A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times Volume IV Part 10

Foreigners were not less surprised than the French themselves; they had supposed that France would remain for a long while under the effects of the reverse experienced at Saint-Quentin. "The loss of Calais," said Pope Paul IV., "will be the only dowry that the Queen of England will obtain from her marriage with Philip. For France such a conquest is preferable to that of half the kingdom of England." When Mary Tudor, already seriously ill, heard the news, she exclaimed from her deathbed, on the 20th of January, "If my heart is opened, there will be found graven upon it the word Calais." And when the Grand Prior of France, on repairing to the court of his sister, Mary of Lorraine, in Scotland, went to visit Queen Elizabeth, who had succeeded Mary Tudor, she, after she had made him dance several times with her, said to him, "My dear prior, I like you very much, but not your brother, who robbed me of my town of Calais."

Guise was one of those who knew that it is as necessary to follow up a success accomplished as to proceed noiselessly in the execution of a sudden success. When he was master of Calais he moved rapidly upon the neighboring fortresses of Guines and Ham; and he had them in his power within a few days, notwithstanding a resistance more stout than he had encountered at Calais. During the same time the Duke of Nevers, encouraged by such examples, also took the field again, and gained possession, in Champagne and the neighborhood, of the strong castles of Herbemont, Jamoigne, Chigny, Rossignol, and Villemont. Guise had no idea of contenting himself with his successes in the west of France; his ambition carried him into the east also, to the environs of Metz, the scene of his earliest glory. He heard that Vieilleville, who had become governor of Metz, was setting about the reduction of Thionville, "the best picture of a fortress I ever saw," says Montluc. "I have heard,"

wrote Guise to Vieilleville, "that you have a fine enterprise on hand; I pray you do not commence the execution of it, in any fas.h.i.+on whatever, until I be with you: having given a good account of Calais and Guines, as lieutenant-general of his Majesty in this realm, I should be very vexed if there should be done therein anything of honor and importance without my presence." He arrived before Thionville on the 4th of June, 1558.

Vieilleville and his officers were much put out at his interference.

"The duke might surely have dispensed with coming," said D'Estrees, chief officer of artillery; "it will be easy for him to swallow what is all chewed ready for him." But the bulk of the army did not share this feeling of jealousy. When the pioneers, drawn up, caught sight of Guise, "Come on, sir," they cried, "come and let us die before Thionville; we have been expecting you this long while." The siege lasted three weeks longer. Guise had with him two comrades of distinction, the Italian Peter Strozzi, and the Gascon Blaise do Montluc. On the 20th of June Strozzi was mortally wounded by an arquebuse-shot, at the very side of Guise, who was talking to him with a hand upon his shoulder. "Ah! by G.o.d's head, sir," cried Strozzi, in Italian, "the king to-day loses a good servant, and so does your excellency." Guise, greatly moved, attempted to comfort him, and spoke to him the name of Jesus Christ; but Strozzi was one of those infidels so common at that time in Italy.

"'Sdeath," said he, "what Jesus are you come hither to remind me of?

I believe in no G.o.d; my game is played." "You will appear to-day before His face," persisted Guise, in the earnestness of his faith. "'Sdeath,"

replied Strozzi, "I shall be where all the others are who have died in the last six thousand years." The eyes of Guise remained fixed a while upon his comrade dying in such a frame of mind; but he soon turned all his thoughts once more to the siege of Thionville. Montluc supported him valiantly. A strong tower still held out, and Montluc carried it at the head of his men. Guise rushed up and threw his arm round the warrior's neck, saying, "Monseigneur, I now see clearly that the old proverb is quite infallible: 'A good horse will go to the last.' I am off at once to my quarters to report the capture to the king. Be a.s.sured that I shall not conceal from him the service you have done." The reduction of Thionville was accomplished on that very day, June 22, 1558. That of Arlon, a rich town in the neighborhood, followed very closely. Guise, thoroughly worn out, had ordered the approaches to be made next morning at daybreak, requesting that he might be left to sleep until he awoke of himself; when he did awake, he inquired whether the artillery had yet opened fire; he was told that Montluc had surprised the place during the night. "That is making the pace very fast," said he, as he made the sign of the cross; but he did not care to complain about it. Under the impulse communicated by him the fortunes of France were reviving everywhere. A check received before Gravelines, on the 13th of July, 1558, by a division commanded by De Termes, governor of Calais, did not subdue the national elation and its effect upon the enemy themselves.

"It is an utter impossibility for me to keep up the war," wrote Philip II., on the 15th of February, 1559, to Granvelle. On both sides there was a desire for peace; and conferences were opened at Cateau-Cambresis.

On the 6th of February, 1559, a convention was agreed upon for a truce which was to last during the whole course of the negotiation, and for six days after the separation of the plenipotentiaries, in case no peace took place.

It was concluded on the 2d of April, 1559, between Henry II. and Elizabeth, who had become Queen of England at the death of her sister Mary (November 17, 1558); and next day, April 3, between Henry II., Philip II., and the allied princes of Spain, amongst others the Prince of Orange, William the Silent, who, whilst serving in the Spanish army, was fitting himself to become the leader of the Reformers, and the liberator of the Low Countries. By the treaty with England, France was to keep Calais for eight years in the first instance, and on a promise to pay five hundred thousand gold crowns to Queen Elizabeth or her successors.

