Chapter XII: Imperial Struggles of Francis I and Henry II (3)

In the matter of policy it cannot be denied that Charles V was much greater than Francis I. He kept or gained everything that was contested between him and his rival; he obtained the empire and took possession of the duchy of Milan, and he kept the kingdom of Naples. Nor did he owe his success entirely to the favour of blind fortune; it was rather the result of wise conduct, well-thought-out methods, and the adoption of measures likely to bring about the end he had in view. He was fortunate, and would have been thoroughly worthy of his good fortune had he not so often used fraudulent means to bring about success. He possessed in a high degree the royal faculty of understanding men. The greatest generals in Europe were to be found at the head of his armies; his ministers had no sway over him, and he always employed them in the matters for which they were most suitable. He understood both his own subjects and foreigners; he knew that Bourbon was a hero and that Saluzzo was only a traitor. He therefore made use of Bourbon for conquest and Saluzzo for treachery. Bourbon was a hero, but he was a French refugee, so Charles placed Pescara to act as a spy over him. Pescara was almost on an equality with Bourbon and was jealous of him. Both men however were ambitious and not very faithful, so Charles employed the trustworthy and useful Lannoy to watch them both. He won over from France La Marck, Sickingen, the sublime Bourbon, the prince of Orange, and Andrea Doria, the greatest men of his time, while Francis only took from him the obscure prince of Melfi. Charles V greatly excelled his rival also in steadiness and energy.

Francis I was capable of actions which dazzle us, but he was only energetic by fits and starts, with long intervals of lethargy and languor; while with Charles V there were no such intervals. Always full of energy, he made his preparations, he carried them out, he plotted, he sowed dissension where it suited his purpose to do so, he went to Germany, to Italy, to Spain; he controlled the great powers and subdued the lesser ones, he fettered them all by his negotiations. Bayle remarks that since there were many more leagues formed against Francis I than against Charles V, the former must have been more feared than the latter; but it was the emperor’s cleverness which made people believe that Francis I was so formidable. Moreover such leagues do not always prove that the power of the person against whom they are formed is greatly feared. After the defeat of the De Foix and the expulsion of the French in 1522, the whole of Italy formed a league against them; was it because she had more fear of Francis I, who was routed and expelled, than of the emperor, who was master of the Milanese and of the kingdom of Naples? No, but she thought she would be more likely to be left in peace if she submitted quietly to the emperor, than if she made an effort to help the fallen king to rise, by lending him a helping hand.

Henry VIII, it is true, more often allied himself with Charles V than with Francis I. He thought he had some claim to France; he knew he had none to Italy, to Germany, or to Spain. Charles V knew how to turn to his own advantage the power of his rival, which he exaggerated in order to injure him. But Francis I was far superior to his rival when he was defending Provence against his attacks, and Bayle is right in saying that he deserved more glory for preserving his own kingdom, in spite of circumstances, than Charles V, who failed to do this notwithstanding his great power and numerous intrigues, deserved for all his other conquests. Again, Francis was superior to Charles when he warned the latter that the people of Ghent were in rebellion, and allowed him to pass through France on his way to subdue them; when he pardoned the rebels of La Rochelle; when he behaved with such moderation after the scandalous scene in Rome; and when, Charles having calumniated him throughout Germany, he took no further vengeance than heaping benefits on the German merchants.

Finally, in military ability Francis I was at least the equal of Charles V; in political genius he was his inferior, but he surpassed him in honour: indeed his political inferiority was partly the result of a greater moral delicacy, which made him more fastidious than Charles as to the means by which he tried to gain his ends. In drawing this parallel we have been looking at Francis I as a politician and a soldier, but the point of view is not advantageous to him. He will perhaps shine more brightly in the history of literature and of art.[o]

CHARACTER AND POLICY OF HENRY II

Henry II, at the age of twenty-eight, displayed all the military qualities that had distinguished his father in his youth. He was trained in every kind of physical exercise, and enjoyed the reputation of being a most accomplished knight. “He possessed,” says Brantôme,[p] “majesty and grace, and manners that were suavely royal. He loved war, and never found life so much to his liking as when he was in the midst of battle.” His enterprising character had revealed itself in the last two struggles against Charles V, in which he had taken part under Montmorency and D’Annebaut. Cavalli, the Venetian envoy, who erred on the side of leniency, said of Henry that his excellent qualities gave promise to France of the worthiest monarch that had reigned there in two centuries. Like his father he made it a point to become acquainted with every gentleman in his realm. He detested Charles V, and took no pains to hide his feeling. The emperor well knew the bellicose humour of the king towards him and exerted every effort to furnish it satisfaction. “Henry’s father,” wrote Charles V to his ambassador at Rome, “drew the Turk towards him by the hair of his head; Henry will seize him by hair, hands, and feet.”

One thing, however, was wanting in the new king: though a poet, and possessing like all his race a cultivated taste in literature, he lacked that personal charm which made of Francis I the natural head of the most cultured court in Europe. The men of letters in general have little to say in his praise, and the Calvinists, whose numbers were constantly increasing and whom he persecuted with relentless rigour, have least of all been inclined to spare him.

