After long wandering in strange seas, we come in view of familiar
lights and headlands. With the advent of the house of Bourbon, we have
grasped a thread which leads directly down to our own time.
The accession of a Protestant King was hailed with delirious joy by the
Huguenots, and with corresponding rage by Catholic France. The one
looked forward to redressing of wrongs and avenging of injuries; and
the other flatly refused submission unless Henry should recant his
heresy, and become a convert to the true faith.
The new King saw there was no bed of roses preparing for him. After
four years of effort to reconcile the irreconcilable, he decided upon
his course. He was not called to the throne to rule over Protestant
France, nor to be an instrument of vengeance for the Huguenots. He saw
that the highest good of the kingdom required, not that he should
impose upon it either form of belief or worship, but give equal
opportunity and privilege to both.
To the consternation of the Huguenots he announced himself ready to
listen to the arguments in favor of the religion of Rome; and it took
just five hours of deliberation to convince him of its truth. He
announced himself ready to abjure his old faith. Bitter reproaches on
the one side and rejoicings on the other greeted this decision. It was
not heroic. But many even among the Protestants acknowledged it to be
an act of supreme political wisdom.
Peace was restored, and the "Edict of Nantes," which quickly followed,
proved to his old friends, the Huguenots, that they were not forgotten.
The Protestants, with every disability removed, shared equal privileges
with the Catholics throughout the kingdom; and the first victory for
religious liberty was splendidly won.
An era of unexampled prosperity dawned. Never had the kingdom been so
wisely and beneficently governed. Sincerity, simplicity, and sympathy
had taken the place of dissimulation, craft, and cruelty. Uplifting
agencies were everywhere at work, reaching even to the peasantry, that
forgotten element in the nation.
The reign of the Bourbon dynasty had opened auspiciously. Henry IV.
was the idol of the people. His loveless marriage with Margaret de
Valois had been annulled, and he had espoused Marie de Medici. The
blood from that poisoned stream was again to be intermingled with the
blood of the future Kings of France.
After a reign of twenty-one years, the sagacious ruler who had done
more than any other to make her great and happy was stricken down by
the hand of an assassin, and a cry of grief arose alike from Catholic
and Protestant throughout the kingdom.
Poor France was again at the mercy of a woman with the corrupt
instincts of the de Medici. The widow of Henry IV., who was Regent
during the infancy of her son Louis, was intriguing, vulgar, and
without the ability of the great Catharine. The kingdom was rent by
cabals of aspiring favorites and ambitious nobles, until the reign of
Louis XIII., or rather of Cardinal Richelieu, began.
The foundations of this man's policy lay deep, out of sight of all save
his own far-reaching intelligence. Pitiless as an iceberg, he crushed
every obstacle to his purpose. Impartial as fate, with no loves, no
hatreds, Catholics, Protestants, nobles, Parliaments, one after another
were borne down before his determination to make the King, what he had
not been since Charlemagne, supreme in France.
The will of the great minister mowed down like a scythe. The power of
the grandees, that last remnant of feudalism, and a perpetual menace to
monarchy, was swept away. One great noble after another was humiliated
and shorn of his privileges, if not of his head.
The Huguenots, being first shaken into submission, saw their political
liberties torn from them by the stroke of a pen, and even while the
Catholics were making merry over this discomfiture, the minister was
planning to send Henrietta, sister of the King, across the Channel to
become Queen of Protestant England, as wife of Charles I. But the act
of supreme audacity was to come. This high prelate of the church, this
cardinal minister, formed alliance with Gustavus Adolphus, the great
leader of the Protestants in the war upon the Emperor and the Pope!
He allowed no religion, no class, to sway or to hold him. He was for
France; and her greatness and glory augmented under his ruthless
dominion. By his extraordinary genius he made the reign of a
commonplace King one of dazzling splendor; and while gratifying his own
colossal ambition he so strengthened the foundations of the monarchy
that princes of the blood themselves could not shake it.
It was great--it was dazzling, but of all his work there is but one
thing which revolutions and time have not swept away. The "French
Academy" alone survives as his monument. Out of a gathering of
literary friends he created a national institution, its object the
establishing a court of last appeal in all that makes for eloquence in
speaking or writing the French language. In a country where nothing
endures, this has remained unchanged for two hundred and thirty years.
But this master of statecraft, this creator of despotic monarchy, had
one unsatisfied ambition. He would have exchanged all his honors for
the ability to write one play like those of Corneille. Hungering for
literary distinction, he could not have gotten into his own Academy had
he not created it. And jealous of his laurels, he hated Corneille as
much as he did the enemies of France.