “I have no doubt your Majesty is aware that you are destroying all the preparatives for your dismarriage, for, this promise once divulged,—and it is demanded of you for no other purpose,—never will the queen, your wife, do the things necessary to make your dismarriage valid, nor indeed will the pope bestow upon it his Apostolic blessing; that I know of my own knowledge.”
The king made no answer, went out of the gallery, entered his closet, asked for pen and ink, remained there a quarter of an hour, wrote out a second paper like that which had just been torn up, mounted his horse without saying a word to Sully whom he met, went hunting, and, during the day, deposited the new promise of marriage with Henriette d’Entraigues, who kept it or had it kept in perfect secrecy till the 2d of July, the time at which her father, the Count of Entiaigues, gave her up to, the king in consideration of twenty thousand crowns cash.
In the teeth of all these incidents, known or voluntarily ignored, the negotiations for the annulment of the marriage of Henry IV. and Marguerite de Valois were proceeded with at Rome by consent of the two parties. Clement VIII. had pronounced on the 17th of December, 1599, and transmitted to Paris by Cardinal de Joyeuse the decree of annulment. On the 6th of January, 1600, Henry IV. gave his ambassador, Brulart de Sillery, powers to conclude at Florence his marriage with Mary de’ Medici, daughter of Francis I. de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Joan, Archduchess of Austria and niece of the Grand Duke Ferdinand I. de’ Medici, who had often rendered Henry IV. pecuniary services dearly paid for. As early as the year 1592 there had been something said about this project of alliance; it was resumed and carried out on the 5th of October, 1600, at Florence with lavish magnificence. Mary embarked at Leghorn on the 17th with a fleet of seventeen galleys; that of which she was aboard, the General, was all covered over with jewels, inside and out; she arrived at Marseilles on the 3d of November, and at Lyons on the 2d of December, where she waited till the 9th for the king, who was detained by the war with Savoy. He entered her chamber in the middle of the night, booted and armed, and next day, in the cathedral-church of St. John, re-celebrated his marriage, more rich in wealth than it was destined to be in happiness. Mary de’ Medici was beautiful in 1592, when she had first been talked about, and her portrait at that time had charmed the king; but in 1600 she was twenty-seven, tall, fat, with round, staring eyes and a forbidding air, and ill dressed. She knew hardly a word of French; and Henriette d’Entraigues, whom the king had made Marquise do Verneuil, could not help exclaiming when she saw her, “So that is the fat bankeress from Florence!”
Henry IV. seemed to have attained in his public and in his domestic life the pinnacle of earthly fortune and ambition. He was, at one and the same time, Catholic king and the head of the Protestant polity in Europe, accepted by the Catholics as the best, the only possible, king for them in France. He was at peace with all Europe, except one petty prince, the Duke of Savoy, Charles Emmanuel I., from whom he demanded back the marquisate of Saluzzo, or a territorial compensation in France itself on the French side of the Alps. After a short campaign, and thanks to Rosny’s ordnance, he obtained what he desired, and by a treaty of January 17, 1601, he added to French territory La Bresse, Le Bugey, the district of Gex, and the citadel of Bourg, which still held out after the capture of the town. He was more and more dear to France, to which he had restored peace at home as well as abroad, and industrial, commercial, financial, monumental, and scientific prosperity, until lately unknown. Sully covered the country with roads, bridges, canals, buildings, and works of public utility. The moment the king, after the annulment of his marriage with Marguerite de Valois, saw his new wife, Mary de’ Medici, at Lyons, she had disgusted him, and she disgusted him more every day by her cantankerous and headstrong temper; but on the 27th of September, 1601, she brought him a son, who was to be Louis XIII. Henry used to go for distraction from his wife’s temper to his favorite, Henriette d’Entraigues, who knew how to please him at the same time that she was haughty and exacting towards him. He set less store upon the peace of his household than upon that of his kingdom; he had established his favorite at the Louvre itself, close beside his wife; and, his new marriage once contracted, he considered his domestic life settled, as well as his political position.
He was mistaken on both points; he was not at the end of either his political dangers or his amorous fancies. Since 1595, his principal companion in arms, or rather his camp-favorite, Charles de Gontaut, Baron de Biron, whom he had made admiral, duke, and marshal of France, was, all the while continuing to serve him in the field, becoming day by day a determined conspirator against him. He had begun by being a reckless gamester; and in that way he lost fifteen hundred thousand crowns, about six millions (of francs) of our day. “I don’t know,” said he, “whether I shall die on the scaffold or not; but I will never come to the poorhouse.” He added, “When peace is concluded, the king’s love-affairs, the scarcity of his largesses, and the discontent of many will lead to plenty of splits, more than are necessary to embroil the most peaceful kingdoms in the world. And, should that fail, we shall find in religion more than we want to put the most lukewarm Huguenots in a passion and the most penitent Leaguers in a fury.” Henry IV. regarded Biron with tender affection. “I never loved anybody as I loved him,” he used to say; “I would have trusted my son and my kingdom to him. He has done me good service; but he cannot say that I did not save his life three times. I pulled him out of the enemy’s hands at Fontaine-Francaise so wounded and so dazed with blows, that, as I had acted soldier in saving him, I also acted marshal as regarded the retreat.” Biron nevertheless prosecuted his ambitious designs; the independent sovereignty of Burgundy was what he aspired to, and any alliance, any plot, was welcome as a stepping-stone. “Caesar or nothing,” he would say. “I will not die without seeing my head on a quarter-crown piece.” He entered into flagrant conspiracy with the King of Spain, with the Duke of Savoy, with the French malcontents, the Duke of Bouillon, and the Count of Auvergne. Henry IV. knew it, and made every effort to appear ignorant of it, to win Biron back to him; he paid his debts; he sent him on an embassy he tempted him to confessions which should entitle him to a full pardon. “Let him weep,” he would say, “and I will weep with him; let him remember what he owes me, and I will not forget what I owe him. I were loath that Marshal de Biron should be the first example of my just severity, and that my reign, which has hitherto been calm and serene, should be charged all at once with thunder and lightning.” He employed Rosily to bring Biron to confess. “My friend,” said he, “here is an unhappy man, the marshal. It is a serious case. I am anxious to spare him. I cannot bring myself to harm a man who has courage, who has served me so long and been so familiar with me. My fear is that, though I spare him, he will not spare me or my children, or my kingdom. He would never confess anything to me; he behaves to me like a man who has some mischief in his heart. I beg you to see him. If he is open with you, assure him that he may come to me and I will forgive him with all my heart.” Rosny tried and failed. “It is not I who want to destroy this man,” said the king; “it is he who wants to destroy himself. I will myself tell him that, if he lets himself be brought to justice, he has no mercy whatever to expect from me.” He saw Biron at Fontainebleau, received him after dinner, spoke to him with his usual familiarity, and pointing to his own equestrian statue in marble which was on the mantelpiece, said, “What would the King cf Spain say if he saw me like that, eh?” “He would not be much afraid of you,” answered Biron. Henry gave him a stern look. The marshal tried to take back his words: “I mean, sir, if he were to see you in that statue yonder, and not in your own person.” The retreat was not successful; the shot had taken effect; Henry left the room, went back into his closet, and gave orders to his captain of the guard to arrest him. Then he returned to the room and said, “Marshal, reflect upon what I have said to you.” Biron preserved a frigid silence. “Adieu, Baron de Biron!” said the king, thus by a single word annulling all his dignities, and sending him before his proper judges to answer for his treasons. On the 18th of June, 1602, he brought the marshal before the court of Parliament. The inquiry lasted three weeks. Biron was unanimously condemned to death by a hundred and twenty-seven judges “for conspiracies against the king’s person, attempts upon his kingdom, and treasons and treaties with the enemies of the kingdom.” The king gave to this sentence all the alleviations compatible with public interests. He allowed Biron to make his will, remitted the confiscation of his property, and ordered that the execution should take place at the Bastille, in the presence of certain functionaries, and not on the Place de Greve and before the mob. When Biron found himself convicted and sentenced, he burst into a fury, loaded his judges with insults, and roared out that “if he were driven to despair and frenzy, he would strangle half of those present and force the other half to kill him.” The executioner was obliged to strike him unawares. Those present withdrew dumbfounded at the crime, the prisoner’s rage, the execution, and the scene.
When the question of conspiracies and conspirators—with Spain against France and her king had thus been publicly raised and decided, it entailed another: had the Spanish monks, the Jesuits, to call them by their own name, taken part therein? Should proceedings accordingly be taken against them? They were no longer in France; they had been banished on the 29th of December, 1594, by a solemn decree of Parliament, after John Chatel’s attempt. They were demanding their return. The pope was demanding it for them. “If at other times,” they said, “the society had shown hostility to France and her king, it was because, though well received everywhere else, especially in the dominions of the King of Spain, they had met in France with nothing but persecutions and insults. If Henry would be pleased to testify good will towards them, he would soon find them devoted to his person and his throne.” The question was debated at the king’s council, and especially between Henry IV. and Sully when they were together.
Sully did not like the return of the Jesuits. “They are away,” said he; “let them remain so. If they return, it will be all very fine for them to wish, and all very fine for them to act; their presence, their discourse, their influence, involuntary though it be, will be opposed to you, will heat your enemies, will irritate your friends; hatred and mistrust will go on increasing.” The king was of a different opinion. “Of necessity,” he said to Sully, “I must now do one of two things: admit the Jesuits purely and simply, relieve them from the defamation and insults with which they have been blasted, and put to the proof all their fine sentiments and excellent promises, or use against them all severities that can be imagined to keep them from ever coming near me and my dominions. In which latter case, there is no doubt it would be enough to reduce them to utter despair, and to thoughts of attempting my life; which would render me miserable or listless, living constantly in suspicion of being poisoned or assassinated, for these gentry have communications and correspondence everywhere, and great dexterity in disposing men’s minds as it seems good to them. It were better for me to be dead, being therein of Caesar’s opinion that the pleasantest death is that which is least foreseen and apprehended.” The king then called to remembrance the eight projected or attempted assassinations which, since the failure of John Chatel, from 1596 to 1603, had been, and clearly established to have been, directed against him. Upon this, Sully at once went over to the king’s opinion. In September, 1603, letters for the restoration of the Jesuits were issued and referred to the Parliament of Paris. They there met, on the 24th of December, with strong opposition and remonstrances that have remained celebrated, the mouthpiece being the premier president Achille de Harlay, the same who had courageously withstood the Duke of Guise. He conjured the king to withdraw his letters patent, and to leave intact the decree which had banished the Jesuits. This was not, he said, the feeling of the Parliament of Paris only, but also of the Parliaments of Normandy and Burgundy; that is, of two thirds of the magistrates throughout the kingdom. Henry was touched and staggered. He thanked the Parliament most affectionately; but, “We must not reproach the, Jesuits for the League,” said he; “it was the fault of the times. Leave me to deal with this business. I have managed others far more difficult.” The Parliament obeyed, though with regret, and on the 2d of January, 1604, the king’s letters patent were enregistered.
This was not the only business that Henry had at heart; he had another of another sort, and, for him, more difficult to manage. In February, 1609, he saw, for the first time, at the court of France, Charlotte Marguerite, third daughter of the Constable de Montmorency, only sixteen years old. “There was at that time,” say all contemporaries, “nothing so beautiful under heaven, or more graceful, or more perfect.” Before presenting her at court, her father had promised her to Francis de Bassompierre, descended from a branch of the house of Cloves, thirty years old, and already famous for his wit, his magnificence, and his gallantry. He was one of the principal gentlemen of the chamber to the king. Henry IV. sent for him one morning, made him kneel on a hassock in front of his bed, and said that, obtaining no sleep, he had been thinking of him the night before, and of getting him married. “As for me,” says Bassompierre, “who was thinking of nothing so little as of what he wanted to say to me, I answered that, if it were not for the constable’s gout, it would have already been done. ‘No,’ said he to me, ‘I thought of getting you married to Mlle. d’Aumale, and, in consequence of that marriage, of renewing the Duchy of Aumale in your person.’ I asked him if he wanted me to have two wives. Then he said to me with a deep sigh, ‘Bassompierre, I will speak to thee as a friend. I have become not only enamoured, but mad, beside myself, about Mlle. de Montmorency. If thou wed her and she love thee, I shall hate thee; if she loved me, thou wouldst hate me. It is better that this should not be the cause of destroying our good understanding, for I love thee affectionately and sincerely. I am resolved to marry her to my nephew the Prince of Conde, and keep her near my family. That shall be the consolation and the support of the old age which is coming upon me. I shall give my nephew, who is young and loves hunting ten thousand times better than women, a hundred thousand francs a year to pass his time, and I want no other favor from her but her affection, without looking for anything more.”
Thoroughly astounded and put out as he was, Bassompierre reflected that it was, so far as he was concerned, “an amour modified by marriage,” and that it would be better to give way to the king with a good grace: and, “I withdraw, sir,” he said, on very good terms as regarded Mdlle. de Montmorency as well as himself. The king embraced him, wept, promised to love him dearly, saw him again in the evening in company with Mdlle. de Montmorency, who knew nothing, and conversed a long while with the young princess. When she retired, perceiving that Bassompierre was watching her, she shrugged her shoulders, as if to hint to him what the king had said to her. “I lie not,” says Bassompierre: “that single action pierced me to the heart; I spent two days in tormenting myself like one possessed, without sleeping, drinking, or eating.” Two or three days afterwards the Prince of Conde, announced that he intended to marry Mdlle. de Montmorency. The court and the city talked of nothing but this romance and the betrothal which immediately followed.
Henry IV. was fifty-six. He had been given to gallantry all his life; and he had never been faithful or exacting in his attachments. He was not one of those on whom ridicule fastens as fair prey; but he was so under the dominion of his new passion that the young Princess of Conde, who had at first exclaimed, “Jesus, my God, he is mad!” began to fancy to herself that she would be queen before long. Mary de Medici became jealous and uneasy. She determined to take her precautions, and demanded to be crowned before the king set out on the campaign which, it was said, he was about to commence against Austria in accordance with his grand design and in concert with the Protestant princes of Germany, his allies. The Prince of Conde had a fit of jealousy; he carried off his wife first into Picardy; and then to Brussels, where he left her. Henry IV., in respect, first, of going to see her, then of getting her to come back, then of threatening to go after her out of France, took some wild and puerile steps, which, being coincident with his warlike announcements and preparations, caused some strange language to be used, and were injurious to his personal weight as well as to his government’s character for steadiness. Sully grew impatient and uneasy. Mary de’ Medici was insisting strongly upon being crowned. The prospect of this coronation was displeasing to Henry IV., and he did not conceal it. “Hey! my friend,” he said to Sully: “I know not what is the meaning of it, but my heart tells me that some misfortune will happen to me.” He was sitting on a low chair which had been made for him by Sully’s orders at the Arsenal, thinking and beating his fingers on his spectacle-case; then all on a sudden he jumped up, and slapping his hands upon his thighs, “By God,” he said, “I shall die in this city, and shall never go out of it. They will kill me; I see quite well that they have no other remedy in their dangers but my death. Ah! accursed coronation! Thou wilt be the cause of my death.” “Jesus! Sir,” cried Sully, “what fancy of yours is this? If it continue, I am of opinion that you should break off this anointment and coronation, and expedition and war; if you please to give me orders, it shall soon be done.” “Yes, break off the coronation,” said the king: “let me hear no more about it; I shall have my mind at rest from divers fancies which certain warnings have put into it. To bide nothing from you, I have been told that I was to be killed at the first grand ceremony I should undertake, and that I should die in a carriage.” “You never told me that, sir; and so have I often been astounded to see you cry out when in a carriage, as if you had dreaded this petty peril, after having so many times seen you amidst cannon-balls, musketry, lance-thrusts, pike-thrusts, and sword-thrusts; without being a bit afraid. Since your mind is so exercised thereby, if I were you, I would go away to-morrow, let the coronation take place without you, or put it off to another time, and not enter Paris for a long while, or in a carriage. If you please, I will send word to Notre-Dame and St. Denis to stop everything and to withdraw the workmen.” “I am very much inclined,” said the king; “but what will my wife say? For she hath gotten this coronation marvellously into her head.” “She may say what she likes; but I cannot think that, when she knows your opinion about it, she will persist any longer.”
Whatever Sully might say, Mary de’ Medici “took infinite offence at the king for his alarms: the matter was disputed for three days, with high words on all sides, and at last the laborers were sent back to work again.”
