Chapter XIII: Catherine De’ Medici and the Religious Wars (3)

His first acts showed what was to be expected of him. At Turin he repaid the hospitality of the duke of Savoy with prodigal magnificence by giving him Pinerolo, Perugia, and Savigliano, the last remains of the conquests of Francis I beyond the Alps. Hardly had he entered France when he commanded the Protestants to turn Catholic or leave the kingdom. His words were indeed menacing: but the reformers were reassured when they saw that action was limited to sending a few officers to the southern provinces, which were then much disturbed, and to processions of flagellants, in which the king took part and which went through the streets scourging their shoulders for the remission of their sins. He made a solemn entry into Paris, where he greatly scandalised serious people by having about him a great number of monkeys, parrots, and little dogs. At Rheims, “when the crown was placed upon his head,” says L’Estoile,[o] “he said in a loud voice that it hurt him; it slipped twice as though it were going to fall.” An evil omen was seen in this, and with reason. This head, which could not bear a crown, could no more bear the strong and virile ideas that would have been so necessary to defend it.

POLITICAL CONDITIONS

France had need, however, of an able, honest, strong chief to take up the reins of government. Castelnau[g] estimates that “already, by reason of the civil wars, more than a million persons had been put to death, all under the pretext of religion and public utility, with which both parties shielded themselves.” It was only with great difficulty that Catherine de’ Medici had been able to prevent a new explosion during the last days of Charles IX and the two months of her regency. Between the extreme Catholics and the fanatical Protestants a new party was gaining ground, that of the _Politiques_, composed of moderate Catholics who desired the re-establishment of public tranquillity by religious tolerance and energetic repression of factions. The three Montmorencys, Damville, Thoré, and Méru, were the most conspicuous men of this party, which includes a great number of magistrates and of rich bourgeois. A prince of the blood, the duke of Alençon, had undertaken the leadership of it, less through patriotism than through ambition, for he counted upon making use of it for his personal ends. The Guises were at the head of the Catholics, the Bourbons at the head of the Protestants; in order to be neither isolated nor second in one or the other camp he had thought it possible to form a third party that should be devoted to his interests. The Béarnais [Henry IV] justly calls him “a double heart, an evil and misshapen mind, like a deformed body.” We must, however, give him credit for two things: he wished to be French, he said, in name and in fact, and an enemy of Spain; and he never stained his hands with the blood of the Huguenots.[c]

On his return to Paris, Henry III remained there for the winter and during Lent, taking part in the feasts and the devotions. Accompanied by the queen, and carrying a large rosary in his hand, he visited the churches, the oratories, and the different religious houses; an action which gave rise to numberless lampoons, libels, and satirical writings.

L’Estoile[o] in his journal, indifferent in the main and censorious, gives a faithful portrayal of the feelings of the Parisian people. They were anything but disposed to pardon the effeminacy and ridiculous actions of the king.[m]

[Sidenote: [1575-1576 A.D.]]

They saw the descendant of St. Louis and Francis sink religion into ridicule, and knighthood into disgrace. They saw a king of France, surrounded by minions or favourites, dress himself in woman’s clothes, and sing infamous ballads in a public meeting, and on the same day sing psalms through the streets dressed in the robe of a penitent--a Christian Nero, with the solemn voice of Coligny scarcely hushed, and the grim eyes of the Bible-reading Huguenots fixed on all his proceedings. As a consequence there was strife and misery in the land. Alençon, wicked as the king, and not so clever, joined the levies which were gathering round the old leaders. Henry of Navarre escaped from his honourable and close-watched detention by the swiftness of his horse at a hunting-party, and bade his adherents, who came to him in great numbers, once more “to follow the White Plume, always in the front of battle.” He celebrated his recovered independence by resuming the exercise of the Protestant faith. But the great families of the Montmorencys and others, who were merely discontented with the government, were disinclined to mix their standards with the avowed Huguenots. It was, therefore, easy for the queen-mother to break up the ill-assorted union. She sent embassies of her bedchamber-women to wait on the duke of Alençon, and in a very short time that feeble prince was detached from the cause. He, however, mediated a peace which was very favourable to the reformers. Their worship was permitted in all parts of France except in Paris; all edicts against them were withdrawn; the massacre itself was disavowed; and several additional towns were surrendered to them as pledges. This was the fifth peace since the religious wars began, and was called the Peace of Monsieur, in honour of Alençon.[79] The king, who appeared at ball and theatre with rich necklaces round his bare neck, and affected the appearance of a female beauty, had no wish, in signing this pacification, but to be left undisturbed by the anger of faction or the ambition of his brother. To separate Alençon from the Huguenots, he would have made greater sacrifices still. But the sacrifice he made was quite enough. The Catholics saw the overthrow of their faith in the terms of the treaty; the Huguenots the finger of God in the spread of their opinions.

THE HOLY LEAGUE

[Sidenote: [1576-1584 A.D.]]

