After long wandering in strange seas, we come in view of familiar
lights and headlands. With the advent of the house of Bourbon, we have
grasped a thread which leads directly down to our own time.
The accession of a Protestant king was hailed with delirious joy by the
Huguenots, and with corresponding rage by Catholic France. The one
looked forward to redressing of wrongs and avenging of injuries; and
the other flatly refused submission unless Henry should recant his
heresy and become a convert to the true faith.
The new king saw there was no bed of roses preparing for him. After
four years of effort to reconcile the irreconcilable, he decided upon
his course. He was not called to the throne to rule over Protestant
France, nor to be an instrument of vengeance for the Huguenots.
He saw that the highest good of the kingdom required not that he should
impose upon it either form of belief or worship, but give equal
opportunity and privilege to both.
To the consternation of the Huguenots, he announced himself ready to
listen to the arguments in favor of the religion of Rome; and it took
just five hours of deliberation to convince him of its truth. He
declared himself ready to abjure his old faith. Bitter reproaches on
the one side and rejoicings on the other greeted this decision. It was
not heroic. But many even among the Protestants acknowledged it to be
an act of supreme political wisdom.
Peace was restored, and the Edict of Nantes, which quickly followed,
proved to his old friends, the Huguenots, that they were not forgotten.
The Protestants, with disabilities removed, shared equal privileges
with the Catholics throughout the kingdom, and the first victory for
religious liberty was splendidly won.
An era of unexampled prosperity dawned. Never had the kingdom been so
wisely and beneficently governed. Sincerity, simplicity, and sympathy
had taken the place of dissimulation, craft, and cruelty. Uplifting
agencies were everywhere at work, reaching even to the peasantry, that
forgotten element in the nation.
The formal abjuration of the Protestant faith was made by the King in
the Church of St. Denis in 1593. This church also witnessed the
marriage of Henry with Marie de' Medici, after his release from her
debased relative, Margaret of Valois, daughter of Catharine de' Medici.
Henry IV., great although he was, was not above the ordinary weaknesses
of humanity, and, captivated by the beauty of Marie, was a willing
party to the Italian marriage which was urged upon him, which marriage
was the one mistake of a great reign.
It was not to be expected that any minister would rise to the full
stature of Henry IV. at this time. But in the Duke of Sully he had a
wise and efficient instrument for his plan, which was out of the chaos
left by the devastation of thirty years of religious wars, to evolve
peace and prosperity; and to create economic conditions upon a
foundation insuring growth and permanence.
The royal authority, impaired by the successors of Francis, must first
be restored. And to that end all political elements, including the
States General, must be held firmly down; and that body, representing
the _Tiers État_, was never summoned after France was well in hand by
the king who was _par excellence_ the friend of the people!
It is the Edict of Nantes which stands preeminent among the events of
this reign, and which is Henry's monument in the annals of France. His
foreign policy was controlled by a desire to check the preponderance of
the Hapsburgs; that being, in fact, the dominant sentiment in Europe at
that time. But a remarkable proof of the breadth of his treatment of
this subject is the plan he formulated of a European tribunal composed
of the five great powers, which should insist upon the maintenance of a
_balance of power_--a phrase common enough now, but heard then for the
first time; and which had for its immediate purpose the separating of
the crown of Spain and the empire, by forbidding their being held by
members of the same family, and of course designed as a check upon the
Hapsburgs.
This was a pet theory with Henry, and the subject of much discussion
with Sully and of negotiation with Elizabeth, Queen of England, at the
very time when Philip II. of Spain, in pursuance of a precisely
opposite policy, had been moving heaven and earth to bring about a
marriage with that extraordinary sister of his dead wife Mary. Henry
did not witness the realization of his dream. But time has justified
its wisdom, and modern statesmanship has been able to devise no wiser
plan than that conceived in the mind of this enlightened king nearly
three centuries ago.
How much France lost by Ravaillac's dagger can only be surmised, and
when Henry, fatally stricken (1610), was carried dying into the Louvre,
a cry of grief arose from Catholic and Protestant alike throughout the
kingdom. After a reign of twenty-one years, the sagacious ruler, who
had done more than any other to make the country great and happy, was
the victim of assassination. And France once more was the sport of a
cruel fate which placed her in the hands of a woman and a Medici.
Marie, the widow of Henry IV., was appointed regent during the minority
of her son Louis aged ten years.
