FRANCE UNDER HENRY IV.
Difficulties of Henry IV.--Henry IV. and Sully--Economical
policy of Sully--His financial reforms--French taxation in
the seventeenth century--Policy of Henry IV. towards the
nobles--His foreign policy--Acquisition of Bresse and Bugey--The
Cleves-Jülich question--Death of Henry IV.--Regency of Marie de
Medicis--Mismanagement of affairs--The States-General of 1614--The
Huguenot rising--Entry of Richelieu into the ministry.
[Sidenote: =Difficulties of Henry IV. 1596.=]
‘Now I am king!’ cried Henry IV. when he received the submission of the
last of the Leaguers. He was right, for it was only then that he was
able to turn his attention to the true business of a king, the good
government of his people. The evils under which France groaned were
mainly threefold: the selfishness and factiousness of the nobility,
the religious dissensions, and the shameful financial mismanagement.
As long as civil and foreign war was desolating the country, no steps
could be taken to deal with these dangers, but directly the submission
of the League and the absolution of Henry had produced internal quiet,
and the treaty of Vervins restored external peace, Henry found his
hands free to strike at the root of the evil. Twenty days before the
treaty was signed the publication of the Edict of Nantes found the true
solution of the religious difficulty. It secured to the Calvinists
the freedom of conscience for which they had nominally fought, to the
Catholics the religious ascendency which their numbers and traditions
entitled them to demand. Nor could the most zealous of Leaguers refuse
to recognise the justice of a compromise which the Pope himself had
sanctioned. The dangers which threatened France from the factiousness
of the nobility and the disorder of the finances did not admit of so
simple a remedy. They required long years of patient, watchful and firm
government, and Henry IV. was not able in the time allotted him to do
more than make a beginning and set an example. For this purpose he
called to his intimate counsels his old comrade in arms, the duke of
Sully, whom he had known and valued since childhood. The whole internal
administration of the country was confided to him under the king, and
the title of Superintendant of the Finances, which was conferred on him
in 1598, gave him special authority in that department.
[Sidenote: =Henry IV. and Sully.=]
For the twelve remaining years of the reign of Henry these two men
were continuously and inseparably engaged upon the great work of the
rehabilitation of the affairs of France. The very contrast between them
in temperament and talents served to bind them the closer together and
fit them for their joint work. Henry himself was a true Gascon, frank,
open-hearted, open-minded, genial, generous, and perhaps boastful.
Sully was severe, harsh, cold and reserved. With Henry pleasure, even
dissipation, had ever held a foremost place. Unhappy in his marriage
he had solaced himself with many mistresses and a large family of
bastards, and even after he became king the recklessness of his
expenditure, and the extravagance of his orgies occasioned scandal
even in pleasure-loving Paris. Sully, on the other hand, was morose
in manner and thrifty even to meanness in private life. Avaricious,
incorruptible, indefatigable, intensely jealous of his authority,
and proud of his services, he found his pleasure in the rooting out
of abuse and his triumph in the overthrow of the evil-doer. Henry
inspired love and loyalty in his people, Sully won their respect and
their hatred. Yet neither was complete without the other. To Henry,
gay, chivalrous and manly, human nature was a book more easily read,
a tool more deftly used. His mind was more inventive, his heart more
expansive, his conceptions far wider and deeper in their scope. In a
word, he was a statesman, while Sully was an administrator, and France
required the services of both. While Henry’s clear genius cut the knot
of the religious question, and seized unerringly the moment to throw
France boldly on to the track of her political greatness, Sully’s
honest watchfulness was laying the foundations of economical resource,
and purifying the streams of administrative policy, which alone could
enable France to make the sacrifices necessary for the attainment of
her political future.
[Sidenote: =Encouragement of agriculture.=]
The characteristic bent of Sully’s mind is most evident in his
economical measures. He looked upon France as an essentially
agricultural country, and he believed further that an agricultural
population was a far more trustworthy support to the Crown than one
engaged in industrial pursuits. Consequently he devoted all his efforts
to the development of agriculture. France was to be the great producer
of food for Europe. By the draining of the marshes, and the careful
management of the forest-land, large tracts hitherto unproductive were
brought under cultivation, and the country soon began to supply food
products more than sufficient for her own wants. The removal of all
export-duties on corn enabled her to sell this surplus to less favoured
nations at considerable profit, without rendering herself dependent
upon others for any prime necessity of national existence. In this
Sully showed himself a true exponent of the economical ideas of the
seventeenth century. At a period when Europe was torn with religious
and political dissensions, when France especially was preparing to
launch herself upon a career of aggrandisement, which was to evoke
a hundred years of war, it seemed all important to politicians that
a country should not be dependent upon any other for the chief
necessities of life. It was not so much a principle of economical
policy as a necessity of national safety which drove nations to make
themselves as self-supporting as possible in days of almost universal
war. They encouraged only such manufactures as were required by their
own people, they prohibited the importation of foreign food products by
high import-duties, they kept gold and silver as much as possible in
the country, chiefly in order that the government might have ready to
hand the means of waging war. It has been too much the fashion to look
at the protective system of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
from the economical side alone. Its foundations are laid far more in
the interests of prudent national policy than in those of a false
economy, though it is true that hardly any statesman of the time fully
realised how false the economy was. Sully certainly was no exception to
the general rule. While encouraging agriculture as much as possible he
deliberately depreciated manufactures, imposed duties on manufactured
articles, prohibited the exportation of gold and silver, and did all
in his power to hinder the establishment of new industries. Here the
greater statesmanship of the king corrected the prejudices of the
minister. [Sidenote: =Partial encouragement of manufactures.=]
Henry at once perceived the political as well as the economical value
of an industrial population and of national industries, encouraged
the nascent silk manufactures of Lyons and Nismes, and the glass
and pottery works of Paris and Nevers, promoted the construction of
roads, and of the first of the great canals of France, that between
the Loire and the Seine. In the department of foreign affairs, where
the influence of Sully was less powerful, his efforts were even
more observable. He renewed the extremely important capitulations
with Turkey, which were the solid fruit of the alliance of Francis
I. with the Sultan, and thus retained for France a predominant
voice at the court of Constantinople and the larger share of the trade
with that port. He made favourable treaties of commerce with England
and Holland, which helped to encourage the exportation of French wines,
and promoted the colonisation of Canada, where Champlain founded Quebec
in 1608.