The Holy League began in 1576--a league which bound itself by the most awful sanctions to extirpate heresy--to spare neither friend nor foe till the pestilence was banished, and even, if need be, to alter the succession to the throne. The next heir after the childless Alençon was a Huguenot; but ascending far above the successors of Hugh Capet, Bourbon, or Valois, there was a prince whose whole heart was devoted to Rome, and who traced his lineal descent to Charlemagne--and this was Henry of Guise, son of that old Francis who was assassinated by Poltrot, and who himself bore marks of his Catholic soldiership in a wound upon his face, which made him known as the Balafré. “No Protestant king of Navarre! We will have Catholic Henry of Guise!”

But Alençon [who hated Guise and had tried once or twice to assassinate him] was by no means pleased with this part of the league’s intentions. He threw himself into its ranks by way of stemming its course, and was lost or forgotten in the tumult which raged in every heart. The king summoned the states to meet at Blois, but the states showed the somewhat contradictory symptoms, not only of hatred of dissent, but of something very like republicanism. They wished to control the royal power by commissioners appointed by themselves, whose decision on any disputed question was to be final; and being bribed and coerced by the party of the Guises, they passed an edict interdicting the Huguenot faith, and withdrawing all the guarantee towns from their hands. This was, in fact, a declaration of war; the white plume was waving in the breeze in a moment, and all the party were in arms. More sincerity arose on both sides in viewing the matters in dispute, and amalgamation became almost impossible. The king brought discredit on the league and on himself by joining it as a member. This move degraded him from being monarch of France to being one of a faction, and not even the chief of it; for in spite of Henry’s calling himself the leader of the confederacy, the real authority remained with Henry of Guise. The king, for instance, wished to raise money, but the Balafré frowned, and the Catholic purses remained closed. He could neither command nor persuade. [In fact there seems to have been some idea of setting him aside somewhat as his fabled ancestor Pepin had set aside the last of the Merovingians.] His thoughts, therefore, were soon bent on peace. He managed to obtain a treaty at Bergerac in 1577, by which the former state of affairs was restored. A compliment at the same time was paid to the Huguenots, and a triumph gained to himself, by the abolition of the league.

But one of the articles of the league was the indissoluble “association and brotherhood of its members till its objects were obtained.” Now, its objects could not be obtained while a Huguenot was favoured, or even tolerated in France, or while there was a chance of the accession of so dangerous a heretic as Henry of Navarre. War after war broke out, to the number of seven in all, and with still increasing hatred; but it is useless to particularise them. It will serve to show the curious mixture of motive and action that one of these is called the War of the Lovers, because it arose from the jealousies and rivalries of the leaders who were invited to meet at the palace of the queen-mother. That astute Italian introduced a sort of chivalry of vice in the prosecution of a campaign. She invited the young king of Navarre to come to her court with all the cavaliers he chose. There were balls and dances every night, and the appearance of the greatest cordiality; for a radius of a mile and a half was established round the house, within which quarrels and fighting were unknown. It was an oasis consecrated to the coarser Venus. But outside those narrow limits the war raged with undiminished ardour. A Huguenot lord, after joining in the same dance with a Catholic, would ask him to accompany him for a ride across the line, and the survivor came in with bloody sword to boast of the result. One night Henry gave a return entertainment to the queen and all the court. When the supper was over, and the dances were resumed, Henry slipped out of the garden, joined Sully and some other young nobles who were waiting his arrival, and rode all night. On the following day the queen-mother heard that one of her towns about thirty miles off had been surprised and pillaged; and when Henry rode back within the peaceful circle, complimented him on the success of his stratagem.

But gloomy forebodings began to mingle with these festivities. Alençon, to weaken the power of Spain, was allowed to place himself at the head of the revolted provinces. The revolt was religious as much as political, and the furious leaguers saw the brother of the king and heir of the throne enlisted against the church. His visit to London, to prosecute his claim to Elizabeth’s hand, also, though terminating in ridicule and disappointment, showed his want of attachment to the true faith. He came back to Paris humiliated and unsuccessful, both in love and war. His want of zeal was discovered, and not much reliance could be placed on a man who supported the rebels of Holland and wooed the great heretic Elizabeth of England. His death, in 1584, was not lamented on any other account than that it advanced by one step the cause of a far more hated, because far more terrible opponent.[f]

THE WAR OF THE THREE HENRYS

[Sidenote: [1584-1586 A.D.]]