The regency of this woman is a story of cabals and the intrigues of
aspiring favorites. If Marie had not the ability of her great
kinswoman Catharine, it must be confessed neither had she her darker
vices. She was simply intriguing and vulgar, and the willing
instrument for designing people cleverer than herself. So powerful was
the influence of Eleonora Galigai and her husband, Concini, both
Italians like herself, that in that superstitious age it was ascribed
to magic. Marie became the mere secretary to record the wishes of
these parasites. Concini was made marquis, then minister. Whom he
commended was elevated, and whom he denounced was abased. Public
indignation reached its climax when this adventurer was finally created
Marshal of France, before whom counts and dukes must bow. So furious
was the storm raised by this, that Marie declared her willingness to
surrender the regency, and after summoning the States General she
presented her son, Louis XIII., thirteen years of age, declaring that
he was qualified to reign.
Only once again was this body to be called together. That was in 1789,
by Louis XVI., when it was transformed into a National Assembly.
But when it was discovered that the power of the detested pair was as
great behind the boy king as it had been behind his mother, the storm
gathered again from all parts of the kingdom. It was France in
struggle with Concini, the man who was audaciously sending princes of
the blood and dukes to the Bastille.
But a counter-influence was weaving about Louis. He was made to
realize the indignity to himself in letting two vulgar Italians usurp
his authority. Thus Albert de Luynes, his adored friend, procured his
signature to a paper ordering the immediate destruction of Concini and
his wife. And when Louis had seen Concini despatched by his own agents
in the court of the Louvre, and the arrest, trial, and execution of
Eleonora (upon the charge of sorcery), he completed the work by
banishing his mother, only to fall immediately into the power of Albert
de Luynes, himself an intriguing parasite, who intended to play the
very same role as the pair he had overthrown.
The clever Eleonora, when arraigned on the charge of sorcery, replied,
"The only magic I have used is that of a strong mind over a weak one."
Albert de Luynes's head was never carried about Paris on a pike, as was
hers. But he experimented with the same kind of magic.
This wretched period after the death of the great Henry had occupied
twelve years. But in 1622 Cardinal Richelieu took his seat among the
advisers of the king. The true man had been found. King, nobles,
people of all ranks and religions, realized that a master had appeared
in the land; a master inscrutable in his purposes, and clothed with a
mysterious power.
The foundations of this man's policy lay deep, out of sight of all save
his own far-reaching intelligence. Pitiless as an iceberg, he crushed
every obstacle to his purpose. Impartial as fate, with no loves, no
hatreds, catholics, protestants, nobles, parliaments, one after another
were borne down before his determination to make the king, what he had
not been since Charlemagne, supreme in France.
The will of the great minister mowed down like a scythe. The power of
the grandees, that last remnant of feudalism, and a perpetual menace to
monarchy, was swept away. One great noble after another was humiliated
and shorn of his privileges, if not of his head.
The Huguenots, being first shaken into submission, saw their political
liberties torn from them by the stroke of a pen; and even while the
Catholics were making merry over this discomfiture the minister was
planning to send Henrietta, sister of the king, across the channel to
become queen of Protestant England, as wife of Charles I. But the act
of supreme audacity was to come. This high prelate of the Church, this
cardinal-minister, formed an alliance with Gustavus Adolphus, the great
leader of the Protestants in the war upon the emperor and the pope!
He allowed no religion, no class, to sway or to hold him. He was for
France; and her greatness and glory augmented under his ruthless
dominion. By his extraordinary genius he made the reign of a
commonplace king one of dazzling splendor; and while gratifying his own
colossal ambition, he so strengthened the foundations of the monarchy
that princes of the blood themselves could not shake it.
It was great, it was dazzling, but of all his work there is but one
thing which revolutions and time have not swept away: the "French
Academy" alone survives as his monument. Out of a gathering of
literary friends he created a national institution, its object the
establishing a court of last appeal in all that makes for eloquence in
speaking or writing the French language. In a country where few things
endure, this has remained unchanged for two hundred and thirty years.
But this master of statecraft, this creator of despotic monarchy, had
one unsatisfied ambition. He would have exchanged all his honors for
the ability to write one play like those of Corneille. Hungering for
literary distinction, he could not have gotten into his own Academy had
he not created it. And jealous of his laurels, he hated Corneille as
much as he did the enemies of France.
The feeble King Louis XIII. manifested wisdom in at least one thing.
He permitted this greatest statesman of his time, and one of the
greatest perhaps of all time, to have a free hand in managing his
kingdom. And whatever the pressure from the queen-mother, from cabals
and intriguing nobles, he never yielded the point, but kept his great
minister in his service as long as they both lived. This was
especially commendable in Louis because they were personally
antagonistic, and also because the queen-mother constantly used her
powerful influence over her son for his downfall.