COURT FAVOURITES

Scarcely had Henry II ascended the throne when he recalled Montmorency, the master who had instructed him in the art of war and who had beguiled the tedium of a recent period of disgrace by building the superb mansions of Écouen and Chantilly. Montmorency immediately became all-powerful, and showered upon his family the highest dignities and honours. Claude of Guise, his brother the cardinal De Lorraine, and his six sons, all destined to attain the highest eminence, were also given great prominence in the councils of the new reign; they literally blocked the approaches to the throne. “It seemed,” says Tavannes, “as though the king had sworn to partition France among them.” Diane de Poitiers, grand sénéschale of Normandy and mistress of Henry II, though many years his senior, wielded, under the title of duchess of Valentinois, an influence far wider and more powerful than that exerted by the duchess d’Étampes during the preceding reign. By the marriage of her daughter she became allied to the family of Guise, with whom all her future movements were made in concert. Lastly Saint-André, a former governor of the king, was elevated to the position of marshal, and the pope bestowed the cardinal’s hat upon two favourite prelates, Charles de Bourbon, brother of the duke de Vendôme, and Charles de Lorraine, archbishop of Rheims.

D’Annebaut, to whom Henry attributed the defeat of Perpignan; the cardinal De Tournon, and several gentlemen who had served as secretaries of state under Francis I were banished from the court. Out of eleven cardinals who sat in the council seven were sent to Rome, partly with the intention of propitiating the new ministry, and partly to strengthen French influence with the government of Rome, and to establish a French party in the sacred college. The duchess d’Étampes was also requested to withdraw, the king even taking from her the diamonds she had received from Francis I to present them to the duchess of Valentinois.

These many changes resulted, as was inevitable, in widespread discontent. The new councillors were accused of rapacity, and the spirit of jealous distrust in which they arrogated all the power to themselves highly incensed the people, while the king was reproached with the weakness which made him so readily yield himself over to be governed. The highest personages made open traffic of court dignities and positions; Montmorency in particular being accused of having furthered his own and his kinsmen’s interests by bribes given to the highest nobles, and by peopling the courts of justice with magistrates and councillors of his own creation. Venality and corruption everywhere prevailed, and the spirit manifested by new ministers in entering upon their office was almost that of dogs rushing upon a quarry.

Not one of the writings, in which speaks prejudice or passion, that has come down to us from that day is unquestioningly to be believed; it is an unfortunate fact that many of our most entertaining historical memoirs are little better than chronicles of scandals, since, however incontestable may be the facts they contain, the manner in which these are dressed is invariably calculated to mislead.

On the other hand these memoirs enable us to form an excellent idea of the brilliancy of the court, of the intellectual standard of its members, of the political ability of the councillors surrounding Henry II, of the sentiments of honour and obedience by which were actuated the nobility. It is seen that to untrammelled liberty of opinion, whether in praise or blame, was allied a deep-seated reverence for law, for the government, and for the king. Indeed many diplomatic documents, which for a long time remained unknown, are to the honour of Montmorency, Diane de Poitiers, and the Guises, attesting a truth that contemporaneous writers of military memoirs seem scarcely to suspect--namely, that diplomacy can accomplish more than arms. From the additional circumstance that the records of the relations with Venice are mainly favourable to the court, it will be seen that, strange though it may appear, it was the Frenchmen of that day who contributed the most towards blackening the national character.

Catherine de’ Medici, wife of Henry II, and Jeanne d’Albret, queen of Navarre, also played parts during this reign, small at first but increasing to great prominence as time went on. Catherine, whom Francis I had loved and protected against her enemies, gave as yet no evidence of personal ambition or greed for authority. She passively submitted to the rule of the duchess of Valentinois, but worked stealthily all the time to strengthen her own private influence--an influence which Diane herself finally came to second, and which paved the way to the reign upon which Catherine was soon to enter.[f]

RELIGIOUS PERSECUTIONS AND ROYAL MARRIAGES

The first days of his accession were employed by Henry in royal progresses through his domains, and in shows and spectacles. In the last of these he was himself a chief performer, and no one held the lists with a firmer lance, or overthrew his opponent with a more scientific thrust. Henry next proceeded to the slaughter of such of his people as began to think for themselves on religious subjects. Gibbets were erected on the side of the road by which he made his entrance into the good city of Paris, and unhappy Protestants were suspended from them by cords round their bodies, and dropped into a slow fire, which was kindled under them, till they expired. The Protestant princes of the league of Smalkald had been completely beaten at the great battle of Mühlberg within a month of Francis’ death. The elector of Saxony and the landgraf of Hesse were taken prisoners, their military followers dispersed, and to all human appearance the cause of the Reformation on the continent was at an end.