[Sidenote: =Financial reform.=]
The greatest debt which France owed to Sully was the reform of the
financial administration. It is a singular thing that a nation which
has shown itself in other departments of administration so persistent
in its adherence to fixed principles, should have been content to
manage the important department of finance at haphazard. From the
time that France became a nation, to the time of the Revolution, she
produced but four great finance ministers, Suger, Sully, Colbert, and
Turgot, and of them the two most important, Sully and Colbert, were
not so much great financiers as honest and sensible administrators.
The business of Sully was to produce order out of chaos, to defeat
corruption, to govern justly. He made no attempt to reorganise the
finances of France, to introduce a new and better system of taxation,
still less did he venture to interfere with privileges which rendered
anything like a just incidence of taxation impossible. Nor indeed would
he have wished to do so if he had dared. On the contrary he accepted
the system as he found it, and contented himself with enforcing its
proper observance. The only important novelty which he introduced
was the tax known as the _paulette_, by which the judicial and
financial officials were permitted to hand on their offices to their
heirs on payment of the tax. This was in fact to create a caste of
hereditary officials, and to add yet one more to the many privileged
classes of France.
[Sidenote: =French Revenue, the Taille.=]
The revenue of the country was chiefly drawn from four sources known as
the _Taille_, the _Gabelle_, the _Aides_, and the _Douanes_. Of these,
the _taille_ was the most lucrative, and was originally a direct tax
upon property. But in course of time its mode of assessment became
varied in different parts of France. In the _pays d’election_, or those
provinces which originally appertained to the monarchy of France, such
as Normandy, Touraine, the Isle de France, etc., the _taille_ was still
a property tax and was levied upon each man personally according to a
computation of what he was worth; but in the _pays d’état_, or those
provinces which had been annexed to the crown of France in more recent
times, many of which had on annexation secured fiscal privileges which
they had been accustomed to enjoy--such as Burgundy, Guienne, Provence,
etc.--it was levied only upon land and was in fact a land tax and not a
property tax. In the _pays d’élection_ the nobles, in the _pays d’état_
the _terres nobles_, i.e. the lands which were or once had been in
the possession of the nobility, were free from _taille_, and so were
the lands of the Church, which paid their tenths (_décimes_) instead.
In itself there was nothing unjust about the _taille_, excepting the
fact that as, owing to the exemptions, it fell almost entirely on
the classes which had no political power, the temptation to increase
it abnormally was a very strong one to a needy finance minister who
was anxious not to make powerful enemies. But the real evil of the
tax lay in the method of its assessment and collection in the _pays
d’election_. The gross sum to be raised from each province was fixed
by the government, and a contract made with a capitalist on the best
terms available for the letting to him of the sole right of raising
that sum from that particular province. The _Intendant_, the financial
agent for the province, then proceeded to assess the total sum to be
raised upon the different parishes, and the farmer general in his turn
farmed out the raising of these smaller sums to subordinate agents of
his own. Finally the inhabitants of each parish elected a committee to
levy the parochial quota upon individuals. Nothing could well exceed
the wastefulness and injustice of such a system. Every parish which had
made or could make interest with the _Intendant_, every inhabitant who
had interest with the assessment committee got the quota reduced at the
expense of less fortunate neighbours. Each farmer and sub-farmer wrung
the most he could out of an unfortunate peasantry, and was protected
by a government which had already received all that was due to it of
the tax. The only nominal check upon the farmers was the supervision
of their accounts by the _chambre des comptes_, but that was a mere
farce, as no attempt was made to ensure the accuracy of the registers
upon which they worked. A system by which it mattered not a _sou_ to
the government to see that the tax was fairly levied, while it was to
the direct interest of the officials to take care that it was unfairly
levied, stands selfcondemned, but it was a system which was universal
throughout France. By farming out the different branches of the revenue
to harpies who fattened on the misery of the people, the government
shirked the difficulty of having to deal with venal servants of its
own, and reaped the benefit of a sure though diminished income at the
price of abdicating one of the chief functions of government, and
subjecting the innocent tax-payers to the worst form of governmental
tyranny, a taxation both capricious and corrupt. When Sully turned his
attention to the abuses of the system, it is said that the people were
paying 200 millions of francs in taxes while the government received
only 50 millions!