Henry, in spite of his presentiments, made no change in his plans; he did not go away; he did not defer the queen’s coronation; on the contrary, he had it proclaimed on the 12th of May, 1610, that she would be crowned next day, the 13th, at St. Denis, and that on Sunday, the 16th, she would make her entry into Paris. On Friday, the 14th, he had an idea of going to the Arsenal to see Sully, who was ill; we have the account of this visit and of the king’s assassination given by Malherbe, at that time attached to the service of Henry IV., in a letter written on the 19th of May, from the reports of eye-witnesses, and it is here reproduced, word for word.
“The king set out soon after dinner to go to the Arsenal. He deliberated a long while whether he should go out, and several times said to the queen, ‘My dear, shall I go or not?’ He even went out two or three times, and then all on a sudden returned, and said to the queen, ‘My dear, shall I really go?’ and again he had doubts about going or remaining. At last he made up his mind to go, and, having kissed the queen several times, bade her adieu. Amongst other things that were remarked he said to her, ‘I shall only go there and back; I shall be here again almost directly.’ When he got to the bottom of the steps, where his carriage was waiting for him, M. de Praslin, his captain of the guard, would have attended him, but said to him, ‘Get you gone; I want nobody; go about your business.’
“Thus having about him only a few gentlemen and some footmen, he got into his carriage, took his place on the back seat at the left hand side, and made M. d’Epernon sit at the right. Next to him, by the door, were M. de Montbazon and M. de la Force; and by the door on M. d’Epernon’s side were Marshal de Lavardin and M. de Cresqui; on the front seat the Marquis of Mirabeau and the first equerry. When he came to the Croix-du-Tiroir he was asked whither it was his pleasure to go; he gave orders to go towards St. Innocent. On arriving at Rue de la Ferronnerie, which is at the end of that of St. Honors on the way to that of St. Denis, opposite the Salamandre he met a cart, which obliged the king’s carriage to go nearer to the ironmongers’ shops which are on the St. Innocent side, and even to proceed somewhat more slowly, without stopping, however, though somebody, who was in a hurry to get the gossip printed, has written to that effect. Here it was that an abominable assassin, who had posted himself against the nearest shop, which is that with the Coeur couronng perce d’une fleche, darted upon the king, and dealt him, one after the other, two blows with a knife in the left side; one, catching him between the armpit and the nipple, went upwards without doing more than graze; the other catches him between the fifth and sixth ribs, and, taking a downward direction, cuts a large artery of those called venous. The king, by mishap, and as if to further tempt this monster, had his left hand on the shoulder of M. de Montbazon, and with the other was leaning on M. d’Epernon, to whom he was speaking. He uttered a low cry and made a few movements. M. de Montbazon having asked, ‘What is the matter, sir?’ he answered, ‘It is nothing,’ twice; but the second time so low that there was no making sure. These are the only words he spoke after he was wounded.
“In a moment the carriage turned towards the Louvre. When he was at the steps where he had got into the carriage, which are those of the queen’s room, some wine was given him. Of course some one had already run forward to bear the news. Sieur de Cerisy, lieutenant of M. de Praslin’s company, having raised his head, he made a few movements with his eyes, then closed them immediately, without opening them again any more. He was carried up stairs by M. de Montbazon and Count de Curzon en Quercy, and laid on the bed in his closet, and at two o’clock carried to the bed in his chamber, where he was all the next day and Sunday. Somebody went and gave him holy water. I tell you nothing about the queen’s tears; all that must be imagined. As for the people of Paris, I think they never wept so much as on this occasion.”
The grief was deep and general, at the court as well as amongst the people, in the provinces as well as at Paris; and with the grief were mingled surprise and alarm, and an idea, also, that the king had died unhappy and uneasy. On the 14th of May, in the morning, before starting upon his visit to the Arsenal, he had gone to hear mass at the Feuillants’ [order of St. Bernard]; and on his return he said to the Duke of Guise and to Bassompierre, who were in attendance, “You do not understand me now, you and the rest; but I shall die one of these days, and, when you have lost me, you will know my worth and the difference there is between me and other kings.” “My God, sir,” said Bassompierre, “will you never cease vexing us by telling us that you will soon die? You will live, please God, some good, long years. You are only in the flower of your age, in perfect bodily health and strength, full of honor more than any mortal man, in the most flourishing kingdom in the world, loved and adored by your subjects, with fine houses, fine women, fine children who are growing up.” Henry sighed as he said, “My friend, all that must be left.”
These are the last words that are to be found of his in contemporary accounts; a few hours afterwards he was smitten to death in his carriage, brought back to the Louvre, laid out on his bed; one of his councillors of state, M. de Vie, seated on the same bed, had put to his mouth his cross of the order, and directed his thoughts to God; Milon, his chief physician, was at the bedside, weeping: his surgeons wanted to dress his wounds; a sigh died away on his lips, and “It is all over,” said the physician; “he is gone.” Guise and Bassompierre went out to look after what was passing out of doors; they met “M. de Sully with some forty horse, who, when he came up to us, said to us in tearful wise, ‘Gentlemen, if the service ye vowed to the king is impressed upon your souls as deeply as it ought to be with all good Frenchmen, swear all of ye this moment to keep towards the king his son and successor the same allegiance that ye showed him, and to spend your lives and your blood in avenging his death?’ ‘Sir,’ said Bassompierre, ‘it is for us to cause this oath to be taken by others; we have no need to be exhorted thereto;’ Sully turned his eyes upon him, he adds, and then went and shut himself up in the Bastille, sending out to ‘seize and carry off all the bread that could be found in the market and at the bakers’. He also despatched a message in haste to M. de Rohan, his son-in-law, bidding him face about with six thousand Swiss, whose colonel-general he was, and march on Paris.” Henry IV. being dead, it was for France and for the kingship that Sully felt alarm and was taking his precautions.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
REGENCY OF MARY DE’ MEDICI. (1610-1617.)
On the death of Henry IV. there was extreme disquietude as well as grief in France. To judge by appearances, however, there was nothing to justify excessive alarm. The edict of Nantes (April 13, 1598) had put an end, so far as the French were concerned, to religious wars. The treaty of Vervins (May 2, 1598) between France and Spain, the twelve years’ truce between Spain and the United Provinces (April 9, 1609), the death of Philip II. (September 13, 1598), and the alliance between France and England seemed to have brought peace to Europe. It might have been thought that there remained no more than secondary questions, such as the possession of the marquisate of Saluzzo and the succession to the duchies of Cleves and Juliers. But the instinct of peoples sees further than the negotiations of diplomats. In the public estimation of Europe Henry IV. was the representative of and the security for order, peace, national and equitable policy, intelligent and practical ideas. So thought Sully when, at the king’s death, he went, equally alarmed and disconsolate, and shut himself up in the arsenal; and the people had grounds for being of Sully’s opinion. Public confidence was concentrated upon the king’s personality. Spectators pardoned, almost with a smile, those tender foibles of his which, nevertheless, his proximity to old age rendered still more shocking. They were pleased at the clear-sighted and strict attention he paid to the education of his son Louis, the dauphin, to whose governess, Madame de Montglas, he wrote, “I am vexed with you for not having sent me word that you have whipped my son, for I do wish and command you to whip him every time he shows obstinacy in anything wrong, knowing well by my own case that there is nothing in the world that does more good than that.” And to Mary de’ Medici herself he added, “Of one thing I do assure you, and that is, that, being of the temper I know you to be of, and foreseeing that of your son, you stubborn, not to say headstrong, madame, and he obstinate, you will verily have many a tussle together.”
Henry IV. saw as clearly into his wife’s as into his son’s character. Persons who were best acquainted with the disposition of Mary de’ Medici, and were her most indulgent critics, said of her, in 1610, when she was now thirty-seven years of age, “that she was courageous, haughty, firm, discreet, vain, obstinate, vindictive and mistrustful, inclined to idleness, caring but little about affairs, and fond of royalty for nothing beyond its pomp and its honors.” Henry had no liking for her or confidence in her, and in private had frequent quarrels with her. He had, nevertheless, had her coronation solemnized, and had provided by anticipation for the necessities of government. On the king’s death, and at the imperious instance of the Duke of Epernon, who at once introduced the queen, and said in open session, as he exhibited his sword, “It is as yet in the scabbard; but it will have to leap therefrom unless this moment there be granted to the queen a title which is her due according to the order of nature and of justice,” the Parliament forthwith declared Mary regent of, the kingdom. Thanks to Sully’s firm administration, there were, after the ordinary annual expenses were paid, at that time in the vaults of the Bastille or in securities easily realizable, forty-one million three hundred and forty-five thousand livres, and there was nothing to suggest that extraordinary and urgent expenses would come to curtail this substantial reserve. The army was disbanded, and reduced to from twelve to fifteen thousand men, French or Swiss. For a long time past no power in France had, at its accession, possessed so much material strength and so much moral authority.
But Mary de’ Medici had, in her household and in her court, the wherewithal to rapidly dissipate this double treasure. In 1600, at the time of her marriage, she had brought from Florence to Paris her nurse’s daughter, Leonora Galigai, and Leonora’s husband, Concino Concini, son of a Florentine notary, both of them full of coarse ambition, covetous, vain, and determined to make the best of their new position so as to enrich themselves, and exalt themselves beyond measure, and at any price. Mary gave them, in that respect, all the facilities they could possibly desire; they were her confidants, her favorites, and her instruments, as regarded both her own affairs and theirs. These private and subordinate servants were before long joined by great lords, court-folks, ambitious and vain likewise, egotists, mischief-makers, whom the strong and able hand of Henry IV. had kept aloof, but who, at his death, returned upon the scene, thinking of nothing whatever but their own fortunes and their rivalries. They shall just be named here pell-mell, whether members or relatives of the royal family or merely great lords the Condes, the Contis, the Enghiens, the Dukes of Epernon, Guise, Elbeuf, Mayenne, Bouillon, and Nevers, great names and petty characters encountered at every step under the regency of Mary de’ Medici, and, with their following, forming about her a court-hive, equally restless and useless. Time does justice to some few men, and executes justice on the ruck: one must have been of great worth indeed to deserve not to be forgotten. Sully appeared once more at court after his momentary retreat to the arsenal; but, in spite of the show of favor which Mary de’ Medici thought it prudent and decent to preserve towards him for some little time, he soon saw that it was no longer the place for him, and that he was of as little use there to the state as to himself; he sent in, one after the other, his resignation of all his important offices, and terminated his life in regular retirement at Rosny and Sully-sur-Loire. Du Plessis-Mornay attempted to still exercise a salutary influence over his party.
“Let there be no more talk amongst us,” said he, “of Huguenots or Papists; those words are prohibited by our edicts. And, though there were no edict at all, still if we are French, if we love our country, our families, and even ourselves, they ought henceforth to be wiped out of our remembrance. Whoso is a good Frenchman, shall to me be a citizen, shall to me be a brother.” This meritorious and patriotic language was not entirely without moral effect, but it no longer guided, no longer inspired the government; egotism, intrigue, and mediocrity in ideas as well as in feelings had taken the place of Henry IV. Facts, before long, made evident the sad result of this. All the parties, all the personages who walked the stage and considered themselves of some account, believed that the moment had arrived for pushing their pretensions, and lost no time about putting them forward. Those persons we will just pass in review without stopping at any one of them. History has no room for all those who throng about her gates without succeeding in getting in and leaving traces of their stay. The reformers were the party to which the reign of Henry IV. had brought most conquests, and which was bound to strive above everything to secure the possession of them by extracting from them every legitimate and practicable consequence. Mary de’ Medici, having been declared regent, lost no time about confirming, on the 22d of May, 1610, the edict of Nantes and proclaiming religious peace as the due of France. “We have nothing to do with the quarrels of the grandees,” said the people of Paris; “we have no mind to be mixed up with them.” Some of the preachers of repute and of the party’s old leaders used the same language. “There must be nought but a scarf any longer between us,” Du Plessis-Mornay would say. Two great Protestant names were still intact at this epoch: one, the Duke of Sully, without engaging in religious polemics, had persisted in abiding by the faith of his fathers, in spite of his king’s example and attempts to bring him over to the Catholic faith: the other, Du Plessis-Mornay, had always striven, and was continuing to strive, actively for the Protestant cause. These two illustrious champions of the Reformed party were in agreement with the new principles of national right, and with the intelligent instincts of their people, whose confidence they deserved and seemed to possess.
But the passions, the usages, and the suspicions of the party were not slow in reappearing. The Protestants were highly displeased to see the Catholic worship and practices re-established in Bearn, whence Queen Jeanne of Navarre had banished them; the rights of religious liberty were not yet powerful enough with them to surmount their taste for exclusive domination. As a guarantee for their safety, they had been put in possession of several strong places in France; neither the edict of Nantes nor its confirmation by Mary de’ Medici appeared to them a sufficient substitute for this guarantee; and they claimed its continuance, which was granted them for five years. After Henry IV.‘s conversion to Catholicism, his European policy had no longer been essentially Protestant; he had thrown out feelers and entered into negotiations for Catholic alliances; and these, when the king’s own liberal and patriotic spirit was no longer there to see that they did not sway his government, became objects of great suspicion and antipathy to the Protestants. Henry had constantly and to good purpose striven against the spirit of religious faction and civil war; anxious, after his death, about their liberty and their political importance, the Reformers reassumed a blind confidence in their own strength, and a hope of forming a small special state in the midst of the great national state. Their provincial assemblies and their national synods were, from 1611 to 1621, effective promoters of this tendency, which before long became a formal and organized design; at Saumur, at Tonneins, at Privas, at Grenoble, at Loudun, at La Rochelle, the language, the movements, and the acts of the party took more and more the character of armed resistance, and, ere long, of civil war; the leaders, old and new.
Duke Henry of Rohan as well as the Duke of Bouillon, the Marquis of La Force as well as the Duke of Lesdiguieres, more or less timidly urged on the zealous Protestants in that path from which the ancient counsels of Sully and Mornay were not successful in deterring them. On the 10th of May, 1621, in the assembly at La Rochelle, a commission of nine members was charged to present and get adopted a, plan of military organization whereby Protestant France, Warn included, was divided into eight circles, having each a special council composed of three deputies at the general assembly, under a chief who had the disposal of all the military forces; with each army-corps there was a minister to preach; the royal moneys, talliages, aid and gabel, were to be seized for the wants of the army; the property of the Catholic church was confiscated, and the revenues therefrom appropriated to the expenses of war and the pay of the ministers of the religion. It was a Protestant republic, organized on the model of the United Provinces, and disposed to act as regarded the French kingship with a large measure of independence. When, after thus preparing for war, they came to actually make it, the Protestants soon discovered their impotence; the Duke of Bouillon, sixty-five years of age and crippled with gout, interceded for them in his letters to Louis XIII., but did not go out of Sedan; the Duke of Lesdiguieres, to whom the assembly had given the command of the Protestants of Burgundy, Provence, and Dauphiny, was at that very moment on the point of abjuring their faith and marching with their enemies. Duke Henry of Rohan himself, who was the youngest, and seemed to be the most ardent, of their new chiefs, was for doing nothing and breaking up. “If you are not disposed to support the assembly,” said the Marquis of Chateauneuf, who had been sent to him to bring him to a decision, “it will be quite able to defend itself without you.” “If the assembly,” said Rohan, feeling his honor touched, “does take resolutions contrary to my advice, I shall not sever myself from the interest of our churches;” and he sacrificed his better judgment to the popular blindness. The Dukes of La Tremoille and of Soubise, and the Marquises of La Force and of Chatillon followed suit. As M. de Sismondi says, to these five lords and to a small number of towns was the strength reduced of the party which was defying the King of France.
Thus, since the death of Henry IV., the king and court of France were much changed: the great questions and the great personages had disappeared. The last of the real chiefs of the League, the brother of Duke Henry of Guise, the old Duke of Mayenne, he on whom Henry, in the hour of victory, would wreak no heavier vengeance than to walk him to a stand-still, was dead. Henry IV.‘s first wife, the sprightly and too facile Marguerite de Valois, was dead also, after consenting to descend from the throne in order to make way for the mediocre Mary de’ Medici. The Catholic champion whom Henry IV. felicitated himself upon being able to oppose to Du Plessis-Mornay in the polemical conferences between the two communions, Cardinal de Perron, was at the point of death. The decay was general, and the same amongst the Protestants as amongst the Catholics; Sully and Mornay held themselves aloof or were barely listened to. In place of these eminent personages had come intriguing or ambitious subordinates, who were either innocent of or indifferent to anything like a great policy, and who had no idea beyond themselves and their fortunes. The husband of Leonora Galigai, Concini, had amassed a great deal of money and purchased the Marquisate of Ancre; nay, more, he had been created Marshal of France, and he said to the Count of Bassompiere, “I have learned to know the world, and I am aware that a man, when he has arrived at a certain pitch of prosperity, comes down with a greater run the higher he has mounted. When I came to France, I was not worth a son, and I owed more than eight thousand crowns. My marriage and the queen’s kind favor has given me much advancement, office, and honor; I have worked at making my fortune, and I pushed it forward as long as I saw the wind favorable. So soon as I felt it turning, I thought about beating a retreat and enjoying in peace the large property we have acquired. It is my wife who is opposed to this desire. At every crack of the whip we receive from Fortune, I continue to urge her. God knows whether warnings have been wanting. My daughter’s death is the last, and, if we do not heed it, our downfall is at hand.” Then he quietly made out an abstract of all his property, amounting to eight millions, with which he purposed to buy from the pope the usufruct of the duchy of Ferrara, and leave his son, besides, a fine inheritance. But his wife continued her opposition; it would be cowardly and ungrateful, she said, to abandon the queen: “So that,” cried he, “I see myself ruined without any help for it; and, if it were not that I am under so much obligation to my wife, I would leave her and go some whither where neither grandees nor common folk would come to look after me.”
