A policy of "magnificence."

It now remained to consolidate the later successes attained by the

policy of the Valois--the acquisition of the duchies of Burgundy and

Brittany; but instead there was a sudden change and that policy seemed

about to be lost in dreams of recapturing the rights of the Angevins

over Naples, and conquering Constantinople. Charles VIII., a prince with

neither intelligence nor resolution, his head stuffed with chivalric

romance, was scarcely freed from his sister's control when he sought in

Italy a fatal distraction from the struggle with the house of Austria.

By this "war of magnificence" he caused an interruption of half a

century in the growth of national sentiment, which was only revived by

Henry II.; and he was not alone in thus leaving the bone for the shadow:

his contemporaries, Ferdinand the Catholic when delivered from the

Moors, and Henry VII. from the power of the English nobles, followed the

same superficial policy, not taking the trouble to work for that real

strength which comes from the adhesion of willing subjects to their

sovereign. They only cared to aggrandize themselves, without thought of

national feeling or geographical conditions. The great theorist of these

"conquistadores" was Machiavelli. The regent, Anne of Beaujeu, worked in

her daughter's interest to the detriment of the kingdom, by means of a

special treaty destined to prevent the property of the Bourbons from

reverting to the crown; while Anne of Brittany did the like for her

daughter Claude. Louis XII., the next king of France, thought only of

the Milanese; Ferdinand the Catholic all but destroyed the Spanish unity

at the end of his life by his marriage with Germaine de Foix; while the

house of Austria was for centuries to remain involved in this petty

course of policy. Ministers followed the example of their self-seeking

masters, thinking it no shame to accept pensions from foreign

sovereigns. The preponderating consideration everywhere was direct

material advantage; there was disproportion everywhere between the means

employed and the poverty of the results, a contradiction between the

interests of the sovereigns and those of their subjects, which were

associated by force and not naturally blended. For the sake of a morsel

of Italian territory every one forgot the permanent necessity of

opposing the advance of the Turkish crescent, the two horns of which

were impinging upon Europe on the Danube and on the Mediterranean.

The wars in Italy.

Italy and Germany were two great tracts of land at the mercy of the

highest bidder, rich and easy to dominate, where these coarse and alien

kings, still reared on medieval traditions, were for fifty years to

gratify their love of conquest. Italy was their first battlefield;

Charles VIII. was summoned thither by Lodovico Il Moro, tyrant of Milan,

involved in a quarrel with his rival, Ferdinand II. of Aragon. The

Aragonese had snatched the kingdom of Naples from the French house of

Anjou, whose claims Louis XI. had inherited in 1480. To safeguard

himself in the rear Charles VIII. handed over Roussillon and Cerdagne

(Cerdaña) to Ferdinand the Catholic (that is to say, all the profits of

Louis XI.'s policy); gave enormous sums of money to Henry VII. of

England; and finally, by the treaty of Senlis ceded Artois and

Franche-Comté to Maximilian of Austria. After these fool's bargains the

paladin set out for Naples in 1494. His journey was long and triumphant,

and his return precipitate; indeed it very nearly ended in a disaster at

Fornovo, owing to the first of those Italian holy leagues which at the

least sign of friction were ready to turn against France. At the age of

twenty-eight, however, Charles VIII. died without issue (1498).

Louis XII. (1498-1515).

The accession of his cousin, Louis of Orleans, under the title of Louis

XII., only involved the kingdom still further in this Italian imbroglio.

Louis did indeed add the fief of Orleans to the royal domain and

hastened to divorce Jeanne of France in order to marry Anne, the widow

of his predecessor, so that he might keep Brittany. But he complicated

the Naples affair by claiming Milan in consideration of the marriage of

his grandfather, Louis of Orleans, to Valentina, daughter of Gian

Galeazzo Visconti, duke of Milan. In 1499, appealed to by Venice, and

encouraged by his favourite, Cardinal d'Amboise (who was hoping to

succeed Pope Alexander VI.), and also by Cesare Borgia, who had lofty

ambitions in Italy, Louis XII. conquered Milan in seven months and held

it for fourteen years; while Lodovico Sforza, betrayed by his Swiss

mercenaries, died a prisoner in France. The kingdom of Naples was still

left to recapture; and fearing to be thwarted by Ferdinand of Aragon,

Louis XII. proposed to this master of roguery that they should divide

the kingdom according to the treaty of Granada (1500). But no sooner had

Louis XII. assumed the title of king of Naples than Ferdinand set about

despoiling him of it, and despite the bravery of a Bayard and a Louis

d'Ars, Louis XII., being also betrayed by the pope, lost Naples for good

in 1504. The treaties of Blois occasioned a vast amount of diplomacy,

and projects of marriage between Claude of France and Charles of

Austria, which came to nothing but served as a prelude to the later

quarrels between Bourbons and Habsburgs.

It was Pope Julius II. who opened the gates of Italy to the horrors of

war. Profiting by Louis XII.'s weakness and the emperor Maximilian's

strange capricious character, this martial pope sacrificed Italian and

religious interests alike in order to re-establish the temporal power of

the papacy. Jealous of Venice, at that time the Italian state best

provided with powers of expansion, and unable to subjugate it

single-handed, Julius succeeded in obtaining help from France, Spain and

the Empire. The league of Cambrai (1508) was his finest diplomatic

achievement. But he wanted to be sole master of Italy, so in order to

expel the French "barbarians" whom he had brought in, he appealed to

other barbarians who were far more dangerous--Spaniards, Germans and

Swiss--to help him against Louis XII., and stabbed him from behind with

the Holy League of 1511.

Louis XII. and Julius II.

Weakened by the death of Cardinal d'Amboise, his best counsellor, Louis

XII. tried vainly in the assembly of Tours and in the unsuccessful

council of Pisa to alienate the French clergy from a papacy which was

now so little worthy of respect. But even the splendid victories of

Gaston de Foix could not shake that formidable coalition; and despite

the efforts of Bayard, La Palice and La Trémoille, it was the Church

that triumphed. Julius II. died in the hour of victory; but Louis XII.

was obliged to evacuate Milan, to which he had sacrificed everything,

even France itself, with that political stupidity characteristic of the

first Valois. He died almost immediately after this, on the 1st of

January 1515, and his subjects, recognizing his thrift, his justice and

the secure prosperity of the kingdom, forgot the seventeen years of war

in which they had not been consulted, and rewarded him with the fine

title of Father of his People.

Francis I. (1515-1547).

As Louis XII. left no son, the crown devolved upon his cousin and

son-in-law the count of Angoulême, Francis I. No sooner king, Francis,

in alliance with Venice, renewed the chimerical attempts to conquer

Milan and Naples; also cherishing dreams of his own election as emperor

and of a partition of Europe. The heroic episode of Marignano, when he

defeated Cardinal Schinner's Swiss troops (13-15 of September 1515),

made him master of the duchy of Milan and obliged his adversaries to

make peace. Leo X., Julius II.'s successor, by an astute volte-face

exchanged Parma and the Concordat for a guarantee of all the Church's

possessions, which meant the defeat of French plans (1515). The Swiss

signed the permanent peace which they were to maintain until the

Revolution of 1789; while the emperor and the king of Spain recognized

Francis II.'s very precarious hold upon Milan. Once more the French

monarchy was pulled up short by the indignation of all Italy (1518).

Character of Francis I.

The question now was how to occupy the military activity of a young,

handsome, chivalric and gallant prince, "ondoyant et divers,"

intoxicated by his first victory and his tardy accession to fortune.

This had been hailed with joy by all who had been his comrades in his

days of difficulty; by his mother, Louise of Savoy, and his sister

Marguerite; by all the rough young soldiery; by the nobles, tired of the

bourgeois ways of Louis XI. and the patriarchal simplicity of Louis

XII.; and finally by all the aristocracy who expected now to have the

government in their own hands. So instead of heading the crusade against

the Turks, Francis threw himself into the electoral contest at

Frankfort, which resulted in the election of Charles V., heir of

Ferdinand the Catholic, Spain and Germany thus becoming united. Pope Leo

X., moreover, handed over three-quarters of Italy to the new emperor in

exchange for Luther's condemnation, thereby kindling that rivalry

between Charles V. and the king of France which was to embroil the whole

of Europe throughout half a century (1519-1559), from Pavia to St

Quentin.

Rivalry of Francis I. and Charles V.

Defeat at Pavia and treaty of Madrid.