The next heir to the throne was now the Huguenot Henry of Navarre. With such a prospect before them the Catholic party grew stronger and more determined. Three men, all Henrys, now stood forth as leaders of these parties, and of these the royal faction was least. The vacillating king sought alliance first with one side and then with the other. His own inclination led him away from the Huguenot cause; his safety was not assured with the cause of Guise. He was not strong enough himself to have a loyal and determined following of his own.[a]

The conduct henceforth of Navarre and Guise proved a remarkable contrast. It was the interest of the Bourbon to elevate and dignify the throne to which he saw himself likely to succeed; he therefore treated with profound reverence the office of the king, and his person with outward respect. It was the business of the Guise to degrade the crown, which would otherwise have been too sacred for a sacrilegious hand to touch; he therefore treated the king with marked indignity, and stirred up the lowest passions of the mob in opposition to the highest authority in the land. By his success in this policy he made a narrow escape of exciting feelings of hatred to royalty itself, which would have punished his ambition by taking away the object of it.[f]

An interesting result, however, of this attitude of the Guise party was an advance in political thinking. There were hints abroad of the sovereignty of the people. The Jesuit opponents of Elizabeth and Navarre must give up the idea of hereditary monarchy. Orthodoxy was the indispensable qualification, however, rather than popular choice; the church rather than the nation was the source of sovereignty. It was on this basis that the Guise party made a treaty with Philip of Spain. The Pact of Joinville at the end of 1584 made the league party not only a menace to hereditary monarchy in France, but by junction with Spain it became anti-national in its character. The war now became more political and less trivial. The destinies of France were at stake. But the foreign aid which made the Guise cause a European question, and widened the quarrel to one of universal religious war, was not destined to amount to enough to repress Protestantism in France. The year 1585 was spent in useless negotiations in France; during the next year the war was hardly begun, and before decisive action had been taken in France the foreign situation had changed entirely through the action of Elizabeth.[a]

On the 18th of February, 1587, the execution of Mary Queen of Scots fell like a firebrand on the Catholic plans. She had once been queen of France, and was related to the Guises. She had been true to but one object throughout her life, but that object justified and ennobled all her deeds, for it was the supremacy of the church. The violences of the league, the curses of the pope, and the threats of Philip of Spain and of all the Catholics of Europe, had led to the sad catastrophe, by showing the wise counsellors of Elizabeth that while Mary lived and plotted there was no safety for Protestantism or freedom; and now the blow recoiled with tenfold force on the persons who had made it unavoidable. Philip began his preparations for the Armada. Guise concealed no longer his enmity to the king, and roused the populace and parliament of Paris, both of which were entirely at his command, against him. The infatuated monarch showed his usual want of judgment. He replied to the reclamations of the magistrates by confiscating their salaries, and threatening to throw them in sacks into the Seine. But no course of proceeding would probably have altered the result. Victories and defeats all had the same effect.[f]

_The Battle of Coutras (1587 A.D.)_

[Sidenote: [1587 A.D.]]

One great battle stands out in the dreary stretch of these years. Henry of Navarre had marched from La Rochelle across the Loire country to meet a German force which was advancing from the east. Henry III sent an army under Joyeuse to intercept the forces of the Huguenots and he succeeded in doing this at the strong position of Coutras. The situation was such that the Huguenots had no hope of escape except through victory. Henry had reached the château of Coutras an hour before Joyeuse and on the evening of the 19th of October, 1587; the advance guard of the Huguenots drove the duke’s Albanian scouts from the town. Joyeuse, however, was afraid that the enemy would try to escape and began preparations for battle in the middle of the night.[a]

The young courtiers had sworn to give quarter to no one. The king of Navarre had only time to leave Coutras and prepare for battle, a little before day, in the angle of land formed by the two rivers Dronne and Isle. According to D’Aubigné,[n] who has left us the most circumstantial account of this day [and who was himself a soldier in the service of Henry IV], the Catholics had about five thousand foot-soldiers and twenty-five hundred cavalry; the Protestants, almost as many infantry, but hardly half as many cavalry.

The battle began with volleys of cannon. The Catholics suffered from the Huguenot artillery, which was better aimed than their own, and with loud cries demanded a charge. At the moment when the Catholics started, the ministers Chandieu and D’Amours began to chant in front of the Protestant army the twelfth verse of Psalm cxviii. At the sight of the kneeling Protestants the frivolous youths who were about Joyeuse uttered insulting cries. “They tremble, the cowards, they are confessing.” “You are mistaken,” replied a more experienced captain, “when the Huguenots look like that, they are determined to conquer or die.” In an instant the Huguenot men-at-arms had mounted. “Cousins!” cried the king of Navarre to Condé and Soissons, “I will say no more to you than that you are of the blood of Bourbon, and, as God lives, I will show you that I am your senior.” “And we,” replied Condé, “we will show that you have good juniors.”

The Huguenot line was formed in a crescent on a little plain. The light cavalry of Poitou, which formed the point of the crescent on the right, were driven back by a great force of Catholic cavalry, and drew the Gascon squadron of the viscount de Turenne along in their rout. The left wing of the Catholics with a shout of victory pushed on to the baggage in order to plunder, without heeding what was taking place on the rest of the battle-field. Three hundred Protestant arquebusiers, believing the battle lost and inspired by a heroic despair, threw themselves upon a large battalion of nearly three thousand of the enemy’s foot-soldiers with such violence as to break through the first ranks. The rest of the Huguenot infantry followed this movement and the two bodies of infantry attacked each other with great violence.