This modest style of language did not prevent Marshal d’Ancre from occasionally having strange fits of domineering arrogance. “By God, sir,” he wrote to one of his friends, “I have to complain of you; you treat for peace without me; you have caused the queen to write to me that, for her sake, I must give up the suit I had commenced against M. de Montbazon to get paid what he owes me. In all the devils’ names, what do the queen and you take me for? I am devoured to my very bones with rage.” In his dread lest influence opposed to his own should be exercised over the young king, he took upon himself to regulate his amusements and his walks, and prohibited him from leaving Paris. Louis XIII. had amongst his personal attendants a young nobleman, Albert de Luynes, clever in training little sporting birds, called butcher-birds (pies grieches, or shrikes), then all the rage; and the king made him his falconer and lived on familiar terms with him. Playing at billiards one day, Marshal d’Ancre, putting on his hat, said to the king, “I hope your Majesty will allow me to be covered.” The king allowed it, but remained surprised and shocked. His young page, Albert de Luynes, observed his displeasure, and being anxious, himself also, to become a favorite, he took pains to fan it.
A domestic plot was set hatching against Marshal d’Ancre. What was its extent and who were the accomplices in it? This is not clear. However it may have been, on the 24th of April, 1617, M. de Vitry, captain of the guard (capitaine de quartier) that day in the royal army which was besieging Soissons, ordered some of his officers to provide themselves with a pistol each in their pockets, and he himself went to that door of the Louvre by which the king would have to go to the queenmother’s. When Marshal d’Ancre arrived at this door, “There is the marshal,” said one of the officers; and Vitry laid hands upon him, saying, “Marshal, I have the king’s orders to arrest you.” “Me!” said the marshal in surprise, and attempting to resist.
The officer fired upon him, and so did several others. It was never known, or, at any rate, never told, whose shot it was that hit him; but, “Sir,” said Colonel d’Ornano, going up to the young king, “you are this minute King of France: Marshal d’Ancre is dead.” And the young king, before the assembled court, repeated with the same tone of satisfaction, “Marshal d’Ancre is dead.” Baron de Vitry was appointed Marshal of France in the room of the favorite whom he had just murdered. The day after the murder, the mob rushed into the church of St. German-l’Auxerrois, where the body of Marshal d’Ancre had been interred; they heaved up the slabs, hauled the body from the ground, dragged it over the pavement as far as the Pont-Neuf, where they hanged it by the feet to a gallows; and they afterwards tore it in pieces, which were sold, burned, and thrown into the Seine. The ferocious passions of the populace were satisfied; but court-hatred and court-envy were not; they attacked the marshal’s widow, Leonora Galigai. She resided at the Louvre, and, at the first rumor of what had happened, she had sent to demand asylum with the queen-mother. Meeting with a harsh refusal, she had undressed herself in order to protect with her body her jewels which she had concealed in her mattresses. The moment she was discovered, she was taken to the Bastille and brought before the Parliament. She began by throwing all the blame upon her husband; it was he, she said, who had prevented her from retiring into Italy, and who had made every attempt to push his fortunes farther. When she was sentenced to death, Leonora recovered her courage and pride. “Never,” said a contemporary, “was anybody seen of more constant and resolute visage.” “What a lot of people to look at one poor creature!” said she at sight of the crowd that thronged upon her passage. There is nothing to show that her firmness at the last earned her more of sympathy than her weaknesses had brought her of compassion. The mob has its seasons of pitilessness. Leonora Galigai died leaving one child, a son, who was so maltreated that he persisted in refusing all food, and, at last, would take nothing but the sweetmeats that the young queen, Anne of Austria, married two years before to Louis XIII., had the kindness to send him.
We encounter in this very insignificant circumstance a trace of one of those important events which marked the earliest years of Mary de’ Medici’s regency and the influence of her earliest favorites. Concini and his wife, both of them, probably, in the secret service of the court of Madrid, had promoted the marriage of Louis XIII. with the Infanta Anne of Austria, eldest daughter of Philip III., King of Spain, and that of Philip, Infante of Spain, who was afterwards Philip IV., with Princess Elizabeth of France, sister of Louis XIII. Henry IV., in his plan for the pacification of Europe, had himself conceived this idea, and testified a desire for this double marriage, but without taking any trouble to bring it about. It was after his death that, on the 30th of April, 1612, Villeroi, minister of foreign affairs in France, and Don Inigo de Caderiias, ambassador of the King of Spain, concluded this double union by a formal deed. They signed on the same day, at Fontainebleau, between the King and Queen-regent of France on one side and the King, of Spain on the other, a treaty of defensive alliance to the effect “that those sovereigns should give one another mutual succor against such as should attempt anything against their kingdoms or revolt against their authority; that they should, in such case, send one to the other, at their own expense for six months, a body of six thousand foot and twelve hundred horse; that they should not assist any criminal charged with high treason, and should even give them over into the hands of the ambassadors of the king who claimed them.” It is quite certain that Henry IV. would never have let his hands be thus tied by a treaty so contrary to his general policy of alliance with Protestant powers, such as England and the United Provinces; he had no notion of servile subjection to his own policy, but he would have taken good care not to abandon it; he was of those, who, under delicate circumstances, remain faithful to their ideas and promises without systematic obstinacy and with a due regard for the varying interests and requirements of their country and their age. The two Spanish marriages were regarded in France as an abandonment of the national policy; France was, in a great majority, Catholic, but its Catholicism differed essentially from the Spanish Catholicism: it affirmed the entire separation of the temporal power and the spiritual power, and the inviolability of the former by the latter; it refused assent, moreover, to certain articles of the council of Trent. It was Gallican Catholicism, determined to keep a pretty large measure of national independence, political and moral, as opposed to Spanish Catholicism, essentially devoted to the cause of the papacy and of absolutist Austria. Under the influence of this public feeling, the two Spanish marriages and the treaty which accompanied them were unfavorably regarded by a great part of France: a remedy was desired; it was hoped that one would be found in the convocation of the states-general of the kingdom, to which the populace always looked expectantly; they were convoked first for the 16th of September, 1614, at Sens; and, afterwards, for the 20th of October following, when the young king, Louis XIII., after the announcement of his majority, himself opened them in state. Amongst the members there were one hundred and forty of the clergy, one hundred and thirty-two of the noblesse, and one hundred and ninety-two of the third estate. The clergy elected for their president Cardinal de Joyeuse who had crowned Mary de’ Medici; the noblesse Henry de Bauffremont, Baron of Senecey, and the third estate Robert Miron, provost of the tradesmen of Paris.
These elections were not worth much, and have left no trace on history. The chief political fact connected with the convocation of the, states-general of 1614, was the entry into their ranks of the youthful Bishop of Lucon, Armand John dot Plessis de Richelieu, marked out by the finger of God to sustain, after the powerful reign of Henry IV. and the incapable regency of Mary de’ Medici, the weight of the government of France. He was in, two cases elected to the states-general, by the clergy of Loudun and by that of Poitou. As he was born on the 5th of September, 1585, he was but twenty-eight years old in 1614. He had not been destined for the church, and he was pursuing a layman’s course of study at the college of Navarre, under the name of the Marquis de Chillon, when his elder brother, Alphonse Louis du Plessis de Richelieu, became disgusted with ecclesiastical life, turned Carthusian, and resigned the unpretending bishopric of Lucon in favor of his brother Armand, whom Henry IV. nominated to it in 1605, instructing Cardinal du Perron, at that time his charge d’affaires at Rome, to recommend to Pope Paul V. that election which he had very much at heart. The young prelate betook himself with so much ardor to his theological studies, that at twenty years of age he was a doctor, and maintained his theses in rochet and camail as bishop-nominate. At Rome some objection was still made to his extreme youth; but he hastened thither, and delivered before the pope a Latin harangue, which scattered all objections to the wind. After consecration at Rome, in 1607, he returned to Paris, and hastened to take possession of his see of Lucon, “the poorest and the nastiest in France,” as he himself said. He could support poverty, but he also set great store by riches, and he was seriously anxious for the expenses of his installation. “Taking after you, that is, being a little vain,” he wrote to one of his fair friends, Madame de Bourges, with whom he was on terms of familiar correspondence about his affairs, “I should very much like, being more easy in my circumstances, to make more show: but what can I do? No house; no carriage; furnished apartments are inconvenient; I must borrow a coach, horses, and a coachman, in order to at least arrive at Lucon with a decent turn-out.” He purchased second-hand the velvet bed of one Madame de Marconnay, his aunt; he made for himself a muff out of a portion of his uncle the Commander’s martenskins. Silver-plate he was very much concerned about. “I beg you,” he wrote to Madame de Bourges, “to send me word what will be the cost of two dozen silver dishes of fair size, as they are made now; I should very much like to get them for five hundred crowns, for my resources are not great. I am quite sure that for a matter of a hundred crowns more, you would not like me to have anything common. I am a beggar, as you know; in such sort that I cannot do much in the way of playing the opulent; but at any rate, when I have silver dishes, my nobility will be considerably enhanced.”
He succeeded, no doubt, in getting his silver dishes and his well-appointed episcopal mansion; for when, in 1614, he was elected to the states-general, he had acquired amongst the clergy and at the court of Louis XIII. sufficient importance to be charged with the duty of speaking, in presence of the king, on the acceptance of the acts of the council of Trent, and on the restitution of certain property belonging to the Catholic church in Warn. He made skilful use of the occasion for the purpose of still further exalting and improving the question and his own position. He complained that for a long time past ecclesiastics had been too rarely summoned to the sovereign’s councils, “as if the honor of serving God,” he said, “rendered them incapable of serving the king;” he took care at the same time to make himself pleasant to the mighty ones of the hour; he praised the young king for having, on announcing his majority, asked his mother to continue to watch over France, and “to add to the august title of mother of the king that of mother of the kingdom.” The post of almoner to the queen-regnant, Anne of Austria, was his reward. He carried still further his ambitious foresight; in February, 1615, at the time when the session of the states-general closed, Marshal d’Ancre and Leonora Galigai were still favorites with the queen-mother; Richelieu laid himself out to be pleasant to them, and received from the marshal in 1616 the post of secretary of state for war and foreign affairs. Marshal d’Ancre was at that time looking out for supports against his imminent downfall. When, in 1617, he fell and was massacred, people were astonished to find Richelieu on good terms with the marshal’s court-rival Albert de Luynes, who pressed him to remain in the council at which he had sat for only five months. To what extent was the Bishop of Lucon at that time on terms of understanding with the victor? There is no saying; but to accept the responsibility of the new favorite’s accession was a compromising act. Richelieu judged it more prudent to remain Bishop of Lucon and to wear the appearance of defeat by following Mary de’ Medici to Blois, whither, since the fall of her favorites, she had asked leave to retire. He would there, he said, be more useful to the government of the young king; for, remaining at the side of Mary de’ Medici, he would be able to advise her and restrain her. He so completely persuaded Louis XIII. and Albert de Luynes, that he received orders to set out for Blois with the queen-mother, which he did on the 4th of May, 1617. The Bishop of Lucon, though still young, was already one of the ambitious sort who stake their dignity upon the ultimate success of their fortunes, success gained no matter at what price, by address or by hardihood, by complaisance or by opposition, according to the requirements of facts and times. Dignity apart, the young bishop had accurately measured the expediency of the step he was taking in the interest of his future, high-soaring ambition.
On arriving at Blois with the queen-mother, he began by dividing his life between that petty court in disgrace and his diocese of Lucon. He wished to set Albert de Luynes at rest as to his presence at the court of Mary de’ Medici, the devotion he showed her, and the counsels he gave her. He had but small success, however. The new favorite was suspicious and anxious. Richelieu appeared to be occupied with nothing but the duties of his office; he presided at conferences; and he published, against the Protestants, a treatise entitled The Complete Christian (De la Perfection du Chretien). Luynes was not disposed to believe in these exclusively religious preoccupations; he urged upon the king that Richelieu should not live constantly in the queen-mother’s neighborhood, and in June, 1617, he had orders given him to retire to the courtship of Avignon. Pope Paul V. complained that the Bishop of Lucon was exiled from his diocese. “What is to be done about residence,” said he, “which is due to his bishopric? and what will the world say at seeing him prohibited from going whither his duty binds him to go?” The king answered that he was surprised at the pope’s complaint. “An ecclesiastic,” said he, “could not possibly be in any better place than Avignon, church territory; my lord the Bishop of Lucon is far from finding time for nothing but the exercises of his profession; I have discovered that he indulged in practices prejudicial to my service. He is one of those spirits that are carried away far beyond their duty, and are very dangerous in times of public disorder.”
Richelieu obeyed without making any objection; he passed two years at Avignon, protesting that he would never depart from it without the consent of Luynes and without the hope of serving him. The favor and fortune of the young falconer went on increasing every day. He had, in 1617, married the daughter of the Duke of Montbazon, and, in 1619, prevailed upon the king to have the estate of Maille raised for him to a duchy-peerage under the title of Luynes. In 1621 he procured for himself the dignity of constable, to which he had no military claim. Louis XIII. sometimes took a malicious pleasure in making fun of his favorite’s cupidity and that of his following. “I never saw,” said he, “one person with so many relatives; they come to court by ship-loads, and not a single one of them with a silk dress.” “See,” said he one day to the Count of Bassompierre, pointing to Luynes surrounded by a numerous following: “he wants to play the king, but I shall know how to prevent it; I will make him disgorge what he has taken from me.” Friends at court warned Luynes of this language; and Luynes replied with a somewhat disdainful impertinence, “It is good for me to cause the king a little vexation from time to time: it revives the affection he feels for me.” Richelieu kept himself well informed of court-rumors, and was cautious not to treat them with indifference. He took great pains to make himself pleasant to the young constable. “My lord,” he wrote to him in August, 1621, “I am extremely pleased to have an opportunity of testifying to you, that I shall never have any possession that I shall not be most happy to employ for the satisfaction of the king and yourself. The queen did me the honor of desiring that I should have the abbey of Redon; but the moment I knew that the king and you, my lord, were desirous of disposing of it otherwise, I gave it up with very good cheer, in order that being in your hands you might gratify therewith whomsoever you pleased; assuring you, my lord, that I have more contentment in testifying to you thereby that which you will on every occasion recognize in me, than I should have had by an augmentation of four thousand crowns’ income. The queen is very well, thank God. I think it will be very meet that from time to time, by means of those who are passing, you should send her news of the king and of you and yours, which will give her great satisfaction “ (Letters of Cardinal Richelieu, t. i. p. 690).
Whilst Richelieu was thus behaving towards the favorite with complaisance and modesty, Mary de’ Medici, whose mouthpiece he appeared to be, assumed a different posture, and used different language; she complained bitterly of the slavery and want of money to which she was reduced at Blois; a plot, on the part of both aristocrats and domestics, were contrived by those about her to extricate her; she entered into secret relations with a great, a turbulent, and a malcontent lord, the Duke of Epernon; two Florentine servants, Ruccellai and Vincenti Ludovici, were their go-betweens; and it was agreed that she should escape from Blois and take refuge at Angouleme, a lordship belonging to the Duke of Epernon. She at the same time wrote to the king to plead for more liberty. He replied, “Madame, having understood that you have a wish to visit certain places of devotion, I am rejoiced thereat. I shall be still more pleased if you take a resolution to move about and travel henceforward more than you have done in the past; I consider that it will be of great service to your health, which is extremely precious to me. If business permitted me to be of the party, I would accompany you with all my heart.” Mary replied to him with formal assurances of fidelity and obedience; she promised before God and His angels “to have no correspondence which could be prejudicial to the king’s service, to warn him of all intrigues, which should come to her knowledge, that were opposed to his will, and to entertain no design of returning to court save when it should please the king to give her orders to do so.” There was between the king, the queen-mother, Albert de Luynes, the Duke of Epernon and their agents, an exchange of letters and empty promises which deceived scarcely anybody, and which destroyed all confidence as well as all truthfulness between them. The Duke of Epernon protested that he had no idea of disobeying the king’s commands, but that he thought his presence was more necessary for the king’s service in Angoumois than at Metz. He complained at the same time that for two years past he had received from the court only the simple pay of a colonel at ten months for the year, which took it out of his power to live suitably to his rank. He set out for Metz at the end of January, 1619, saying, “I am going to take the boldest step I ever took in my life.”