The money was never paid, and Calais was never restored, and this without the English government's having considered that it could make the matter a motive for renewing the war. By the treaty with Spain, France was to keep Metz, Toul, and Verdun, and have back Saint-Quentin, Le Catelet, and Ham; but she was to restore to Spain or her allies a hundred and eighty-nine places in Flanders, Piedmont, Tuscany, and Corsica. The malcontents--for the absence of political liberty does not suppress them entirely--raised their voices energetically against this last treaty signed by the king, with the sole desire, it was supposed, of obtaining the liberation of his two favorites, the Constable de Montmorency and Marshal de Saint-Andre, who had been prisoners in Spain since the defeat at Saint-Quentin. "Their ransom," it was said, "has cost the kingdom more than that of Francis I." Guise himself said to the king, "A stroke of your Majesty's pen costs more to France than thirty years of war cost." Ever since that time the majority of historians, even the most enlightened, have joined in the censure that was general in the sixteenth century; but their opinion will not be indorsed here; the places which France had won during the war, and which she retained by the peace,--Metz, Toul, and Verdun on her frontier in the north-east, facing the imperial or Spanish possessions, and Boulogne and Calais on her coasts in the north-west, facing England,--were, as regarded the integrity of the state and the security of the inhabitants, of infinitely more importance than those which she gave up in Flanders and Italy. The treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, too, marked the termination of those wars of ambition and conquest which the Kings of France had waged beyond the Alps an injudicious policy, which, for four reigns, had crippled and wasted the resources of France in adventurous expeditions, beyond the limits of her geographical position and her natural and permanent interests.

More or less happily, the treaty of Cateau-Cambreis had regulated all those questions of external policy which were burdensome to France; she was once more at peace with her neighbors, and seemed to have nothing more to do than to gather in the fruits thereof. But she had in her own midst questions far more difficult of solution than those of her external policy, and these perils from within were threatening her more seriously than any from without. Since the death of Francis I., the religious ferment had pursued its course, becoming more general and more fierce; the creed of the Reformers had spread very much; their number had very much increased; permanent churches, professing and submitting to a fixed faith and discipline, had been founded; that of Paris was the first, in 1555; and the example had been followed at Orleans, at Chartres, at Lyons, at Toulouse, at Roch.e.l.le, in Normandy, in Touraine, in Guienne, in Poitou, in Dauphiny, in Provence, and in all the provinces, more or less.

In 1561, it was calculated that there were twenty-one hundred and fifty reformed, or, as the expression then was, rectified (dressees), churches.

"And this is no fanciful figure; it is the result of a census taken at the instigation of the deputies who represented the reformed churches at the conference of Poissy on the demand of Catherine de' Medici, and in conformity with the advice of Admiral de Coligny." [_La Reformation en France pendant sa premiere periode,_ by Henri Luttheroth, pp. 127-132.]

It is clear that the movement of the Reformation in the sixteenth century was one of those spontaneous and powerful movements which have their source and derive their strength from the condition of men's souls and of whole communities, and not merely from the personal ambitions and interests which soon come and mingle with them, whether it be to promote or to r.e.t.a.r.d them. One thing has been already here stated and confirmed by facts; it was specially in France that the Reformation had this truly religious and sincere character; very far from supporting or tolerating it, the sovereign and public authorities opposed it from its very birth; under Francis I. it had met with no real defenders but its martyrs; and it was still the same under Henry II. During the reign of Francis I., within a s.p.a.ce of twenty-three years, there had been eighty-one capital executions for heresy; during that of Henry II., twelve years, there were ninety-seven for the same cause, and at one of these executions Henry II.

was present in person, on the s.p.a.ce in front of Notre-Dame: a spectacle which Francis I. had always refused to see. In 1551, 1557, and 1559, Henry II., by three royal edicts, kept up and added to all the prohibitions and penalties in force against the Reformers. In 1550, the ma.s.sacre of the Vaudians was still in such lively and odious remembrance that a n.o.ble lady of Provence, Madame de Cental, did not hesitate to present a complaint, in the name of her despoiled, proscribed, and murdered va.s.sals, against the Cardinal de Tournon, the Count de Grignan, and the Premier President Maynier d'Oppede, as having abused, for the purpose of getting authority for this ma.s.sacre, the religious feelings of the king, who on his death-bed had testified his remorse for it. "This cause," says De Thou, "was pleaded with much warmth, and occupied fifty audiences, with a large concourse of people, but the judgment took all the world by surprise. Guerin alone, advocate-general in 1545, having no support at court, was condemned to death, and was scape-goat for all the rest. D'Oppede defended himself with fanatical pride, saying that he only executed the king's orders, like Saul, whom G.o.d commanded to exterminate the Amalekites. He had the Duke of Guise to protect him; and he was sent back to discharge the duties of his office. Such was the prejudice of the Parliament of Paris against the Reformers that it interdicted the hedge-schools (_ecoles buissonnieres_), schools which the Protestants held out in the country to escape from the jurisdiction of the precentor of Notre-Dame de Paris, who had the sole supervision of primary schools. Hence comes the proverb, to play truant (_faire l'ecole buissonniere--to go to hedge school_). All the resources of French civil jurisdiction appeared to be insufficient against the Reformers. Henry II. asked the pope for a bull, transplanting into France the Spanish Inquisition, the only real means of extirpating the root of the errors."

It was the characteristic of this Inquisition, that it was completely in the hands of the clergy, and that its arm was long enough to reach the lay and the clerical indifferently. Pope Paul IV. readily gave the king, in April, 1557, the bull he asked for, but the Parliament of Paris refused to enregister the royal edict which gave force in France to the pontifical brief. In 1559 the pope replied to this refusal by a bull which comprised in one and the same anathema all heretics, though they might be kings or emperors, and declared them to have "forfeited their benefices, states, kingdoms, or empires, the which should devolve on the first to seize them, without power on the part of the Holy See itself to restore them." [_Magnum Bullarium Romanum, a Beato Leone Magno ad Paulum IV.,_ t. i. p. 841: Luxembourg, 1742.] The Parliament would not consent to enregister the decree unless there were put in it a condition to the effect that clerics alone should be liable to the inquisition, and that the judges should be taken from amongst the clergy of France. For all their pa.s.sionate opposition to the Reformation, the Magistrates had no idea of allowing either the kings.h.i.+p or France to fall beneath the yoke of the papacy.

Amidst all these disagreements and distractions in the very heart of Catholicism, the Reformation went on growing from day to day. In 1558, Lorenzo, the Venetian amba.s.sador, set down even then the number of the Reformers at four hundred thousand. In 1559, at the death of Henry II., Claude Haton, a priest and contemporary chronicler on the Catholic side, calculated that they were nearly a quarter of the population of France.