The territorial power of Charles V., heir to the houses of Burgundy,

Austria, Castile and Aragon, which not only arrested the traditional

policy of France but hemmed her in on every side; his pretensions to be

the head of Christendom; his ambition to restore the house of Burgundy

and the Holy Roman Empire; his grave and forceful intellect all rendered

rivalry both inevitable and formidable. But the scattered heterogeneity

of his possessions, the frequent crippling of his authority by national

privileges or by political discords and religious quarrels, his

perpetual straits for money, and his cautious calculating character,

almost outweighed the advantages which he possessed in the terrible

Spanish infantry, the wealthy commerce of the Netherlands, and the

inexhaustible mines of the New World. Moreover, Francis I. stirred up

enmity everywhere against Charles V., and after each defeat he found

fresh support in the patriotism of his subjects. Immediately after the

treaty of Madrid (1526), which Francis I. was obliged to sign after the

disaster at Pavia and a period of captivity, he did not hesitate between

his honour as a gentleman and the interests of his kingdom. Having been

unable to win over Henry VIII. of England at their interview on the

Field of the Cloth of Gold, he joined hands with Suleiman the

Magnificent, the conqueror of Mohács; and the Turkish cavalry, crossing

the Hungarian _Puszta_, made their way as far as Vienna, while the

mercenaries of Charles V., under the constable de Bourbon, were reviving

the saturnalia of Alaric in the sack of Rome (1527). In Germany, Francis

I. assisted the Catholic princes to maintain their political

independence, though he did not make the capital he might have made of

the reform movement. Italy remained faithful to the vanquished in spite

of all, while even Henry VIII. of England, who only needed bribing, and

Wolsey, accessible to flattery, took part in the temporary coalition.

Thus did France, menaced with disruption, embark upon a course of action

imposed upon her by the harsh conditions of the treaty of

Madrid--otherwise little respected--and later by those of Cambrai

(1529); but it was not till later, too late indeed, that it was defined

and became a national policy.

Further prosecution of romantic expeditions.

The truce at Nice.

After having, despite so many reverses and mistakes, saved Burgundy,

though not Artois nor Flanders, and joined to the crown lands the

domains of the constable de Bourbon who had gone over to Charles V.,

Francis I. should have had enough of defending other people's

independence as well as his own, and should have thought more of his

interests in the north and east than of Milan. Yet between 1531 and 1547

he manifested the same regrets and the same invincible ambition for that

land of Italy which Charles V., on his side, regarded as the basis of

his strength. Their antagonism, therefore, remained unabated, as also

the contradiction of an official agreement with Charles V., combined

with secret intrigues with his enemies. Anne de Montmorency, now head of

the government in place of the headstrong chancellor Duprat, for four

years upheld a policy of reconciliation and of almost friendly agreement

between the two monarchs (1531-1535). The death of Francis I.'s mother,

Louise of Savoy (who had been partly instrumental in arranging the peace

of Cambrai), the replacement of Montmorency by the bellicose Chabot, and

the advent to power of a Burgundian, Granvella, as Charles V.'s prime

minister, put an end to this double-faced policy, which attacked the

Calvinists of France while supporting the Lutherans of Germany; made

advances to Clement VII. while pretending to maintain the alliance with

Henry VIII. (just then consummating the Anglican schism); and sought an

alliance with Charles V. without renouncing the possession of Italy. The

death of the duke of Milan provoked a third general war (1536-1538); but

after the conquest of Savoy and Piedmont and a fruitless invasion of

Provence by Charles V., it resulted in another truce, concluded at Nice,

in the interview at Aigues-mortes, and in the old contradictory policy

of the treaty of Cambrai. This was confirmed by Charles V.'s triumphal

journey through France (1539).

Fourth outbreak of war.

Rivalry between Madame d'Etampes, the imperious mistress of the aged

Francis I., and Diane de Poitiers, whose ascendancy over the dauphin was

complete, now brought court intrigues and constant changes in those who

held office, to complicate still further this wearisome policy of

ephemeral "combinazioni" with English, Germans, Italians and Turks,

which urgent need of money always brought to naught. The disillusionment

of Francis I., who had hitherto hoped that Charles V. would be generous

enough to give Milan back to him, and then the assassination of Rincon,

his ambassador at Constantinople, led to a fourth war (1544-1546), in

the course of which the king of England went over to the side of Charles

V.

Royal absolutism under Francis I.

Unable in the days of his youth to make Italy French, when age began to

come upon him, Francis tried to make France Italian. In his château at

Blois he drank greedily of the cup of Renaissance art; but he found the

exciting draughts of diplomacy which he imbibed from Machiavelli's

_Prince_ even more intoxicating, and he headed the ship of state

straight for the rock of absolutism. He had been the first king "_du bon

plaisir_" ("of his own good pleasure")--a "Caesar," as his mother Louise

of Savoy proudly hailed him in 1515--and to a man of his gallant and

hot-headed temperament love and war were schools little calculated to

teach moderation in government. Italy not only gave him a taste for art

and letters, but furnished him with an arsenal of despotic maxims. Yet

his true masters were the jurists of the southern universities,

passionately addicted to centralization and autocracy, men like Duprat

and Poyet, who revived the persistent tradition of Philip the Fair's

legists. Grouped together on the council of affairs, they managed to

control the policy of the common council, with its too mixed and too

independent membership. They successfully strove to separate "the

grandeur and superexcellence of the king" from the rest of the nation;

to isolate the nobility amid the seductions of a court lavish in

promises of favour and high office; and to win over the bourgeoisie by

the buying and selling and afterwards by the hereditary transmission of

offices. Thanks to their action, feudalism was attacked in its landed

interest in the person of the constable de Bourbon; feudalism in its

financial aspect by the execution of superintendent Semblançay and the

special privileges of towns and provinces by administrative

centralization. The bureaucracy became a refuge for the nobles, and

above all for the bourgeois, whose fixed incomes were lowered by the

influx of precious metals from the New World, while the wages of

artisans rose. All those time-worn medieval institutions which no longer

allowed free scope to private or public life were demolished by the

legists in favour of the monarchy.

The concordat of 1516.

Their master-stroke was the Concordat of 1516, which meant an immense

stride in the path towards absolutism. While Germany and England, where

ultramontane doctrines had been allowed to creep in, were seeking a

remedy against the economic exactions of the papacy in a reform of dogma

or in schism, France had supposed herself to have found this in the

Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges. But to the royal jurists the right of the

churches and abbeys to make appointments to all vacant benefices was a

guarantee of liberties valuable to the clergy, but detestable to

themselves because the clergy thus retained the great part of public

wealth and authority. By giving the king the ecclesiastical patronage

they not only made a docile instrument of him, but endowed him with a

mine of wealth, even more productive than the sale of offices, and a

power of favouring and rewarding that transformed a needy and ill-obeyed

king into an absolute monarch. To the pope they offered a mess of

pottage in the shape of _annates_ and the right of canonical

institution, in order to induce him to sell the Church of France to the

king. By this royal reform they completely isolated the monarchy, in the

presumptuous pride of omnipotence, upon the ruins of the Church and the

aristocracy, despite both the university and the parlement of Paris.

Thus is explained Francis I.'s preoccupation with Italian adventures in

the latter part of his reign, and also the inordinate squandering of

money, the autos-da-fé in the provinces and in Paris, the harsh

repression of reform and free thought, and the sale of justice; while

the nation became impoverished and the state was at the mercy of the

caprices of royal mistresses--all of which was to become more and more

pronounced during the twelve years of Henry II.'s government.

Henry II. (1547-1559).

Henry II. shone but with a reflected light--in his private life

reflected from his old mistress, Diane de Poitiers, and in his political

action reflected from the views of Montmorency or the Guises. He only

showed his own personality in an egoism more narrow-minded, in hatred

yet bitterer than his father's; or in a haughty and jealous insistence

upon an absolute authority which he never had the wit to maintain.

Henry II. and Charles V.

Defence of Metz.

Truce of Vaucelles.

The struggle with Charles V. was at first delayed by differences with

England. The treaty of Ardres had left two bones of contention: the

cession of Boulogne to England and the exclusion of the Scotch from the

terms of peace. At last the regent, the duke of Somerset, endeavoured to

arrange a marriage between Edward VI., then a minor, and Mary Stuart,

who had been offered in marriage to the dauphin Francis by her mother,

Marie of Lorraine, a Guise who had married the king of Scotland. The

transference of Mary Stuart to France, and the treaty of 1550 which

restored Boulogne to France for a sum of 400,000 crowns, suspended the

state of war; and then Henry II.'s opposition to the imperial policy of

Charles V. showed itself everywhere: in Savoy and Piedmont, occupied by

the French and claimed by Philibert Emmanuel, Charles V.'s ally; in

Navarre, unlawfully conquered by Ferdinand the Catholic and claimed by

the family of Albret; in Italy, where, aided and abetted by Pope Paul

III., Henry II. was trying to regain support; and, finally, in Germany,

where after the victory of Charles V. at Mühlberg (1547) the Protestant

princes called Henry II. to their aid, offering to subsidize him and

cede to him the towns of Metz, Toul and Verdun. The Protestant alliance

was substituted for the Turkish alliance, and Henry II. hastened to

accept the offers made to him (1552); but this was rather late in the

day, for the reform movement had produced civil war and evoked fresh

forces. The Germans, in whom national feeling got the better of

imperialistic ardour, as soon as they saw the French at Strassburg, made

terms with the emperor at Passau and permitted Charles to use all his

forces against Henry II. The defence of Metz by Francis of Guise was

admirable and successful; but in Picardy operations continued their

course without much result, owing to the incapacity of the constable de

Montmorency. Fortunately, despite the marriage of Charles V.'s son

Philip to Mary Tudor, which gave him the support of England (1554), and

despite the religious pacification of Germany through the peace of

Augsburg (1555), Charles V., exhausted by illness and by thirty years of

intense activity, in the truce of Vaucelles abandoned Henry II.'s

conquests--Piedmont and the Three Bishoprics. He then abdicated the

government of his kingdoms, which he divided between his son Philip II.

and his brother Ferdinand (1556). A double victory, this, for France.