The queen-mother made her exit from Blois on the night between the 21st and 22d of February, 1619, by her closet window, against which a ladder had been placed for the descent to the terrace, whence a second ladder was to enable her to descend right down. On arriving at the terrace she found herself so fatigued and so agitated, that she declared it would be impossible to avail herself of the second ladder; she preferred to have herself let down upon a cloak to the bottom of the terrace, which had a slight slant. Her two equeries escorted her along the faubourg to the end of the bridge. Some officers of her household saw her pass without recognizing her, and laughed at meeting a woman between two men, at night and with a somewhat agitated air. “They take me for a bona roba,” said the queen. On arriving at the end of the faubourg of Blois, she did not find her carriage, which was to have been waiting for her there. When she had come up with it, there was a casket missing which contained her jewels; there was a hundred thousand crowns’ worth in it; the casket had fallen out two hundred paces from the spot; it was recovered, and the queen-mother got into her carriage and took the road to Loches, where the Duke of Epernon had been waiting for her since the day before. He came to meet her with a hundred and fifty horsemen. Nobody in the household of Mary de’Medici had observed her departure.
Great was the rumors when her escape became known, and greater still when it was learned in whose hands she had placed herself. It was civil war, said everybody. At the commencement of the seventeenth century, there were still two possible and even probable chances of civil war in France; one between Catholics and Protestants, and the other between what remained of the great feudal or quasi-feudal lords and the kingship. Which of the two wars was about to commence? Nobody knew; on one side there was hesitation; the most contradictory moves were made. Louis XIII., when he heard of his mother’s escape, tried first of all to disconnect her from the Duke of Epernon. “I could never have imagined,” said be, “that there was any man who, in time of perfect peace, would have had the audacity, I do not say to carry out, but to conceive the resolution of making an attempt upon the mother of his king . . . ; in order to release you from the difficulty you are in, Madame, I have determined to take up arms to put you in possession of the liberty of which your enemies have deprived you.” And he marched troops and cannon to Angoumois. “Many men,” says Duke Henry of Rohan, “envied the Duke of Epernon his gallant deed, but few were willing to submit themselves to his haughty temper, and everybody, having reason to believe that it would all end in a peace, was careful not to embark in the affair merely to incur the king’s hatred, and leave to others the honors of the enterprise.” The king’s troops were well received wherever they showed themselves; the towns opened their gates to them. “It needs,” said a contemporary, “mighty strong citadels to make the towns of France obey their governors when they see the latter disobedient to the king’s. will.” Several great lords held themselves carefully aloof; others determined to attempt an arrangement between the king and his mother; it was known what influence over her continued to be preserved by the Bishop of Lucon, still in exile at Avignon; he was pressed to return; his confidant, Father Joseph du Tremblay, was of opinion that he should; and Richelieu, accordingly, set out. The governor of Lyons had him arrested at Vienne in Dauphiny, and was much surprised to find him armed with a letter from the king, commanding that he should be allowed to pass freely everywhere. Richelieu was prepared to advise a reconciliation between king and queen-mother, and the king was as much disposed to exert himself to that end as the queen-mother’s friends. At Limoges the Bishop of Lucon was obliged to carefully avoid Count Schomberg, commandant of the royal troops, who was not at all in the secret of the negotiation. When he arrived at Angers a fresh difficulty supervened. The most daring, of the queen-mother’s domestic advisers, Ruccellai, had conceived a hatred of the bishop, and tried to exclude him from the privy council. Richelieu let be, “Certain,” as he said, “that they would soon fall back upon him.” He was one of the patient as well as ambitious, who can calculate upon success, even afar off, and wait for it. The Duke of Epernon supported him; Ruccellai, defeated, left the queen-mother, taking with him some of her most warmly attached servants. When the subordinates were gone, recourse was had, accordingly, to Richelieu. On the 10th of August, 1619, he concluded at Angouleme between the king and his mother a treaty, whereby the king promised to consign to oblivion all that had passed since Blois; the queen-mother consented to exchange her government of Touraine against that of Anjou; and the Duke of Epernon received from the town of Boulogne fifty thousand crowns in recompense for what he had done, and he wrote to the king to protest his fidelity. The queen-mother still hesitated to see her son; but, at his entreaty, she at last sent off the Bishop of Lucon from Angouleme to make preparations for the interview, and, five days afterwards, she set out herself, accompanied by the Duke of Epernon, who halted at the limits of his own government, not caring to come to any closer quarters with so recently reconciled a court. The king received his mother, according to some, in the little town of Cousieres, and, according to others, at Tours or Amboise. They embraced, with tears. “God bless me, my boy, how you are grown!” said the queen. “In order to be of more service to you, mother,” answered the king. The cheers of the people hailed their reconciliation; not without certain signs of disquietude on the part of the favorite, Albert de Luynes, who was an eye-witness. After the interview, the king set out for Paris again; and Mary de’ Medici returned to her government of Anjou to take possession of it, promising, she said, to rejoin her son subsequently at Paris. Du Plessis-Mornay wrote to one of his friends at court, “If you do not get the queen along with you, you have done nothing at all; distrust will increase with absence; the malcontents will multiply; and the honest servants of the king will have no little difficulty in managing to live between them.”
How to live between mother and son without being committed to one or the other, was indeed the question. A difficult task. For three months the courtiers were equal to it; from May to July, 1619, the court and the government were split in two; the king at Paris or at Tours, the queen-mother at Angers or at Blois. Two eminent men, Richelieu amongst the Catholics and Du Plessis-Mornay amongst the Protestants, advised them strongly and incessantly to unite again, to live and to govern together. “Apply yourself to winning the king’s good graces,” said Richelieu to the queen-mother: “support on every occasion the interests of the public without speaking of your own; take the side of equity against that of favor, without attacking the favorites and without appearing to envy their influence.” Mornay used the same language to the Protestants. “Do not wear out the king’s patience,” he said to them: “there is no patience without limits.” Louis XIII. listened to them without allowing himself to be persuaded by them; the warlike spirit was striving within the young man; he was brave, and loved war as war rather than for political reasons. The grand provost of Normandy was advising him one day not to venture in person into his province, saying, “You will find there nothing but revolt and disagreeables.” “Though the roads were all paved with arms,” answered the king, “I would march over the bellies of my foes, for they have no cause to declare against me, who have offended nobody. You shall have the pleasure of seeing it; you served the late king my father too well not to rejoice at it.” The queenmother, on her side, was delighted to see herself surrounded at Angers by a brilliant court; and the Dukes of Longueville, of La Tremoille, of Retz, of Rohan, of Mayenne, of Epernon, and of Nemours, promised her numerous troops and effectual support. She might, nevertheless, have found many reasons to doubt and wait for proofs. The king moved upon Normandy; and his quartermasters came to assign quarters at Rouen. “Where have you left the king?” asked the Duke of Longueville. “At Pontoise, my lord; but he is by this time far advanced, and is to sleep to-night at Magny.” “Where do you mean to quarter him here?” asked the duke. “In the house where you are, my lord.” “It is right that I yield him place,” said the duke, and the very same evening took the road back to the district of Caux. It was under this aspect of public feeling that an embassy from the king and a pacific mission from Rome came, without any success, to Rangers, and that on the 4th of July, 1619, a fresh civil war between the king and the partisans of the queen-mother was declared.
It was short and not very bloody, though pretty vigorously contested. The two armies met at Ponts de Ce; they had not, either of them, any orders or any desire to fight; and pacific negotiations were opened at La Fleche. The queen-mother declared that she had made up her mind to live henceforth at her son’s court, and that all she desired was to leave honorably the party with which she was engaged. That was precisely the difficulty. The king also declared himself resolved to receive his mother affectionately; but he required her to abandon the lords of her party, and that was what she could not make up her mind to do. In the unpremeditated conflict that took place at Ponts de Ce, the troops of the queen-mother were beaten. “They had two hundred men killed or drowned,” says Bassompierre, “and about as many taken prisoners.” This reverse silenced the queen’s scruples; there was clearly no imperative cause for war between her and the king, and the queen’s partisans could not be blind to the fact that, if the struggle were prolonged, they would be beaten.
The kingship had the upper hand in the country, and a consent was given to the desired arrangements. “Assure the king that I will go and see him to-morrow at Brissac,” said the queen-mother. “I am perfectly satisfied with him, and all I think of is to please him, and pray God for him personally, and for the prosperity of his kingdom.” A treaty was concluded at Angers on the 10th of August, 1620; the queen-mother returned to Paris; and the civil war at court was evidently, not put an end to never to recur, but stricken with feebleness and postponed.
Two men of mark, Albert de Luynes and Richelieu, came out of this crisis well content. The favorite felicitated himself on the king’s victory over the queen-mother, for he might consider the triumph as his own; he had advised and supported the king’s steady resistance to his mother’s enterprises. Besides, he had gained by it the rank and power of constable; it was at this period that he obtained them, thanks to the retirement of Lesdiguieres, who gave them up to assume the title of marshal-general of the king’s camps and armies. The royal favor did not stop there for Luynes; the keeper of the seals, Du Vair, died in 1621; and the king handed over the seals to the new constable, who thus united the military authority with that of justice, without being either a great warrior or a great lawyer. All he had to do was to wait for an opportunity of displaying his double power. The defaults of the French Protestants soon supplied one. In July, 1567, Henry IV.‘s mother, Jeanne d’Albret, on becoming Queen of Navarre, had, at the demand of the Estates of Bearn, proclaimed Calvinism as the sole religion of her petty kingdom; all Catholic worship was expressly forbidden there; religious liberty, which Protestants everywhere invoked, was proscribed in Bearn; moreover, ecclesiastical property was confiscated there. The Catholics complained, loudly; the Kings of France were supporters of their plaint; it had been for a long time past repudiated or eluded; but on the 13th of August, 1620, Louis XIII. issued two edicts for the purpose of restoring in Bearn free Catholic worship, and making restitution of their property to the ecclesiastical establishments. The council of Pau, which had at first repudiated them, hastened to enregister these edicts in the hope of retarding at least their execution; but the king said, “In two days I shall be at Pau; you want me there to assist your weakness.” He was asked how he would be received at Pau. “As sovereign of Warn,” said he. “I will dismount first of all at the church, if there be one; but, if not, I want no canopy or ceremonial entry; it would not become me to receive honors in a place where I have never been, before giving thanks to God, from whom I hold all my dominions and all my power.” Religious liberty was thus reestablished at Pau. “It is the king’s intention,” said the Duke of Montmorency to the Protestants of Villeneuve-de-Berg, who asked that they might enjoy the liberty promised them by the edicts, “that all his subjects, Catholic or Protestant, be equally free in the exercise of their religion; you shall not be hindered in yours, and I will take good care that you do not hinder the Catholics in theirs.” The Duke of Montmorency did not foresee that the son and successor of the king in whose name he was so energetically proclaiming religious liberty, Louis XIV., would abolish the edict of Nantes whereby his grandfather, Henry IV., had founded it. Justice and iniquity are often all but contemporary.
It has just been said that not only Luynes, but Richelieu too, had come well content out of the crisis brought about by the struggle between Louis XIII. and the queen-mother. Richelieu’s satisfaction was neither so keen nor so speedy as the favorite’s. Pope Paul V. had announced, for the 11th of January, 1621, a promotion of ten cardinals. At the news of this, the queen-mother sent an express courier to Rome with an urgent demand that the Bishop of Lucon should be included in the promotion. The Marquis of Coeuvres, ambassador of France at Rome, insisted rather strongly, in the name of the queen-mother and of the Duke of Luynes, from whom he showed the pope some very pressing letters. The pope, in surprise, gave him a letter to read in the handwriting of King Louis XIII., saying that he did not at all wish the Bishop of Lucon to become cardinal, and begging that no notice might be taken of any recommendations which should be forwarded on the subject. The ambassador, greatly surprised in his turn, ceased to insist. It was evidently the doing of the Duke of Luynes, who, jealous of the Bishop of Lucon and dreading his influence, had demanded and obtained from the king this secret measure. It was effectual; and, at the beginning of the year 1621, Richelieu had but a vague hope of the hat. He had no idea, when he heard of this check, that at the end of a few months Luynes would undergo one graver still, would die almost instantaneously after having practised a policy analogous to that which Richelieu was himself projecting, and would leave the road open for him to obtain the cardinal’s hat, and once more enter into the councils of the king, who, however, said to the queen-mother, “I know him better than you, madame; he is a man of unbounded ambition.”
The two victories won in 1620 by the Duke of Luynes, one over the Protestants by the re-establishment in Warn of free worship for the Catholics, and the other over his secret rival Richelieu, by preventing him from becoming cardinal, had inspired him with great confidence in his good fortune. He resolved to push it with more boldness than he had yet shown. He purposed to subdue the Protestants as a political party whilst respecting their religious creed, and to reduce them to a condition of subjection in the state whilst leaving them free, as Christians, in the church. A fundamentally contradictory problem; for the different liberties are closely connected, one with another, and have need to be security one for another; but, at the commencement of the seventeenth century, people were not so particular in point of consequence, and it was thought possible to give religious liberty its guarantees whilst refusing them to general political liberty. That is what the Duke of Luynes attempted to do; to all the towns to which Henry IV. had bound himself by the edict of Nantes, he made a promise of preserving to them their religious liberties, and he called upon them at the same time to remain submissive and faithful subjects of the sovereign kingship. La Rochelle, Montauban, Saumur, Sancerre, Charite-sur-Loire, and St. Jean d’Angely were in this category; and it was to Montauban, as one of the most important of those towns, that Louis XIII. first addressed his promise and his appeal, inconsistent one with the other.
Some years previously, in May, 1610, amidst the grief and anxiety awakened by the assassination of Henry IV. by Ravaillac, the population of Montauban had maintained and testified a pacific and moderate disposition. The synod was in assembly when the news of the king’s death arrived there. We read in the report of the town-council, under date of May 19, 1610,
“The ecclesiastics (Catholic) having come to the council, the consuls gave them every assurance for their persons and property, and took them under the protection and safeguard of the king and the town, without suffering or permitting any hurt, wrong, or displeasure to be done them. . . . The ecclesiastics thanked them, and protested their desire to live and die in that town, as good townsmen and servants of the king . .” On the 22d of May, in a larger council-general, the council gives notice to the Parliament of Toulouse that everything shall remain peaceable. . . . Consul Beraud moves that “every one take forthwith the oath of fidelity we owe to his Majesty, and that every one also testify, by acclamation, his wishes and desires for the prosperity and duration of his reign.”
Ten years later, in 1620, the disposition of the Protestants was very much changed; distrust and irritation had once more entered into their hearts. Henry IV. was no longer there to appease them or hold them in. The restoration of the freedom of Catholic worship in Warn had alarmed and offended them as a violation of their own exclusive right proclaimed by Jeanne d’Albret. In January, 1621, during an assembly held at La Rochelle, they exclaimed violently against what they called “the woes experienced by their brethren of Warn.” Louis XIII. considered their remonstrances too arrogant to be tolerated. On the 24th of April, 1621, by a formal declaration, he confirmed all the edicts issued in favor of the liberty of Protestants, but with a further announcement that he would put down with all the rigor of the laws those who did not remain submissive and tranquil in the enjoyment of their own rights. This measure produced amongst the Protestants a violent schism. Some submitted, and their chiefs gave up to the king the places they commanded. On the 10th of May, 1621, Saumur opened her gates to him. Others, more hot-tempered and more obstinate, persisted in their remonstrances. La Rochelle, Montauban, and St. Jean d’Angely took that side. Duke Henry of Rohan and the Duke of Soubise, his brother, supported them in their resistance. Rohan went to Montauban, and, mounting into the pulpit, said to the assembly, “I will not conceal from you that the most certain conjecture which can be formed from the current news is, that in a short time the royal army will camp around your walls, since St. Jean d’Angely is surrendered, and all that remains up to here is weakened, broken down, and ready to receive the yoke, through the factions of certain evil spirits. I have no fear lest the consternation and cowardice of the rest should reach by contagion to you. In days past you swore in my presence the union of the churches. Of a surety we will get peace restored to you here. I pray you to have confidence in me, that on this occasion I will not desert you, whatever happen. Though there should be but two men left of my religion, I will be one of the two. My houses and my revenues are seized, because I would not bow beneath the proclamation. I have my sword and my life left. Three stout hearts are better than thirty that quail.”
