half a dozen familiars. He was helped with difficulty not on to a
horse but on to a mule. His long, thin, somewhat deformed legs with
difficulty held the saddle, and he stooped forward gracelessly as
he rode. No one could have told him from a chance traveller of the
poorer sort. He was in grey, as always--a thick, coarse cloth--and on
his head a rough, pointed hat, with a leaden medal stuck in the band
of it, and on the medal, stamped, an image of Our Lady.
He rode out over the drawbridge toward Tours, in the bitterly cold
mist as the day broadened. One hundred yards and more behind came the
archers and the drivers of the wagons; for he had begun a journey.
The king and his little group of attendants halted for twenty minutes
in the town for Mass. As he came out of Mass, he turned to the first
poor inn of the market square, and ate the first short meal of the
day, while the innkeeper and the serving-maid watched him in terror,
and the passers-by in the streets huddled in corners, catching
glimpses of him through the thick, small panes of the window.
And all during that meal he talked, and talked incessantly, to his
companions, upon every point of his policy: upon the place they
should visit, upon the chances of meeting the messenger whom he
expected--upon all things.
They took the road again like a little company of poor pilgrims; they
followed up the Loire.
They came at last to a place where the road, damp with melting snow
but now lit by a pale morning sun, passed through a deep wood along
the river bank, and there stood a hut which the foresters used. It
was the appointed spot. The king halted, dismounted, and entered with
but one companion. The rest stood without.
They had not long to wait. Another small group approached from the
west, but these were splashed with mud, broken with fatigue, their
fine horses hardly carrying them, and stumbling as they went. One of
them was half in armour, and seemed to be their chief. He scrambled
down stiffly from his beast, almost falling as he did so, entered the
hut, and knelt before the king.
The king raised him, but before he could tell his great news Louis
deluged him with yet another river of talk. How were the ways? What
had he met? Had he passed through Bar, or had he come round north
through Argonne? Had he heard what the common people were saying in
either place?
Twice the newcomer attempted to tell his news, and twice he was
swamped again by that ceaseless flood of clipped, tumbling words. At
last he had his moment, and he took it to tell in three phrases the
enormous thing which he had carried in silence through that night and
through four desperate marches before.
Charles the Bold was dead. Nancy was relieved. Lorraine was master of
his own again. The imagined new State was in ruins. Louis took up the
ceaseless chatter again, patting the hand of his messenger as he did
so, and smiling a thin but contented smile.
His work was accomplished. His great scheme was fulfilled, and yet
such a moment led him to nothing more solemn than an endless cataract
of words--save for one moment, when he fell again upon his knees on
the earth floor of that hut and prayed as fervently as though he had
been alone. He rose again to question and requestion, and to make
his comments. He was exhausted before he was silent.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, far off in Lorraine, the battle had been brought to its
conclusion, and the great Duke was dead.
It was upon Sunday, the 5th of January 1477, that René of Lorraine,
coming out from his Mass in the Abbey Church of St. Nicholas, had
ordered his armies--some few of the lords of the Barrois, some few
more from the Charolais, some from the Jura were there; but the great
mass of his rank and file were a hubbub of German talk from the
Alsatian towns and from the Swiss mountains--ten thousand of them.
They had not far to go. Nancy was but a short two hours’ march away,
and there, before his capital, starving and on the edge of surrender,
Lorraine knew that the way was barred by the army of Charles.
It had been bitter cold, but there was half a thaw. The ice on the
Meurthe (to the right of the road as the long column went northward
up the bank) was still continuous, but thin and slushy. The great
masses of snow round about were melting. It was somewhat before noon
that they saw, drawn up in rank upon slightly rising ground before
them, the host of Charles, and in the distance behind it, two miles
away, the spires of Nancy.
From a wood upon his right to the west, down to the river Meurthe
upon the east, Charles had drawn his line, with his guns commanding
the road whereby the columns of Lorraine should advance. Fine snow
began to fall, and under the veil of that cloud Lorraine detached a
mass of the Swiss to follow round secretly by the hollow lane along
the woodside. So they came up, unperceived, upon the flank of the
Burgundians.
But those Burgundians, Charles’s men, stood in rank awaiting the
shock upon their front, ignorant of the turning column. They were but
five thousand all told, and against them were two men to their one.