[Sidenote: =The Gabelle.=]
If the _taille_ was the most lucrative tax, the _Gabelle_ or
salt tax was the most oppressive. Salt was a government monopoly farmed
out to capitalists in the usual way, but the special grievance with
regard to the tax did not lie in the fact that it was a monopoly, or
that the quality of the government salt was bad, but in the assessment
of the tax. The government laid down by decree the amount of salt which
every Frenchman was supposed to require, or at any rate had to buy,
and each household was assessed therefore at a sum representing the
amount of salt legally consumable by the number of persons of whom it
was composed. There is something ludicrous in the idea of a paternal
government dictating to its children the amount of salt which is good
for them, but there was little of a joke in it to the over-burdened
French peasant, who was compelled to pay an extortionate sum for a
far larger amount of an inferior commodity than he could possibly use
or dispose of. The door was thus thrown open wide to corruption and
to smuggling--those two ogres which ever prey upon a faulty fiscal
system--but the abuse not only lasted until the Revolution but grew in
intensity with increasing civilisation. In 1781, eight years before
the Revolution broke out, it was calculated that it cost 18 million
_livres_ a year to bring the treasury a revenue of 72 million
_livres_ from the _gabelle_; in other words, that a fourth
of the produce of the tax was spent in collecting it, while the yearly
convictions for smuggling amounted to between three and four thousand.
[Sidenote: =The Aides and Douanes.=]
The _Aides_ and the _Douanes_, which answered roughly to
the modern excise and customs duties, were not open to such obvious
objections, but they too played their part in helping to discourage
trade and impoverish the people. Each province, almost each district
of France, had its own internal customs, and levied a toll which
was nearly prohibitive on the circulation of wealth. Each branch
of indirect taxation was farmed out, and gave rise to a needy host
of agents, inspectors, and tax-gatherers, who looked to make their
fortune out of the necessities of the tax-payers. But this was not
all. Besides the taxes authorised by government and paid directly or
through farmers to the national exchequer, there were, when Sully
took charge of the finances, many other payments of a most oppressive
nature exacted from the people, which were in fact part of the terrible
legacy of the long civil wars. [Sidenote: =Military requisitions and
charges upon revenue.=]Governors of provinces and commandants of
garrisons levied what they considered necessary for the maintenance of
the troops, without any authorisation from the treasury, and without
rendering any account of the sums so raised. Many of the nobles whose
assistance or whose neutrality Henry had found it prudent to buy,
received their gratifications in the form of charges upon the revenue
arising from certain districts, and, as there was no check exercised by
the government over the amounts raised, they frequently levied upon the
wretched people three or four times the sum originally due.
[Sidenote: =Administrative measures of Sully.=]
A system so badly conceived and so iniquitously administered as this
was calculated both to impoverish the people and to dry up the sources
of wealth. Sully did not attempt to deal with the larger problem
except by encouraging agriculture and permitting the free exportation
of corn, but he applied himself diligently to the humbler task of
reforming the financial administration. In this he kept two principles
steadily in view, to insist rigorously that the levy of all sums on
the people should be definitely authorised by the government, and to
enforce a proper system of audit of the national finances. Thus he
obliged the military governors to apply to the treasury for the pay of
their troops, he abolished a crowd of useless and expensive financial
agents and forced them to refund their ill-gotten gains, he caused the
assessment registers to be verified and corrected, and swept away at a
blow a number of false claims for exemption which had been corruptly
admitted. By such measures he soon succeeded in restoring order to
the finances. In twelve years of rigorous and just administration
he relieved the French people from paying unauthorised and illegal
taxation, and this saved them more than 120 millions of francs
annually, he remitted to them more than 20 millions of arrears, paid
off or cancelled 330 millions of debt, provided the necessary resources
for the maintenance of a large army, and an expensive court, and stored
up in the cellars of the Bastille a treasure of 30 millions against
unforeseen contingencies. Well may France look upon him and his master
as the joint founders of her national greatness.
[Sidenote: =Relations between the Crown and the Nobles.=]
The restoration of order after thirty years of civil war was a task
far more difficult and no less necessary than the purification of the
financial system. In France the Crown had ever been the champion of
order and centralisation, the nobles the representatives of disorder
and local independence. In England the nobles were a class singled out
from their fellow-countrymen by greater responsibilities, in France
they formed a caste distinguished from the inferior people by special
privileges. Their tendency therefore naturally was to magnify those
privileges, and to intensify the distinctions which separated them both
from the king and the Commonalty, to assert rights of their own rather
than assist in vindicating the rights of others. Nothing is more
significant in the history of England than the fact that throughout
the constitutional struggles of the medieval period the nobles as a
whole were anxious to make common cause with the people and content
to share their victory with them. Parliament, the representative of
the nation in its three estates, thus became by their common action
the depositary and the safeguard of the national liberty. In France
on the other hand the nobles are ever found fighting for their own
class interests. Fenced round by their own privileges, regardless of
the common weal, they aspired to an independence which could not but
be destructive of national life. The people learned to look to the
Crown as their protector from the licence of the nobles, to welcome its
increasing power as representing greater security of life and property.
A centralised and absolute Crown might possibly be a curse in the
future, a decentralised and independent nobility was beyond question a
curse evident and imminent in the present. And so the States-General,
the representative of France in her three estates, was permitted to
sink into oblivion by a Crown which would have no rival, and a nation
which preferred the maintenance of its class jealousies to that union
of classes which could alone secure liberty.