The whole assembly vehemently cheered this fiery speech. The premier consul of Montauban, Dupuy, swore to live and die in the cause of union of the churches. “The Duke of Rohan exerted himself to place Montauban in a position to oppose a vigorous resistance to the royal troops. Consul Dupuy, for his part, was at the same time collecting munitions and victuals.” It was announced that the king’s army was advancing; and reports were spread, with the usual exaggeration, of the deeds of violence it was already committing. At the news thereof, every nerve is strained to advance the fortifications “there is none that shirks, of whatever age, or sex, or condition; every other occupation ceases; night serves to render the day’s work bigger; the inhabitants are all a-sweat, soiled with dust, laden with earth.” Whilst the multitude was thus working pell-mell to put the town substantially in a state of defence, the warlike population, gentlemen and burgesses, were arming and organizing for the struggle. They had chosen for their chief a younger son of Sully’s, Baron d’Orval, devoted to the Protestant cause, even to the extent of rebellion, whilst his elder brother, the Marquis of Rosny, was serving in the royal army. Their aged father, Sully, went to Montauban to counsel peace; not that he exactly blamed the resistance, but he said that it would be vain, and that a peace on good terms was possible. He was listened to with respect, though he was not believed, and though the struggle was all the while persisted in. The royal army, with a strength of twenty thousand men, and commanded by the young Duke of Mayenne, son of the great Leaguer, came up on the 18th of August, 1621, to besiege Montauban, with its population of from fifteen thousand to twenty thousand. Besiegers and besieged were all of them brave; the former the more obstinate, the latter the more hare-brained and rash. The siege lasted two months and a half with alternate successes and reverses. The people of the town were directed and supported by commissions charged with the duty of collecting meal, preparing quarters for the troops, looking after the sick and wounded, and distributing ammunition. “Day and night, from hour to hour, one of the consuls went to inspect these services. All was done without confusion, without a murmur.” Ministers of the Reformed church, to the number of thirteen, were charged to keep up the enthusiasm with chants, psalms, and prayers. One of them, the pastor Chamier, was animated by a zealous and bellicose fanaticism; he was never tired of calling to mind the calamities undergone by the towns that had submitted to the royal army; he was incessantly comparing Montauban to Bethulia, Louis XIII. to Nabuchodonosor, the Duke of Mayenne to Holofernes, the Montalbanese to the people of God, and the Catholics to the Assyrians. The indecision and diversity of views in the royal camp formed a singular contrast to the firm resolution, enthusiasm, and union which prevailed in the town. On the 16th and 17th of August the king passed his army in review; several captains were urgent in dissuading him from prosecuting the siege; they proposed to build forts around Montauban, and leave there the Duke of Mayenne “to harass the inhabitants, make them consume both their gunpowder and their tooth-powder, and, peradventure, bring them to a composition.” But the self-respect of the king and of the army was compromised; the Duke of Luynes ardently desired to change his name for that of Duke of Montauban; there was promise of help from the Prince of Conde and the Duke of Vendome, who were commanding, one in Berry and the other in Brittany. These personal interests and sentiments carried the day; the siege was pushed forward with ardor, although without combined effort; the Duke of Mayenne was killed there on the 16th of September, 1621; and, amongst the insurgents, the preacher Chamier met, on the 17th of October, the same fate. It was in the royal army and the government that fatigue and the desire of putting a stop to a struggle so costly and of such doubtful issue first began to be manifested. And, at the outset, in the form of attempts at negotiation. The Duke of Luynes himself had a proposal made to the Duke of Rohan, who was in residence at Castres, for an interview, which Rohan accepted, notwithstanding the mistrust of the people of Castres, and of the majority of his friends. The conference was held at a league’s distance from Montauban. After the proper compliments, Luynes drew Rohan aside into an alley alone, and, “I thank you,” he said, “for having put trust in me; you shall not find it misplaced; your safety is as great here as in Castres. Having become connected with you, I desire your welfare; but you deprived me, whilst my favor lasted, of the means of procuring the greatness of your house. You have succored Montauban in the very teeth of your king. It is a great feather in your cap; but you must not make too much of it. It is time to act for yourself and your friends. The king will make no general peace; treat for them who acknowledge you. Represent to them of Montauban that their ruin is but deferred for a few days; that you have no means of helping them. For Castres and other places in your department, ask what you will, and you shall obtain it. For your own self, anything you please (carte blanche) is offered you. . . . If you will believe me, you will get out of this miserable business with glory, with the good graces of the king, and with what you desire for your own fortunes, which I am anxious to promote so as to be a support to mine.”
Rohan replied, “I should be my own enemy if I did not desire my king’s good graces and your friendship. I will never refuse from my king benefits and honors, or from you the offices of a kind connection. I do well consider the peril in which I stand; but I beg you also to look at yours. You are universally hated, because you alone possess what everybody desires. Wars against them of the religion have often commenced with great disadvantages for them; but the restlessness of the French spirit, the discontent of those not in the government, and the influence of foreigners have often retrieved them. If you manage to make the king grant us peace, it will be to his great honor and advantage, for, after having humbled the party, without having received any check, and without any appearance of division within or assistance from without, he will have shown that he is not set against the religion, but only against the disobedience it covers, and he will break the neck of other parties without having met with anything disagreeable. But, if you push things to extremity, and the torrent of your successes does not continue,—and you are on the eve of seeing it stopped in front of Montauban,—every one will recover his as yet flurried senses, and will give you a difficult business to unravel. Bethink you that you have gathered in the harvest of all that promises mingled with threats could enable you to gain, and that the remnant is fighting for the religion in which it believes. For my own part, I have made up my mind to the loss of my property and my posts; if you have retarded the effects thereof on account of our connection, I am obliged to you for it; but I am quite prepared to suffer everything, since my mind is made up, having solemnly promised it and my conscience so bidding me, to hear of nothing but a general peace.”
The reply was worthy of a great soul devoted to a great cause, a soul that would not sacrifice to the hopes of fortune either friends or creed. It was a mark of Duke Henry of Rohan’s superior character to take account, before everything, of the general interests and the moral sentiments of his party. The chief of the royal party, the Duke of Luynes, was, on the contrary, absorbed in the material and momentary success of his own personal policy; he refused to treat for a general peace with the Protestants, and he preferred to submit to a partial and local defeat before Montauban, rather than be hampered with the difficulties of national pacification. At a council held on the 26th of October, 1621, it was decided to publicly raise the siege. The king and the royal army departed in November from the precincts of Montauban, which they purposed to attack afresh on the return of spring: the king was in a hurry to go and receive at Toulouse the empty acclamations of the mob, and he ordered Luynes to go and take, on the little town of Monheur, in the neighborhood of Toulouse, a specious revenge for his check before Montauban. Monheur surrendered on the 11th of December, 1621. Another little village in the neighborhood, Negrepelisse, which offered resistance to the royal army, was taken by assault, and its population infamously massacred. But in the midst of these insignificant victories, on the 14th of December, 1621, the royal favorite, the constable, interim keeper of the seals, Duke Albert of Luynes, had an attack of malignant fever, and died in three days at the camp of Longueville. “What was marvellously surprising, and gave a good idea of the world and its vanity,” says his contemporary, the Marquis of Fontaine Mareuil, “was that this man, so great and so powerful, found himself, nevertheless, to such a degree abandoned and despised, that for two days, during which he was in agony, there was scarcely one of his people who would stay in his room, the door being open all the time, and anybody who pleased coming in, as if he had been the most insignificant of men; and when his body was taken to be interred, I suppose, to his duchy of Luynes, instead of priests to pray for him, I saw some of his valets playing piquet on his bier whilst they were having their horses baited.”
It was not long before magnificence revisited the favorite’s bier. “On the 11th of January, 1622, his mortal remains having arrived at Tours, all the religious bodies went out to receive it; the constable was placed in a chariot drawn by six horses, accompanied by pages, Swiss, and gentlemen in mourning. He was finally laid in the cathedral-church, where there took place a service which was attended by Marshal de Lesdiguieres, the greatest lords of the court, the judicature, and the corporation.” It is a contemporary sheet, the Mercure Francais, which has preserved to us these details as to the posthumous grandeur of Albert de Luynes, after the brutal indifference to which he had been subjected at the moment of his death.
His brothers after him held a high historical position, which the family have maintained, through the course of every revolution, to the present day; a position which M. Cousin took pleasure in calling to mind, and which the last duke but one of Luynes made it a point of duty to commemorate by raising to Louis XIII. a massive silver statue almost as large as life, the work of that able sculptor, M. Rudde, which figured at the public exhibition set on foot by Count d’Haussonville, in honor of the Alsace-Lorrainers whom the late disasters of France drove off in exile to Algeria.
Richelieu, when he had become cardinal, premier minister of Louis XIII. and of the government of France, passed a just but severe judgment upon Albert de Luynes. “He was a mediocre and timid creature,” he said, “faithless, ungenerous, too weak to remain steady against the assault of so great a fortune as that which ruined him incontinently; allowing himself to be borne away by it as by a torrent, without any foothold, unable to set bounds to his ambition, incapable of arresting it, and not knowing what he was about, like a man on the top of a tower, whose head goes round and who has no longer any power of discernment. He would fain have been Prince of Orange, Count of Avignon, Duke of Albret, King of Austrasia, and would not have refused more if he had seen his way to it.” [Memoires de Richelieu, p. 169, in the Petitot Collection, Series v., t. xxii.]
This brilliant and truthful portrait lacks one feature which was the merit of the Constable de Luynes: he saw coming, and he anticipated, a long way off and to little purpose, but heartily enough, the government of France by a supreme kingship, whilst paying respect, as long as he lived, to religious liberty, and showing himself favorable to intellectual and literary liberty, though he was opposed to political and national liberty. That was the government which, after him, was practised with a high hand and rendered triumphant by Cardinal Richelieu to the honor, if not the happiness, of France.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
LOUIS XIII., CARDINAL RICHELIEU, AND THE COURT. (1622-1642.)
The characteristic of Louis XIV.‘s reign is the uncontested empire of the sovereign over the nation, the authority of the court throughout the country. All intellectual movement proceeded from the court or radiated about it; the whole government, whether for war or peace, was concentrated in its hands. Conde, Turenne, Catinat, Luxembourg, Villars, Vendome belonged, as well as Louvois or Colbert, to the court; from the court went the governors and administrators of provinces; there was no longer any greatness existing outside of the court; there were no longer any petty private courts. As for the state, the king was it.
For ages past, France had enjoyed the rare good fortune of seeing her throne successively occupied by Charlemagne and Charles V., by St. Louis and Louis XI., by Louis XII., Francis I. and Henry IV., great conquerors or wise administrators, heroic saints or profound politicians, brilliant knights or models of patriot-kings. Such sovereigns had not only governed, but also impressed the imagination of the people; it was to them that the weak, oppressed by the great feudal lords, had little by little learned to apply for support and assistance; since the reign of Francis I., especially, in the midst of the religious struggles which had caused division amongst the noblesse and were threatening to create a state within the state, the personal position of the grandees, and that of their petty private courts, had been constantly diminishing in importance; the wise policy, the bold and prudent courage of Henry IV., and his patriotic foresight had pacified hatred and stayed civil wars; he had caused his people to feel the pleasure and pride of being governed by a man of a superior order. Cardinal Richelieu, more stern than Henry IV., set his face steadily against all the influences of the great lords; he broke them down one after another; he persistently elevated the royal authority; it was the hand of Richelieu which made the court and paved the way for the reign of Louis XIV. The Fronde was but a paltry interlude and a sanguinary game between parties. At Richelieu’s death, pure monarchy was founded.
In the month of December, 1622, the work was as yet full of difficulty. There were numerous rivals for the heritage of royal favor that had slipped from the dying hands of Luynes. The Prince of Conde, a man of ability and moderation, “a good managing man (homme de bon menage),” as he was afterwards called by the cardinal, was the first to get possession of the mind of the king, at that time away from his mother, who was residing at Paris. “It was not so much from dislike that they opposed her,” says Richelieu, “as from fear lest, when once established at the king’s council, she might wish to introduce me there. They acknowledged in me some force of judgment; they dreaded my wits, fearing lest, if the king were to take special cognizance of me, it might come to his committing to me the principal care of his affairs.” [Memoires de Richelieu, t. ii. p. 193.] On returning to Paris, the king, nevertheless, could not refuse this gratification to his mother. However, “the prince, who was in the habit of speaking very freely, and could not be mum about what he had on his mind, permitted himself to go so far as to say that she had been received into the council on two conditions, one, that she should have cognizance of nothing but what they pleased, and the other, that, though only a portion of affairs was communicated to her, she would serve as authority for all in the minds of the people.” [Memoires de Richelieu, t. ii. p. 194.] In fact, the queen-mother quite perceived that she was only shown the articles in the window, and did not enter the shop; “but, with all the prudence and patience of an Italian, when she was not carried away by passion, she knew how to practise dissimulation towards the Prince of Conde and his allies, Chancellor Sillery and his son Puisieux, secretary of state.” She accompanied her son on an expedition against the Huguenots of the South, which she had not advised, “foreseeing quite well that, if she were separated from the king, she would have no part either in peace or war, and that, if they got on without her for ten months, they would become accustomed to getting on without her.” She had the satisfaction of at last seeing the Bishop of Lucon promoted to the cardinalship she had so often solicited for him in vain; but, at the same time, the king called to the council Cardinal Rochefoucauld, “not through personal esteem for the old cardinal,” says Richelieu, “but to cut off from the new one all hope of a place for which he might be supposed to feel some ambition.” Nevertheless, in spite of his enemies’ intrigues, in spite of a certain instinctive repugnance on the part of the king himself, who repeated to his mother, “I know him better than you, madame; he is a man of unbounded ambition,” the “new cardinal” was called to the council at the opening of the year 1624, on the instance of the Marquis of La Vieuville, superintendent of finance and chief of the council, who felt himself unsteady in his position, and sought to secure the favor of the queen-mother. It was as the protege and organ of Mary de’ Medici that the cardinal wrote to the Prince of Conde, on the 11th of May, 1624, “The king having done me the honor to place me on his council, I pray God with all my heart to render me worthy of serving him as I desire; and I feel myself bound thereto by every sort of consideration. I cannot sufficiently thank you for the satisfaction that you have been pleased to testify to me thereat. Therefore would I far rather do so in deed by serving you than by bootless words. And in that I cannot fail without failing to follow out the king’s intention. I have made known to the queen the assurance you give her by your letter of your affection, for which she feels all the reciprocity you can desire. She is the more ready to flatter herself with the hope of its continuance, in that she will be very glad to incite you thereto by all the good offices she has means of rendering you with His Majesty.” [Lettres du Cardinal de Richelieu, t. ii. p. 5.] On the 12th of August, however, M. de la Vieuville fell irretrievably, and was confined in the castle of Amboise. A pamphlet of the time had forewarned him of the danger which threatened him when he introduced Richelieu into the council. “You are both of the same temper,” it said; “that is, you both desire one and the same thing, which is, to be, each of you, sole governor. That which you believe to be your making will be your undoing.”
From that moment the cardinal, in spite of his modest resistance based upon the state of his health, became the veritable chief of the council. “Everybody knew that, amidst the mere private occupations he had hitherto had, it would have been impossible for him to exist with such poor health, unless he took frequent recreation in the country.” [Memoires de Richelieu, t. ii. p. 289.] Turning his attention to founding his power and making himself friends, he authorized the recall of Count Schomberg, lately disgraced, and of the Duke of Anjou’s, the king’s brother’s, governor, Colonel Ornano, imprisoned by the Marquis of La Vieuville. He, at the same time, stood out against the danger of concentrating all the power of the government in a single pair of hands. “Your Majesty,” he said, “ought not to confide your public business to a single one of your councillors and hide it from the rest; those whom you have chosen ought to live in fellowship and amity in your service, not in partisanship and division. Every time, and as many times as a single one wants to do everything himself, he wants to ruin himself; but in ruining himself he will ruin your kingdom and you, and as often as any single one wants to possess your ear and do in secret what should be resolved upon openly, it must necessarily be for the purpose of concealing from Your Majesty either his ignorance or his wickedness.” [Memoires de Richelieu, t. ii. p. 349.] Prudent rules and acute remarks, which Richelieu, when he became all-powerful, was to forget.