They held at Paris, in May, 1559, their first general synod; and eleven fully established churches sent deputies to it. This synod drew up a form of faith called the Gallican Confession, and likewise a form of discipline. "The burgess-cla.s.s, for a long while so indifferent to the burnings that took place, were astounded at last at the constancy with which the pile was mounted by all those men and all those women who had nothing to do but to recant in order to save their lives. Some could not persuade themselves that people so determined were not in the right; others were moved with compa.s.sion. 'Their very hearts,' say contemporaries, 'wept together with their eyes.'" It needed only an opportunity to bring these feelings out. Some of the faithful one day in the month of May, 1558, on the public walk in the Pre-aux-Clercs, began to sing the psalms of Marot. Their singing had been forbidden by the Parliament of Bordeaux, but the practice of singing those psalms had but lately been so general that it could not be looked upon as peculiar to heretics. All who happened to be there, suddenly animated by one and the same feeling, joined in with the singers, as if to protest against the punishments which were being repeated day after day. This manifestation was renewed on the following days. The King of Navarre, Anthony de Bourbon, Prince Louis de Conde, his brother, and many lords took part in it together with a crowd, it is said, of five or six thousand persons.

It was not in the Pre-aux-Clercs only and by singing that this new state of mind revealed itself amongst the highest cla.s.ses as well as amongst the populace. The Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d'Albret, in her early youth, "was as fond of a ball as of a sermon," says Brantome, "and she had advised her spouse, Anthony de Bourbon, who inclined towards Calvinism, not to perplex himself with all these opinions." In 1559 she was pa.s.sionately devoted to the faith and the cause of the Reformation. With more levity, but still in sincerity, her brother-in-law, Louis de Conde, put his ambition and his courage at the service of the same cause.

Admiral de Coligny's youngest brother, Francis d'Andelot, declared himself a Reformer to Henry II. himself, who, in his wrath, threw a plate at his head, and sent him to prison in the castle of Melun. Coligny himself, who had never disguised the favorable sentiments he felt towards the Reformers, openly sided with them on the ground of his own personal faith, as well as of the justice due to them. At last the Reformation had really great leaders, men who had power and were experienced in the affairs of the world; it was becoming a political party as well as a religious conviction; and the French Reformers were henceforth in a condition to make war as well as die at the stake for their faith.

Hitherto they had been only believers and martyrs; they became the victors and the vanquished, alternately, in a civil war.

A new position for them, and as formidable as it was grand. It was destined to bring upon them cruel trials and the worth of them in important successes; first, the Saint-Bartholomew, then the accession of Henry IV. and the edict of Nantes. At a later period, under Louis XIII.

and Louis XIV., the complication of the religious question and the political question cost them the advantages they had won; the edict of Nantes disappeared together with the power of the Protestants in the state. They were no longer anything but heretics and rebels. A day was to come, when, by the force alone of moral ideas, and in the name alone of conscience and justice, they would recover all the rights they had for a time possessed, and more also; but in the sixteenth century that day was still distant, and armed strife was for the Reformers their only means of defence and salvation. G.o.d makes no account of centuries, and a great deal is required before the most certain and the most salutary truths get their place and their rights in the minds and communities of men.

On the 29th of June, 1559, a brilliant tournament was celebrated in lists erected at the end of the street of Saint-Antoine, almost at the foot of the Bastille. Henry II., the queen, and the whole court had been present at it for three days. The entertainment was drawing to a close. The king, who had run several tilts "like a st.u.r.dy and skilful cavalier,"

wished to break yet another lance, and bade the Count de Montgomery, captain of the guards, to run against him. Montgomery excused himself; but the king insisted. The tilt took place. The two jousters, on meeting, broke their lances skilfully; but Montgomery forgot to drop at once, according to usage, the fragment remaining in his hand; he unintentionally struck the king's helmet and raised the visor, and a splinter of wood entered Henry's eye, who fell forward upon his horse's neck. All the appliances of art were useless; the brain had been injured. Henry II. languished for eleven days, and expired on the 10th of July, 1559, aged forty years and some months. An insignificant man, and a reign without splendor, though fraught with facts pregnant of grave consequences.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Joust between Henri II. and Count de Montgomery----268]

CHAPTER x.x.xII.----FRANCIS II., JULY 10, 1559--DECEMBER 5, 1560.

During the course, and especially at the close of Henry II.'s reign, two rival matters, on the one hand the numbers, the quality, and the zeal of the Reformers, and on the other, the anxiety, prejudice, and power of the Catholics, had been simultaneously advancing in development and growth.

Between the 16th of May, 1558, and the 10th of July, 1559, fifteen capital sentences had been executed in Dauphiny, in Normandy, in Poitou, and at Paris. Two royal edicts, one dated July 24, 1558, and the other June 14, 1559, had renewed and aggravated the severity of penal legislation against heretics. To secure the registration of the latter, Henry II., together with the princes and the officers of the crown, had repaired in person to Parliament; some disagreement had already appeared in the midst of that great body, which was then composed of a hundred and thirty magistrates; the seniors who sat in the great chamber had in general shown themselves to be more inclined to severity, and the juniors who formed the chamber called La Tournelle more inclined to indulgence towards accusations of heresy. The disagreement reached its climax in the very presence of the king. Two councillors, Dubourg and Dufaure, spoke so warmly of reforms which were, according to them, necessary and legitimate, that their adversaries did not hesitate to tax them with being Reformers themselves. The king had them arrested, and three of their colleagues with them. Special commissioners were charged with the preparation of the case against them. It has already been mentioned that one of the most considerable amongst the officers of the army, Francis d'Andelot, brother of Admiral Coligny, had, for the same cause, been subjected to a burst of anger on the part of the king. He was in prison at Meaux when Henry II. died. Such were the personal feelings and the relative positions of the two parties when Francis II., a boy of sixteen, a poor creature both in mind and body, ascended the throne.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Francis II----269]

Deputies from Parliament went, according to custom, to offer their felicitations to the new king, and to ask him "to whom it was his pleasure that they should, thenceforward, apply for to learn his will and receive his commands." Francis II. replied, "With the approbation of the queen my mother, I have chosen the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine, my uncles, to have the direction of the state; the former will take charge of the department of war, the latter the administration of finance and justice." Such had, in fact, been his choice, and it was no doubt with his mother's approbation that he had made it. Equally attentive to observe the proprieties and to secure her own power, Catherine de' Medici, when going out to drive with her son and her daughter-in-law Mary Stuart, on the very day of Henry II.'s death, said to Mary, "Step in, madame; it is now your turn to go first."