But in the meantime the fate of the day was decided elsewhere. Joyeuse had started at a gallop with his men-at-arms spread out in a single line of lances; the three Bourbons were awaiting him steadfastly at the head of three squadrons formed six files deep. Most of the Huguenot cavalry was armed with sword and pistol; when the enemy was fifteen paces distant they threw themselves with all their might from their horses and fired point blank, while some platoons of arquebusiers stationed between the squadrons fired with surer aim upon the Catholics. The latter could not even make use of their lances. Their long line was driven back and broken. There followed a short and terrible hand-to-hand conflict, in which the king of Navarre and his cousins kept their word to one another and fought like true knights. The nobles of the court, gaily decked, plumed, dressed in velvet and embroidery, were crushed like glass by the poor and rude gentlemen of the south. These young effeminates knew only how to die.

The first squadrons had met at nine o’clock; at ten there was not a man of Joyeuse’s army who had not either fallen or fled. The infantry had also dispersed after the defeat of the cavalry. The king of Navarre had great difficulty in stopping the carnage. The Protestants took cruel revenge for the barbarities practised by Joyeuse upon their comrades; more than four hundred gentlemen and two thousand soldiers were put to the sword. Joyeuse surrendered to two Huguenots when a third split open his head with a blow of his pistol butt. Nearly all the lords and gentlemen who had followed him were killed or taken prisoners. The booty, including the ransoms, amounted to more than 600,000 crowns. The victors had not lost forty men.

The king of Navarre showed himself worthy of this brilliant triumph by moderation and humanity. He exhibited no more pride after the victory than fear before the combat. He received all the prisoners with kindness, restored their arms to some, released others without ransom, and declared that after as before he demanded only the edict of 1577.[l]

At the same time Guise repulsed the enemy from the soil of France in Alsace. The defeat was attributed to the king, and the victory to the duke--a fatal contrast between him and Guise, of which he could not weaken the effect by comparison with Navarre. The two uncrowned Henrys were held up as models for the third, for even the Catholics saw with a sort of pride the achievements of Henry, who, though a Huguenot, was a prince and a Frenchman still. This state of affairs could not last long. Guise made a solemn entry into Paris, and was received with all the ceremony usually reserved for a king.[f]

Henry de Guise at this time was thirty-eight years of age. He was tall and well proportioned, with blond curly hair and piercing eyes. The scar on his cheek gave him a martial appearance. Although not a great general, he possessed all the military qualities necessary to gain the love of the populace. Indefatigable, prompt of decision, rapid and sure of execution, affable, generous, familiar even, though ever guarding his dignity, he had the external gifts and the successful personality which Henry III lacked. Madame de Retz said that in comparison to him the other princes were but people. All were devoted to him. “France,” Balzac said of him later, “went mad over this man; to say they loved him is too weak an expression.”[m]

_The Day of the Barricades and the Treaty of Union_

[Sidenote: [1588-1589 A.D.]]

Henry was at the Louvre, and trembled at his subject’s approach. When the interview was over, Guise returned to his house and surrounded it with armed men, as if to hint that his life was in danger from the king--a very old trick, and very often successful. Everything continued quiet on both sides till some Swiss royal guards marched into the town. In a moment the mob were up in arms. Barricades were erected in the streets; pistols were fired at the passengers. The Swiss were attacked, and indiscriminate massacre began. Catherine strove in vain to induce her unworthy son to go and show himself to the malcontents. He heard the firing on his troops, and had not the courage to order them to defend themselves; and while his mother rode boldly into the streets to quell the insurrection, he slipped noiselessly to his stables, where the Tuileries gardens now are, and galloped without pause to Rambouillet. On the following day he got safe within the walls of Chartres. This was called the day of the Barricades, and for a while it certainly advanced the cause of the duke of Guise. With affected moderation he rejected the acclamations of his party, allowed the Swiss guards to escape, and in other ways endeavoured to pacify the adherents of the king. To Chartres the king was followed by the now triumphant Guise, who dictated there, to the degraded king, what was thenceforward called the Treaty of Union of July, 1588. It forgave, or rather it applauded, all the outrages of Paris. It declared all heretics incapable of any public trust, office, or employment. It excluded the heretical members of the house of Bourbon from the line of succession to the crown. It raised the duke to the office of lieutenant-general of the kingdom; and it provided for the immediate convention of the states-general of France. To the observance of these terms, Henry pledged himself in the most solemn forms of adjuration.

_The Meeting of the States-General_

Again, therefore, the states-general were summoned to meet at the city of Blois; and, on the 16th of October, 1588, 505 deputies were assembled to listen to the inaugural oration of the king. “Among them,” says the contemporary historian, Matthieu, “was conspicuous Henry, duke of Guise, who, as great master of the royal household, sat near the throne, dressed in white satin, with his hood thrown carelessly backward; and from that elevated position he cast his eyes along the dense crowd before him that he might recognise and distinguish his followers, and encourage with a glance their reliance on his fortune and success; and thus, without uttering a word, might seem to say to each of them, ‘I see you;’ and then (proceeds Matthieu) the duke rising, with a profound obeisance to the assembly, and followed by the long train of his officers and gentlemen, retired to meet and to introduce the king.”