Before the fruits of the battle of Mühlberg could be gathered by the victors, news reached the confederated Protestants that a quarrel had broken out between the French king and the emperor, and between the emperor and the pope. They actually became the arbiters of these great dissensions, and were courted by all parties. Charles, in order to intimidate his holiness, insisted on the return of the general council to Trent, where it had been originally summoned in 1544, and its removal from Bologna, to which it had been transferred by Paul. This was to place it where the influence of Protestant belief was greatest, and already there were hopes of a compromise, by which Germany might become an undivided power. England was under an eclipse at this time, and was nearly forgotten outside of her guardian seas. Edward VI was on the throne, Somerset was protector, and both were too weak to do anything more than defend their authority against the cabals of the political and religious parties into which the nation was split.

The career was therefore open to the rival crowns. Charles, in entering on the new contest, showed his usual sagacity, and made concessions after having obtained all the advantages of force. He granted liberty of worship to the Protestants by an imperial rescript, marriage of their priests, and communion in both kinds, till the council of Trent should come to a final decision. But this was assuming too much of the pontifical authority to be pleasing to the pope. He protested against the Interim, as this act was called, and prosecuted his schemes in favour of France more zealously than ever. Persecution and toleration therefore became the conflicting arms of the champions in this great struggle; and it shows us how completely the political view at this time excluded the religious, that the heretics were slain and tortured by a man who was utterly regardless of the great question in dispute, while their liberties were defended by a gloomy and unrelenting bigot, who looked on them as the enemies of God and man.

Henry, too thoughtless to take warning by the sudden change in his adversary’s treatment of the innovators, sought to strengthen his cause, and increase the papal influence, by double severity against the new faith. The massacres and atrocities perpetrated under Francis at Mérindol and Cabrières rested for a long time in the memory of the people, till they were expelled by still wilder excesses of fanaticism and hatred. Rebellions, prompted by despair and over-taxation, broke out in several places, and an expedition into Italy was thwarted by the necessity of hurrying back to punish refractory Bordeaux. Disregarding the protest of the local parliament, the edict of the king had imposed a duty on salt, which maddened the consumers; for the article lay at their doors, and the commissaries were inquisitorial as well as unjust. Montmorency, the favourite, was in his element now. He was sent down to execute justice on the revolters, and spared neither sex nor age. A hundred of the chief artisans of Bordeaux were ignominiously hanged; crowns of red-hot iron were placed on other sufferers’ heads while they were broken alive on the wheel. The bells were taken down, in sign of the withdrawal of the city’s municipal powers; and a breach was made in the walls, in sign of its subjection to military law. Wherever the constable went, he was preceded by the executioners of his vengeance; and having spread desolation and misery through the whole south of the kingdom, he returned to Paris in time to take part in the rejoicings which had been going on while these terrible events occurred, for the marriage of Anthony de Bourbon with Jeanne d’Albret. The mother of this Jeanne was the Protestant and poetess, Marguerite of Navarre, the sister of Francis I; and the eldest son of this marriage was Henry IV. These blood-stained espousals were the connecting link between the follower of Bayard and the friend of Sully. It is a great step when we come, with only one life between, from the armed bravo of Marignano to the author of the Edict of Nantes.

[Sidenote: [1547-1548 A.D.]]

At this time also another marriage was resolved on, and another royal bride made her appearance at the court of France. A beautiful and graceful child she was, whose life has been studied with more zeal, and fate lamented with more tears, than those of any other queen; for it was the fair and unfortunate Mary of Scotland, transplanted now, in her sixth year, from the bleak land which scarcely owned its allegiance, and always refused its affections--to appear for a brief moment on the brightest and gayest throne in Europe, and go back to the toils and struggles, the errors and sorrows of her native realm. She was betrothed in 1548 to Francis the dauphin, who later ascended the throne as Francis II. The rejoicings on these two auspicious events were soon interrupted; for all the nations were in a roused and unsettled state, and every day brought forth some new complication of parties, or totally unexpected turn in the progress of affairs.

A distinction seems always to have been drawn between the doctrines of the Lutherans and the Calvinists. The Lutherans were considered merely dissidents from the papal church, but the Calvinists were thought rebels against royal authority. Excesses on both sides justified to superficial observers the opinion, which inflamed the Catholics and reformers with unappeasable rage, that their joint existence was impossible. Catholicism, when it was triumphant, trampled on the faintest spirit of dissent; and dissent, when it had the opportunity, retorted with almost insane retribution. The release from the darkness in which all men’s minds had been avowedly kept was too sudden to be wisely borne. The light blinded their eyes, and the persecutors could point to their victims’ acts in justification of their own. This will account for the tragedies and nameless horrors of the next half century in France, in which the national character entirely changed. Jacques Bonhomme became a ravening savage instead of a complaining drudge, and knight and cavalier became brutalised below the standard of a Chinese mandarin or maddened Hindu.

WAR WITH CHARLES V AND HIS SUCCESSOR

[Sidenote: [1548-1552 A.D.]]