Eighteen months had barely rolled away when Colonel Ornano, lately created a marshal at the Duke of Anjou’s request, was again arrested and carried off a prisoner “to the very room where, twenty-four years ago, Marshal Biron had been confined.” For some time past “it had been current at court and throughout the kingdom that a great cabal was going on,” says Richelieu in his Memoires, “and the cabalists said quite openly that under his ministry, men might cabal with impunity, for he was not a dangerous enemy.” If the cabalists had been living in that confidence, they were most woefully deceived. Richelieu was neither meddlesome nor cruel, but he was stern and pitiless towards the sufferings as well as the supplications of those who sought to thwart his policy. At this period, he wished to bring about a marriage between the Duke of Anjou, then eighteen years old, and Mdlle. de Montpensier, the late Duke of Montpensier’s daughter, and the richest heiress in France. The young prince did not like it. Madame de Chevreuse, it was said, seeing the king an invalid and childless, was already anticipating his death, and the possibility of marrying his widowed queen to his successor. “I should gain too little by the change,” said Anne of Austria one day, irritated by the accusations of which she was the object. Divers secret or avowed motives had formed about the Duke of Anjou what was called the “aversion” party, who were opposed to his marriage; but the arrest of Colonel Ornano dismayed the accomplices for a while. The Duke of Anjou protested his fidelity to his brother, and promised the cardinal to place in the king’s hands a written undertaking to submit his wishes and affections to him. The intrigue appeared to have been abandoned. But the “dreadful (epouvantable) faction,” as the Cardinal calls it in his Memoires, conspired to remove the young prince from the court. The Duke of Vendome, son of Henry IV. and Gabrielle d’Estrees, had offered him an asylum in his government of Brittany; but the far-sighted policy of the minister took away this refuge from the heir to the throne, always inclined as he was to put himself at the head of a party. The Duke of Vendome and his brother the Grand Prior, disquieted at the rumors which were current about them, hastened to go and visit the king at Blois. He received them with great marks of affection. “Brother,” said he to the Duke of Vendome, laying his hand upon his shoulder, “I was impatient to see you.” Next morning, the 15th of June, the two princes were arrested in bed. “Ah! brother,” cried Vendome, “did not I tell you in Brittany that we should be arrested?” “I wish I were dead, and you were there,” said the Grand Prior. “I told you, you know, that the castle of Blois was a fatal place for princes,” rejoined the duke. They were conducted to Amboise. The king, continually disquieted by the projects of assassination hatched against his minister, gave him a company of musketeers as guards, and set off for Nantes, whither the cardinal was not slow to go and join him. In the interval, a fresh accomplice in the plot had been discovered.
This time it was in the king’s own household that he had been sought and found. Henry de Talleyrand, Count of Chalais, master of the wardrobe, hare-brained and frivolous, had hitherto made himself talked about only for-his duels and his successes with women. He had already been drawn into a plot against the cardinal’s life; but, under the influence of remorse, he had confessed his criminal intentions to the minister himself. Richelieu appeared touched by the repentance, but he did not forget the offence, and his watch over this “unfortunate gentleman,” as he himself calls him, made him aware before long that Chalais was compromised in an intrigue which aimed at nothing less, it was said, than to secure the person of the cardinal by means an ambush, so as to rid him at need. Chalais was arrested in his bed on the 8th of July. The Marquis la Valette, son of the Duke of Epernon and governor or Metz had been asked to give an asylum to Monsieur in case he decided upon flying from the court, had answered after embarrassed fashion; the cardinal had his enemies in a trap He went to call on Monsieur; it was in Richelieu’s own house, and under pretext of demanding hospitality of him, that the conspirators calculated upon striking their blow. “I very much, regret,” said the cardinal to Gaston, “that your Highness did, not warn me that you and your friends meant to do me the honor of coming to sup with me. I would have exerted myself, to entertain them and receive them to the best of my ability.” [Journal de Bassompierre, t. ii.] Monsieur seemed to be dumbfounded; he still thought of flight, but Madame de Guise had just arrived at Nantes with her daughter, Mdlle. de Montpensier; Madame de Chevreuse had been driven from court; the young prince’s friends had been scared or won over; and President le Coigneux, his most honest adviser, counselled him get the cardinal’s support with the king. “That rascal,” said the president, “gets so sharp an edge on his wits, that it is necessary to avail one’s self of all sorts of means to undo what he does.” Monsieur at last gave way, and consented to married, provided that the king would treat it as appanage. Louis XIII., in his turn, hesitated, being attracted by the arguments of certain underlings, “folks ever welcome, as being apparently out of the region of political interests, and seeming to have an eye in everything to their master’s person only.” They represented to the king that if the Duke of Anjou were to have children, he would become of more importance in the country, which would be to the king’s detriment. The minister, boldly demanded of the king the dismissal of “those petty folks who insolently abused his ear.” Louis XIII., in his turn gave way; and on the 5th of August, 1626, the cardinal celebrated the marriage of Gaston, who became Duke of Orleans on, the occasion, with Mary of Bourbon, Mdlle. de Montpesier. “No viols or music were heard that day and it was said in the bridegroom’s circle that there was no occasion for having Monsieur’s marriage stained with blood. This was reported to the king, and to the cardinal who did not at all like it.”
When Chalais, in his prison, heard of the marriage, he undoubtedly conceived some hope of a pardon, for he exclaimed, as the cardinal himself says, “That is a mighty sharp trick, to have not only scattered a great faction, but, by removing its object, to have annihilated all hopes of re-uniting it. Only the sagacity of the king and his minister could have made such a hit; it was well done to have caught Monsieur between touch-and-go (entre bond et volee). The prince, when he knows of this, will be very vexed, though he do not say so, and the count (of Soissons, nephew of Conde) will weep over it with his mother.”
The hopes of Chalais were deceived. He had written to the king to confess his fault. “I was only thirteen days in the faction,” he said; but those thirteen days were enough to destroy him. In vain did his friends intercede passionately for him; in vain did his mother write to the king the most touching letter. “I gave him to you, sir, at eight years of age; he is a grandson of Marshal Montluc and President Jeannin; his family serve you daily, but dare not throw themselves at your feet for fear of displeasing you; nevertheless, they join with me in begging of you the life of this wretch, though he should have to end his days in perpetual imprisonment, or in serving you abroad.” Chalais was condemned to death on the 18th of August, 1626, by the criminal court established at Nantes for that purpose; all the king’s mercy went no farther than a remission of the tortures which should have accompanied the execution. He sent one of his friends to assure his mother of his repentance. “Tell him,” answered the noble lady, “that I am very glad to have the consolation he gives me of, his dying in God; if I did not think that the sight of me would be too much for him, I would go to him and not leave him until his head was severed from his body; but, being unable to be of any help to him in that way, I am going to pray God for him.” And she returned into the church of the nuns of Sainte-Claire. The friends of Chalais had managed to have the executioner carried off, so as to retard his execution; but an inferior criminal, to whom pardon had been granted for the performance of this service, cut off the unfortunate culprit’s head in thirty-one strokes. [Memoires d’un Favori du Duc d’ Orleans (Archives curieuses de l’Histoire de France), 2d series, t. iii.] “The sad news was brought to the Duke of Orleans, who was playing abbot; he did not leave the game, and went on as if instead of death he had heard of deliverance.” An example of cruelty which might well have discouraged the friends of the Duke of Orleans “from dying a martyr’s death for him” like the unhappy Chalais.
It has been said that Richelieu was neither meddlesome nor cruel, but that he was stern and pitiless; and he gave proof of that the following year, on an occasion when his personal interests were not in any way at stake. At the outset of his ministry, in 1624, he had obtained from the king a severe ordinance against duels—a fatal custom which was at that time decimating the noblesse.
Already several noblemen, amongst others M. du Plessis-Praslin, had been deprived of their offices or sent into exile in consequence of their duels, when M. de Bouteville, of the house of Montmorency, who had been previously engaged in twenty-one affairs of honor, came to Paris to fight the Marquis of Beuvron on the Place Royale. The Marquis’s second, M. de fussy d’Amboise, was killed by the Count of Chapelles, Bouteville’s second. Beuvron fled to England. M. de Bouteville and his comrade had taken post for Lorraine; they were recognized and arrested at Vitry-le-Brule and brought back to Paris; and the king immediately ordered Parliament to bring them to trial. The crime was flagrant and the defiance of the kings orders undeniable; but the culprit was connected with the greatest houses in the kingdom; he had given striking proofs of bravery in the king’s service; and all the court interceded for him. Parliament, with regret, pronounced condemnation, absolving the memory of Bussy d’Amboise, who was a son of President De Mesmes’s wife, and reducing to one third of their goods the confiscation to which the condemned were sentenced. “Parliament has played the king,” was openly said in the queen’s ante-chamber; “if the things proceed to execution, the king will play Parliament.”
“The cardinal was much troubled in spirit,” says he himself “it was impossible to have a noble heart and not pity this poor gentleman, whose youth and courage excited so much compassion.” However, whilst expounding, according to his practice, to the king the reasons for and against the execution of the culprits, Richelieu let fall this astounding expression: “It is a question of breaking the neck of duels or of your Majesty’s edicts.”
Louis XIII. did not hesitate: though less stern than his brother, he was, more indifferent, and “the love he bore his kingdom prevailed over his compassion for these two gentlemen.” Both died with courage. “There was no sign of anything weak in their words or mean in their actions. They received the news that they were to die with the same visage as they would have that of pardon,” “in such sort that they who had lived like devils were seen dying like saints, and they who had cared for nothing but to foment duels serving towards the extinction of them.” [Memoires d’un Favori du Due d’ Orleans (Archives curieuses de l’Histoire de France), t. ii.]
The cardinal had got Chalais condemned as a conspirator; he had let Bouteville be executed as a duellist; the greatest lords bent beneath his authority, but the power that depends on a king’s favor is always menaced and tottering. The enemies of Richelieu had not renounced the idea of overthrowing him; their hopes even went on growing, since, for some time past the queen-mother had been waxing jealous of the all powerful minister, and no longer made common cause with him. The king had returned in triumph from the siege of La Rochelle; the queen-mother hoped to retain him by her at court; but the cardinal, ever on the watch over the movements of Spain, prevailed upon Louis XIII. to support his subject, the Duke of Nevers, legitimate heir to Mantua and Montferrat, of which the Spaniards were besieging the capital. The army began to march, but the queen designedly retarded the movements of her son. The cardinal was appointed generalissimo, and the king, who had taken upon himself the occupation of Savoy, was before long obliged by his health to return to Lyons, where he fell seriously ill. The two queens hurried to his bedside; and they were seconded by the keeper of the seals, M. de Marillac, but lately raised to power by Richelieu as a man on whom he could depend, and now completely devoted to the queen-mother’s party.
At the news of the king’s danger, the cardinal quitted St. Jean de Maurienne for a precipitate journey to Lyons; but he was soon obliged to return to his army. During the king’s convalescence, the resentment of the queen-mother against the minister, as well as that of Anne of Austria, had free course; and when the royal train took the road slowly back to Paris, in the month of October, the ruin of the cardinal had been resolved upon.
What a trip was that descent of the Loire from Roanne to Briare in the same boat and “at very close quarters between the queen-mother and the cardinal!” says Bassompierre. “She hoped that she would more easily be able to have her will, and crush her servant with the more facility, the less he was on his guard against it; she looked at him with a kindly eye, accepted his dutiful attentions and respects as usual, and spoke to him with as much appearance of confidence as if she had wholly given it him.” [Memoires de Richelieu, t. iii. pp. 303-305.]
The king had requested his mother “to put off for six weeks or two months the grand move against the cardinal, for the sake of the affairs of his kingdom, which were then at a crisis in Italy” [Memoires de Bassompierre, t. iii. p. 276], and she had promised him; but Richelieu “suspected something wrong, and discovered more,” and, on the 12th of November, 1630, when mother and son were holding an early conference at the Luxembourg, a fine palace which Mary de’ Medici had just finished, “the cardinal arrived there; finding the door of the chamber closed, he entered the gallery and went and knocked at the door of the cabinet, where he obtained no answer. Tired of waiting, and knowing the ins and outs of the mansion, he entered by the little chapel; whereat the king was somewhat dismayed, and said to the queen in despair, ‘Here he is!’ thinking, no doubt, that he would blaze forth. The cardinal, who perceived this dismay, said to them, ‘I am sure you were speaking about me.’ The queen answered, ‘We were not.’ Whereupon, he having replied, ‘Confess it, madam,’ she said yes, and thereupon conducted herself with great tartness towards him, declaring to the king ‘that she would not put up with the cardinal any longer, or see in her house either him or any of his relatives and friends, to whom she incontinently gave their dismissal, and not to them only, but even down to the pettiest of her officers who had come to her from his hands.’” [Memoires de Richelieu, t. iii. p. 428.]
The struggle was begun. Already the courtiers were flocking to the Luxembourg; the keeper of the seals, Marillac, had gone away to sleep at his country-house at Glatigny, quite close to Versailles, where the king was expected; and he was hoping that Louis XIII. would summon him and put the power in his hands. The king was chatting with his favorite St. Simon, and tapping with his finger-tips on the window-pane. “What do you think of all this?” he asked. “Sir,” was the reply, “I seem to be in another world, but at any rate you are master.” “Yes, I am,” answered the king, “and I will make it felt too.” He sent for Cardinal La Vallette, son of the Duke of Epernon, but devoted to Richelieu. “The cardinal has a good master,” he said: “go and make my compliments to him, and tell him to come to me without delay.” [Memoires de Bassompierre, t. iii. p. 276.]
With all his temper and the hesitations born of his melancholy mind, Louis XIII. could appreciate and discern the great interests of his kingdom and of his power. The queen had supposed that the king would abandon the cardinal, and “that her private authority as mother, and the pious affection and honor the king showed her as her son, would prevail over the public care which he ought, as king, to take of his kingdom and his people. But God, who holds in His hand the hearts of princes, disposed things otherwise: his Majesty resolved to defend his servant against the malice of those who prompted the queen to this wicked design.” [Memoires de Richelieu.] He conversed a long while with the cardinal, and when the keeper of the seals awoke the next morning, it was to learn that the minister was at Versailles with the king, who had lodged him in a room under his own, that his Majesty demanded the seals back, and that the exons were at his, Marillac’s, door to secure his person.
At the same time was despatched a courier to headquarters at Foglizzo in Piedmont. The three marshals Schomberg, La Force, and Marillac, had all formed a junction there. Marillac, brother of the keeper of the seals, held the command that day; and he was awaiting with patience the news, already announced by his brother, of the cardinal’s disgrace. Marshal Schomberg opened the despatches; and the first words that met his eye were these, written in the king’s own hand: “My dear cousin, you will not fail to arrest Marshal Marillac; it is for the good of my service and for your own exculpation.” The marshal was greatly embarrassed; a great part of the troops had come with Marillac from the army of Champagne and were devoted to him. Schomberg determined, on the advice of Marshal La Force, in full council of captains, to show Marillac the postcript. “Sir,” answered the marshal, “a subject must not murmur against his master, nor say of him that the things he alleges are false. I can protest with truth that I have done nothing contrary to his service. The truth is, that my brother the keeper of the seals and I have always been the servants of the queen-mother; she must have had the worst of it, and Cardinal Richelieu has won the day against her and her servants.” [Memoires de Puy-Seyur.]
Thus arrested in the very midst of the army he commanded, Marshal Marillac was taken to the castle of St. Menehould and thence to Verdun, where a court of justice extraordinary sat upon his case. It was cleared of any political accusation: the marshal was prosecuted for peculation and extortion, common crimes at that time with many generals, and always odious to the nation, which regarded their punishment with favor. “It is a very strange thing,” said Marillac, “to prosecute me as they do; my trial is a mere question of hay, straw, wood, stones, and lime; there is not case enough for whipping a lackey.” There was case enough for sentencing to death a marshal of France. The proceedings lasted eighteen months; the commission was transferred from Verdun to Ruel, to the very house of the cardinal. Marillac was found guilty by a majority of one only. The execution took place on the 10th of May, 1632. The former keeper of the seals, Michael de Marillac, died of decline at Chateaudun, three months after the death of his brother.