[Sidenote: =Policy of Henry IV. towards the nobles.=]
The religious wars had afforded a great opportunity to the nobles of
asserting their independence. Many of them had embraced Calvinism,
and so gained for their disintegrating aspirations a religious
sanction and a political ideal. It is said that by the Edict of
Nantes Calvinistic worship was legalised in 3500 castles. Faction is
ever strong when the Crown is weak, and Henry IV. had to
buy the doubtful allegiance of many of the smaller nobles by sheer
bribery, before he could establish himself upon the throne. But no
sooner had he made his position secure than the nobles found that
they had a master. They might be courtiers but not politicians. Henry
deliberately intrusted the affairs of government to men of business
of inferior rank, dependent on himself, and jealous of the nobles.
Rigid inquiry was made into the privileges claimed by the nobles, and
those which could not be substantiated were rescinded. The institution
of the _paulette_ was intended to create a noblesse of the
robe as a counterpoise to the noblesse of the sword. Duelling, that
much-loved privilege of a gentleman, was absolutely forbidden, and
the issue of letters of pardon to those who killed their adversary in
a duel stopped. The nobles, accustomed to the licence of civil war,
soon grew restive under the strong hand of Henry. [Sidenote: =The
conspiracy of Biron, 1602.=] The maréchal de Biron, on the part of
the Catholics, and the duc de Bouillon, the leader of the Huguenots,
permitted themselves to enter into relations with Savoy and Spain, and
to talk somewhat vaguely of a partition of France, in a way which was
incompatible with loyalty to the king. When Henry struck he struck
hard. The thirty-two wounds which Biron had received in the service
of France failed to obtain his pardon. In 1602 he was executed, and
his death gave the signal for the beginning of that war of revenge on
the part of the Crown against the nobles, which was carried on with
such relentless severity by Richelieu, and did not cease until the
triumph of the Crown was assured under Louis XIV. The duc
de Bouillon escaped to Germany, the comte d’Auvergne was imprisoned,
the duc d’Epernon, frightened into submission, was pardoned. Perhaps
Henry himself hardly dared to touch the former companion of Henry
III., the governor of half France, and the proudest of all her
proud nobility. Four years afterwards the vengeance of Henry was still
awake though all the excitement and danger had long ago quieted down.
In 1606 he travelled through the disaffected districts of the south and
south-west accompanied by an army, destroyed several castles belonging
to the nobles, and put to death, after sentences by special tribunals,
those who had taken a prominent part in the late troubles.
[Illustration: MAP SHOWING THE TERRITORIAL GAINS OF FRANCE IN THE
17th CENTURY.]
But it was in the sphere of foreign affairs that the genius of Henry
IV. fully displayed itself. For many years France had played
a sorry part in European politics. If Francis I. had done
something to preserve Europe from falling under the yoke of Charles
V., men also remembered that he was the perjured of Madrid,
the abettor and the ally of the Turk. [Sidenote: =Foreign policy of
Henry IV.=] Since his death France had fallen lower and lower in
the scale of nations, until under the stress of the religious wars she
seemed to bid fair to become another Italy, a plaything tossed to and
fro among the nations of Europe. It was the stubbornness of the Dutch,
and the craft of Elizabeth, not the patriotism of Frenchmen, which had
saved France from the yoke of Philip II. in that terrible
time. After the peace of Vervins Henry had to restore the national
prestige, and regain the national influence which had died almost
to nothing. [Sidenote: =The indefensible frontier of France.=]
The great danger to France lay from the pressure exercised upon an
indefensible frontier on all sides by the Austro-Spanish power. While
Spain held Roussillon, Franche-Comté, and the Netherlands, and could
reckon on the vassalage of Savoy, while the passes of the Vosges were
in the hands of the Empire, the Austro-Spanish House held the gates
of France. France could not breathe with the hand of her enemy on her
throat. But the strength of a chain is that of its weakest link, and
Henry’s eagle eye soon detected the weak place in the circle of iron
which bound him. It lay in north Italy, the old battle-field of France
and Spain. The Milanese was a rich open country, depending for its
protection from attack upon its fortresses and its rivers. It was a
fief of the Empire in the possession of Spain, and its communications
with Spain by sea through the friendly port of Genoa were more easy
than with Germany, through the tedious and often difficult mountain
paths which connected the Valtelline with the Brenner pass and the
valley of the Inn. It lay therefore invitingly open to attack from the
mountains of Savoy on the west, and those of the Grisons on the north,
and if once it fell into the hands of France, not only would the chain
which bound her be broken, but a terrible counterblow would be dealt to
the influence of the Austro-Spanish House in Europe, for through Milan
ran the road by which Spain could best open communications in safety
with south Germany and Franche-Comté. If that way was blocked, the only
route possible for the troops and treasure of Spain was the long sea
voyage by the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel to Antwerp and the
Spanish Netherlands, a route fraught with peril from the storms which
rage round Cape Finisterre, and from the English and French privateers
which swarmed in the narrow seas.