The lofty consciousness of his royal character still imparted some dignity to Henry’s demeanor. Addressing the states with a majestic and touching eloquence, he asserted his title to the gratitude of his people, claimed the unimpaired inheritance of the prerogatives of his ancestors, pronounced the pardon of those who had already entered into traitorous conspiracies against him, and threatened condign punishment of all who might in future engage in any similar attempts. Even Guise listened, with evident discomposure, to this unexpected rebuke, and public menace, from the lips of his sovereign. It was, however, the single gleam of success with which Henry was cheered in his intercourse with the representatives of his people; and the rest of the history of the states-general of 1588, is little else than a record of the humiliations to which they subjected him.

He spoke, as we have seen, with royal indignation, of the outrages of Paris and of Chartres: but he was compelled to omit all those passages of his address in his subsequent publication of it. He publicly claimed for himself the cognizance of all questions respecting the verification of the powers of the deputies: but he was constrained, with equal publicity, to retract that pretension. He entertained an appeal from one of the members of the Tiers État against a decision of his order: but he was sternly reminded that the states had met at Blois, not as supplicants to obey, but as councillors to advise, him. He pardoned the dukes of Soissons and Conti their having borne arms under the Huguenot standards, that so they might be qualified to take their places among the order of the nobles: but the validity of his pardon was contemptuously denied. He resisted, as an insult, the demand of the states, that he should repeat, in their presence, the oath he had already taken to observe the Treaty of the Union: but he was taught that submission was inevitable. He demanded that the states should, in their turn, swear fidelity to himself, and to the fundamental laws of the realm: but he was obliged to withdraw that demand. He insisted that the exclusion of Henry of Béarn from the succession to the throne should be preceded by an invitation to that prince to return into the bosom of the church: but his proposal was inflexibly and scornfully resisted. He commissioned two of his officers to lay before the order of the clergy his objections to the acceptance of the decrees of the Council of Trent: but his officers were driven away with insult. He solicited pecuniary aid for carrying on the war against the Huguenots: but the suit was answered by a demand for his surrender of a large part of his actual revenue.

This long series of indignities was readily traced by Henry to the guidance of a single hand. Guise was but too successfully exerting his influence at Blois to dethrone the king by degrading him. The crown, which must inevitably fall from the grasp of a prince whom all men had been taught to despise, might readily be transferred to the brows of a prince to whom all were looking with admiration.

Yet it was a hazardous policy. The king who had conquered at Jarnac and Montcontour, and who had concurred in devising the massacre of St. Bartholomew, was not a man to be restrained by the voice either of fear, of humanity, or of conscience. The friends of Guise saw, and pointed out to him, the danger of provoking the dormant passions of the enervated Henry; but he received their remonstrances with contempt, and habitually and ostentatiously placed himself within the powers of the sovereign whom he at once despised, exasperated, and defied.[w] This contemptuous attitude was to lead to his undoing.

THE ASSASSINATION OF HENRY, DUKE OF GUISE (1588 A.D.)

On December 23rd, at three o’clock in the morning, the duke of Guise left the room of Charlotte de Beaune, and found on returning to his house five notes which warned him to leave Blois immediately. His attendants begged him to take refuge without delay with his troops; but being weary he retired to sleep. At about eight o’clock, he got up, dressed himself in a new gray satin doublet, too thin for the season, took his cloak, went out, passed over the drawbridge and entered the castle.

Henry III, during the same night, prepared the ambuscade. The evening before, at seven o’clock, he told Liancourt, the chief equerry, in a loud voice, to order his coach for four o’clock in the morning, because he wished to visit a shrine and return in time for the council. He gave a secret order to the Corsican Ornano, and to the forty-five Gascons of his especial guard, to be near his room the following day at five o’clock; then he shut himself up in his private chamber. At four he rose and went out, saying nothing to the queen, who was uneasy. He ascended one flight with Du Halde, led him into a gallery which he had divided into fifty cells, during the last two or three days, under the pretext of lodging there some Capuchin friars whom he wished to have constantly near him, but in reality to hide and separate all those who were to take part in the premeditated act. He pushed Du Halde into one, and without speaking a word shut him in. Towards five o’clock the forty-five guards presented themselves, one by one. He took each one in turn to the higher landing, and locked them up, each in a separate cell.

The members of the council convoked for six o’clock arrived, and not noticing anything strange on the staircases or in the corridors, began their sitting. As soon as the king had seen Cardinal De Guise, who was staying in the town, at the hôtel d’Allaye, enter the large hall, he ascended to his cells, opened the doors, made his men come down, took them into his room, having commanded them to make no noise so as not to awaken the queen-mother, who was dying on the lower landing. The glimmering light of the December dawn and the light from the king’s candle but dimly showed their uneasy countenances and eager eyes. The king made a speech to his forty-five men, urging them to avenge him; he was delighted to find that his oratory was more successful than it was with the state deputies. These young noblemen, suddenly transported from their Gascony cottages, where they suffered hunger and every sort of privation, to become the confidants of the king, to enter his chamber, to hear themselves called his champions, his avengers, his friends, must have been the more amazed at this sudden fortune, in that the duke of Guise had threatened to plunge them back into their former misery.