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARY STUART----270]

During the first days of mourning she kept herself in a room entirely hung with black; and there was no light beyond two wax-candles burning on an altar covered with black cloth. She had upon her head a black veil, which shrouded her entirely, and hid her face; and, when any one of the household went to speak to her, she replied in so agitated and so weak a tone of voice that it was impossible to catch her words, whatever attention might be paid to them. But her presence of mind and her energy, so far as the government was concerned, were by no means affected by it; he who had been the princ.i.p.al personage at the court under Henry II., the Constable de Montmorency, perfectly understood, at his first interview with the queen-mother, that he was dismissed, and all he asked of her was, that he might go and enjoy his repose in freedom at his residence of Chantilly, begging her at the same time to take under her protection the heirs of his house. Henry II.'s favorite, Diana de Poitiers, was dismissed more harshly. "The king sent to tell Madame de Valentinois," writes the Venetian amba.s.sador, "that for her evil influence (_mali officii_) over the king his father she would deserve heavy chastis.e.m.e.nt; but, in his royal clemency, he did not wish to disquiet her any further; she must, nevertheless, restore to him all the jewels given her by the king his father." "To bend Catherine de' Medici, Diana was also obliged," says De Thou, "to give up her beautiful house at Chenonceaux on the Cher, and she received in exchange the castle of Chaumont on the Loire." The Guises obtained all the favors of the court at the same time that they were invested with all the powers of the state.

In order to give a good notion of Duke Francis of Guise and his brother the Cardinal of Lorraine, the two heads of the house, we will borrow the very words of those two men of their age who had the best means of seeing them close and judging them correctly, the French historian De Thou and the Venetian amba.s.sador John Micheli. "The Cardinal of Lorraine," says De Thou, "was of an impetuous and violent character; the Duke of Guise, on the contrary, was of a gentle and moderate disposition. But as ambition soon overleaps the confines of restraint and equity, he was carried away by the violent counsels of the cardinal, or else surrendered himself to them of his own accord, executing with admirable prudence and address the plans which were always chalked out by his brother." The Venetian amba.s.sador enters into more precise and full details. "The cardinal," he says, "who is the leading man of the house, would be, by common consent, if it were not for the defects of which I shall speak, the greatest political power in this kingdom. He has not yet completed his thirty-seventh year; he is endowed with a marvellous intellect, which apprehends from half a word the meaning of those who converse with him; he has an astonis.h.i.+ng memory, a fine and n.o.ble face, and a rare eloquence which shows itself freely on any subject, but especially in matters of politics. He is very well versed in letters: he knows Greek, Latin, and Italian. He is very strong in the sciences, chiefly in theology. The externals of his life are very proper and very suitable to his dignity, which could not be said of the other cardinals and prelates, whose habits are too scandalously irregular. But his great defect is shameful cupidity, which would employ, to attain its ends, even criminal means, and likewise great duplicity, whence comes his habit of scarcely ever saying that which is. There is worse behind. He is considered to be very ready to take offence, vindictive, envious, and far too slow in benefaction. He excited universal hatred by hurting all the world as long as it was in his power to. As for Mgr. de Guise, who is the eldest of the six brothers, he cannot be spoken of save as a man of war, a good officer. None in this realm has delivered more battles and confronted more dangers. Everybody lauds his courage, his vigilance, his steadiness in war, and his coolness, a quality wonderfully rare in a Frenchman. His peculiar defects are, first of all, stinginess towards soldiers; then he makes large promises, and even when he means to keep his promise he is infinitely slow about it."

To the sketch of the Cardinal of Lorraine Brantome adds that he was, "as indeed he said, a coward by nature." a strange defect in a Guise.

It was a great deal, towards securing the supremacy of a great family and its leading members, to thus possess the favor of the court and the functions of government; but the power of the Guises had a still higher origin and a still deeper foundation. "It was then," said Michael de Castelnau, one of the most intelligent and most impartial amongst the chroniclers of the sixteenth century, "that schism and divisions in religious matters began to be mixed up with affairs of state. Well, all the clergy of France, and nearly all the n.o.blesse and the people who belonged to the Roman religion, considered that the Cardinal of Lorraine and the Duke of Guise were, as it were, called of G.o.d to preserve the Catholic religion established in France for the last twelve hundred years. And it seemed to them not only an act of impiety to change or alter it in any way whatever, but also an impossibility to do so without ruin to the state. The late king, Henry, had made a decree in the month of June, 1559, being then at Ecouen, by which the judges were bound to sentence all Lutherans to death, and which was published and confirmed by all the Parliaments, without any limitation or modification whatever, and with a warning to the judges not to mitigate the penalty, as they had done for some years previously. Different judgments were p.r.o.nounced upon the decree: those who took the most political and most zealous view of religion considered that it was necessary, as well to preserve and maintain the Catholic religion as to keep down the seditious, who, under the cloak of religion, were doing all they could to upset the political condition of the kingdom. Others, who cared nothing for religion, or for the state, or for order in the body politic, also thought the decree necessary, not at all for the purpose of exterminating the Protestants, --for they held that it would tend to multiply them,--but because it would offer a means of enriching themselves by the confiscations ensuing upon condemnation, and because the king would thus be able to pay off forty-two millions of livres which he owed, and have money in hand, and, besides that, satisfy those who were demanding recompense for the services they had rendered the crown, wherein many placed their hopes."