[Sidenote: =Importance of Savoy.=]
In Italy, therefore, lay the opportunity of France, and Savoy held
the key of the position. The duchy of Savoy, which still extended as
far as the Rhone, and disputed with the king of France for the rule
over Provence and Dauphiné, had been gradually pushed by its more
powerful neighbour more and more towards Italy. Its duke had quite
lately established himself in his capital of Turin at the foot of the
mountain, and his ambition was to become an Italian prince. But though
Piedmont and not Savoy had become the centre of his power, the border
land of Savoy and not the Italian land of Piedmont became necessarily
the centre of his policy. Situated on the mountains between France
and the Milanese, Savoy held the gates both of France and of Imperial
Italy. Through her mountain passes could pour, when she gave the word,
the troops of France into the fertile plains of Lombardy, or those of
the Habsburgs into the valley of the Rhone. A position so decisive
and so dangerous rendered a consistent policy impossible. Courted
by both parties, her opportunity lay in playing off one against the
other as long as possible, but her safety necessitated the choice of
the stronger for her ally in the end. A misreading of the political
barometer at a critical moment would mean nothing less than national
extinction. From the time that the rivalry between France and the
Austro-Spanish power began to develop itself in Italy, the dukes of
Savoy had been compelled to follow this tortuous policy. During the
Italian expeditions of Charles VIII. and Louis XII. they were on
the side of victorious France, but in the war between Francis I. and
Charles V. Savoy veered to the side of the Emperor. Punished for this
by the occupation of his country by French troops for twenty-five
years, the duke was reinstated in his dominions at the peace of
Cateau-Cambrésis (1559), subject to the continued occupation by France
of six fortresses, including Susa and Pinerolo, which commanded the
gates of important passes through the Alps. In the troubles which
afflicted France under the later Valois kings, Charles Emmanuel of
Savoy succeeded in obtaining possession of Saluzzo; and although it
was provided in the treaty of Vervins that he should restore it, the
provision remained a dead letter. This gave Henry IV. the opportunity
he desired of recalling Savoy to the French alliance. In 1600, after
the death of Gabrielle d’Estrées, he had procured a divorce from his
first wife Marguerite de Valois, and had strengthened his influence
in Italy by his marriage with Marie de Médicis, the daughter of the
grand-duke of Tuscany. [Sidenote: =Cession of Bresse and Bugey to
France.=] In the same year he marched upon Savoy and quickly overran
it, but in January 1601 agreed to a treaty with the young duke Charles
Emmanuel, who had succeeded Emmanuel Philibert in 1580, by which
Saluzzo was left in the hands of Savoy, but France obtained instead
the two small duchies of Bresse and Bugey. By this treaty Savoy was
brought back into alliance with France at the price of the surrender of
a distant possession, which, in the hands of France, could not but be
considered a standing menace and a cause of hostility by the court of
Turin.
Thus Henry IV. laid the foundations of the policy afterwards so
successfully pursued in Italy by Richelieu. In fact, to both of these
great statesmen the end to be attained was the same. The abasement
of the Austro-Spanish House in the interests of France was the
beginning and end of their foreign policy. But Henry had not the same
opportunities of putting his designs into execution which were enjoyed
by his successor. [Sidenote: =Attack upon the Austro-Spanish House.=]
It is difficult to say how far the Great Design attributed to Henry
in the _Memoirs of Sully_ was ever more than a dream. [Sidenote: =The
Great Design.=] Statesmen have often sought relief from the _ennui_
engendered by the pettiness of diplomatic routine in the delightful
task of building political castles in the air, and it is likely enough
that Henry, in his more imaginative moments, conceived of a Europe in
which religious wars should cease and national dissensions rest, at
the bidding of an arbitration court which represented a confederacy of
free states, and was the mouthpiece of a law of religious toleration.
It is not less likely that his shrewd genius also foresaw that in a
Europe whose unity depended on political confederacy, whose peace was
secured by religious toleration, there would be no room for the Holy
Roman Empire or for the monarchy of Spain. The destruction of the
Austro-Spanish House was a condition precedent to the success of the
Great Design. If Henry ever intended seriously to try to combine those
who represented the political forces of Protestantism in a confederacy
against Spain and the Empire, based on a recognition of the three
religions, he must have abandoned the attempt as hopeless on the death
of Elizabeth in 1603.
[Sidenote: =The Cleves-Jülich question.=]
A few years later, however, an opportunity presented itself of dealing
a blow at the Austro-Spanish House in a less original but equally
effective way. In 1609 John William,[1] duke of Cleves, Jülich, and
Berg died without children, and the right of succession was claimed by
two princes. John Sigismund, the elector of Brandenburg, whose wife
was the child of the eldest daughter of William the Rich, brother and
predecessor of the last duke, rested his wife’s claim partly on his
descent from the elder branch, and partly on a will made by William the
Rich in which he gave the descendants of the elder daughter preference
over those of the younger. The count palatine of Neuburg had married
a younger daughter of William the Rich, who claimed the inheritance
as being the nearest of kin. The eldest sister of John William being
dead, she made over her claim to her son Wolfgang William. The question
was therefore mainly the old one of the eldest by descent against
the nearest of kin, and was eminently one for the imperial courts to
decide. But the matter was complicated by religious considerations.
The three duchies lay along the course of the lower Rhine from the
frontiers of the United Provinces nearly to Andernach, enclosing within
their embraces a considerable part of the archbishopric of Köln. The
population was Catholic but both the claimants were Lutherans, and on
the principle of _cujus regio ejus religio_, laid down by the
religious peace of Augsburg, if the duchies passed into Lutheran hands,
there was a strong probability that they would before long not only
become Lutheran themselves, but drag the vacillating archbishopric
of Köln with them. The Emperor, Rudolf, in order to guard against
this danger, at once claimed the right of administering the duchies
until the question of the succession was settled, and sent an army
to occupy Jülich. But if the Catholics could not permit the duchies
to fall into Lutheran hands, still less could Protestant or French
interests see unmoved the imperial armies encamped on the borders of
the United Provinces, in close proximity to the frontiers of France
and the Spanish Netherlands. An imperial army on the lower Rhine was
a menace alike to north German Protestantism, to the hardly won Dutch
independence, and to English and French jealousy.