Henry II. and Philip II.

Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis.

Henry II.'s resumption of war, without provocation and without allies,

was a grave error; but more characterless than ever, the king was urged

to it by the Guises, whose influence since the defence of Metz had been

supreme at court and who were perhaps hoping to obtain Naples for

themselves. On the other hand, Pope Paul IV. and his nephew Carlo

Caraffa embarked upon the struggle, because as Neapolitans they detested

the Spaniards, whom they considered as "barbarous" as the Germans or the

French. The constable de Montmorency's disaster at Saint Quentin (August

1557), by which Philip II. had not the wit to profit, was successfully

avenged by Guise, who was appointed lieutenant-general of the kingdom.

He took Calais by assault in January 1558, after the English had held it

for two centuries, and occupied Luxemburg. The treaty of

Cateau-Cambrésis (August 1559) finally put an end to the Italian

follies, Naples, Milan and Piedmont; but it also lost Savoy, making a

gap in the frontier for a century. The question of Burgundy was

definitely settled, too; but the Netherlands had still to be conquered.

By the possession of the three bishoprics and the recapture of Calais an

effort towards a natural line of frontier and towards a national policy

seemed indicated; but while the old soldiers could not forget Marignano,

Ceresole, nor Italy perishing with the name of France on her lips, the

secret alliance between the cardinal of Lorraine and Granvella against

the Protestant heresy foretold the approaching subordination of national

questions to religious differences, and a decisive attempt to purge the

kingdom of the new doctrines.

The Reformation.

The origin and general history of the religious reformation in the 16th

century are dealt with elsewhere (see CHURCH HISTORY and REFORMATION).

In France it had originally no revolutionary character whatever; it

proceeded from traditional Gallican theories and from the innovating

principle of humanism, and it began as a protest against Roman decadence

and medieval scholasticism. It found its first adherents and its first

defenders among the clerics and learned men grouped around Faber

(Lefèvre) of Étaples at Meaux; while Marguerite of Navarre, "des Roynes

la non pareille," was the indefatigable Maecenas of these innovators,

and the incarnation of the Protestant spirit at its purest. The

reformers shook off the yoke of systems in order boldly to renovate both

knowledge and faith; and, instead of resting on the abstract _a priori_

principles within which man and nature had been imprisoned, they

returned to the ancient methods of observation and analysis. In so

doing, they separated intellectual from popular life; and acting in this

spirit, through the need of a moral renaissance, they reverted to

primitive Christianity, substituting the inner and individual authority

of conscience for the general and external authority of the Church.

Their efforts would not, however, have sufficed if they had not been

seconded by events; pure doctrine would not have given birth to a

church, nor that church to a party; in France, as in Germany, the

religious revolution was conditioned by an economic and social

revolution.

The economic renaissance due to the great maritime discoveries had the

consequence of concentrating wealth in the hands of the bourgeoisie.

Owing to their mental qualities, their tendencies and their resources,

the bourgeoisie had been, if not alone, at least most apt in profiting

by the development of industry, by the extension of commerce, and by the

formation of a new and mobile means of enriching themselves. But though

the bourgeois had acquired through capitalism certain sources of

influence, and gradually monopolized municipal and public functions, the

king and the peasants had also benefited by this revolution. After a

hundred and fifty years of foreign war and civil discord, at a period

when order and unity were ardently desired, an absolute monarchy had

appeared the only power capable of realizing such aspirations. The

peasants, moreover, had profited by the reduction of the idle landed

aristocracy; serfdom had decreased or had been modified; and the free

peasants were more prosperous, had reconquered the soil, and were

selling their produce at a higher rate while they everywhere paid less

exorbitant rents. The victims of this process were the urban

proletariat, whose treatment by their employers in trade became less and

less protective and beneficent, and the nobility, straitened in their

financial resources, uprooted from their ancient strongholds, and

gradually despoiled of their power by a monarchy based on popular

support. The unlimited sovereignty of the prince was established upon

the ruins of the feudal system; and the capitalism of the merchants and

bankers upon the closing of the trade-gilds to workmen, upon severe

economic pressure and upon the exploitation of the artisans' labour.

Transformation of religious reform into party politics.

Though reform originated among the educated classes it speedily found an

echo among the industrial classes of the 16th century, further assisted

by the influence of German and Flemish journeymen. The popular

reform-movement was essentially an urban movement; although under

Francis I. and Henry II. it had already begun to spread into the

country. The artisans, labourers and small shop-keepers who formed the

first nucleus of the reformed church were numerous enough to provide an

army of martyrs, though too few to form a party. Revering the monarchy

and established institutions, they endured forty years of persecution

before they took up arms. It was only during the second half of Henry

II.'s reign that Protestantism, having achieved its religious evolution,

became a political party. Weary of being trodden under foot, it now

demanded much more radical reform, quitting the ranks of peaceable

citizens to pass into the only militant class of the time and adopt its

customs. Men like Coligny, d'Andelot and Condé took the place of the

timid Lefèvre of Étaples and the harsh and bitter Calvin; and the reform

party, in contradiction to its doctrines and its doctors, became a

political and religious party of opposition, with all the compromises

that presupposes. The struggle against it was no longer maintained by

the university and the parlement alone, but also by the king, whose

authority it menaced.

Royal persecution under Francis I. and Henry II.

With his intrepid spirit, his disdain for ecclesiastical authority and

his strongly personal religious feeling, Francis I. had for a moment

seemed ready to be a reformer himself; but deprived by the Concordat of

all interest in the confiscation of church property, aspiring to

political alliance with the pope, and as mistrustful of popular forces

as desirous of absolute power and devoted to Italy, he paused and then

drew back. Hence came the revocation in 1540 of the edict of tolerance

of Coucy (1535), and the massacre of the Vaudois (1545). Henry II., a

fanatic, went still further in his edict of Châteaubriant (1551), a code

of veritable persecution, and in the _coup d'état_ carried out in the

parlement against Antoine du Bourg and his colleagues (1559). At the

same time the pastors of the reformed religion, met in synod at Paris,

were setting down their confession of faith founded upon the Scriptures,

and their ecclesiastical discipline founded upon the independence of the

churches. Thenceforward Protestantism adopted a new attitude, and

refused obedience to the orders of a persecuting monarchy when contrary

to its faith and its interests. After the saints came men. Hence those

wars of religion which were to hold the monarchy in check for forty

years and even force it to come to terms.

Francis II. (1559-1560).

In slaying Henry II. Montgomery's lance saved the Protestants for the

time being. His son and successor, Francis II., was but a nervous sickly

boy, bandied between two women: his mother, Catherine de' Medici,

hitherto kept in the background, and his wife, Mary Stuart, queen of

Scotland, who being a niece of the Guises brought her uncles, the

constable Francis and the cardinal of Lorraine, into power. These

ambitious and violent men took the government out of the hands of the

constable de Montmorency and the princes of the blood: Antoine de

Bourbon, king of Navarre, weak, credulous, always playing a double game

on account of his preoccupation with Navarre; Condé, light-hearted and

brave, but not fitted to direct a party; and the cardinal de Bourbon, a

mere nonentity. The only plan which these princes could adopt in the

struggle, once they had lost the king, was to make a following for

themselves among the Calvinist malcontents and the gentlemen disbanded

after the Italian wars. The Guises, strengthened by the failure of the

conspiracy of Amboise, which had been aimed at them, abused the

advantage due to their victory. Despite the edict of Romorantin, which

by giving the bishops the right of cognizance of heresy prevented the

introduction of the Inquisition on the Spanish model into France;

despite the assembly of Fontainebleau, where an attempt was made at a

compromise acceptable to both Catholics and moderate Calvinists; the

reform party and its Bourbon leaders, arrested at the states-general of

Orleans, were in danger of their lives. The death of Francis II. in

December 1560 compromised the influence of the Guises and again saved

Protestantism.

Charles IX. (1560-1574).