By the advice of the duke of Guise these forty-five noblemen, sent by the states to entreat the king to reform his household, were to be dispersed as unnecessary. Still boorish, and knowing nothing beyond the patois of their villages, they remained homely and unaffected. One of them, called Périac, dimly understood that the king’s speech showed that it was necessary to stab the duke of Guise, and he interrupted him with a joyous familiarity, striking him in the stomach with the flat of his hand, and crying out to him, “Cap de Jou, I’ll kill him for you!” Reassured by the enthusiasm of these young men, Henry III himself posted them in his room and in the passages; then he retired to his private chamber, impatient and troubled at not having seen the duke of Guise arrive, but learning finally, at half-past eight, that Henry of Guise had just entered the council-room.

Henry of Guise had felt very cold in his satin doublet; his night had exhausted him. As he entered he felt sick and faint; his eyes were full of tears. “I am cold,” said he, “let me go to the fire.” Whilst more wood was being thrown on the fire, he said to M. de Morgondaine, keeper of the treasury, “I beg of you to ask M. de Saint-Prix to give me some Damascus raisins, or some preparation of roses.” They could only find some Brignolles plums, which he began to eat. M. de Marillac, master of requests, read a report upon the salt-taxes, when the door opened and Revol, secretary of state, was seen to advance. He said to the duke, “Monsieur, the king asks for you; he is in his old room.” Then he hastily went out. The duke did not notice this hasty retreat, nor the agitation of Revol, who was so white that the king had come to him a minute before, and said, “My God, Revol, how white you are! Rub your cheeks, Revol, rub your cheeks.” The duke of Guise got up, put some prunes in his silver comfit plate, leaving the rest upon the cloth. “Gentlemen,” said he “who will have some?” He threw his cloak upon his left arm, took his gloves and the comfit plate in the same hand, placed the fingers of his right hand upon his beard, was saluted and followed by the forty-five who were waiting for him. Two paces from the door of the old room he turned to see why they followed him, and immediately received first a sword-thrust in the back, then innumerable stabs from sword and dagger. Seizing hold of some of his murderers he dragged them along with him, and fell near the king’s bed.

On hearing this noise Cardinal De Guise broke up the council and rose: “Ah,” he cried, “they are killing my brother!” “Do not move, sir,” answered the marshal D’Aumont, drawing his sword, “the king has need of you!”

At the same moment, the king half-opened the door of his room, and seeing the body gave orders for the pockets to be searched. Whilst they were carrying out this command the Balafré, uttering a long, deep, and husky sigh, died. The body was covered again with a gray cloak and with a cross of straw, and left lying there for some time exposed to the taunts and mockeries of the courtiers, who called him “the handsome king of Paris.” They were not content with insulting him by words alone. “A diamond heart,” someone says, “was taken from his finger by the sieur D’Entragues.” To prevent the members of the league procuring any relics of their leader, the dead body was burned, by order of M. de Richelieu, grand provost of France, and the ashes were thrown into the Loire.[s] The cardinal De Guise and many other partisans of the house of Guise were arrested. The president of the Tiers État, and three other conspicuous Leaguers among the members of that body, were made state prisoners. The cardinal De Guise was murdered next day.[a]

It is said that when Henry III was certain that Guise had expired, he stepped from his room, sword in hand, and cried out: “We are no longer two! I am now king!”[80] then pushed with his foot the still quivering body. It was just sixteen years since Guise, at dawn of a fatal day, had struck with his foot another corpse!

DEATH OF CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI

Another famous death soon followed that of the Guises. The queen-mother had been violently affected by the catastrophe of December 23rd. Several days after, she visited the cardinal De Bourbon in the apartment whither he had retired. The cardinal broke forth in reproaches and accused Catherine of having caused the assassination of the Guises. This scene so disturbed the aged queen that her gout became worse; she was confined to her bed and never recovered. The 5th of January, 1589, at the age of sixty-one years, she joined her accomplice in the disaster of St. Bartholomew. The other accomplice, doubly an assassin, was not long in following his mother.