National efforts, however they might ostensibly be only on temporal or political subjects, borrowed their spirit from these theological dissensions. Wars, sieges, marriages, all had reference to the great argument of the time; for it was felt on both sides that the preponderance of either of the parties in the religious struggle would decide the predominance of the political opinions which were supposed to be involved. Protestantism and free government, if not the cry, was already the sentiment of all the peoples, and Catholicism and loyalty to the crown were the counterblasts on the other side. If Charles V, therefore, at any time, perceived that the pope himself relaxed in his opposition to the Calvinist reformers, he opposed the person of his holiness without the least compunction, but with an unabated reverence for his office; and if Henry II saw, in the midst of his executions of the Protestants of his own kingdom, that encouragement of the Lutherans of Germany would weaken his rival’s forces, he sent assistance to the confederated princes. But both were equally bent on maintaining their individual authority. It will therefore not surprise us when we perceive that, in the year 1552, the part played by these unprincipled potentates became reversed. Charles, the publisher of the Interim which secured the Protestant demands, is at open war with them in Germany; and Henry, the torturer of the reformers of his own kingdom, is armed in their defence. Maurice of Saxony, however, saved the French king the trouble of crossing the Rhine, for he secretly placed himself at the head of a band of determined Protestants, forced the passes of the Tyrol, and scattered the council of Trent, which was still carrying on its labours. Without check or pause they marched without beat of drum, and got so close to the house in Innsbruck where Charles was in bed with a slight illness, that his imperial majesty had to fly with no more dignified apparel than his shirt and stockings.

While the confederated princes were lamenting the escape of their expected prisoner, they were cheered with a message from the emperor himself offering terms of accommodation. The rapidity of his flight had been increased by the knowledge, which reached him in his retreat, that Henry, with a great French army, was on the borders of Germany, and ready to cross over to the assistance of his enemies. Better, he thought, to yield at once than allow his French rival to gain the glory of a reconciliation. The princes accepted the offer, and wrote to beg Henry to discontinue his advance. Henry yielded to their request by discontinuing his advance; but indemnified himself by turning to one side, and seized by main force the cities of Metz, Toul, and Verdun, spread his legions over Lorraine, and made an attempt on Strasburg and the county of Alsace. In this he was only repulsed by the Protestantism of the people. They feared the most Christian king and had more confidence in the Catholic emperor, who, to the great satisfaction and at the powerful request of sixty thousand armed Lutherans, had just signed his name to the Treaty of Passau. This Treaty of Passau was the termination for a long time of the German strife. Equal rights were secured by it to Protestant and papist; equal eligibility to seats in the great council of Speier, and mutual freedom of worship in the states of both communions.

The war henceforth became a petty personal quarrel between the sovereigns. Charles, having pacified the reformers, swore he would die before the walls of Metz, which the king had taken, before he would raise the siege; and Henry swore he would lose his last man before a Spaniard crossed the ditch. It was a duel with the world gathered round the lists. Metz was a wretchedly placed town, with no regular fortifications, no bastions or towers, and was commanded by hills in the immediate neighbourhood. But Francis, duke of Guise, threw himself into the place, and made preparations for defence.[v]

_The Siege of Metz (1552 A.D.)_

[Sidenote: [1552 A.D.]]

On approaching the place, the 120,000 men who accompanied Charles V found neither food nor trees nor shelter in a province which the stupidity of the men of Brandenburg had ravaged without aim or profit, as completely as the defenders of Metz might have done systematically in their own interest. Albert, their markgraf, with the improvidence of a savage, had reduced himself to famine. Charles V remained for a long time encamped at Saarbrücken and at Forbach, waiting for his heavy artillery.

Guise had no intention of letting himself be surprised by this army, masked as it was behind the forests, and most frequently employed himself in visiting the guards and sentinels. He established a “watch” of mounted men at St. Julien, to give warning of the approach of the enemy. In the beginning of October, the imperial army came and encamped at St. Avold, and on the 19th Metz was invested. Under fire of the enemy’s cannon, Guise continued the defensive works. Frequent sorties kept up the ardour and health of his garrison and exhausted the enemy by continual alarms and losses. Every day brought some damage to the enemy, taking soldiers and horses and spoiling the provisions that were being brought to them.

At the very beginning the emperor sent a trumpeter to Guise to announce that Hesdin had been taken from the king of France and that his brother, the duke d’Aumale, had fallen into the hands of the markgraf of Brandenburg. But Guise did not heed these communications; himself informed of what was passing outside, he was in constant communication with the king, and imparted to him every episode of the siege, his hopes, his checks, and the movements of the besieging army. His quarters were near the Champagne gate, the principal object of attack, that he might be at all hours on the spot where action and the greatest danger were making ready. He had about five thousand men under his orders in the town a few days before the investment, but he was entirely without artillery. He sent a letter to the king, through the enemy’s lines, on the 29th of October: “Having already split and cracked four of the seven pieces of artillery I have had fired, am decided on careful consideration to load them only with half charges, and to use them to terrify more by their noise than their effect, and to employ falconets and other small pieces, it not having depended on me to give warning of what I needed in good time, when means to assist me were available.” He had a double cannon on the Ste. Marie platform, but “one of the pins of the said piece is sticking out; the other large culverin is burst at the front end, about a foot and a half, and I have had it sawn off and shall still be able to use it. I assure you, sire, that the fault was not that they were overloaded, but they are so badly cast and of such brittle material that they cannot bear even the smallest charge.”