[Sidenote: =League under Henry IV. against the Emperor, 1610.=]
Henry IV. seized the opportunity. He at once declared himself the
protector of the rights of the elector of Brandenburg and the count of
Neuburg, and put himself at the head of an alliance of the enemies of
the Austro-Spanish House. England, the United Provinces, the German
Protestant Union, Venice and Savoy responded to his call. Three French
armies were set on foot, one was directed to the Pyrenees, the second
under Lesdiguières was to co-operate with Savoy and Venice in the
conquest of the Milanese, while the third, under the command of the
king himself, attacked Jülich and occupied the duchies in conjunction
with the Dutch and English contingents and the German Protestants. It
seemed as if the death-knell of the Austro-Spanish power had sounded.
Rudolf II., ignorant of politics and half-crazed in intellect, was
implicated in serious quarrels with his unwilling subjects of Bohemia
and Hungary. In Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, Ferdinand, the nephew
of the Emperor, was, with the help of the Jesuits, waging an ardent
and determined war against the Calvinism which threatened to take a
strong root even in the hereditary dominions of the Habsburgs. Wanting
in money, wanting in leadership, wanting in unity, the power of Austria
had no troops on which it could depend, no subjects which it could
trust. Nor was Spain in much better plight. Exhausted by the ambition
of Philip II., misgoverned by a weak king and an incapable minister,
she had chosen this very time gratuitously to deal a serious blow
to her own prosperity by expelling from her borders the Moriscoes,
the most laborious and intelligent of her working population. It was
clear that she could do little more to help the cause than to defend
her own frontiers, and hold the Milanese against the attacks of the
allies. The forces of the Catholic League, the resources of Maximilian
of Bavaria, and the genius of his general Tilly, were in fact all
that Catholicism and the Austro-Spanish power had to rely upon in the
death duel in which she had almost by inadvertence engaged herself.
[Sidenote: =Assassination of Henry IV.=] Help came from a quarter the
least expected. A terrible crime struck France with tragic suddenness
to her knees and saved the House of Austria. As Henry IV. passed
through the streets of Paris to visit his minister Sully, but two days
before the date fixed for his departure for the campaign, a fanatic
named Ravaillac plunged a dagger into his heart. With Henry IV. died
the combination of which he was the head and soul, and the capture
of Jülich from the imperialists by Maurice of Nassau, aided by a
small English contingent, was the only step taken in the direction of
realising the Great Design of the first of the Bourbons.
[Sidenote: =Marie de Medicis declared Regent.=]
The dagger of Ravaillac not only saved the Austro-Spanish House but
plunged France into fifteen years of misery and dishonour. The young
king Louis XIII. was but nine years old and a regency was
inevitable. The duc d’Épernon was the only man who showed the necessary
energy and presence of mind to deal with the crisis which had so
suddenly arisen. Surrounding the palace and the Hôtel de Ville with
his own troops and those of the other nobles on whom he could rely, he
entered the chamber where the Parlement was assembled, and demanded
that they should at once recognise the queen-mother as regent. Pointing
significantly to his sword he said: ‘This sword is as yet in its
scabbard, but if the queen is not declared regent before this assembly
separates, I foresee that it will have to be drawn. That which can be
done to-day without danger cannot be done to-morrow without difficulty
and bloodshed.’ There were many in the Parlement who were not sorry
to see that body thus suddenly raised into the unaccustomed position
of the arbiter of the government of France. There were many more who
found the arguments of Épernon too powerful to be resisted, and Marie
was without further question recognised by a decree of the Parlement
as regent of the kingdom during the minority of the king, and invested
with the full powers of the crown. A Council of Regency was at once
formed from among the leaders of the nobility, and thus fell in a
moment the whole structure of government which Henry IV. and
Sully had laboured so hard to erect. The nobles resumed their place at
the head of affairs. Sully, who alone might have had influence enough
to stop this disastrous counter-revolution, lost his courage, thought
only of securing his own safety, and after a few ineffectual protests
retired into private life. The treasure which he had so painfully
amassed was squandered among the nobles to buy their adherence to the
new government. [Sidenote: =Reversal of the policy of Henry IV.=]
The regent, devoted in her inmost heart to Spain, and dreading the
risk of foreign war, hastened to disband the larger part of the troops
which Henry IV. had collected, and to set on foot secret
negotiations with the court of Spain. After the capture of Jülich, on
September 1st, 1610, by which all danger of Imperial aggression in the
lower Rhineland was taken away, she openly announced her intention
to withdraw altogether from the war, and to ally herself with Spain
through the double marriage of her daughter Elizabeth to the heir to
the Spanish crown, and of Anne of Austria, the eldest daughter of
Philip III., to the young king of France. Six months after
the murder of Henry IV. his whole policy at home and abroad
had been reversed. The great combination against the House of Austria
fell to pieces when France retired. The German Protestants and the
Dutch made their peace with the Emperor by the truce of Willstedt,
signed in October 1610. The duke of Savoy, betrayed by France, had to
make his peace as best he could with Spain, and the key of Italy was
once more thrown away. At home, disorder corruption and anarchy raised
their heads again, and the selfish and factious nobility tore France
in pieces in a struggle in which their desire for places and money was
hardly disguised by a thin veneer of political ambition.