The death of this woman, who had figured so prominently in Christian affairs for thirty years, made but a feeble sound in the midst of the tempests that rose from the ashes of the Guises. The importance of Catherine had diminished greatly in the last few years: justly punished through the only source which could affect her, her love for Henry III, she had seen her power wane at the moment when she hoped to reign completely: neglected by her favourite son, half sacrificed to the favourites, at enmity with her son-in-law the Béarnais, she finally was without guidance; the race of Valois, which she had dreamed to place on all the thrones, being without issue, the Bourbons being her enemies, with the instinct of family, always found in a woman even the most corrupted, her hopes turned to the children of her eldest daughter; she thought to found a Lorraine dynasty; and only made herself the instrument and the puppet of the league. Her qualities as a ruler cannot be judged by the last years of her life: although morality and patriotism equally forbid the justification of this fatal woman, the historian must acknowledge that when it was possible to combine the policy of her family with the policy of state, she pursued two ideas which were beneficial to the destiny of France--the humiliation of the great, and resistance to the house of Austria. The end which she failed to attain by treachery and deceit might have been gained by the force and audacity of a genius more magnanimous: Richelieu was in this regard the happy inheritor of Catherine’s idea.[l]

THE SIEGE OF PARIS AND THE DEATH OF HENRY III

Heaven and earth rose against the massacre of Blois. It seemed a wilful playing into the hands of the Huguenots to remove the Catholic chief, and the pope looked on the deed not only as murder, but as heresy. The unruly capital burst into a cry of disobedience, and the Sorbonne formally withdrew the allegiance of the people from an unworthy king. The name of royalist was as fatal as that of Huguenot had been. The president Harlay, and sixty of the councillors, who bore the royal commission, were only saved from death by being taken to the Bastille. But in the midst of this general indignation, the states-general, and they alone, were, in appearance at least, unmoved. Occasionally, indeed, and even earnestly, they solicited the release of the prisoners. But they breathed not so much as a single remonstrance to the king against his enormous infringement of their sacred character and privileges in the persons of their colleagues. With an almost incredible abjectness they addressed themselves at once to the ordinary business of the session, and discussed with Henry, amendments in the law of treason, schemes for the admission of his officers to join in their deliberations, and plans for bringing to account all public defaulters. They presented to him, not indignant defiances, but humble descriptions of the sufferings of his people, and meek supplications for the redress of them; and continued, during a whole month after the death of the Princes of Lorraine, to prostrate themselves before the king, as in the presence, not of an assassin, but of a conqueror. The session then closed with the royal audience customary on such occasions; when, in the hope of propitiating his favour to the imprisoned deputies, they addressed him in a speech in which his royal virtues, and especially his _clemency_, were lavishly extolled. On the 16th January, 1589, they at last took their leave of their sovereign, and of each other: when “we parted,” says their great orator and memorialist, Bernard, “with tears in our eyes, bewailing what had passed, and looking forward with terror to what was yet to come; and observing that, in our separation, France had an evil augury that she herself was about to be torn in pieces.”

The augury was but too well verified. The states-general of France never again assembled till they met ineffectually in the reign of Louis XIII, to be then finally adjourned till the eve of the French Revolution.[w]

Notwithstanding all this, however, when the meeting at Blois was dissolved, the members spread the flame of disaffection through town and country. The duke of Mayenne, brother of the murdered Guise, was declared by the council of Sixteen, consisting of deputies from the sixteen quarters of Paris, lieutenant-general of the kingdom, till the states-general could be assembled. In short, the king was deserted by his people, and nothing was wanting but the formal sentence of his deposition. Henry of Navarre saw his inheritance endangered, and came to the rescue. An interview took place between the cousins--the most Christian king, and the most chivalrous Bourbon. It was not altogether regard for his own interests which moved the new ally. In so unsettled a nation as France then was, a forcible change of dynasty would have led to unending conflict. To save his country from perpetual civil war or total anarchy was the object of Henry’s efforts. His plans were bold and masterly. The few devoted adherents who still clung to their sovereign, from hereditary attachment, or from the poetic compassion which binds noble natures to a fallen race, accepted the guidance of the Huguenot chief. Mayenne was repulsed from Tours, and when men saw such measures of tenderness, as now distinguished the royal army, announced in the royal name, and such admirable military tactics displayed under the royal banner, the personal vices of the nominal monarch began to be forgotten.

Opposition was paralysed by the consciousness that the royal authority was now supported by conduct worthy of a king; and at the end of July, an army of forty thousand men, confident in their leader, and restored to the full feeling of loyalty to the throne, commenced the siege of Paris. Henry of Valois gazed on the hated battlements with delight. “Farewell, Paris,” he said; “from this time your towers and pinnacles shall offend my eyes no more. I will make it difficult to discover where your position was.” But Henry of Navarre was more wisely employed. He was superintending the placing of the troops, bringing up the guns, arranging the tents; and it was understood that the day of assault was fixed for the 2nd of August. Mayenne saw no chance of safety. His garrison was weak and dispirited; the populace, with its usual fickleness, was cowardly where it was not mad.