Dupes’ Day was over and lost. The queen-mother’s attack on Richelieu had failed before the minister’s ascendency and the king’s calculating fidelity to a servant he did not like; but Mary de’ Medici’s anger was not calmed, and the struggle remained set between her and the cardinal. The Duke of Orleans, who had lost his wife after a year’s marriage, had not hitherto joined his mother’s party, but all on a sudden, excited by his grievances, he arrived at the cardinal’s, on the 30th of January, 1631, “with a strong escort, and told him that he would consider it a strange purpose that had brought him there; that, so long as he supposed that the cardinal would serve him, he had been quite willing to show him amity; now, when he saw that he foiled him in everything that be had promised, to such extent that the way in which he, Monsieur, had behaved himself, had served no end but to make the world believe that he had abandoned the queen his mother, he had come to take back the word he had given him to show him affection.” On leaving the cardinal’s house, Monsieur got into his carriage and went off in haste to Orleans, whilst the king, having received notice from Richelieu, was arriving with all despatch from Versailles to assure his minister “of his protection, well knowing that nobody could wish him ill, save for the faithful services he rendered him.” [Memoires de Richelieu, t. ii. p. 444.]
The queen-mother had undoubtedly been aware of the Duke of Orleans’ project, for she had given up to him Madame’s jewels which he had confided to her; she nevertheless sent her equerry to the king, protesting “that she had been much astonished when she heard of Monsieur’s departure, that she had almost fainted on the spot, and that Monsieur had sent her word that he was going away from court because he could no longer tolerate the cardinal’s violent proceedings against her.
“When the king signified to her that he considered this withdrawal very strange, and let her know that he had much trouble in believing that she knew nothing about it, she took occasion to belch forth fire and flames against the cardinal, and made a fresh attempt to ruin him in the king’s estimation, though she had previously bound herself by oath to take no more steps against him.” [Memoires de Richelieu, t. ii. p. 465.]
The cardinal either had not sworn at all or did not consider himself more bound than the queen by oaths. Their Majesties set out for Compiegne; there the minister brought the affair before the council, explaining with a skilful appearance of indifference the different courses to be taken, and ending by propounding the question of his own retirement or the queen-mother’s. “His Majesty, without hesitation, made his own choice, taking the resolution of returning to Paris and of begging the queen-mother to retire for the time being to one of his mansions, particularly recommending Moulins, which she had formerly expressed to the late king a wish to have; and, in order that she might be the better contented with it, he offered her the government of it and of all the province.” Next day, February 23, 1631, before the queen-mother was up, her royal son had taken the road back to Paris, leaving Marshal D’Estrees at Compiegne to explain to the queen his departure and to hasten his mother’s, a task in which the marshal had but small success, for Mary de’ Medici declared that, if they, meant to make her depart, they would have to drag her stark naked from her bed. She kept herself shut up in the castle, refusing to go out and complaining of the injury the seclusion did to her health; then she fled by night from Compiegne, attended by one gentleman only, to go and take refuge in Flanders, whence she arrived before long at Brussels.
The cardinal’s game was definitively won. Mary de’ Medici had lost all empire over her son, whom she was never to see again.
The Duke of Orleans meanwhile had taken the road to Lorraine, seeking a refuge in the dominions of a prince able, crafty, restless, and hostile to France from inclination as well as policy. Smitten, before long, with the duke’s sister, Princess Margaret, Gaston of Orleans married her privately, with a dispensation from the Cardinal of Lorraine, all which did not prevent either duke or prince from barefacedly denying the marriage when the king reproached them with having contracted this marriage without his consent. In the month of June, 1632, the Duke of Orleans entered France again at the head of some wretched regiments, refuse of the Spanish army, given to him by Don Gonzalvo di Cordova. For the first time, he raised the standard of revolt openly. For him it was of little consequence, accustomed as he was to place himself at the head of parties that he abandoned without shame in the hour of danger; but he dragged along with him in his error a man worthy of another fate and of another chief. Henry, Duke of Montmorency, marshal of France, and governor of Languedoc, was a godson of Henry IV., who said one day to M. de Villeroy and to President Jeannin, “Look at my son Montmorency, how well made he is; if ever the house of Bourbon came to fail, there is no family in Europe which would so well deserve the crown of France as, his, whose great men have always supported it, and even added to it at the price of their blood.” Shining at court as well as in arms, kind and charitable, beloved of everybody and adored by his servants, the Duke of Montmorency had steadily remained faithful to the king up to the fatal day when the Duke of Orleans entangled him in his hazardous enterprise. Languedoc was displeased with Richelieu, who had robbed it of some of its privileges; the duke had no difficulty in collecting adherents there; and he fancied himself to be already wielding the constable’s sword, five times borne by a Montmorency, when Gaston of Orleans entered France and Languedoc sooner than he had been looked for, and with a smaller following than he had promised. The eighteen hundred men brought by the king’s brother did not suffice to re-establish him, with the queen his mother, in the kingdom; the governor of Languedoc made an appeal to the Estates then assembled at Pezenas; he was supported by the Bishop of Alby and by that of Nimes; the province itself proclaimed revolt. The sums demanded by the king were granted to the duke, whom the deputies prayed to remain faithful to the interests of the province, just as they promised never to abandon his. The Archbishop of Narbonne alone opposed this rash act; he left the Estates, where he was president, and the duke marched out to meet Monsieur as far as Lunel. “Troops were levied throughout the province and the environs as openly as if it had been for the king.” But the regiments were slow in forming; the Duke of Orleans wished to gain over some of the towns; Narbonne and Montpellier closed their gates. The bishop’s influence had been counted upon for making sure of Nimes, and Montmorency everywhere tried to practise on the Huguenots; “but the Reformed ministers of Nimes, having had advices by letter from his Majesty, whereby he represented himself to have been advertised that the principal design of Monsieur was to excite them of the religion styled Reformed, considered themselves bound in their own defence to do more than the rest for the king’s service. They assembled the consistory, resolved to die in obedience to him, went to seek the consuls and requested them to have the town-council assembled, in order that it might be brought to take a similar resolution; which the consuls, gained over by M. de Montmorency, refused.” [Memoires de Richelieu, t. iii. p. 160.] Thereupon the ministers sent off in haste to Marshal La Force, who had already taken position at Pont-Saint-Esprit with his army; and, he having despatched some light horse on the 26th of July, the people cried, “Hurrah! for the king!” the bishop was obliged to fly, and the town was kept to its allegiance. “Beaucaire, the governor of which had been won over,” made armed resistance. “If we beat the king’s army,” said the Duke of Montmorency on returning to Pezenas after this incident, “we shall have no lack of towns; if not, we shall have to go and make our court at Brussels.”
At the news of his brother’s revolt, the king, who happened to be on the frontiers of Lorraine, had put himself in motion, but he marched at his ease and by short stages, “thinking that the fire Monsieur would kindle would be only a straw fire.”
He hurried his movements when he heard of Montmorency’s uprising, and left Paris after having put the seals upon the duke’s house, who had imprudently left five hundred and fifty thousand livres there; the money was seized and lodged in the royal safe. The Princess of Guemene, between whom and Montmorency there were very strong ties, went to see the cardinal, who was in attendance on the king. “Sir,” she said to him, “you are going to Languedoc; remember the great marks of attachment that M. de Montmorency showed you not long ago; you cannot forget then without ingratitude.” Indeed, when the king believed himself to be dying at Lyons, he had recommended the cardinal to the Duke of Montmorency, who had promised to receive him into his government. “Madam,” replied Richelieu coldly, “I have not been the first to break off.”
Already the Parliament of Toulouse, remaining faithful to the king, had annulled the resolutions of the Estates, the letters and commissions of the governor; and the Parliament of Paris had just enregistered a resolution against the servants and adherents of the Duke of Orleans, as rebels guilty of high treason and disturbers of the common peace. Six weeks were granted the king’s brother to put an end to all acts of hostility; else the king was resolved to decree against him, after that interval of delay, “whatsoever he should consider it his duty to do for the preservation of his kingdom, according to the laws of the realm and the example of his predecessors.”
It was against Marshal Schomberg that Montmorency was advancing. The latter found himself isolated in his revolt, shut up within the limits of his government, between the two armies of the king, who was marching in person against him. Calculations had been based upon an uprising of several provinces and the adhesion of several governors, amongst others of the aged Duke of Epernon, who had sent to Monsieur to say, “I am his very humble servant; let him place himself in a position to be served;” but no one moved, the king every day received fresh protestations of fidelity, and the Duke of Epernon had repaired to Montauban to keep that restless city to its duty, and to prevent any attempt from being made in the province.
At three leagues’ distance from Castelnaudary, Marshal Schomberg was besieging a castle called St. Felix-de-Carmain, which held out for the Duke of Orleans. Montmorency advanced to the aid of the place; he had two thousand foot and three thousand horse; and the Duke of Orleans accompanied him with a large number of gentlemen. The marshal had won over the defenders of St. Felix, and he was just half a league from Castelnaudary when he encountered the rebel army. The battle began almost at once. Count de Moret, natural son of Henry IV. and Jacqueline de Bueil, fired the first shot. Hearing the noise, Montmorency, who commanded the right wing, takes a squadron of cavalry, and, “urged on by that impetuosity which takes possession of all brave men at the like juncture, he spurs his horse forward, leaps the ditch which was across the road, rides over the musketeers, and, the mishap of finding himself alone causing him to feel more indignation than fear, he makes up his mind to signalize by his resistance a death which he cannot avoid.” Only a few gentlemen had followed him, amongst others an old officer named Count de Rieux, who had promised to die at his feet and he kept his word. In vain had Montmorency called to him his men-at-arms and the regiment of Ventadour; the rest of the cavalry did not budge. Count de Moret had been killed; terror was everywhere taking possession of the men. The duke was engaged with the king’s light horse; he had just received two bullets in his mouth. His horse, “a small barb, extremely swift,” came down with him and he fell wounded in seventeen places, alone, without a single squire to help him. A sergeant of a company of the guards saw him fall, and carried him into the road; some soldiers who were present burst out crying; they seemed to be lamenting their general’s rather than their prisoner’s misfortune. Montmorency alone remained as if insensible to the blows of adversity, and testified by the grandeur of his courage that “in him it had its seat in a place higher than the heart.” [Journal du Duc de Montmorency (Archives curieuses de l’Histoire de France), t. iv.]
Whilst the army of the Duke of Orleans was retiring, carrying off their dead, nearly all of the highest rank, the king’s men were bearing away Montnmorency, mortally wounded, to Castelnaudary. His wife, Mary Felicia des Ursins, daughter of the Duke of Bracciano, being ill in bed at Beziers, sent him a doctor, together with her equerry, to learn the truth about her husband’s condition. “Thou’lt tell my wife,” said the duke, “the number and greatness of the wounds thou hast seen, and thou’lt assure her that it which I have caused her spirit is incomparably more painful, to me than all the others.” On passing through the faubourgs of the town, the duke desired that his litter should be opened, “and the serenity that shone through the pallor of his visage moved the feelings of all present, and forced tears from the stoutest and the most stolid.” [Journal du Due de Montmorency (Archives curieuses de l’Histoire de France), t. iv.]
The Duke of Orleans did not lack the courage of the soldier; he would fain have rescued Montmorency and sought to rally his forces; but the troops of Languedoc would obey none but the governor; the foreigners mutinied, and the king’s brother had no longer an army. “Next day, when it was too late,” says Richelieu, “Monsieur sent a trumpeter to demand battle of Marshal Schomberg, who replied that he would not give it, but that, if he met him, he would try to defend himself against him.” Monsieur considered himself absolved from seeking the combat, and henceforth busied himself about nothing but negotiation. Alby, Beziers, and Pezenas hastened to give in their submission. It was necessary for the Duchess of Montmorency, ill and in despair, to quicken her departure from Beziers, where she was no longer safe. “As she passed along the streets she heard nothing but a confusion of voices amongst the people, speaking insolently of those who would withdraw in apprehension.” The king was already at Lyons.
He was at Pont-Saint-Esprit when he sent a message to his brother, from whom he had already received emissaries on the road. The first demands of Gaston d’Orleans were still proud; he required the release of Montmorency, the rehabilitation of all those who had served his party and his mother’s, places of surety and money. The king took no notice; and a second envoy from the prince was put in prison. Meanwhile, the superintendent of finance, M. de Bullion, had reached him from the king, and “found the mind of Monsieur very penitent and well disposed, but not that of all the rest, for Monsieur confessed that he had been ill-advised to behave as he did at the cardinal’s house, and afterwards leave the court; acknowledging himself to be much obliged to the king for the clemency he had shown to him in his proclamation, which had touched him to the heart, and that he was bounden therefor to the cardinal, whom he had always liked and esteemed, and believed that he also on his side liked him.” [Memoires de Richelieu, t. viii. p. 196.]
The Duchess of Montmorency knew Monsieur, although she, it was said, had pressed her husband to join him; and all ill as she was, had been following him ever since the battle of Castelnaudary, in the fear lest he should forget her husband in the treaty. She could not, unfortunately, enter Beziers, and it was there that the arrangements were concluded. Monsieur protested his repentance, cursing in particular Father Chanteloube, confessor and confidant of the queen his mother, “whom he wished the king would have hanged; he had given pretty counsel to the queen, causing her to leave the kingdom; for all the great hopes he had led her to conceive, she was reduced to relieve her weariness by praying to God.” [Memoires de Richelieu, t. viii. p. 196.] As for Monsieur, he was ready to give up all intelligence with Spain, Lorraine, and the queen his mother, “who could negotiate her business herself.” He bound himself to take no interest “in him or those who had connected themselves with him on these occasions for their own purposes, and he would not complain should the king make them suffer what they had deserved.” It is true that he added to these base concessions many entreaties in favor of M. de Montmorency; but M. de Bullion did not permit him to be under any delusion. “It is for your Highness to choose,” he said, “whether or not you prefer to cling to the interests of M. de Montmorency, displease the king and lose his good graces.” The prince signed everything; then he set out for Tours, which the king had assigned for his residence, receiving on the way, from town to town, all the honors that would have been paid to his Majesty himself. M. de Montmorency remained in prison.
“He awaited death with a resignation which is inconceivable,” says the author of his Memoires; “never did man speak more boldly than he about it; it seemed as if he were recounting another’s perils when he described his own to his servants and his guards, who were the only witnesses of such lofty manliness.” His sister, the Princess of Conde, had a memorial prepared for his defence put before him. He read it carefully, then he tore it up, “having always determined,” he said, “not to (chicaner) go pettifogging for (or, dispute) his life.” “I ought by rights to answer before the Parliament of Paris only,” said he to the commission of the Parliament of Toulouse instructed to conduct his trial, “but I give up with all my heart this privilege and all others that might delay my sentence.”
There was not long to wait for the decree. On arriving at Toulouse, October 27, at noon, the duke had asked for a confessor. “Father,” said he to the priest, “I pray you to put me this moment in the shortest and most certain path to heaven that you can, having nothing more to hope or wish for but God.” All his family had hurried up, but without being able to obtain the favor of seeing the king. “His Majesty had strengthened himself in the resolution he had taken from the first to make in the case of the said Sieur de Montmorency a just example for all the grandees of his kingdom in the future, as the late king his father had done in the person of Marshal Biron,” says Richelieu in his Memoires. The Princess of Conde could not gain admittance to his Majesty, who lent no ear to the supplications of his oldest servants, represented by the aged Duke of Epernon, who accused himself by his own mouth of having but lately committed the same crime as the Duke of Montmorency. “You can retire, duke,” was all that Louis XIII. deigned to reply. “I should not be a king if I had the feelings of private persons,” said he to Marshal Chatillon, who pointed out to him the downcast looks and swollen eyes of all his court.
It was the 30th of October, early: and the Duke of Montmorency was sleeping peacefully. His confessor came and awoke him. “Surgite, eamus (rise, let us be going),” he said, as he awoke; and when his surgeon would have dressed his wounds, “Now is the time to heal all my wounds with a single one,” he said, and he had himself dressed in the clothes of white linen he had ordered to be made at Lectoure for the day of execution. When the last questions were put to him by the judges, he answered by a complete confession; and when the decree was made known to him, “I thank you, gentlemen,” said he to the commissioners, “and I beg you to tell all them of your body from me, that I hold this decree of the king’s justice for a decree of God’s mercy.” He walked to the scaffold with the same tranquillity, saluting right and left those whom he knew, to take leave of them; then, having with difficulty placed himself upon the block, so much did his wounds still cause him to suffer, he said out loud, “Domine Jesu, accipe spiritum meum (Lord Jesus, receive my spirit)!” As his head fell, the people rushed forward to catch his blood and dip their handkerchiefs in it.
Henry de Montmorency was the last of the ducal branch of his house, and was only thirty-seven.