[_Memoires de Michael de Castelnau, in the Pet.i.tot collection,_ Series I., t. x.x.xiii. pp. 24-27.]

The Guises were, in the sixteenth century, the representatives and the champions of these different cliques and interests, religious or political, sincere in their belief or shameless in their avidity, and all united under the flag of the Catholic church. And so, when they came into power, "there was nothing," says a Protestant chronicler, "but fear and trembling at their name." Their acts of government soon confirmed the fears as well as the hopes they had inspired. During the last six months of 1559 the edict issued by Henry II. from Ecouen was not only strictly enforced, but aggravated by fresh edicts; a special chamber was appointed and chosen amongst the Parliament of Paris, which was to have sole cognizance of crimes and offences against the Catholic religion. A proclamation of the new king, Francis II., ordained that houses in which a.s.semblies of Reformers took place should be razed and demolished. It was death to the promoters of "unlawful a.s.semblies for purposes of religion or for any other cause." Another royal act provided that all persons, even relatives, who received amongst them any one condemned for heresy should seize him and bring him to justice, in default whereof they would suffer the same penalty as he. Individual condemnations and executions abounded after these general measures; between the 2d of August and the 31st of December, 1559, eighteen persons were burned alive for open heresy, or for having refused to communicate according to the rites of the Catholic church, or go to ma.s.s, or for having hawked about forbidden books. Finally, in December, the five councillors of the Parliament of Paris, whom, six months previously, Henry II. had ordered to be arrested and shut up in the Bastille, were dragged from prison and brought to trial. The chief of them, Anne Dubourg, nephew of Anthony Dubourg, Chancellor of France under Francis I., defended himself with pious and patriotic persistency, being determined to exhaust all points of law and all the chances of justice he could hope for without betraying his faith. Everything shows that he had nothing to hope for from his judges; one of them, the President Minard, as he was returning from the palace on the evening of December 12, 1559, was killed by a pistol-shot; the a.s.sa.s.sin could not be discovered; but the crime, naturally ascribed to some friend of Dubourg, served only to make certain and to hasten the death of the prisoner on trial. Dubourg was condemned on the 22d of December, and heard unmoved the reading of his sentence. "I forgive my judges," said he; "they have judged according to their own lights, not according to the light that comes from on high. Put out your fires, ye senators; be converted, and live happily. Think without ceasing of G.o.d and on G.o.d." After these words, which were taken down by the clerk of the court, "and which I have here copied," says De Thou, Dubourg was taken on the 23d of December, in a tumbrel to the Place de Greve. As he mounted the ladder he was heard repeating several times, "Forsake me not, my G.o.d, for fear lest I forsake thee." He was strangled before he was cast into the flames (De Thou, t. iii. pp. 399-402), the sole favor his friends could obtain for him.

But extreme severity on the part of the powers that be is effectual only when it falls upon a country or upon parties that are effete with age, or already vanquished and worn out by long struggles; when, on the contrary, it is brought to bear upon parties in the flush of youth, eager to proclaim and propagate themselves, so far from intimidating them, it animates them, and thrusts them into the arena into which they were of themselves quite eager to enter. As soon as the rule of the Catholic, in the persons and by the actions of the Guises, became sovereign and aggressive, the threatened Reformers put themselves into the att.i.tude of defence. They too had got for themselves great leaders, some valiant and ardent, others prudent or even timid, but forced to declare themselves when the common cause was greatly imperilled. The house of Bourbon, issuing from St. Louis, had for its representatives in the sixteenth century Anthony de Bourbon, King of Navarre and husband of Jeanne d'Albret, and his brother Louis de Bourbon, Prince of Conde. The King of Navarre, weak and irresolute though brave enough, wavered between Catholicism and the Reformation, inclining rather in his heart to the cause of the Reformation, to which the queen his wife, who at first showed indifference, had before long become Pa.s.sionately attached. His brother, the Prince of Conde, young, fiery, and often flighty and rash, put himself openly at the head of the Reformed party. The house of Bourbon held itself to be the rival perforce of the house of Lorraine.

It had amongst the high n.o.blesse of France two allies, more fitted than any others for fighting and for command, Admiral de Coligny and his brother, Francis d'Andelot, both of them nephews of the Constable Anne de Montmorency, both of them already experienced and famous warriors, and both of them devoted, heart and soul, to the cause of the Reformation.

Thus, at the accession of Francis II., whilst the Catholic party, by means of the Guises, and with the support of the majority of the country, took in hand the government of France, the reforming party ranged themselves round the King of Navarre, the Prince of Conde, and Admiral de Coligny, and became, under their direction, though in a minority, a powerful opposition, able and ready, on the one hand, to narrowly watch and criticise the actions of those who were in power, and on the other to claim for their own people, not by any means freedom as a general principle in the const.i.tution of the state, but free manifestation of their faith, and free exercise of their own form of wors.h.i.+p.

Apart from--we do not mean to say above-these two great parties, which were arrayed in the might and appeared as the representatives of the national ideas and feelings, the queen-mother, Catherine de' Medici, was quietly laboring to form another, more independent of the public, and more docile to herself, and, above all, faithful to the crown and to the interests of the kingly house and its servants; a party strictly Catholic, but regarding as a necessity the task of humoring the Reformers and granting them such concessions as might prevent explosions fraught with peril to the state; a third party (tiers part), as we should say nowadays, politic and prudent, somewhat lavish of promises without being sure of the power to keep them, not much embarra.s.sed at having to change att.i.tude and language according to the s.h.i.+fting phases of the moment, and anxious above everything to maintain public peace and to put off questions which it could not solve pacifically. In the sixteenth century, as at every other time, worthy folks of moderate views and nervous temperaments, ambitious persons combining greed with suppleness, old servants of the crown, and officials full of scruples and far from bold in the practical part of government, were the essential elements of this party. The Constable de Montmorency sometimes issued forth from Chantilly to go and aid the queen-mother, in whom he had no confidence, but whom he preferred to the Guises. A former councillor of the Parliament, for a long while chancellor under Francis I. and Henry II., and again summoned, under Francis II., by Catherine de' Medici to the same post, Francis Olivier, was an honorable executant of the party's indecisive but moderate policy. He died on the 15th of March, 1560; and Catherine, in concert with the Cardinal of Lorraine, had the chancellors.h.i.+p thus vacated conferred upon Michael de l'Hospital, a magistrate already celebrated, and destined to become still more so. As soon as he entered upon this great office he made himself remarkable by the marvellous ability he showed in restraining within bounds "the Lorraines themselves, whose servant he was," says the Protestant chronicler Regnier de la Planche; "to those who had the public weal at heart he gave hope that all would at last turn out well, provided that he were let alone; and, to tell the truth, it would be impossible to adequately describe the prudence he displayed; for, a.s.suredly, although if he had taken a shorter road towards manfully opposing the mischief he would have deserved more praise, and G.o.d would perhaps have blessed his constancy, yet, so far as one can judge, he alone, by his moderate behavior, was the instrument made use of by G.o.d for keeping back many an impetuous flood under which every Frenchman would have been submerged.