Charles IX. also was a minor, and the regent should legally have been

the first prince of the blood, Antoine de Bourbon; but cleverly

flattered by the queen-mother, Catherine de' Medici, he let her take the

reins of government. Hitherto Catherine had been merely the resigned and

neglected wife of Henry II., and though eloquent, insinuating and

ambitious, she had been inactive. She had attained the age of forty-one

when she at last came into power amidst the hopes and anxieties aroused

by the fall of the Guises and the return of the Bourbons to fortune.

Indifferent in religious matters, she had a passion for authority, a

characteristically Italian adroitness in intrigue, a fine political

sense, and the feeling that the royal authority might be endangered both

by Calvinistic passions and Catholic violence. She decided for a system

of tolerance; and Michel de l'Hôpital, the new chancellor, was her

spokesman at the states of Orleans (1560). He was a good and honest man,

moderate, conciliatory and temporizing, anxious to lift the monarchy

above the strife of parties and to reconcile them; but he was so little

practical that he could believe in a reformation of the laws in the

midst of all the violent passions which were now to be let loose. These

two, Catherine and her chancellor, attempted, like Charles V. at

Augsburg, to bring about religious pacification as a necessary condition

for the maintenance of order; but they were soon overwhelmed by the

different factions.

The parties.

Edict of tolerance.

On one side was the Catholic triumvirate of the constable de

Montmorency, the duke of Guise, and the marshal de St André; and on the

other the Huguenot party of Condé and Coligny, who, having obtained

liberty of conscience in January 1561, now demanded liberty of worship.

The colloquy at Poissy between the cardinal of Lorraine and Theodore

Beza (September 1561), did not end in the agreement hoped for, and the

duke of Guise so far abused its spirit as to embroil the French

Calvinists with the German Lutherans. The rupture seemed irremediable

when the assembly of Poissy recognized the order of the Jesuits, which

the French church had held in suspicion since its foundation. However,

yielding to the current which was carrying the greater part of the

nation towards reform, and despite the threats of Philip II. who dreaded

Calvinistic propaganda in his Netherlands, Michel de l'Hôpital

promulgated the edict of January 17, 1562--a true charter of

enfranchisement for the Protestants. But the pressure of events and of

parties was too strong; the policy of toleration which had miscarried at

the council of Trent had no chance of success in France.

Character of the religious wars.

The triumvirate's relations with Spain and Rome were very close; they

had complete ascendancy over the king and over Catherine; and now the

massacre of two hundred Protestants at Vassy on the 1st of March 1562

made the cup overflow. The duke of Guise had either ordered this, or

allowed it to take place, on his return from an interview with the duke

of Württemberg at Zabern, where he had once more demanded the help of

his Lutheran neighbours against the Calvinists; and the Catholics having

celebrated this as a victory the signal was given for the commencement

of religious wars. When these eight fratricidal wars first began,

Protestants and Catholics rivalled one another in respect for royal

authority; only they wished to become its masters so as to get the upper

hand themselves. But in course of time, as the struggle became

embittered, Catholicism itself grew revolutionary; and this twofold

fanaticism, Catholic and Protestant, even more than the ambition of the

leaders, made the war a ferocious one from the very first. Beginning

with surprise attacks, if these failed, the struggle was continued by

means of sieges and by terrible exploits like those of the Catholic

Montluc and the Protestant des Adrets in the south of France. Neither of

these two parties was strong enough to crush the other, owing to the

apathy and continual desertions of the gentlemen-cavaliers who formed

the élite of the Protestant army and the insufficient numbers of the

Catholic forces. Allies from outside were therefore called in, and this

it was that gave a European character to these wars of religion; the two

parties were parties of foreigners, the Protestants being supported by

German _Landsknechts_ and Elizabeth of England's cavalry, and the royal

army by Italian, Swiss or Spanish auxiliaries. It was no longer

patriotism but religion that distinguished the two camps. There were

three principal theatres of war: in the north Normandy and the valley of

the Loire, where Orleans, the general centre of reform, ensured

communications between the south and Germany; in the south-west Gascony

and Guienne; in the south-east Lyonnais and Vivarais.

First religious war.

In the first war, which lasted for a year (1562-1563), the triumvirs

wished to secure Orleans, previously isolated. The threat of an English

landing decided them to lay siege to Rouen, and it was taken by assault;

but this cost the life of the versatile Antoine de Bourbon. On the 19th

of December 1562 the duke of Guise barred the way to Dreux against the

German reinforcements of d'Andelot, who after having threatened Paris

were marching to join forces with the English troops for whom Coligny

and Condé had paid by the cession of Havre. The death of marshal de St

André, and the capture of the constable de Montmorency and of Condé,

which marked this indecisive battle, left Coligny and Guise face to

face. The latter's success was of brief duration; for on the 18th of

February 1563 Poltrot de Méré assassinated him before Orleans, which he

was trying to take once and for all. Catherine, relieved by the loss of

an inconvenient preceptor, and by the disappearance of the other

leaders, became mistress of the Catholic party, of whose strength and

popularity she had now had proof, and her idea was to make peace at once

on the best terms possible. The egoism of Condé, who got himself made

lieutenant-general of the kingdom, and bargained for freedom of worship

for the Protestant nobility only, compromised the future of both his

church and his party, though rendering possible the peace of Amboise,

concluded the 19th of March 1563. All now set off together to recapture

Havre from the English.

Peace of Amboise (1563).

Second civil war.

Peace of Longjumeau.

The peace, however, satisfied no one; neither Catholics (because of the

rupture of religious unity) nor the parlements; the pope, the emperor

and king of Spain alike protested against it. Nor yet did it satisfy the

Protestants, who considered its concessions insufficient, above all for

the people. It was, however, the maximum of tolerance possible just

then, and had to be reverted to; Catherine and Charles IX. soon saw that

the times were not ripe for a third party, and that to enforce real

toleration would require an absolute power which they did not possess.

After three years the Guises reopened hostilities against Coligny, whom

they accused of having plotted the murder of their chief; while the

Catholics, egged on by the Spaniards, rose against the Protestants, who

had been made uneasy by an interview between Catherine and her daughter

Elizabeth, wife of Philip II. of Spain, at Bayonne, and by the duke of

Alva's persecutions of the reformed church of the Netherlands--a

daughter-church of Geneva, like their own. The second civil war began

like the first with a frustrated attempt to kidnap the king, at the

castle of Montceaux, near Meaux, in September 1567; and with a siege of

Paris, the general centre of Catholicism, in the course of which the

constable de Montmorency was killed at Saint-Denis. Condé, with the

men-at-arms of John Casimir, son of the Count Palatine, tried to starve

out the capital; but once more the defection of the nobles obliged him

to sign a treaty of peace at Longjumeau on the 23rd of March 1568, by

which the conditions of Amboise were re-established. After the attempt

at Montceaux the Protestants had to be contented with Charles IX.'s

word.

Third war.

Peace of St Germain (1570).

This peace was not of long duration. The fall of Michel de l'Hôpital,

who had so often guaranteed the loyalty of the Huguenots, ruined the

moderate party (May 1568). Catholic propaganda, revived by the monks and

the Jesuits, and backed by the armed confraternities and by Catherine's

favourite son, the duke of Anjou, now entrusted with a prominent part by

the cardinal of Lorraine; Catherine's complicity in the duke of Alva's

terrible persecution in the Netherlands; and her attempt to capture

Coligny and Condé at Noyers all combined to cause a fresh outbreak of

hostilities in the west. Thanks to Tavannes, the duke of Anjou gained

easy victories at Jarnac over the prince of Condé, who was killed, and

at Moncontour over Coligny, who was wounded (March-October 1569); but

these successes were rendered fruitless by the jealousy of Charles IX.

Allowing the queen of Navarre to shut herself up in La Rochelle, the

citadel of the reformers, and the king to loiter over the siege of Saint

Jean d'Angély, Coligny pushed boldly forward towards Paris and, having

reached Burgundy, defeated the royal army at Arnay-le-duc. Catherine had

exhausted all her resources; and having failed in her project of

remarrying Philip II. to one of her daughters, and of betrothing Charles

IX. to the eldest of the Austrian archduchesses, exasperated also by the

presumption of the Lorraine family, who aspired to the marriage of their

nephew with Charles IX.'s sister, she signed the peace of St Germain on

the 8th of August 1570. This was the culminating point of Protestant

liberty; for Coligny exacted and obtained, first, liberty of conscience

and of worship, and then, as a guarantee of the king's word, four

fortified places: La Rochelle, a key to the sea; La Charité, in the

centre; Cognac and Montauban in the south.

Coligny and the Netherlands.

St Bartholomew, August 24, 1572.