It was a fine opportunity for Monsieur to once more break his engagements. Shame and anxiety drove him equally. He was universally reproached with Montmorency’s death; and he was by no means easy on the subject of his marriage, of which no mention had been made in the arrangements. He quitted Tours and withdrew to Flanders, writing to the king to complain of the duke’s execution, saying that the life of the latter had been the tacit condition of his agreement, and that, his promise being thus not binding, he was about to seek a secure retreat out of the kingdom. “Everybody knows in what plight you were, brother, and whether you could have done anything else,” replied the king.
“What think you, gentlemen, was it that lost the Duke of Montmorency his head?” said Cardinal Zapata to Bautru and Barrault, envoys of France, whom he met in the antechamber of the King of Spain. “His crimes,” replied Bautru. “No,” said the cardinal, “but the clemency of his Majesty’s predecessors.” Louis XIII. and Cardinal Richelieu have assuredly not merited that, reproach in history.
So many and such terrible examples were at last to win the all-powerful minister some years of repose. Once only, in 1636, a new plot on the part of Monsieur and the Count of Soissons threatened not only his power, but his life. The king’s headquarters were established at the castle of Demuin; and the princes, urged on by Montresor and Saint-Ibal, had resolved to compass the cardinal’s death. The blow was to be struck at the exit from the council. Richelieu conducted the king back to the bottom of the staircase.
The two gentlemen were awaiting the signal; but Monsieur did not budge, and retired without saying a word. The Count of Soissons dared not go any further, and the cardinal mounted quietly to his own rooms, without dreaming of the extreme peril he had run. Richelieu was rather lofty than proud, and too clear-sighted to mistake the king’s feelings towards him. Never did he feel any confidence in his position; and never did he depart from his jealous and sometimes petty watchfulness. Any influence foreign to his own disquieted him in proximity to a master whose affairs he governed altogether, without ever having been able to get the mastery over his melancholy and singular mind.
Women filled but a small space in the life of Louis XIII. Twice, however, in that interval of ten years which separated the plot of Montmorency from that of Cinq-Mars, did the minister believe himself to be threatened by feminine influence; and twice he used artifice to win the monarch’s heart and confidence from two young girls of his court, Louise de La Fayette and Marie d’Hautefort. Both were maids of honor to the queen. Mdlle. d’Hautefort was fourteen years old when, in 1630, at Lyons, in the languors of convalescence, the king first remarked her blooming and at the same time severe beauty, and her air of nobility and modesty; and it was not long before the whole court knew that he had remarked her, for his first care, at the sermon, was to send the young maid of honor the velvet cushion on which he knelt for her to sit upon. Mdlle. d’Hautefort declined it, and remained seated, like her companions, on the ground; but henceforth the courtiers’ eyes were riveted on her movements, on the interminable conversations in which she was detained by the king, on his jealousies, his tiffs, and his reconciliations. After their quarrels, the king would pass the greater part of the day in writing out what he had said to Mdlle. d’Hautefort and what she had replied to him. At his death, his desk was found full of these singular reports of the most innocent, but also most stormy and most troublesome love-affair that ever was. The king was especially jealous of Mdlle. d’Hautefort’s passionate devotion to the queen her mistress, Anne of Austria. “You love an ingrate,” he said, “and you will see how she will repay your services.” Richelieu had been unable to win Mdlle. d’Hautefort; and he did his best to embitter the tiff which separated her from the king in 1635. But Louis XIII. had learned the charm of confidence and intimacy; and he turned to Louise de La Fayette, a charming girl of seventeen, who was as virtuous as Mdlle. d’Hautefort, but more gentle and tender than she, and who gave her heart in all guilelessness to that king so powerful, so a-weary, and so melancholy at the very climax of his reign. Happily for Richelieu, he had a means, more certain than even Mdlle. d’Hautefort’s pride, of separating her from Louis XIII.; Mdlle. de La Fayette, whilst quite a child, had serious ideas of becoming a nun; and scruples about being false to her vocation troubled her at court, and even in those conversations in which she reproached herself with taking too much pleasure, Father Coussin, her confessor, who was also the king’s, sought to quiet her conscience; he hoped much from the influence she could exercise over the king; but Mdlle. de La Fayette, feeling herself troubled and perplexed, was urgent. When the Jesuit reported to Louis XIII. the state of his fair young friend’s feelings, the king, with tears in his eyes, replied, “Though I am very sorry she is going away, nevertheless I have no desire to be an obstacle to her vocation; only let her wait until I have left for the army.” She did not wait, however. Their last interview took place at the queen’s, who had no liking for Mdlle. de La Fayette; and, as the king’s carriage went out of the court-yard, the young girl, leaning against the window, turned to one of her companions and said, “Alas! I shall never see him again!” But she did see him again often for some time. He went to see her in her convent, and “remained so long glued to her grating,” says Madame de Motteville, “that Cardinal Richelieu, falling a prey to fresh terrors, recommenced his intrigues to tear him from her entirely. And he succeeded.” The king’s affection for Mdlle. d’Hautefort awoke again. She had just rendered the queen an important service. Anne of Austria was secretly corresponding with her two brothers, King Philip IV. and the Cardinal Infante, a correspondence which might well make the king and his minister uneasy, since it was carried on through Madame de Chevreuse, and there was war at the time with Spain. The queen employed for this intercourse a valet named Laporte, who was arrested and thrown into prison. The chancellor removed to Val-de-Grace, whither the queen frequently retired; he questioned the nuns and rummaged Anne of Austria’s cell. She was in mortal anxiety, not knowing what Laporte might say or how to unloose his tongue, so as to keep due pace with her own confessions to the king and the cardinal. Mdlle. d’Hautefort disguised herself as a servant, went straight to the Bastille, and got a letter delivered to Laporte, thanks to the agency of Commander de Jars, her friend, then in prison. The confessions of mistress and agent being thus set in accord, the queen obtained her pardon, but not without having to put up with reproaches and conditions of stern supervision. Madame de Chevreuse took fright, and went to seek refuge in Spain. The king’s inclination towards Mdlle. d’Hautefort revived, without her having an idea of turning it to profit on her own account. “She had so much loftiness of spirit that she could never have brought herself to ask anything for herself and her family; and all that could be wrung from her was to accept what the king and queen were pleased to give her.”
Richelieu had never forgotten Mdlle. d’Hautefort’s airs: he feared her, and accused her to the king of being concerned in Monsieur’s continual intrigues. Louis XIII.‘s growing affection for young Cinq-Mars, son of Marshal d’Effiat, was beginning to occupy the gloomy monarch; and he the more easily sacrificed Mdlle. d’Hautefort. The cardinal merely asked him to send her away for a fortnight. She insisted upon hearing the order from the king’s own mouth. “The fortnight will last all the rest of my life,” she said: “and so I take leave of your Majesty forever.” She went accompanied by the regrets and tears of Anne of Austria, and leaving the field open to the new favorite, the king’s “rattle,” as the cardinal called him.
M. de Cinq-Mars was only nineteen when he was made master of the wardrobe and grand equerry of France. Brilliant and witty, he amused the king and occupied the leisure which peace gave him. The passion Louis XIII. felt for his favorite was jealous and capricious. He upbraided the young man for his flights to Paris to see his friends and the elegant society of the Marais, and sometimes also Mary di Gonzaga, daughter of the Duke of Mantua, wooed but lately by the Duke of Orleans, and not indifferent, it was said, to the vows of M. Le Grand, as Cinq-Mars was called. The complaints were detailed to Richelieu by the king himself in a strange correspondence, which reminds one of the “reports” of his quarrels with Mdlle. d’Hautefort. “I am very sorry,” wrote Louis XIII. on the 4th of January, 1641, “to trouble you about the ill tempers of M. Le Grand. I upbraided him with his heedlessness; he answered that for that matter he could not change, and that he should do no better than he had done. I said that, considering his obligations to me, he ought not to address me in that manner. He answered in his usual way: that he didn’t want my kindness, that he could do very well without it, and that he would be quite as well content to be Cinq-Mars as M. Le Grand, but, as for changing his ways and his life, he couldn’t do it. And so, he continually knagging at me and I at him, we came as far as the court-yard, when I said to him that, being in the temper he was in, he would do me the pleasure of not coming to see me. I have not seen him since. Signed, Louis.” This time the cardinal reconciled the king and the favorite, whom he had himself placed near him, but whose constant attendance upon the king his master he was beginning to find sometimes very troublesome. “One day he sent word to him not to be for the future so continually at his heels, and treated him even to his face with so much tartness and imperiousness as if he had been the lowest of his valets.” Cinq-Mars began to lend an ear to those who were egging him on against the cardinal.
Then began a series of negotiations and intrigues; the Duke of Orleans had come back to Paris, the king was ill and the cardinal more so than he; thence arose conjectures and insensate hopes; the Duke of Bouillon, being sent for by the king, who confided to him the command of the army of Italy, was at the same time drawn into the plot which was beginning to be woven against the minister; the Duke of Orleans and the queen were in it; and the town of Sedan, of which Bouillon was prince-sovereign, was wanted to serve the authors of the conspiracy as an asylum in case of reverse. Sedan alone was not sufficient; there was need of an army. Whence was it to come? Thoughts naturally turned towards Spain.
For so perilous a treaty a negotiator was required, and the grand equerry proposed his friend, Viscount de Fontrailles, a man of wit, who detested the cardinal, and who would have considered it a simpler plan to assassinate him; he consented, however, to take charge of the negotiation, and he set out for Madrid, where his treaty was soon concluded, in the name of the Duke of Orleans. The Spaniards were to furnish twelve thousand foot and five thousand horse, four hundred thousand crowns down, twelve thousand crowns’ pay a month, and three hundred thousand livres to fortify the frontier-town which was promised by the duke. Sedan, Cinq-Mars, and the Duke of Bouillon were only mentioned in a separate instrument.
The king was then at Narbonne, on his way to his army, which was besieging Perpignan. The grand equerry was with him. Fontrailles went to call upon him. “I do not intend to be seen by anybody,” said he, “but to make speedily for England, as I do not think I am strong enough to undergo the torture the cardinal might put me to in his own room on the least suspicion.” On the 21st of April, the cardinal was dangerously ill, and the king left him at Narbonne a prey to violent fever, with an abscess on the arm which prevented him from writing, whilst Cinq-Mars, ever present and ever at work, was doing his best to insinuate into his master’s mind suspicion of the minister, and the hopes founded upon his disgrace or death. The king listened, as he subsequently avowed, in order to discover his favorite’s wicked thoughts and make him tell all he had in his heart. “The king was tacitly the head of this conspiracy,” says Madame de Motteville: “the grand equerry was the soul of it; the name made use of was that of the Duke of Orleans, the king’s only brother; and their counsel was the Duke of Bouillon, who joined with them because, having belonged to the party of M. de Soissons, he was in very ill odor at court. They all formed fine projects touching the change that was to take place to the advantage of their aggrandizement and fortunes, persuading themselves that the cardinal could not live above a few days, during which he would not be able to set himself right with the king.” Such were their projects and their hopes when the Gazette de France, on the 21st of June, 1642, gave these two pieces of news both together. “The cardinal-duke, after remaining two days at Arles, embarked on the 11th of this month for Tarascon, his health becoming better and better. The king has ordered under arrest Marquis de Cinq-Mars, grand equerry of France.”
Great was the surprise, and still greater was the dismay, amongst the friends of Cinq-Mars. “Your grand designs are as well known at Paris as that the Seine flows under the Pont Neuf,” wrote Mary di Gonzaga to him a few days previously.
Those grand designs so imprudently divulged caused a presentiment of great peril. When left alone with his young favorite, and suddenly overwhelmed, amidst his army, with cares and business of which his minister usually relieved him, the king had too much wit not to perceive the frivolous insignificance of Cinq-Mars compared with the mighty capability of the cardinal. “I love you more than ever,” he wrote to Richelieu: “we have been too long together to be ever separated, as I wish everybody to understand.” In reply, the cardinal had sent him a copy of the treaty between Cinq-Mars and Spain.
The king could not believe his eyes; and his wrath equalled his astonishment. Together with that of the grand equerry he ordered the immediate arrest of M. de Thou, his intimate friend; and the order went out to secure the Duke of Bouillon, then at the head of the army of Italy. He, caught, like Marshal Marillac, in the midst of his troops, had vainly attempted to conceal himself; but he was taken and conducted to the castle of Pignerol. Fontrailles had seen the blow coming. He went to visit the grand equerry, and, “Sir,” said he, “you are a fine figure; if you were shorter by the whole head, you would not cease to be very tall; as for me, who am already very short, nothing could be taken off me without inconveniencing me and making me cut the poorest figure in the world; you will be good enough, if you please, to let me get out of the way of edged tools.” And he set out for Spain, whence he had hardly returned.
What had become of the most guilty, if not the most dangerous, of all the accomplices? Monsieur, “the king’s only (unique) brother,” as Madame de Motteville calls him, had come as far as Moulins, and had sent to ask the grand equerry to appoint a place of meeting, when he heard of his accomplice’s arrest, and, before long, that of the Duke of Bouillon. Frightened to death as he was, he saw that treachery was safer than flight, and, just as the king had joined the all but dying cardinal at Tarascon, there arrived an emissary from the Duke of Orleans bringing letters from him. He assured the king of his fidelity; he entreated Chavigny, the minister’s confidant, to give him “means of seeing his Eminence before he saw the king, in which case all would go well.” He appealed to the cardinal’s generosity, begging him to keep his letter as an eternal reproach, if he were not thenceforth the most faithful and devoted of his friends.
Abbe de La Riviere, who was charged to implore pardon for his master, was worthy of such a commission: he confessed everything, he signed everything, though he “all but died of terror,” and, at the cardinal’s demand, he soon brought all those poltrooneries written out in the Duke of Orleans’ own hand. The prince was all but obliged to appear at the trial and deliver up his accomplices in the face of the whole world. The respect, however, of Chancellor Seguier for his rank spared him this crowning disgrace. The king’s orders to his brother, after being submitted to the cardinal, bore this note in the minister’s hand: “Monsieur will have in his place of exile twelve thousand crowns a month, the same sum that the King of Spain had promised to give him.”
“Paralysis of the arm did not prevent the head from acting;” the dying cardinal had dictated to the king, stretched on a couch at his side, in a chamber of his house at Monfrin, near Tarascon, those last commands which completed the dishonor of the Duke of Orleans and the ruin of the favorite. Louis XIII. slowly took the road back to Fontainebleau in the cardinal’s litter, which the latter had lent him. The prisoners were left in the minister’s keeping, who ordered them before long to Lyons, whither he was himself removed. The grand equerry coming from Montpellier, M. de Thou from Tarascon, in a boat towed by that of the cardinal, and the Duke of Bouillon from Pignerol, were all three lodged in the castle of Pierre-Encise. Their examination was put off until the arrival of such magistrates “as should be capable of philosophizing and perpetually thinking of the means they must use for arriving at their ends.” That was useless, inasmuch as the grand equerry “never ceased to say quite openly that he had done nothing to which the king had not consented.”
Louis XIII. was, no doubt, affected by such language; for, scarcely had he arrived at Fontainebleau, whither he had been preceded by news of the end of the queen his mother, who had died at Cologne in exile and poverty, when he wrote to all the parliaments of his kingdom, to the governors of the provinces, and to the ambassadors at foreign courts, to give his own account of the arrest of the guilty and the part he himself had played in the matter. “The notable and visible change which had for the last year appeared in the conduct of Sieur de Cinq-Mars, our grand equerry, made us resolve, as soon as we perceived it, to carefully keep watch on his actions and his words, in order to fathom them and discover what could be the cause. To this end, we resolved to let him act and speak with us more freely than heretofore.” And in a letter written straight to the chancellor, the king exclaims in wrath, “It is true that having seen me sometimes dissatisfied with the cardinal, whether from the apprehension I felt lest he should hinder me from going to the siege of Perpignan, or induce me to leave it, for fear lest my health might suffer, or from any other like reason, the said Sieur de Cinq-Mars left nothing undone to chafe me against my said cousin, which I put up with so long as his evil offices were confined within the bounds of moderation. But when he went so far as to suggest to me that the cardinal must be got rid of, and offered to carry it out himself, I conceived a horror of his evil thoughts, and held them in detestation. Although I have only to say so for you to believe it, there is nobody who can deem but that it must have been so; for, otherwise, what motive would he have had for joining himself to Spain against me, if I had approved of what he desired?”
The trial was a foregone conclusion; the king and his brother made common cause in order to overwhelm the accused, “an earnest of a peace which was not such as God announced with good will to man on Christmas day,” writes Madame de Motteville, “but such as may exist at court and amongst brothers of royal blood.”