Thus reduced to make use of his artillery only for noise, he still did not hesitate to announce that he could defend himself for ten months. Every two or three days he sent despatches to Fontainebleau or to the relieving army; he indicated means of supplying him with news and of seizing convoys. He wrote to his brother, the cardinal De Lorraine, to the constable, to the marshal De Saint-André; he excited everyone to an interest in the honour of saving his town. The cardinal shared this passion with all the ardour of his vehement temperament. To relieve his brother, to save Metz, to hurry to the king at any moment to suggest an idea, propose a surprise of the besiegers, and--noteworthy solicitude which shows the party leader still hidden behind the courtier--commend to him those gentlemen whom his brother singled out for their gallant conduct in the sorties, name those who were wounded, demand for his partisans the offices of those who had just been killed, were the occupations of his every moment.

On the 20th of November, Charles V approached the ramparts of Metz, believing that in a few days they were to fall into his hands; but at this moment his engineers judged it necessary to change the point of attack. Whilst they opened new trenches in front of the Tour d’Enfer, not a day passed but some troops of French horse went to alarm the enemy and ransack the highways, where spoil was made of provisions and booty of prisoners. On the 28th of November the Tour d’Enfer fell with a crash. Guise wrote to the king that the breach was three hundred paces in width, but that he did not fear the assailants, for “St. Rémy swears by all the gods he will make them a tasty dish. I think, sire, they will not be cold when they go out.” The whole garrison awaited the assault with the same gaiety. The ensigns and standards were planted on the breach to defy the enemy and every morning on mounting guard new colours were seen to float. While filling the sacks of earth, the men-at-arms removed their cuirasses and worked clothed in their “woollen liveries.” Bales of wool were rolled by women beside the sacks of earth in the space left empty where the rampart had fallen in. One evening Guise, between two of these bales, was watching the preparations for an attack, when the engineer, Camillo Marini, putting his head in the place whence Guise had just withdrawn his own, suddenly received a discharge from an arquebuse which scattered his brains.

(From an old French print)]

[Sidenote: [1552-1553 A.D.]]

Only on the 7th of December did the assault seem imminent. Guise hurried to the breach with all his volunteers whom he encouraged “by many of those good words which incite to honour, to virtue, and to victory.” The assault was not attempted, but the besieged had no time to rejoice at this, for the next day they learned that Henry II was on the march to besiege Hesdin, instead of advancing to the relief of Metz. It is true that they showed no appearance of desiring to be relieved, but they began to be sparing of provisions; Guise had the pack-horses of the foot-soldiers killed and salted, in order to husband the forage for his cavalry. The Tour de Wassieux fell in near the Champagne gate and left a new breach a hundred paces wide: this opening was closed up like the first, with sacks of earth; the sorties went on; sometimes two or three were made the same day, by different gates. The wounded in the place were numerous. For their benefit Guise sent for the surgeon Ambrose Paré, who had drawn the lancehead from his cheek when he was wounded before Boulogne, and an Italian officer of the imperial army consented for a hundred crowns to introduce him into Metz by night with “his apothecary and his drugs.” The privations and sufferings which the emperor’s army had to endure rendered treasons of this kind possible, especially amongst the Italians, bewildered as they were at finding themselves transported to the north in the middle of winter for the sake of a German quarrel. Whole bands of these Italians deserted from the camp of the besiegers and went to take service with Henry’s army, detachments of which were overrunning Lorraine and intercepting all the convoys of provisions sent from Franche-Comté to the emperor.

The garrisons of Verdun and Toul intercepted food and reinforcements, which were arriving from other points for the besieging army, carried off the famished soldiers who wandered from the camp, and held enclosed in mud and snow this confused multitude of men of all nations. The imperial leaders were not in agreement. The duke of Alva would not allow his veteran Spanish soldiers to be sacrificed under the eyes of the Germans, who refused to advance for an assault. Charles V, exasperated at seeing such weak walls and crumbling ramparts resist so formidable an army, exclaimed: “How, by the wounds of God, is it that they do not enter? By the virtues of God, what is the meaning of it?” He grew irascible, ill, discouraged. He was heard to exclaim: “Ha, I renounce God; I see well that I have no men left; I must bid farewell to the empire, and shut myself up in some monastery, and, by God’s death, in three years I will become a Franciscan!” Finally, beaten in several sorties, and embarrassed by the capture of his provisions, he opened a furious cannonade without attaining the foot of the wall, took to mining, in which he was not more fortunate, and withdrew shamed and desperate on the 26th of December, 1552, leaving his army orders to raise the siege after his departure and execute a retreat on Thionville and Treves, under cover of some cannon mounted at the château de Ladonchamp. He had lost thirty thousand men during the siege.