The Guises set aside, Coligny, supported as he was by Jeanne d'Albret,

queen of Navarre, now received all Charles IX.'s favour. Catherine de'

Medici, an inveterate matchmaker, and also uneasy at Philip II.'s

increasing power, made advances to Jeanne, proposing to marry her own

daughter, Marguerite de Valois, to Jeanne's son, Henry of Navarre, now

chief of the Huguenot party. Coligny was a Protestant, but he was a

Frenchman before all; and wishing to reconcile all parties in a national

struggle, he "trumpeted war" (_cornait la guerre_) against Spain in the

Netherlands--despite the lukewarmness of Elizabeth of England and the

Germans, and despite the counter-intrigues of the pope and of Venice. He

succeeded in getting French troops sent to the Netherlands, but they

suffered defeat. None the less Charles IX. still seemed to see only

through the eyes of Coligny; till Catherine, fearing to be supplanted by

the latter, dreading the results of the threatened war with Spain, and

egged on by a crowd of Italian adventurers in the pay of Spain--men like

Gondi and Birague, reared like herself in the political theories and

customs of their native land--saw no hope but in the assassination of

this rival in her son's esteem. A murderous attack upon Coligny, who had

opposed the candidature of Catherine's favourite son, the duke of Anjou,

for the throne of Poland, having only succeeded in wounding him and in

exciting the Calvinist leaders, who were congregated in Paris for the

occasion of Marguerite de Valois' marriage with the king of Navarre,

Catherine and the Guises resolved together to put them all to death.

There followed the wholesale massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve, in Paris

and in the provinces; a natural consequence of public and private

hatreds which had poisoned the entire social organism. This massacre had

the effect of preventing the expedition into Flanders, and destroying

Francis I.'s policy of alliance with the Protestants against the house

of Austria.

The party of the politiques.

Fourth War. Edict of Boulogne (1573).

Catherine de' Medici soon perceived that the massacre of St Bartholomew

had settled nothing. It had, it is true, dealt a blow to Calvinism just

when, owing to the reforms of the council of Trent, the religious ground

had been crumbling beneath it. Moreover, within the party itself a gulf

had been widening between the pastors, supported by the Protestant

democracy and the political nobles. The reformers had now no leaders,

and their situation seemed as perilous as that of their co-religionists

in the Netherlands; while the sieges of La Rochelle and Leiden, the

enforced exile of the prince of Orange, and the conversion under pain of

death of Henry of Navarre and the prince of Condé, made the common

danger more obvious. Salvation came from the very excess of the

repressive measures. A third party was once more formed, composed of

moderates from the two camps, and it was recruited quite as much by

jealousy of the Guises and by ambition as by horror at the massacres.

There were the friends of the Montmorency party--Damville at their head;

Coligny's relations; the king of Navarre; Condé; and a prince of the

blood, Catherine de' Medici's third son, the duke of Alençon, tired of

being kept in the background. This party took shape at the end of the

fourth war, followed by the edict of Boulogne (1573), forced from

Charles IX. when the Catholics were deprived of their leader by the

election of his brother, the duke of Anjou, as king of Poland. A year

later the latter succeeded his brother on the throne of France as Henry

III. This meant a new lease of power for the queen-mother.

Fifth War.

Henry III. (1574-1589).

Peace of Monsieur (1576).

The politiques, as the supporters of religious tolerance and an

energetic repression of faction were called, offered their alliance to

the Huguenots, but these, having formed themselves, by means of the

Protestant Union, into a sort of republic within the kingdom, hesitated

to accept. It is, however, easy to bring about an understanding between

people in whom religious fury has been extinguished either by patriotism

or by ambition, like that of the duke of Alençon, who had now escaped

from the Louvre where he had been confined on account of his intrigues.

The compact was concluded at Millau; Condé becoming a Protestant once

more in order to treat with Damville, Montmorency's brother. Henry of

Navarre escaped from Paris. The new king, Henry III., vacillating and

vicious, and Catherine herself, eager for war as she was, had no means

of separating the Protestants and the _politiques_. Despite the victory

of Guise at Dormans, the agreement between the duke of Alençon and John

Casimir's German army obliged the royal party to grant all that the

allied forces demanded of them in the "peace of Monsieur," signed at

Beaulieu on the 6th of May 1576, the duke of Alençon receiving the

appanage of Anjou, Touraine and Berry, the king of Navarre Guienne, and

Condé Picardy, while the Protestants were granted freedom of worship in

all parts of the kingdom except Paris, the rehabilitation of Coligny and

the other victims of St Bartholomew, their fortified towns, and an equal

number of seats in the courts of the parlements.

The Catholic League.

This was going too fast; and in consequence of a reaction against this

too liberal edict a fourth party made its appearance, that of the

Catholic League, under the Guises--Henry le Balafré, duke of Guise, and

his two brothers, Charles, duke of Mayenne, and Louis, archbishop of

Reims and cardinal. With the object of destroying Calvinism by effective

opposition, they imitated the Protestant organization of provincial

associations, drawing their chief supporters from the upper middle class

and the lesser nobility. It was not at first a demagogy maddened by the

preaching of the irreconcilable clergy of Paris, but a union of the more

honest and prudent classes of the nation in order to combat heresy.

Despite the immorality and impotence of Henry III. and the Protestantism

of Henry of Navarre, this party talked of re-establishing the authority

of the king; but in reality it inclined more to the Guises, martyrs in

the good cause, who were supported by Philip II. of Spain and Pope

Gregory XIII. A sort of popular government was thus established to

counteract the incapacity of royalty, and it was in the name of the

imperilled rights of the people that, from the States of Blois onward,

this Holy League demanded the re-establishment of Catholic unity, and

set the religious right of the nation in opposition to the divine right

of incapable or evil-doing kings (1576).

The States of Blois (1576).

[Sidenote: Sixth War and peace of Bergerac (1577). Seventh War and peace

of Fleix (1580).]

In order to oust his rival Henry of Guise, Henry III. made a desperate

effort to outbid him in the eyes of the more extreme Catholics, and by

declaring himself head of the League degraded himself into a party

leader. The League, furious at this stroke of policy, tried to impose a

council of thirty-six advisers upon the king. But the deputies of the

third estate did not support the other two orders, and the latter in

their turn refused the king money for making war on the heretics,

desiring, they said, not war but the destruction of heresy. This would

have reduced Henry III. to impotence; fortunately for him, however, the

break of the Huguenots with the "Malcontents," and the divisions in the

court of Navarre and in the various parties at La Rochelle, allowed

Henry III., after two little wars in the south west, during which

fighting gradually degenerated into brigandage, to sign terms of peace

at Bergerac (1577), which much diminished the concessions made in the

edict of Beaulieu. This peace was confirmed three years after by that of

Fleix. The suppression of both the leagues was stipulated for (1580). It

remained, however, a question whether the Holy League would submit to

this.

Union between the Guises and Philip II.

The death of the duke of Anjou after his mad endeavour to establish

himself in the Netherlands (1584), and the accession of Henry of

Navarre, heir to the effeminate Henry III., reversed the situations of

the two parties: the Protestants again became supporters of the

principle of heredity and divine right; the Catholics appealed to right

of election and the sovereignty of the people. Could the crown of the

eldest daughter of the Church be allowed to devolve upon a relapsed

heretic? Such was the doctrine officially preached in pulpit and

pamphlet. But between Philip II. on the one hand--now master of Portugal

and delivered from William of Orange, involved in strife with the

English Protestants, and desirous of avenging the injuries inflicted

upon him by the Valois in the Netherlands--and the Guises on the other

hand, whose cousin Mary Stuart was a prisoner of Queen Elizabeth, there

was a common interest in supporting one another and pressing things

forward. A definite agreement was made between them at Joinville

(December 31, 1584), the religious and popular pretext being the danger

of leaving the kingdom to the king of Navarre, and the ostensible end

to secure the succession to a Catholic prince, the old Cardinal de

Bourbon, an ambitious and violent man of mean intelligence; while the

secret aim was to secure the crown for the Guises, who had already

attempted to fabricate for themselves a genealogy tracing their descent

from Charlemagne. In the meantime Philip II., being rid of Don John of

Austria, whose ambition he dreaded, was to crush the Protestants of

England and the Netherlands; and the double result of the compact at

Joinville was to allow French politics to be controlled by Spain, and to

transform the wars of religion into a purely political quarrel.

The committee of Sixteen at Paris.

Eighth war of the three Henries.