[Sidenote: =Influence of the maréchal d’Ancre.=]
For seven years Marie held the reins of government. She was a vain,
irritable, and intriguing woman with little of the talent for rule
hereditary in her family, and much of the dependence upon stronger
natures characteristic of her sex. They were years of discord and
disgrace. The real rulers of France were the Italian adventurers
Leonora Galigai and her husband, whom the weakness of Marie actually
raised to the dignity of a marshal of France, although he had never
seen a shot fired in earnest. The nobles were justly enraged at the
prostitution of an office, which they considered one of the chief
prizes of their order, and bitterly jealous of the influence of a
parvenu like the maréchal d’Ancre. Twice they rose in rebellion under
the leadership of the worthless prince de Condé,[2] but d’Ancre and
Marie knew well the sop to throw to that Cerberus. A quarter of a
million of livres purchased the treaty of Ste. Menehould on May 15th,
1614, and six million that of Loudun in May 1616, and the Regent and
her minister quietly pursued their policy unmoved by demands for
reform which died in the presence of gold. The feeble ray of dying
constitutionalism alone sheds a pale gleam of interest over the dreary
years. Partly in the hopes of strengthening her own position, partly
to take a cry, always dangerous, out of the mouth of Condé, Marie de
Médicis consented to summon once more the States-General of France and
ask their advice upon the grievances of the kingdom.
The melancholy interest which surrounds a deathbed attaches to this the
last meeting of the States-General of monarchical France. [Sidenote:
=Meeting of the States-General, 1614.=] The Estates assembled at
Paris on the 14th of October 1614, according to their three orders.
There appeared 140 representatives of the clergy, 132 of the noblesse,
192 of the Tiers État, but these last were not in any real sense
representatives of the commonalty of France. The name of a merchant or
a farmer or a small landowner does not appear among them. They were
for the most part of the official and professional classes, officers
of the petty districts into which France was divided, financial and
municipal officers, with a sprinkling of lawyers and citizens, and they
at once assumed the rôle which their composition marked out for them,
and organised themselves as the official order in opposition to the
other orders of the clergy and the noblesse. [Sidenote: =Quarrels
between the orders.=] From the beginning the jealousy of the three
orders among themselves, and the fatal determination of the Tiers
État to defend the privileges of their own official class against
the nobles, instead of urging the grievances of the country upon the
Crown, rendered the possibility of obtaining any real check upon the
Crown absolutely hopeless. The nobles not unnaturally looked with
jealous eyes on the gradual formation of an hereditary privileged class
of officials, by means of the purchase of offices and the right of
transmission secured by the _paulette_, which could not fail to
grow in a little time into a second noblesse, and they directed their
efforts mainly to procuring the abolition of purchase in the civil
services. The Tiers État on their side, numbering as they did but
comparatively few of the privileged ‘exempt’ among their ranks, fixed
their eyes on the inordinate pensions enjoyed by the great nobles, and
demanded the abolition of the pension list and the reduction of the
_taille_. This was to hit the nobles in their weakest place, and
the contention between the two orders became so keen that the court
had to interfere and bring about a reconciliation. Hardly however
had the Tiers État finished their controversy with the nobles, than
they became involved in a quarrel with the clergy. The magistracy,
especially the lawyers, were strongly Gallican in their views of
ecclesiastical government, that is, they maintained the right of the
national authorities to govern the Church in France in all matters
which were not directly spiritual in their nature, and repudiated
interference from the Pope. Especially they disliked the Jesuits,
and wished to avoid the recognition of the decrees of the Council of
Trent, which had not as yet been formally accepted by France. The
Tiers État accordingly drew up an article in their _cahier_,
or list of grievances, which, under the form of asserting the right
divine of the French kings, and denouncing the crime of regicide,
impliedly denied the right of the popes to depose kings and absolve
subjects from their allegiance. At once the whole question between
the Gallicans and the Ultramontanes was raised, and for more than a
month no other matter was discussed among the Estates. The nobles
sided with the clergy, and agreed with them on twenty-four articles
representing their common views, among which the recognition of the
decrees of Trent and the maintenance of the authority of the Holy See
assumed an equal place of importance with the union of Navarre and
Béarn to France, and the abolition of the _paulette_ and the
purchase system. The Parlement supported the Tiers Etat, and by its
interference introduced one more cause of dissension. Finally, the
court had again to interfere and order the Tiers Etat to omit the
objectionable article from their _cahier_. [Sidenote: =Reforms
brought about by the States-General.=] Yet in spite of these
suicidal quarrels, which proved the unfitness of the States-General to
undertake constitutional responsibilities, their meeting was not wholly
useless. Differing on almost all other questions, the three orders were
agreed upon an attack upon the financial administration. Jeannin, the
finance minister, was, in spite of the efforts of the court, forced
to produce accounts, which, when produced, showed clearly enough that
none had been kept which were fit for production. The consent of the
Crown was obtained to a considerable reduction of the pension list,
the suppression of the _paulette_, and the erection of a special
court to control the finances. Endowed with no legislative power, all
that the Estates could do in the way of ameliorating the government
was to make representations and extort promises, and this they did as
effectively as circumstances permitted in the most important department
of administration. If it must be allowed that they did much to destroy
their own influence and render themselves ridiculous by their jealousy
and quarrelsomeness, it must also be remembered that no king ever dared
to summon them again until monarchy was tottering to its fall.