When, on the 2nd of January, 1553, Guise perceived the men in full retreat, he precipitated himself with his garrison into the camp, to seize the artillery and cut to pieces those who had lagged behind. But a heartrending spectacle presented itself to the eyes of the French. Whichever way they looked, lay so many dead, and an infinity of sick were heard groaning in the huts. In every quarter were great cemeteries, newly dug, tents, arms, and other abandoned furniture. Some of the sick were lying in the mud, others were seated on great stones, with their legs frozen up to the knees in mire, so that they could not withdraw them. More than three hundred were rescued from this horrible condition, but the greater number were obliged to have their legs cut off.

As if by magic, the French forgot their own sufferings, the dangers they had just escaped, the martial ardour which had animated them, and thought of nothing but how to succour these unfortunate Germans, thus abandoned with their feet in the snow, administering all necessaries and such comforts as poor sick foreigners want. Guise had them taken in boats to the duke of Alva at Thionville.[u]

_Minor Engagements; the Abdication of Charles V_

[Sidenote: [1552-1557 A.D.]]

The following year the emperor besieged Thérouanne in Artois. The little garrison which held it did not capitulate till after a valiant defence; he had the town levelled with the ground and it was never rebuilt. Hesdin was treated in the same fashion. Charles was avenging his humiliated pride by a savage war. In 1554 Henry II paid him ravages for ravages in Hainault and Brabant; he sacked Mariembourg, Dinant, and, at the other extremity of the Low Countries, he attacked Renty, not far from St. Omer. The emperor tried to relieve the place, Guise and Tavannes defied his cavalry; but the French army was compelled by lack of provisions to raise the siege.

At the same time, Brissac, by a series of campaigns which have remained the model of their kind, maintained himself with a small army in Piedmont, in spite of the duke of Alva, and seized Casale, capital of Montferrat; Strozzi and Montluc defended Siena in Tuscany against the Florentines and imperialists; the Turks menaced Naples; finally the baron de la Garde, the French admiral in the Levant, sacked the island of Elba and set foot in Corsica. Thus the check given at Metz was not counterbalanced; France seemed to have recovered her youth with her new king: Charles V grew weary of a struggle which he had now sustained for five-and-thirty years. Frustrated alike by France and by the princes of Germany, he ceded the Low Countries, Italy, and Spain to his son Philip II, and sought at the monastery of San Yuste that repose which is never to be found by the ambitious great (1556).

Charles V had not been able to deliver all his crowns to his son; Austria and the title of emperor remained to his brother Ferdinand. The house of Austria was divided. But at the moment in which Philip II lost Germany he seemed to gain England by a second marriage with the queen of that country, Mary Tudor. He had already one son, Don Carlos; he reserved for him all the Spanish possessions, and it was agreed that the child who might be born of this new union should reign over both the Low Countries and England, that is to say, that London and Antwerp should be under the same master, the Thames and the Schelde under the same laws, and that the North Sea should become an English lake. Thus both for the present and the future France was seriously threatened by that domination which was pressing on her from three sides, which might bring upon her an English invasion against which she could no longer hope for aid from Germany. At the beginning of 1556 Henry II had signed the Truce of Vaucelles with Charles V: he broke it the same year (November), that he might not leave Philip II time to establish himself firmly. The holy see was then occupied by a fiery old man, Paul IV, who was alarmed to see the Spaniards beside and above him, at Naples and Milan. The king and the pontiff made alliance. An army under command of Montmorency was sent to the Low Countries; another under the duke of Guise into Italy. The object was to confine Philip II to Spain; Henry II was to enlarge his dominions on the north by neighbouring provinces which it would be easy to retain, and one of his sons received the promise of the crown of Naples, which Duke Francis of Guise, descended in the female line from the house of Anjou, counted on taking for himself. The plan was well thought out. The energetic Paul IV placed his spiritual power at the service of France and the Italian cause; he lanced an excommunication against the most Catholic king.

_Battle and Defence of St. Quentin (August 10th, 1557)_

[Sidenote: [1557-1558 A.D.]]

Against Montmorency, Philip II opposed the duke of Savoy, Emmanuel Philibert, who, despoiled of his states by Francis, rested all his hopes on Spain; and against Francis of Guise, the duke of Alva, a true Spaniard, devoted to the church more even than to his king. Guise, received in triumph at Rome by Paul IV, penetrated into the Abruzzi, but failed near Civitella before the scientific tactics of his adversary. Emmanuel Philibert, after a feigned attack on Champagne, suddenly turned on St. Quentin where he was joined by seven thousand English. This was a place without walls, without munitions, without provisions. Admiral Coligny threw himself into it with seven hundred men; Montmorency approached with supplies; but came so near to the enemy with an army very inferior in numbers and took so few precautions to preserve for himself freedom of movement, that he was obliged to fight without securing his rear. Emmanuel Philibert turned his flank, attacked him in front and rear, and completely defeated him. A Bourbon, the duke d’Enghien, and a viscount of Turrenne were slain; another Bourbon, the duke de Montpensier, and the constable De Montmorency, the marshal De Saint-André, the duke de Longueville were taken with four thousand men, the artillery, and the baggage. There were more than ten thousand killed or wounded.