External appearances, however, seemed to the contrary. In short, when any one represented to him some trouble that was coming, he always had these words on his lips: 'Patience, patience; all will go well.'" This philosophical and patriotic confidence on the part of Chancellor de l'Hospital was fated to receive some cruel falsifications.

A few months, and hardly so much, after the accession of Francis II., a serious matter brought into violent collision the three parties whose characteristics and dispositions have just been described. The supremacy of the Guises was insupportable to the Reformers, and irksome to many lukewarm or wavering members of the Catholic n.o.bility. An edict of the king's had revoked all the graces and alienations of domains granted by his father. The crown refused to pay its most lawful debts, and duns were flocking to the court. To get rid of them, the Cardinal of Lorraine had a proclamation issued by the king, warning all persons, of whatever condition, who had come to dun for payment of debts, for compensations, or for graces, to take themselves off within twenty-four hours on pain of being hanged; and, that it might appear how seriously meant the threat was, a very conspicuous gibbet was erected at Fontainebleau close to the palace. It was a shocking affront. The malcontents at once made up to the Reformers. Independently of the general oppression and perils under which these latter labored, they were liable to meet everywhere, at the corners of the streets, men posted on the lookout, who insulted them and denounced them to the magistrates if they did not uncover themselves before the madonnas set up in their way, or if they did not join in the litanies chanted before them. A repet.i.tion of petty requisitions soon becomes an odious tyranny. An understanding was established between very different sorts of malcontents; they all said and spread abroad that the Guises were the authors of these oppressive and unjustifiable acts. They made common cause in seeking for means of delivering themselves, at the same time drawing an open distinction between the Guises and the king, the latter of whom there was no idea of attacking. The inviolability of kings and the responsibility of ministers, those two fundamental maxims of a free monarchy, had already become fixed ideas; but how were they to be taken advantage of and put in practice when the inst.i.tutions whereby political liberty exerts its powers and keeps itself secure were not in force? The malcontents, whether Reformers or Catholics, all cried out for the states-general. Those of Tours, in 1484, under Charles VIII., had left behind them a momentous and an honored memory. But the Guises and their partisans energetically rejected this cry. "They told the king that whoever spoke of convoking the states-general was his personal enemy and guilty of high treason; for his people would fain impose law upon him from whom they ought to take it, in such sort that there would be left to him nothing of a king but the bare t.i.tle. The queen-mother, though all the while giving fair words to the malcontents, whether Reformers or others, was also disquieted at their demands, and she wrote to her son-in-law, Philip II., King of Spain, 'that they wanted, by means of the said states, to reduce her to the condition of a maid-of-all-work.'

Whereupon Philip replied 'that he would willingly employ all his forces to uphold the authority of the king his brother-in-law and of his ministers, and that he had forty thousand men all ready in case anybody should be bold enough to attempt to violate it.'"

In their perplexity, the malcontents, amongst whom the Reformers were becoming day by day the most numerous and the most urgent, determined to take the advice of the greatest lawyers and most celebrated theologians of France and Germany. They asked whether it would be permissible, with a good conscience and without falling into the crime of high treason, to take up arms for the purpose of securing the persons of the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine, and forcing them to render an account of their administration. The doctors, on being consulted, answered that it would be allowable to oppose by force the far from legitimate supremacy of the Guises, provided that it were done under the authority of princes of the blood, born administrators of the realm in such cases, and with the consent of the orders composing the state, or the greatest and soundest portion of those orders. A meeting of the princes who were hostile to the Guises were held at Vendome to deliberate as to the conduct to be adopted in this condition of opinions and parties; the King of Navarre and his brother the Prince of Conde, Coligny, D'Andelot, and some of their most intimate friends took part in it; and D'Ardres, confidential secretary to the Constable de Montmorency, was present. The Prince of Conde was for taking up arms at once and swoop down upon the Guises, taking them by surprise. Coligny formally opposed this plan; the king, at his majority, had a right, he said, to choose his own advisers; no doubt it was a deplorable thing to see foreigners at the head of affairs, but the country must not, for the sake of removing them, be rashly exposed to the scourge of civil war; perhaps it would be enough if the queen-mother were made acquainted with the general discontent.

The constable's secretary coincided with Coligny, whose opinion was carried. It was agreed that the Prince of Conde should restrain his ardor, and let himself be vaguely regarded as the possible leader of the enterprise if it were to take place, but without giving it, until further notice, his name and co-operation. He was called the mute captain.