The pretensions of the Guises were, in fact, soon manifested in the

declaration of Péronne (March 30, 1585) against the foul court of the

Valois; they were again manifested in a furious agitation, fomented by

the secret council of the League at Paris, which favoured the Guises,

and which now worked on the people through their terror of Protestant

retaliations and the Church's peril. Incited by Philip II., who wished

to see him earning his pension of 600,000 golden crowns, Henry of Guise

began the war in the end of April, and in a few days the whole kingdom

was on fire. The situation was awkward for Henry III., who had not the

courage to ask Queen Elizabeth for the soldiers and money that he

lacked. The crafty king of Navarre being unwilling to alienate the

Protestants save by an apostasy profitable to himself, Henry III., by

the treaty of Nemours (July 7, 1585), granted everything to the head of

the League in order to save his crown. By a stroke of the pen he

suppressed Protestantism, while Pope Sixtus V., who had at first been

unfavourable to the treaty of Joinville as a purely political act,

though he eventually yielded to the solicitations of the League,

excommunicated the two Bourbons, Henry and Condé. But the duke of

Guise's audacity did not make Henry III. forget his desire for

vengeance. He hoped to ruin him by attaching him to his cause. His

favourite Joyeuse was to defeat the king of Navarre, whose forces were

very weak, while Guise was to deal with the strong reinforcement of

Germans that Elizabeth was sending to Henry of Navarre. Exactly the

contrary happened. By the defeat of Joyeuse at Coutras Henry III. found

himself wounded on his strongest side; and by Henry of Guise's successes

at Vimory and Auneau the Germans, who should have been his best

auxiliaries against the League, were crushed (October-November 1587).

Day of the Barricades.

Assassination of the Guises at the second states-general of Blois.

The League now thought they had no longer anything to fear. Despite the

king's hostility the duke of Guise came to Paris, urged thereto by

Philip II., who wanted to occupy Paris and be master of the Channel

coasts whilst he launched his invincible Armada to avenge the death of

Mary Stuart in 1587. On the Day of the Barricades (May 12, 1588) Henry

III. was besieged in the Louvre by the populace in revolt; but his rival

dared not go so far as to depose the king, and appeased the tumult. The

king, having succeeded in taking refuge at Chartres, ended, however, by

granting him in the Act of Union all that he had refused in face of the

barricades--the post of lieutenant-general of the kingdom and the

proscription of Protestantism. At the second assembly of the states of

Blois, called together on account of the need for money (1588), all of

Henry III.'s enemies who were elected showed themselves even bolder than

in 1576 in claiming the control of the financial administration of the

kingdom; but the destruction of the Armada gave Henry III., already

exasperated by the insults he had received, new vigour. He had the old

Cardinal de Bourbon imprisoned, and Henry of Guise and his brother the

cardinal assassinated (December 23, 1588). On the 5th of January, 1589,

died his mother, Catherine de'Medici, the astute Florentine.

Assassination of Henry III.

"Now I am king!" cried Henry III. But Paris being dominated by the duke

of Mayenne, who had escaped assassination, and by the council of

"Sixteen," the chiefs of the League, most of the provinces replied by

open revolt, and Henry III. had no alternative but an alliance with

Henry of Navarre. Thanks to this he was on the point of seizing Paris,

when in his turn he was assassinated on the 1st of August 1589 by a

Jacobin monk, Jacques Clément; with his dying breath he designated the

king of Navarre as his successor.

The Bourbons.

Between the popular League and the menace of the Protestants it was a

question whether the new monarch was to be powerless in his turn. Henry

IV. had almost the whole of his kingdom to conquer. The Cardinal de

Bourbon, king according to the League and proclaimed under the title of

Charles X., could count upon the Holy League itself, upon the Spaniards

of the Netherlands, and upon the pope. Henry IV. was only supported by a

certain number of the Calvinists and by the Catholic minority of the

_Politiques_, who, however, gradually induced the rest of the nation to

rally round the only legitimate prince. The nation wished for the

establishment of internal unity through religious tolerance and the

extinction of private organizations; it looked for the extension of

France's external power through the abasement of the house of Spain,

protection of the Protestants in the Netherlands and Germany, and

independence of Rome. Henry IV., moreover, was forced to take an oath at

the camp of Saint Cloud to associate the nation in the affairs of the

kingdom by means of the states-general. These three conditions were

interdependent; and Henry IV., with his persuasive manners, his frank

and charming character, and his personal valour, seemed capable of

keeping them all three.

Henry IV. (1589-1610).

States-general of 1592.

The first thing for this soldier-king to do was to conquer his kingdom

and maintain its unity. He did not waste time by withdrawing towards the

south; he kept in the neighbourhood of Paris, on the banks of the Seine,

within reach of help from Elizabeth; and twice--at Arques and at Ivry

(1589-1590)--he vanquished the duke of Mayenne, lieutenant-general of

the League. But after having tried to seize Paris (as later Rouen) by a

_coup-de-main_, he was obliged to raise the siege in view of

reinforcements sent to Mayenne by the duke of Parma. Pope Gregory XIV.,

an enthusiastic supporter of the League and a strong adherent of Spain,

having succeeded Sixtus V., who had been very lukewarm towards the

League, made Henry IV.'s position still more serious just at the moment

when, the old Cardinal de Bourbon having died, Philip II. wanted to be

declared the protector of the kingdom in order that he might dismember

it, and when Charles Emmanuel of Savoy, a grandson of Francis I., and

Charles III., duke of Lorraine, a son-in-law of Henry II., were both of

them claiming the crown. Fortunately, however, the Sixteen had disgusted

the upper bourgeoisie by their demagogic airs; while their open alliance

with Philip II., and their acceptance of a Spanish garrison in Paris had

offended the patriotism of the _Politiques_ or moderate members of the

League. Mayenne, who oscillated between Philip II. and Henry IV., was

himself obliged to break up and subdue this party of fanatics and

theologians (December 1591). This game of see-saw between the

_Politiques_ and the League furthered his secret ambition, but also the

dissolution of the kingdom; and the pressure of public opinion, which

desired an effective monarchy, put an end to this temporizing policy and

caused the convocation of the states-general in Paris (December 1592).

Philip II., through the duke of Feria's instrumentality, demanded the

throne for his daughter Isabella, grand-daughter of Henry II. through

her mother. But who was to be her husband? The archduke Ernest of

Austria, Guise or Mayenne? The parlement cut short these bargainings by

condemning all ultramontane pretensions and Spanish intrigues. The

unpopularity of Spain, patriotism, the greater predominance of national

questions in public opinion, and weariness of both religious disputation

and indecisive warfare, all these sentiments were expressed in the wise

and clever pamphlet entitled the _Satire Ménippée_. What had been a slow

movement between 1585 and 1592 was quickened by Henry IV.'s abjuration

of Protestantism at Saint-Denis on the 23rd of July 1593.

Abjuration of Henry IV., July 23, 1593.

The coronation of the king at Chartres in February 1594 completed the

rout of the League. The parlement of Paris declared against Mayenne, who

was simply the mouthpiece of Spain, and Brissac, the governor,

surrendered the capital to the king. The example of Paris and Henry

IV.'s clemency rallied round him all prudent Catholics, like Villeroy

and Jeannin, anxious for national unity; but he had to buy over the

adherents of the League, who sold him his own kingdom for sixty million

francs. The pontifical absolution of September 17, 1595, finally

stultified the League, which had been again betrayed by the unsuccessful

plot of Jean Chastel, the Jesuit's pupil.

Peace of Vervins.

Nothing was now left but to expel the Spaniards, who under cover of

religion had worked for their own interests alone. Despite the brilliant

charge of Fontaine-Française in Burgundy (June 5, 1595), and the

submission of the heads of the League, Guise, Mayenne, Joyeuse, and

Mercoeur, the years 1595-1597 were not fortunate for Henry IV.'s armies.

Indignant at his conversion, Elizabeth, the Germans, and the Swiss

Protestants deserted him; while the taking of Amiens by the Spaniards

compromised for the moment the future both of the king and the country.

But exhaustion of each other, by which only England and Holland

profited, brought about the Peace of Vervins. This confirmed the results

of the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis (May 2, 1598), that is to say, the

decadence of Spanish power, and its inability either to conquer or to

dismember France.

Edict of Nantes, 1598.

The League, having now no reason for existence, was dissolved; but the

Protestant party remained very strong, with its political organization

and the fortified places which the assemblies of Millau, Nîmes and La

Rochelle (1573-1574) had established in the south and the west. It was a

republican state within the kingdom, and, being unwilling to break with

it, Henry IV. came to terms by the edict of Nantes, on the 13th of April

1598. This was a compromise between the royal government and the

Huguenot government, the latter giving up the question of public

worship, which was only authorized where it had existed before 1597 and

in two towns of each _bailliage_, with the exception of Paris; but it

secured liberty of conscience throughout the kingdom, state payment for

its ministers, admission to all employments, and courts composed equally

of Catholics and Protestants in the parlements. An authorization to hold

synods and political assemblies, to open schools, and to occupy a

hundred strong places for eight years at the expense of the king,

assured to the Protestants not only rights but privileges. In no other

country did they enjoy so many guarantees against a return of

persecution. This explains why the edict of Nantes was not registered

without some difficulty.

Results of the religious wars.