Marie had been permitted to return to Paris, where her son, perhaps to
console her for the loss of the Concinis, had built for her the Palais
de Luxembourg, intended as a reminiscence of her dear Italy, with its
Medicean architecture and Italian gardens and fountains. Here she held
her little court in great splendor, and here she wove her ineffectual
webs for Richelieu's defeat and downfall. It is said that at one time
Louis at her instigation had actually taken the pen in hand to sign the
order for his minister's disgrace, when that vigilant and omniscient
being, perfectly aware of what was occurring, appeared from behind the
curtains. And Louis, quailing before the superior will of a master,
sent his vicious, intriguing mother into perpetual banishment. And we
are told that Marie, the subject of those immortal canvases now at the
Louvre, was actually sheltered and fed by the great painter at his own
home in the day of her disgrace and poverty.
It is not strange that Peter the Great pronounced Richelieu the model
statesman! Their ideals were the same. The minister intended that
everything in France should lie helpless at the feet of royalty; that
kingship should absorb into itself every source of power. While
Cromwell was tearing down a throne in England and leading a king to a
scaffold, Richelieu, facing every class, current, and force, was making
the throne impregnable in France, and preparing a magnificent
inheritance for the infant Louis XIV., then in his cradle.
Queen-mother, nobles, parliaments, and Protestants must be taught to
obey. The Huguenots at the siege of La Rochelle, lasting fifteen
months, learned their lesson. The punishment for their revolt was the
loss of every military and political privilege. But although there
were to be no more political assemblies, the edict of Nantes was to be
rigidly enforced, and their rights and immunities under it made
inviolable. Louis the King saw his most intimate friend, Cinq Mars,
sent to the scaffold; his brother Gaston, Duke of Orleans, thrown into
the Bastille like a common prisoner; his mother in exile and poverty.
But he also saw himself without the trouble of governing, surrounded by
homage and adulation, towering high above everything else in France,
and was content.
The growing power of Austria and the ascendency of the Hapsburgs was,
as we have seen, the nightmare of Europe at this period. But the
Reformation was tearing the empire almost asunder. A Protestant
Prussia was trying to struggle away from a Catholic Austria. Richelieu
cared nothing for Catholics nor for Protestants. His aim was to weaken
the hands of the Hapsburgs. And if he joined the Protestant leader
Gustavus Adolphus in a religious crusade, it was with this end in view.
The marriage of Louis with the Infanta of Spain, known as Anne of
Austria, was doubtless a part of the same line of policy, and was the
beginning of many attempts to draw the Spanish peninsula under the
control of France.
When the end of all these schemings arrived, on the 4th day of
December, 1642, Richelieu calmly laid down to die in his princely
residence known at that time as the Palais Cardinal. But as it was his
dying gift to the king, the name was changed to the Palais Royal. Upon
the death of Louis XIII., which occurred in 1643, only a few months
after that of his minister, the widowed Queen Anne, with her infant
son, Louis XIV., removed from the Louvre to the Palais Royal, which
continued to be the residence of the Grand Monarch for some time after
his majority.
Anne was appointed regent for her son, not yet five years old, and, to
the surprise of everyone, immediately called to her aid as her adviser
not a Frenchman, as was expected, but an Italian, Cardinal Mazarin. So
the fate of the kingdom was in the hands of two foreigners, a Spanish
queen-regent and an Italian minister.
Richelieu's and Mazarin's methods were the opposite of each other. One
was direct, the other tortuous and indirect. In true Italian fashion
Mazarin overcame by seeming to yield; and what he said was the thing he
did not mean. Intrigue and bribery were his implements and weapons.
The situation awoke distrust. It was a time to recover lost
privileges, and to struggle out of the chains riveted by Richelieu. A
civil war known as the Fronde was the result.
As all classes had grievances, all were represented in this general
undoing of the last minister's great work. But as no two classes
desired the same thing, the miserable war, without genius and without
system, miserably failed. The royal cause triumphed; and Richelieu's
political structure was not even shaken. Mazarin stood inflexibly by
the work of his great predecessor. Turenne and Condé were the military
heroes of this, as well as of the subsequent foreign wars, resulting in
the acquisition of Alsace (1648) and other great territorial expansion.
When Cardinal Mazarin died in 1661, the young king was asked to whom
the ministers should bring their portfolios. To which came the
unexpected reply, "_To me_."