[Sidenote: =Fall of the maréchal d’Ancre. Ministry of Luynes,
1617.=]
Louis was declared of age just before the meeting of the States-General
in 1614, when he had reached his fourteenth year. In 1616 the hated
double marriage with Spain was celebrated, and Marie’s triumph was
complete. It was short-lived--Louis himself shared the universal
hatred felt for the maréchal d’Ancre. Urged on by his friend and
fellow-sportsman the count de Luynes, he determined to take the
government into his own hands. A third rising of the nobles at the
beginning of 1617 professed as its object the saving of the king
from the hands of a foreigner. Only the queen-mother supported her
favourite, but she was powerless against her son. As the maréchal
entered the Louvre on the 25th of April 1617, he was ordered in the
king’s name to surrender his sword. On his refusal the guard fired
and he fell dead. His wife was not long in following him. Condemned
on an absurd charge of sorcery, she was executed shortly after. The
queen-mother was obliged to retire to Blois, and Louis, seeing his
oppressors so successfully disposed of, felt that at last he was king.
He was mistaken. He had only exchanged one master for another. Luynes,
who succeeded to the power formerly exercised by the maréchal d’Ancre,
soon proved neither more capable or honest in administration, nor more
agreeable to the nobles. The queen-mother never ceased her intrigues to
regain her power, intrigues which became daily more dangerous as they
were directed by the unseen hand of Richelieu. In 1619 the old duke of
Epernon, in 1620 the dukes of Mayenne and Vendôme, in alliance with the
Huguenots under Rohan and La Tremouille, rose in her favour, and Louis
and his favourite found themselves obliged to come to an arrangement
with her.
[Sidenote: =Rising of the Huguenots, 1620.=]
But no sooner had the treaty of Angoulême, made in February 1619,
and confirmed in 1620, restored harmony between Louis and his mother
and the nobles, than the Huguenots, who wished to take advantage
of the troubles of the court in order to increase their political
independence, threw all the south of France into a blaze. Frightened
by the forced restoration of Catholicism in Béarn in 1620, they struck
boldly for independence, dreamed of a Huguenot republic in the south
of France, and were content to see the dismemberment of the nation,
if by it they could satisfy their personal ambition. Wherever the
eye turned among the various interests of which France was composed,
whether upon Luynes and the courtiers, upon the queen-mother and her
rival court, upon Condé and the nobles, upon Rohan and the Huguenots,
the same picture of self-seeking ambition and personal aims was
everywhere presented. Each one for himself and no one for the country
was the motto of all among the leaders of France with two exceptions.
The king himself and Richelieu the young bishop of Luçon, at that
time in disgrace with his patroness Marie de Médicis, were the only
ones in whose breasts the love of France burned with a pure and
unsullied flame, and the hour had not yet struck which was to bind
them together in a common work for the common weal. Meanwhile the
crisis was a serious one, and Louis set himself manfully to meet it.
The clash of arms, and the threat of danger, always brought out the
stronger parts of his nature. He confirmed the Edict of Nantes, then
at the head of a large army, after quieting the north, he marched
towards the great Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle and captured
S. Jean d’Angely in spite of the efforts of Soubise. Leaving the
due d’Epernon to form the siege of La Rochelle, he directed all his
energies to the capture of Montauban, the great Huguenot stronghold of
the south, while Montmorency subdued the Cevennes. For three months
the stout city resisted all the ill-directed efforts of the royal
army, and in November 1621 the king sullenly withdrew the remnants of
his perishing troops. The death of Luynes from a fever caught in camp
did much to make peace possible, and the victory of Louis and Condé
over Soubise in the marches of Rie in April 1622 brought it near. The
Huguenots had come to see that without foreign assistance their cause
was hopeless. The duc de Bouillon remained immovable in the north.
Lesdiguières, the old Huguenot leader, became a Catholic and received
the bâton of Constable. La Force, the heroic defender of Montauban,
accepted the rank of marshal of France and a gift of 200,000 crowns.
Rohan alone remained steadfast, but he too was forced to accept the
inevitable, when it became clear that Montpellier, the last Huguenot
fortress of the south, must surrender. [Sidenote: =The peace of
Montpellier, 1622. Entry of Richelieu into the Ministry.=] The
peace of Montpellier, signed on the 19th October 1622, marks the first
great step taken by the Crown towards the destruction of the Huguenots
as a political organisation. By it religious toleration was secured
to them, but they were forbidden to hold political assemblies of any
kind whatever. All fortifications recently raised by them were to be
demolished, and La Rochelle and Montauban were to be for the future
the only guaranteed towns. The victory of France over the Huguenots
had results far more extended than appeared upon the surface. The
restoration of civil order in the country naturally led to an attempt
to restore personal harmony at court, and under the auspices of La
Vieuville, who now exercised the chief influence in the ministry, a
settlement of the questions still at issue between the king and his
mother was effected. One of the conditions of this settlement was the
entry of Richelieu into the royal council. From that day a new era
dawned for France.