But among the rabble there was a youth of twenty-two, who had been a Jacobin friar for some time, and had degraded the cowl by the wildest excesses, both of debauchery and blood. Every crime was sweet-smelling odour to Jacques Clément the monk. He wore a dagger which was displayed with ferocious energy in every quarrel, and yet was fanatical in his religious beliefs, and carried the practices of superstition and idolatry to an almost insane extent. This was a sort of man who might be extremely useful in the distress to which the Catholic party was reduced. He was sent for by the duchess de Montpensier, sister of the duke of Guise, a woman so wicked that her conduct drives us into a charitable unbelief of its reality, who used such arguments and arts with the blinded, arrogant, sensual young fanatic, that he went forth on the 1st of August determined to repay his benefactress for her goodness and condescension in the way she herself had prescribed. Letters were furnished to him, which were obtained by false pretences from the president Harlay in the Bastille, and on presenting them he was admitted to the camp of the besiegers, and taken into the presence of the king. While Henry was reading the missive which Clément put into his hand, the Jacobin drew a knife from his sleeve, and stabbed him in his chair. It was not at once fatal. The king started up, and, drawing the weapon from his side, wounded his assailant in the face, thus mixing on the same blade the blood of the assassin and his victim. The attendants rushed forward and killed the murderer at once--a happy chance for his employer, for her name escaped the formal revelation which a trial would have produced. Henry was placed in his bed, and for a while hopes were entertained of his recovery.

Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it. An undiscovered spring of goodness welled forth as his last hour drew nigh. He forgave his enemies, recommended himself to his friends, embraced the hero of Navarre, and thanked him for all his aid. He turned to the crowd in the apartment, and declared Henry his rightful and true successor, and added, “Dear cousin and brother-in-law, be sure of this, you will never be king of France unless you profess yourself a Catholic.” If the dignity and tenderness of a death-bed could have wiped out the vices and deficiencies of all his former years, Henry III might have been reckoned among the kings who have done honour to the crown. But the inflexible verdict of history must be delivered upon the course of a man’s life, and not on the expressions or aspirations of his last hours; and the last of the Valois must be pronounced a king without honesty or patriotism, and a man without courage or virtue.[f]

The Valois had given to France thirteen kings in the space of 261 years. They had assisted and contributed to the decline of old feudal France: they seemed at first during several reigns to institute a new order; then, incapable and weak, they let slip from their hands this great work, and disappeared after having plunged France into chaos.[m]

FOOTNOTES

[73] [Louis I of Bourbon, first prince of Condé (1530-1569), brother of Anthony, King of Navarre, and great-grandfather of the “Great Condé.”]

[74] It was this edict which ordered that the year should commence on the 1st of January, instead of, as heretofore, commencing at Easter.

[75] [He did not take the title of King of Navarre until after the death of his mother in 1572.]

[76] [Martin[l] says: “Nothing definite can be affirmed as to the exact number of the victims: the _Martyrologe des réformés_ places it at 30,000; M. de Thou thinks this figure somewhat exaggerated; the _Réveille-matin_ speaks of no less than 100,000 dead; Capilupi speaks of 25,000; La Popelinière of more than 20,000; Papyre Masson, one of the panegyrists of the occasion, reduces the number to 10,000. The last figure is too low; about twenty thousand appears to be the most probable estimate.” This estimate of Martin’s, confessedly only conjectural, is perhaps a trifle conservative. Sully[j] thought that 70,000 perished throughout France. Davila[i] estimated the number killed in Paris at 10,000, over 500 of whom were nobles. This is manifestly overdrawn, when we consider that the massacre of the first night was for the most part confined to the north of the Seine. Possibly about three thousand may have perished in and about Paris and twenty-five thousand in the rest of France. But this, let it be repeated, is mere conjecture.]

[77] [The Venetian despatches are regarded as among the most reliable historical sources.]

[78] The following table shows the genealogy of the last kings of the house of Valois:

HOUSES OF ORLEANS AND ANGOULÊME

=Charles V= (third king of the house of Valois), 1364-1380.
|
+----------+--------------------------------+
| |
=Charles VI=, Louis, duke of Orleans, 1407.
1380-1422. m. Valentine Visconti
| He received the
| duchy of Orleans
| from Charles VI in
| exchange for Touraine.
+---------------------------+----------+
| |
Charles, John,
duke of Orleans, 1467. count of Angoulême, 1467.
| |
=Louis XII=, Charles,
1498-1515. count of Angoulême, 1496.
m. (2) Anne of Brittany m. Louise of Savoy
| |
Claude II---------------+-------------=Francis I=,
| 1515-1547.
=Henry II=,
1547-1559.
m. Catherine de’ Medici
|
+---------------+--------------+--------+----+------------+--------+
| | | | | |
=Francis II=, Elizabeth, =Charles IX=, =Henry III=, Francis, Margaret,
1559-1560. m. Philip 1560-1574. 1574-1589, duke of m.
m. Mary II, king duke of Anjou, Alençon =Henry IV=
Stuart of Spain king of Poland, and Anjou,
last king of 1584
house of Valois

[79] [The title of Monsieur for the king’s brother next himself begins to be used from now on. But, according to Saint-Simon, it was not used regularly and constantly until the time of Gaston, brother of Louis XIII.]

[80] [When he repeated the remark to his mother, she is said to have replied: “God grant you have not made yourself king of nothing.”]