There was need of a less conspicuous and more p.r.o.nounced leader for that which was becoming a conspiracy. And one soon presented himself in the person of G.o.dfrey de Barri, Lord of La Renaudie, a n.o.bleman of an ancient family of Perigord, well known to Duke Francis of Guise, under whose orders he had served valiantly at Metz in 1552, and who had for some time protected him against the consequences of a troublesome trial, at which La Renaudie had been found guilty by the Parliament of Paris of forging and uttering false t.i.tles. Being forced to leave France, he retired into Switzerland, to Lausanne and Geneva, where it was not long before he showed the most pa.s.sionate devotion for the Reformation. "He was a man,"

says De Thou, "of quick and insinuating wits, ready to undertake anything, and burning with desire to avenge himself, and wipe out, by some brilliant deed, the infamy of a sentence which he had incurred rather through another's than his own crime. He, then, readily offered his services to those who were looking out for a second leader, and he undertook to scour the kingdom in order to win over the men whose names had been given him. He got from them all a promise to meet him at Nantes in February, 1560, and he there made them a long and able speech against the Guises, ending by saying, 'G.o.d bids us to obey kings even when they ordain unjust things, and there is no doubt but that they who resist the powers that G.o.d has set up do resist His will. We have this advantage, that we, ever full of submission to the prince, are set against none but traitors hostile to their king and their country, and so much the more dangerous in that they nestle in the very bosom of the state, and, in the name and clothed with the authority of a king who is a mere child, are attacking the kingdom and the king himself. Now, in order that you may not suppose that you will be acting herein against your consciences, I am quite willing to be the first to protest and take G.o.d to witness that I will not think, or say, or do anything against the king, against the queen his mother, against the princes his brothers, or against those of his blood; and that, on the contrary, I will defend their majesty and their dignity, and, at the same time, the authority of the laws and the liberty of the country against the tyranny of a few foreigners.'" [De Thou, t. iii. pp. 467-480.]

"Out of so large an a.s.semblage," adds the historian, "there was not found to be one whom so delicate an enterprise caused to recoil, or who asked for time to deliberate. It was agreed that, before anything else, a large number of persons, without arms and free from suspicion, should repair to court and there present a pet.i.tion to the king, beseeching him not to put pressure upon consciences any more, and to permit the free exercise of religion; that at almost the same time a chosen body of hors.e.m.e.n should repair to Blois, where the king was, that their accomplices should admit them into the town and present a new pet.i.tion to the king against the Guises, and that, if these princes would not withdraw and give an account of their administration, they should be attacked sword in hand; and, lastly, that the Prince of Conde, who had wished his name to be kept secret up to that time, should put himself at the head of the conspirators. The 15th of June was the day fixed for the execution of it all."

But the Guises were warned; one of La Renaudie's friends had revealed the conspiracy to the Cardinal of Lorraine's secretary; and from Spain, Germany, and Italy they received information as to the conspiracy hatched against them. The cardinal, impetuous and pusillanimous too, was for calling out the troops at once; but his brother the duke, "who was not easily startled," was opposed to anything demonstrative. They removed the king to the castle of Amboise, a safer place than the town of Blois; and they concerted measures with the queen-mother, to whom the conspirators were, both in their plans and their persons, almost as objectionable as to them. She wrote, in a style of affectionate confidence, to Coligny, begging him to come to Amboise and give her his advice. He arrived in company with his brother D'Andelot, and urged the queen-mother to grant the Reformers liberty of conscience and of wors.h.i.+p, the only way to checkmate all the mischievous designs and to restore peace to the kingdom. Something of what he advised was done: a royal decree was published and carried up to the Parliament on the 15th of March, ordaining the abolition of every prosecution on account of religion, in respect of the past only, and under reservations which rendered the grace almost inappreciable. The Guises, on their side, wrote to the Constable de Montmorency to inform him of the conspiracy, "of which you will feel as great horror as we do," and they signed, Your thoroughly best friends. The Prince of Conde himself, though informed about the discovery of the plot, repaired to Amboise without showing any signs of being disconcerted at the cold reception offered him by the Lorraine princes. The Duke of Guise, always bold, even in his precautions, "found an honorable means of making sure of him," says Castelnau, "by giving him the guard at a gate of the town of Amboise,"

where he had him under watch and ward himself. The lords and gentlemen attached to the court made sallies all around Amboise to prevent any unexpected attack. "They caught a great many troops badly led and badly equipped. Many poor folks, in utter despair and without a leader, asked pardon as they threw down upon the ground some wretched arms they bore, and declared that they knew no more about the enterprise than that there had been a time appointed them to see a pet.i.tion presented to the king which concerned the welfare of his service and that of the kingdom."

[_Memoires de Castelnau,_ pp. 49, 50.] On the 18th of March, La Renaudie, who was scouring the country, seeking to rally his men, encountered a body of royal horse who were equally hotly in quest of the conspirators; the two detachments attacked one another furiously; La Renaudie was killed, and his body, which was carried to Amboise, was strung up to a gallows on the bridge over the Loire with this scroll: "This is La Renaudie, called La Forest, captain of the rebels, leader and author of the sedition." Disorder continued for several days in the surrounding country; but the surprise attempted against the Guises was a failure, and the important result of the riot of Amboise (_tumulte d'Amboise_), as it was called, was an ordinance of Francis II., who, on the 17th of March, 1560, appointed Duke Francis of Guise "his lieutenant-general, representing him in person absent and present in this good town of Amboise and other places of the realm, with full power, authority, commission, and special mandate to a.s.semble all the princes, lords, and gentlemen, and generally to command, order, provide, and dispose of all things requisite and necessary."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Death of La Renaudie----283]

The young king was, nevertheless, according to what appears, somewhat troubled at all this uproar and at the language of the conspirators.

"I don't know how it is," said he sometimes to the Guises, "but I hear it said that people are against you only. I wish you could be away from here for a time, that we might see whether it is you or I that they are against." But the Guises set about removing this idea by telling the king that neither he nor his brothers would live one hour after their departure, and "that the house of Bourbon were only seeking how to exterminate the king's house." The caresses of the young queen Mary Stuart were enlisted in support of these a.s.sertions of her uncles. They made a cruel use of their easy victory "for a whole month," according to contemporary chronicles, "there was nothing but hanging or drowning folks. The Loire was covered with corpses strung, six, eight, ten, and fifteen, to long poles. . . ." "What was strange to see," says Regnier de la Planche, "and had never been wont under any form of government, they were led out to execution without having any sentence p.r.o.nounced against them publicly, or having the cause of their death declared, or having their names mentioned. They of the Guises reserved the chief of them, after dinner, to make sport for the ladies; the two s.e.xes were ranged at the windows of the castle, as if it were a question of seeing some mummery played. And what is worse, the king and his young brothers were present at these spectacles, as if the desire were to 'blood' them; the sufferers were pointed out to them by the Cardinal of Lorraine with all the signs of a man greatly rejoiced, and when the poor wretches died with more than usual firmness, he would say, 'See, sir, what brazenness and madness; the fear of death cannot abate their pride and felonry. What would they do, then, if they had you in their clutches?'"