Thus the blood-stained 16th century closed with a promise of religious

toleration and a dream of international arbitration. This was the end of

the long tragedy of civil strife and of wars of conquest, mingled with

the sound of madrigals and psalms and pavanes. It had been the golden

age of the arquebus and the viol, of sculptors and musicians, of poets

and humanists, of fratricidal conflicts and of love-songs, of _mignons_

and martyrs. At the close of this troubled century peace descends upon

exhausted passions; and amidst the choir of young and ardent voices

celebrating the national reconciliation, the tocsin no longer sounds its

sinister and persistent bass. Despite the leagues of either faith,

religious liberty was now confirmed by the more free and generous spirit

of Henry IV.

Why was this king at once so easygoing and so capricious? Why, again,

had the effort and authority of feudal and popular resistance been

squandered in the follies of the League and to further the ambitions of

the rebellious Guises? Why had the monarchy been forced to purchase the

obedience of the upper classes and the provinces with immunities which

enfeebled it without limiting it? At all events, when the kingdom had

been reconquered from the Spaniards and religious strife ended, in order

to fulfil his engagements, Henry IV. need only have associated the

nation with himself in the work of reconstructing the shattered

monarchy. But during the atrocious holocausts formidable states had

grown up around France, observing her and threatening her; and on the

other hand, as on the morrow of the Hundred Years' War, the lassitude of

the country, the lack of political feeling on the part of the upper

classes and their selfishness, led to a fresh abdication of the nation's

rights. The need of living caused the neglect of that necessity for

control which had been maintained by the states-general from 1560 to

1593. And this time, moderation on the part of the monarchy no longer

made for success. Of the two contrary currents which have continually

mingled and conflicted throughout the course of French history, that of

monarchic absolutism and that of aristocratic and democratic liberty,

the former was now to carry all before it.

The Bourbons. France in 1610.

The kingdom was now issuing from thirty-eight years of civil war. Its

inhabitants had grown unaccustomed to work; its finances were ruined by

dishonesty, disorder, and a very heavy foreign debt. The most

characteristic symptom of this distress was the brigandage carried on

incessantly from 1598 to 1610. Side by side with this temporary disorder

there was a more serious administrative disorganization, a habit of no

longer obeying the king. The harassed population, the municipalities

which under cover of civil war had resumed the right of self-government,

and the parlements elated with their social importance and their

security of position, were not alone in abandoning duty and obedience.

Two powers faced each other threateningly: the organized and malcontent

Protestants; and the provincial governors, all great personages

possessing an armed following, theoretically agents of the king, but

practically independent. The Montmorencys, the D'Epernons, the Birons,

the Guises, were accustomed to consider their offices as hereditary

property. Not that these two powers entered into open revolt against the

king; but they had adopted the custom of recriminating, of threatening,

of coming to understandings with the foreign powers, which with some of

them, like Marshal Biron, the D'Entragues and the duc de Bouillon,

amounted to conspiracy (1602-1606).

Character of Henry IV.

As to the qualifications of the king: he had had the good fortune not to

be educated for the throne. Without much learning and sceptical in

religious matters, he had the lively intelligence of the Gascon, more

subtle than profound, more brilliant than steady. Married to a woman of

loose morals, and afterwards to a devout Italian, he was gross and

vulgar in his appetites and pleasures. He had retained all the habits of

a country gentleman of his native Béarn, careless, familiar, boastful,

thrifty, cunning, combined since his sojourn at the court of the Valois

with a taint of corruption. He worked little but rapidly, with none of

the bureaucratic pedantry of a Philip II. cloistered in the dark towers

of the Escurial. Essentially a man of action and a soldier, he preserved

his tone of command after he had reached the throne, the inflexibility

of the military chief, the conviction of his absolute right to be

master. Power quickly intoxicated him, and his monarchy was therefore

anything but parliamentary. His personality was everything, institutions

nothing. If, at the gathering of the notables at Rouen in 1596, Henry

IV. spoke of putting himself in tutelage, that was but preliminary to a

demand for money. The states-general, called together ten times in the

16th century, and at the death of Henry III. under promise of

convocation, were never assembled. To put his absolute right beyond all

control he based it upon religion, and to this sceptic disobedience

became a heresy. He tried to make the clergy into an instrument of

government by recalling the Jesuits, who had been driven away in 1594,

partly from fear of their regicides, partly because they have always

been the best teachers of servitude; and he gave the youth of the nation

into the hands of this cosmopolitan and ultramontane clerical order. His

government was personal, not through departments; he retained the old

council though reducing its members; and his ministers, taken from every

party, were never--not even Sully--anything more than mere clerks,

without independent position, mere instruments of his good pleasure.

Fortunately this was not always capricious.

The achievements of Henry IV.

Henry IV. soon realized that his most urgent duty was to resuscitate the

corpse of France. Pilfering was suppressed, and the revolts of the

malcontents--the _Gauthiers_ of Normandy, the _Croquants_ and

_Tard-avisés_ of Périgord and Limousin--were quelled, adroitly at first,

and later with a sterner hand. He then provided for the security of the

country districts, and reduced the taxes on the peasants, the most

efficacious means of making them productive and able to pay. Inspired by

Barthélemy de Laffémas (1545-1612), controller-general of commerce, and

by Olivier de Serres (1539-1619),[31] Henry IV. encouraged the culture

of silk, though without much result, had orchards planted and marshes

drained; while though he permitted the free circulation of wine and

corn, this depended on the harvests. But the twofold effect of civil

war--the ruin of the farmers and the scarcity and high price of rural

labour--was only reduced arbitrarily and by fits and starts.

Industrial policy of Henry IV.

Despite the influence of Sully, a convinced agrarian because of his

horror of luxury and love of economy, Henry IV. likewise attempted

amelioration in the towns, where the state of affairs was even worse

than in the country. But the edict of 1597, far from inaugurating

individual liberty, was but a fresh edition of that of 1581, a second

preface to the legislation of Colbert, and in other ways no better

respected than the first. As for the new features, the syndical courts

proposed by Laffémas, they were not even put into practice. Various

industries, nevertheless, concurrent with those of England, Spain and

Italy, were created or reorganized: silk-weaving, printing, tapestry,

&c. Sully at least provided renascent manufacture with the roads

necessary for communication and planted them with trees. In external

commerce Laffémas and Henry IV. were equally the precursors of Colbert,

freeing raw material and prohibiting the import of products similar to

those manufactured within the kingdom. Without regaining that

preponderance in the Levant which had been secured after the victory of

Lepanto and before the civil wars, Marseilles still took an honourable

place there, confirmed by the renewal in 1604 of the capitulations of

Francis I. with the sultan. Finally, the system of commercial companies,

antipathetic to the French bourgeoisie, was for the first time practised

on a grand scale; but Sully never understood that movement of colonial

expansion, begun by Henry II. in Brazil and continued in Canada by

Champlain, which had so marvellously enlarged the European horizon. His

point of view was altogether more limited than that of Henry IV.; and he

did not foresee, like Elizabeth, that the future would belong to the

peoples whose national energy took that line of action.

The work of Sully.

His sphere was essentially the superintendence of finance, to which he

brought the same enthusiasm that he had shown in fighting the League.

Vain and imaginative, his reputation was enormously enhanced by his

"Économies royales"; he was no innovator, and being a true

representative of the nation at that period, like it he was but lukewarm

towards reform, accepting it always against the grain. He was not a

financier of genius; but he administered the public moneys with the same

probity and exactitude which he used in managing his own, retrieving

alienated property, straightening accounts, balancing expenditure and

receipts, and amassing a reserve in the Bastille. He did not reform the

system of _aides_ and _tailles_ established by Louis XI. in 1482; but by

charging much upon indirect taxation, and slightly lessening the burden

of direct taxation, he avoided an appeal to the states-general and gave

an illusion of relief.

Criticism of Henry IV.'s achievement.

Nevertheless, economic disasters, political circumstances and the

personal government of Henry IV. (precursor in this also of Louis XIV.)

rendered his task impossible or fatal. The nobility remained in debt and

disaffected; and the clergy, more remarkable for wealth and breeding

than for virtues, were won over to the ultramontane ideas of the

triumphant Jesuits. The rich bourgeoisie began more and more to

monopolize the magistracy; and though the country-people were somewhat

relieved from the burden which had been crushing them, the

working-classes remained impoverished, owing to the increase of prices

which followed at a distance the rise of wages. Moreover, under

insinuating and crafty pretexts, Henry IV. undermined as far as he could

the right of control by the states-general, the right of remonstrance by

the parlements, and the communal franchises, while ensuring the

impoverishment of the municipalities by his fiscal methods. Arbitrary

taxation, scandalous intervention in elections, forced candidatures,

confusion in their financial administration, bankruptcy and revolt on

the part of the tenants: all formed an anticipation of the personal rule

of Richelieu and Louis XIV.

Edict of La Paulette.