“Is my son at Paris?” cried Charles V on learning in the depths of his retreat of San Yuste of this great disaster to France. Philip II was not at Paris and did not get there. Cold and methodical of temperament, and obstinate but without dash, he had not thought it prudent to follow up his victory. Before taking another step he wished to have St. Quentin, and St. Quentin did not allow itself to be taken for seventeen days. Coligny, knowing that the salvation of France was in question, had made heroic efforts to prolong the defence. There had been time to collect forces and Philip II, after having taken Ham and Le Catelet, re-entered the Low Countries with the slender results of a victory which had promised to be as disastrous to France as Poitiers or Agincourt.

_The Retaking of Calais (1558 A.D.)_

[Sidenote: [1558-1559 A.D.]]

Henry II had recalled the duke of Guise in all haste from Italy. The conqueror of Metz left the duke of Alva to impose, one knee on the ground, the Spanish will on the pope, and came to receive the title of lieutenant of the kingdom with unlimited power. All the nobility flocked round him; Guise responded to the universal expectation. Whilst a movement of the troops was attracting the attention of the enemy on the side of Luxemburg, the duke hastened to Calais which he immediately invested on the 1st of January, 1558. The English, reckoning on the fortifications of the place and on the marshes which envelop it, had left in it but nine hundred men. Two forts cover the town: that of Nieullay on the land side and that of Rysbank on the side of the sea. Guise attacked the first with fury and carried it on the 3rd of January. The fort of Rysbank fell into his power the same day. On the 6th the castle was attacked; on the 8th the garrison capitulated. The last and shameful memorial of the Hundred Years’ War was thus effaced; the English no longer possessed an inch of territory in France. In an attempt to compensate themselves by an attack on Brest they were unsuccessful, for the troops landed at Le Conquet were driven back into the sea by the peasants of lower Brittany. This was the death-blow of Queen Mary. “If they open my heart,” she said when she was dying, “they will read upon it the name of Calais.” The same blow ended the Anglo-Spanish alliance. Elizabeth, who succeeded her sister Mary on the English throne, made Protestantism triumphant in the island and became the irreconcilable enemy of the king of Spain.

_The Treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis (1559 A.D.)_

Indeed Philip II, that sombre and fanatical spirit, desired to attain the dominion of Europe by another road than his father’s. Half of Germany and the Scandinavian states had separated themselves from Rome, and the Reformation, stifled in Italy and Spain, was fermenting in France, spreading in the Netherlands, triumphing in Scotland and England. Philip II conceived the design of crushing Protestantism. He wished to make himself the armed leader of Catholicism throughout Europe, the secular arm of the holy see, the executor of the sentences of the church. His faith and his ambition were in agreement; for he doubtless calculated that if he stifled heresy it would not be to the profit of orthodox Christianity alone, but to that of his own power, and that the unity of religion would bring about the unity of the empire. In this idea a war with France for a few towns on the frontiers seemed at the moment impolitic and he desired to treat with its king in order to win him to his own plan. Before the peace was concluded some further encounters took place; Guise seized Thionville and Therme, captured Dunkirk, Bergues, and Nieuwport, but suffered a defeat by allowing himself to be caught at Gravelines between the count of Egmont who attacked him in front, and an English fleet whose cannon belaboured his flanks. On the 3rd of April, 1559, peace was at last signed.

By this treaty France kept the Three Bishoprics (Metz, Toul, and Verdun with their territory). She had already re-entered into possession of Boulogne; she also retained Calais, engaging to pay a sum of 500,000 crowns to the English if she had not restored that city at the end of eight years--which she took good care not to do. The two kings of France and Spain mutually restored each other their conquests on the frontiers of the Low Countries and in Italy, with the exception of Piedmont where Henry retained several towns[72] until the claims of Louise of Savoy, grandmother of the king of France, should be settled. The acquisitions of France were valuable and protected her against England and Germany. Nevertheless, one of the negotiators, Montmorency, has been accused of having sacrificed his country’s interests to the desire of recovering his own liberty more quickly; France ceded the county of Charolais, and 189 towns or castles, which she was occupying in the Low Countries or in Italy, in return for St. Quentin, Ham, Le Catelet and a few unimportant places which the Spaniards surrendered to her. “Sire,” Guise and Brissac said bitterly, “you give in one day what would not be taken from you in thirty years of reverses.” Some towns in Italy were neither necessary nor desirable for the French, for they would have served them as a perpetual temptation to return across the Alps. But they were abandoning French territories which should have been preserved at all costs, especially as the Spaniards did not restore Jeanne d’Albret the portion of her kingdom of Navarre which they had held for half a century.[m]

Thus the great game of international politics that for half a century had been played on the boards of Europe was brought to apparent termination,--and France had lost. Since the time of Charles VIII, France, as represented by its king, had longed for foreign conquests. We have seen Francis I in a life-long struggle with Charles V, striving vainly to give imperial influence to his kingly office. Henry II has kept up the game, with Philip II for his counter-player. But now, after all these struggles, all this loss of property and life, the bounds of France still remain almost the same as they were when Francis I came to the throne in 1515. The glamour of the deeds of Francis I may have given a certain added éclat to the French name; but the actual extra-territorial influence of France has shrunk rather than extended since the time when Charles VIII marched practically unopposed to the confines of Italy (1494).