It was too much vengeance to take and too much punishment to inflict for a danger so short-lived and so strictly personal. So hideous was the spectacle that the d.u.c.h.ess of Guise, Anne d'Este, daughter of Renee of France, d.u.c.h.ess of Ferrara, took her departure one day, saying, as she did so, to Catherine de' Medici, "Ah! madame, what a whirlwind of hatred is gathering about the heads of my poor children!" There was, throughout a considerable portion of the country, a profound feeling of indignation against the Guises. One of their victims, Villemongey, just as it came to his turn to die, plunged his hands into his comrades' blood, saying, "Heavenly Father, this is the blood of Thy children: Thou wilt avenge it!" John d'Aubigne, a n.o.bleman of Saintonge, as he pa.s.sed through Amboise one market-day with his son, a little boy eight years old, stopped before the heads fixed upon the posts, and said to the child, "My boy, spare not thy head, after mine, to avenge these brave chiefs; if thou spare thyself, thou shalt have my curse upon thee." The Chancellor Olivier himself, for a long while devoted to the Guises, but now seriously ill and disquieted about the future of his soul, said to himself, quite low, as he saw the Cardinal of Lorraine, from whom he had just received a visit, going out, "Ah! cardinal, you are getting us all d.a.m.ned!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: Louis de Bourbon, Prince of Condo----285]

The mysterious chieftain, the mute captain of the conspiracy of Amboise, Prince Louis of Conde, remained unattainted, and he remained at Amboise itself. People were astounded at his security. He had orders not to move away; his papers were seized by the grand prelate; but his coolness and his pride did not desert him for an instant. We will borrow from the _Histoire des Princes de Conde_ (t. i. pp. 68-71), by the Duke of Aumale, the present heir, and a worthy one, of that line, the account of his appearance before Francis II., "in full council, in presence of the two queens, the knights of the order, and the great officers of the crown. 'As I am certified,' said he, 'that I have near the king's person enemies who are seeking the ruin of me and mine, I have begged him to do me so much favor as to hear my answer in this company here present. Now, I declare that, save his own person and the persons of his brothers, of the queen his mother and of the queen regnant, those who have reported that I was chief and leader of certain sedition-mongers, who are said to have conspired against his person and state, have falsely and miserably lied. And renouncing, for the nonce, my quality as prince of the blood, which I hold, however, of G.o.d alone, I am ready to make them confess, at the sword's point, that they are cowards and rascals, themselves seeking the subversion of the state and the crown, whereof I am bound to promote the maintenance by a better t.i.tle than my accusers. If there be, amongst those present, any one who has made such a report and will maintain it, let him declare as much this moment.' The Duke of Guise, rising to his feet, protested that he could not bear to have so great a prince any longer calumniated, and offered to be his second. Conde, profiting by the effect produced by his proud language, demanded and obtained leave to retire from the court, which he quitted at once."

All seemed to be over; but the whole of France had been strongly moved by what had just taken place; and, though the inst.i.tutions which invite a people to interfere in its own destinies were not at the date of the sixteenth century in regular and effective working order, there was everywhere felt, even at court, the necessity of ascertaining the feeling of the country. On all sides there was a demand for the convocation of the states-general. The Guises and the queen-mother, who dreaded this great and independent national power, attempted to satisfy public opinion by calling an a.s.sembly of notables, not at all numerous, and chosen by themselves. It was summoned to meet on August 21, 1560, at Fontainebleau, in the apartments of the queen-mother. Some great lords, certain bishops, the Constable de Montmorency, two marshals of France, the privy councillors, the knights of the order, the secretaries of state and finance, Chancellor de l'Hospital and Coligny, took part in it; the King of Navarre and the Prince of Conde did not respond to the summons they received; the constable rode up with a following of six hundred horse. The first day was fully taken up by a statement, presented to the a.s.sembly by L'Hospital, of the evils that had fallen upon France, and by a declaration on the part of the Guises that they were ready to render an account of their administration and of their actions. Next day, just as the Bishop of Valence was about to speak, Coligny went up to the king, made two genuflections, stigmatized in energetic terms the Amboise conspiracy and every similar enterprise, and presented two pet.i.tions, one intended for the king himself and the other for the queen-mother.

"They were forwarded to me in Normandy," said he, "by faithful Christians, who make their prayers to G.o.d in accordance with the true rules of piety. They ask for nothing but the liberty of holding their own creed, and that of having temples and celebrating their wors.h.i.+p in certain fixed places. If necessary, this pet.i.tion would be signed by fifty thousand persons." "And I," said the Duke of Guise brusquely, "would find a million to sign a contrary pet.i.tion." This incident went no further between the two speakers. A great discussion began as to the reforms desirable in the church, and as to the convocation of a general council, or, in default thereof, a national council. The Cardinal of Lorraine spoke last, and vehemently attacked the pet.i.tions presented by Admiral de Coligny. "Though couched in moderate and respectful terms,"

said he, "this doc.u.ment is, at bottom, insolent and seditious; it is as much as to say that those gentry would be obedient and submissive if the king would be pleased to authorize their mischievous sentiments. For the rest," he added, "as it is merely a question of improving morals and putting in force strict discipline, the meeting of a council, whether general or national, appears to me quite unnecessary. I consent to the holding of the states-general."

The opinion of the Cardinal of Lorraine was adopted by the king, the queen-mother, and the a.s.semblage. An edict dated August 26 convoked a meeting of the states-general at Meaux on the 10th of December following.