Thus Henry IV. evinced very great activity in restoring order and very

great poverty of invention in his methods. His sole original creation,

the edict of La Paulette in 1604, was disastrous. In consideration of an

annual payment of one-sixtieth of the salary, it made hereditary offices

which had hitherto been held only for life; and the millions which it

daily poured into the royal exchequer removed the necessity for seeking

more regular and better distributed resources. Political liberty and

social justice were equally the losers by this extreme financial

measure, which paved the way for a catastrophe.

Foreign policy of Henry IV.

In foreign affairs the abasement of the house of Austria remained for

Henry IV., as it had been for Francis I. and Henry II., a political

necessity, while under his successors it was to become a mechanical

obsession. The peace of Vervins had concluded nothing. The difference

concerning the marquisate of Saluzzo, which the duke of Savoy had seized

upon in 1588, profiting by Henry III.'s embarrassments, is only worth

mentioning because the treaty of Lyons (1601) finally dissipated the

Italian mirage, and because, in exchange for the last of France's

possessions beyond the Alps, it added to the royal domain the really

French territory of La Bresse, Bugey, Valromey and the district of Gex.

The great external affair of the reign was the projected war upon which

Henry IV. was about to embark when he was assassinated. The "grand

design" of Sully, the organization of a "Christian Republic" of the

European nations for the preservation of peace, was but the invention of

an irresponsible minister, soured by defeat and wishing to impress

posterity. Henry IV., the least visionary of kings, was between 1598 and

1610 really hesitating between two great contradictory political

schemes: the war clamoured for by the Protestants, politicians like

Sully, and the nobility; and the Spanish alliance, to be cemented by

marriages, and preached by the ultramontane Spanish camarilla formed by

the queen, Père Coton, the king's confessor, the minister Villeroy, and

Ubaldini, the papal nuncio. Selfish and suspicious, Henry IV.

consistently played this double game of policy in conjunction with

president Jeannin. By his alliance with the Grisons (1603) he guaranteed

the integrity of the Valtellina, the natural approach to Lombardy for

the imperial forces; and by his intimate union with Geneva he controlled

the routes by which the Spaniards could reach their hereditary

possessions in Franche-Comté and the Low Countries from Italy. But

having defeated the duke of Savoy he had no hesitation in making sure of

him by a marriage; though the Swiss might have misunderstood the treaty

of Brusol (1610) by which he gave one of his daughters to the grandson

of Philip II. On the other hand he astonished the Protestant world by

the imprudence of his mediation between Spain and the rebellious United

Provinces (1609). When the succession of Cleves and of Jülich, so long

expected and already discounted by the treaty of Halle (1610), was

opened up in Germany, the great war was largely due to an access of

senile passion for the charms of the princesse de Condé. The stroke of

Ravaillac's knife caused a timely descent of the curtain upon this new

and tragi-comic Trojan War. Thus, here as elsewhere, we see a

vacillating hand-to-mouth policy, at the mercy of a passion for power or

for sensual gratification. The _Cornette blanche_ of Arques, the _Poule

au pôt_ of the peasant, successes as a lover and a dashing spirit, have

combined to surround Henry IV. with a halo of romance not justified by

fact.

The regency of Marie de'Medici.

The extreme instability of monarchical government showed itself afresh

after Henry IV.'s death. The reign of Louis XIII., a perpetual regency

by women, priests, and favourites, was indeed a curious prelude to the

grand age of the French monarchy. The eldest son of Henry IV. being a

minor, Marie de' Medici induced the parlement to invest her with the

regency, thanks to Villeroy and contrary to the last will of Henry IV.

This second Florentine, at once jealous of power and incapable of

exercising it, bore little resemblance to her predecessor. Light-minded,

haughty, apathetic and cold-hearted, she took a sort of passionate

delight in changing Henry IV.'s whole system of government. Who would

support her in this? On one side were the former ministers, Sillery and

president Jeannin, ex-leaguers but loyalists, no lovers of Spain and

still less of Germany; on the other the princes of the blood and the

great nobles, Condé, Guise, Mayenne and Nevers, apparently still much

more faithful to French ideas, but in reality convinced that the days of

kings were over and that their own had arrived. Instead of weakening

this aristocratic agitation by the see-saw policy of Catherine de'

Medici, Marie could invent no other device than to despoil the royal

treasure by distributing places and money to the chiefs of both parties.

The savings all expended and Sully fallen into disgrace, she lost her

influence and became the almost unconscious instrument of an ambitious

man of low birth, the Florentine Concini, who was to drag her down with

him in his fall; petty shifts became thenceforward the order of the day.

Louis XIII.(1610-1643).

Thus Villeroy thought fit to add still further to the price already paid

to triumphant Madrid and Vienna by disbanding the army, breaking the

treaty of Brusol, and abandoning the Protestant princes beyond the Rhine

and the trans-Pyrenean Moriscos. France joined hands with Spain in the

marriages of Louis XIII. with Anne of Austria and Princess Elizabeth

with the son of Philip III., and the Spanish ambassador was admitted to

the secret council of the queen. To soothe the irritation of England the

duc de Bouillon was sent to London to offer the hand of the king's

sister to the prince of Wales. Meanwhile, however, still more was ceded

to the princes than to the kings; and after a pretence of drawing the

sword against the prince of Condé, rebellious through jealousy of the

Italian surroundings of the queen-mother, recourse was had to the purse.

The peace of Sainte Menehould, four years after the death of Henry IV.,

was a virtual abdication of the monarchy (May 1614); it was time for a

move in the other direction. Villeroy inspired the regent with the idea

of an armed expedition, accompanied by the little king, into the West.

The convocation of the states-general was about to take place, wrung, as

in all minorities, from the royal weakness--this time by Condé; so the

elections were influenced in the monarchist interest. The king's

majority, solemnly proclaimed on the 28th of October 1614, further

strengthened the throne; while owing to the bungling of the third

estate, who did not contrive to gain the support of the clergy and the

nobility by some sort of concessions, the states-general, the last until

1789, proved like the others a mere historic episode, an impotent and

inorganic expedient. In vain Condé tried to play with the parlement of

Paris the same game as with the states-general, in a sort of

anticipation of the Fronde. Villeroy demurred; and the parlement, having

illegally assumed a political rôle, broke with Condé and effected a

reconciliation with the court. After this double victory Marie de'

Medici could at last undertake the famous journey to Bordeaux and

consummate the Spanish marriages. In order not to countenance by his

presence an act which had been the pretext for his opposition, Condé

rebelled once more in August 1615; but he was again pacified by the

governorships and pensions of the peace of Loudun (May 1616).

Concini, Marshal d'Ancre.

But Villeroy and the other ministers knew not how to reap the full

advantage of their victory. They had but one desire, to put themselves

on a good footing again with Condé, instead of applying themselves

honestly to the service of the king. The "marshals," Concini and his

wife Leonora Galigai, more influential with the queen and more exacting

than ever, by dint of clever intrigues forced the ministers to retire

one after another; and with the last of Henry IV.'s "greybeards"

vanished also all the pecuniary reserves left. Concini surrounded

himself with new men, insignificant persons ready to do his bidding,

such as Barbin or Mangot, while in the background was Richelieu, bishop

of Luçon. Condé now began intrigues with the princes whom he had

previously betrayed; but his pride dissolved in piteous entreaties when

Thémines, captain of the guard, arrested him in September 1616. Six

months later Concini had not even time to protest when another captain,

Vitry, slew him at the Louvre, under orders from Louis XIII., on the

24th of April 1617.

Richelieu had appeared behind Marie de' Medici; Albert de Luynes rose

behind Louis XIII., the neglected child whom he had contrived to amuse.

"The tavern remained the same, having changed nothing but the bush." De

Luynes was made a duke and marshal in Concini's place, with no better

title; while the duc d'Epernon, supported by the queen-mother (now in

disgrace at Blois), took Condé's place at the head of the opposition.

The treaties of Angoulême and Angers (1619-1620), negotiated by

Richelieu, recalled the "unwholesome" treaties of Sainte-Menehould and

Loudun. The revolt of the Protestants was more serious. Goaded by the

vigorous revival of militant Catholicism which marked the opening of the

17th century, de Luynes tried to put a finishing touch to the triumph of

Catholicism in France, which he had assisted, by abandoning in the

treaty of Ulm the defence of the small German states against the

ambition of the ruling house of Austria, and by sacrificing the

Protestant Grisons to Spain. The re-establishment of Catholic worship in

Béarn was the pretext for a rising among the Protestants, who had

remained loyal during these troublous years; and although the military

organization of French Protestantism, arranged by the assembly of La

Rochelle, had been checked in 1621, by the defection of most of the

reformed nobles, like Bouillon and Lesdiguières, de Luynes had to raise

the disastrous siege of Montauban. Death alone saved him from the

disgrace suffered by his predecessors (December 15, 1621).