On the other hand, the duchy of Bourbon has reverted to the crown, and the recovery of Calais is an event of real significance. With the expulsion of the English troops from this last coign of vantage, the work begun by Joan of Arc a century before is finished. If the imperial hopes of the French kings have been doomed to disappointment, at least France is now mistress of her own territory; hers is a compact and unified kingdom, if not an empire in the modern sense of the word.

THE LAST DAYS OF HENRY II

It is not to be supposed, however, that the French king regarded the imperial contest as really over. Doubtless Henry II, while momentarily turning his attention to the interior of his kingdom, dreamed of a future day when he should return to the imperial struggle. But if so, the dream was not to be realised. The end of his life was at hand. The same year that witnessed the signing of the treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis was to see Henry II pass finally from the scene; indeed there is nothing more to record of him except the manner of his death. This came about in a way characteristic of the times, but impossible in any other age; it was the accidental outgrowth of the festivities that marked in a sense the culminating features of the treaty.

It had been arranged that a double marriage of international significance should be effected. Henry’s daughter was to marry the king of Spain; his sister to marry the duke of Savoy. Thus the great imperial drama was to close in the conventional way amidst the peal of wedding bells. The weddings took place; but the fates mocked at such an ending, and insisted that what had commenced as a tragedy should remain a tragedy to the end.[a] In scandalous contrast to the feverish agitation--an exaltation mingled with dread--that pervaded all France, the court had given itself over to pleasures and festivities: nothing but balls, masquerades, jousts, and banquets on the occasion of the double marriage of the princesses of France. But the joyous sounds were soon to be changed to the silence of death. On the 20th of June, 1559, Madame Elizabeth of France, daughter of the king, was married at Notre Dame to the duke of Alva, proxy of the king of Spain. On the 27th the contract of the duke of Savoy and Madame Marguerite, the king’s sister, was signed. Splendid lists were marked out, at the end of the rue St. Antoine, facing the royal palace des Tournelles, and almost at the foot of the Bastille where the deposed magistrates were imprisoned. During three days the princes and lords tilted there in presence of the ladies. On the 29th of June the champions (challengers) of the tournament were the dukes of Guise and Nemours, the son of the duke of Ferrara and the king in person, wearing the colours of his sexagenarian lady, the white and black of widows, which Diana had never left off. When the passage at arms was finished the king who had ridden in several races as “swift and expert rider” wished to break another lance before retiring, and in spite of the entreaties of the queen he ordered that the count de Montgomery should be his opponent.

Montgomery in vain tried to be excused. The two jousters rushed violently against each other and broke their lances with dexterity. But Montgomery, forgetting to throw away instantly the fragment remaining in his hand as the rule was, involuntarily struck the helmet of the king, penetrating the bars of his visor, and thrusting a splinter of wood into his eye. The king fell on the neck of his horse, which carried him to the end of the enclosure; here his equerries received him in their arms, and carried him to Tournelles amidst the greatest confusion and indescribable dismay. All the aids of science were ineffectual; the wood had penetrated into the brain. Vainly the renowned Vesale hastened from Brussels on the command of Philip II; Henry II languished eleven days, and expired on the 10th of July after having the marriage of his sister Marguerite with the duke of Savoy celebrated in his chamber the day before his death. He was a few months over forty years of age. All Protestant Europe hailed the arm of the Almighty in this thunderbolt which had struck down the persecuting king in the midst of his “impious” festivities.

The reformers were not mistaken. The race of Valois was doomed. Restored in the fifteenth century by the greatest marvel in French history, it had disregarded the will of God as indicated by Joan of Arc. In the sixteenth century it outraged humanity and hampered the natural development of France. Its days were numbered. Now replacing the fanaticism of Henry II by a policy devoid of principle or sincerity, it was to strive at random during thirty years against the tempests of the religious wars, to disappear finally in a sea of blood.[k]

FOOTNOTES

[67] [See vol. IX, Chapter XV, for the complementary account of this and the subsequent Italian campaigns of Francis I.]

[68] [Charles had succeeded Ferdinand the Catholic, who died in 1516. Francis made no murmur when Charles entered into his vast heritage; indeed, he signed a treaty of offensive and defensive alliance with him at Nyon in 1516. France gained nothing by it except the restitution to Jeanne d’Albret of Basse-Navarre, which Ferdinand had seized. But Maximilian’s death in 1519 changed the whole face of affairs.]

[69] [“I purposely make use of this Protestant term,” says Martin, himself a Catholic, “as expressing a particular form of Catholicism.”]

[70] [The work of Rabelais is discussed in Chapter XIV of the present volume.]

[71] [For a study of the Reformation, see vol. XIII.]

[72] The treaty of 1562 with Savoy finally left France only Pinerolo, Perosa, and Savigliano, which were restored by Henry III in 1574. The marquisate of Saluzzo which Francis I had snatched from the family of that name was usurped by Savoy in 1588 and in 1601 exchanged for Bresse.