They knew not that half their enemies had thus been detached secretly
to the west. Still they waited, confident in the strength of their
position: waiting for the heavy armed knights of Lorraine to charge.
Even as they so stood, the Burgundians heard something which no
troops will stand--the sound of attack behind their line.
It was the custom of the Swiss to sound their horns three times just
before they struck, and that loud, unexpected challenge came where
none thought soldiers to be--far off and behind them to their right,
from the woodside.
It was in vain that Charles attempted to convert his line to the
right, to face that sudden danger; it was in vain that he called for
the guns to be dragged round and faced westward to the wood and the
Swiss. All came too late; for all was in confusion, and already his
line was dissolving. Upon such a beginning of chaos Lorraine, from
the front, charged; and with that the Burgundian troops became a mob,
and the action, hardly begun, turned at once into a slaughter.
Charles’s cavalry, upon the left, near the river, cut itself out
across the water, losing heavily, the horses stamping through the
thin ice, and a remnant escaping by that ford.
Round the great Duke himself a devoted centre rallied, half of them
of his nobility, but it could not stand--it was forced back in the
general flood, and all the two miles of ground that afternoon (the
snow had ceased, and the sun shone upon the carnage) was filled with
a confused mass of massacre and of flight. The Swiss and the Germans
and the French lords of the Barrois pressed on into the midst of the
broken herd, right up to the walls of the town.
A mile from the city gate there ran a brook, the brook of St. John.
There, in the hurly-burly, Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy,
parried right and left desperately, his lords about him, and in their
midst were the enemy, ahorse and afoot, the long halberds of the
Swiss, thrusting pikes, and the swing of swords.
None knew the great Duke Charles in such a confusion. They saw his
rich armour, but they had no other sign; for the golden lion of
Burgundy upon his helm had fallen even before the battle, and he
himself, as he saw the crest tumble on his saddle bow, all those
hours before, had muttered: “An omen--_signum dei_!”
So that man, unknown to the enemy, fought hard with his visor down. A
thrust took him in the left thigh, another in the back. As he reeled
he cried “Bourgoyne!” but one Claude, the Lord of Bauzemont, who was
fighting there for Lorraine, hearing that cry, thrust a lance at him,
not knowing whom he struck. The helm and its visor shattered. The
face of the great Duke was gashed from ear to chin, and he went down.
None knew who had so fallen, for all the nobles about him also were
destroyed. And that was the end of Charles the Bold.
* * * * *
The press of the conquerors rushed up to the city gate, the Gate of
St. Nicholas. The starving people ran to cheer, the garrison let down
the bridge beyond the town, the last remnants of Charles’s force were
massacred at the bridge of Bouxières.
The wintry sun was setting. The force had its hold again upon all the
fields. The Duke of Lorraine held festival that night--back in his
own city, and all his people eating again and drinking, and rejoicing
in victory.
But one thing checked his triumph: whither had Charles gone? Was he
in Metz, or fled perhaps into the Germanies, or got home among his
own people in the Low Countries?
All the next day, Twelfth Day, the Feast of the Kings, they searched
the battlefield, heaps of naked bodies stripped by the spoilers, but
none could say that they had found the great Duke. But that evening,
as Lorraine rode back into Nancy, despondent and fearful, a captain
brought to him a young page, one of the Colonnas of Rome, and said
to him: “This lad knew the great Duke.”
So next morning, the Tuesday, the 7th of January, very early, they
went out among the bodies in the snow, and the Italian boy would say
first of one, then of another: “It is not he ... it is not he.” And
with him also went one who had been a maid in the service of Charles.
Then, at last, they came to the strong body, lying all wounds, with
its dreadful gashed face, and the mass of thick, black hair against
the snow, and the Italian page cried, “That is the Duke,” and the
servant knelt down crying and sobbing, and they heard her say, “Ha!
Burgundy, my Lord! my Lord!”
René of Lorraine had that famous body lifted with reverence, and
wrapped in a linen shroud, and carried with pomp into Nancy.
* * * * *
Thenceforward, with whatever vicissitude of come and go, the Rhine
was recovered for the Gauls.
TWO SATURDAYS
(_Montmartre and Amboise_)
(_August 15, 1534; March 16, 1560_)
Two scenes, half a lifetime apart, small, detailed, vivid, mark the
enormous storm of the Reformation in the Gauls--that vast battle
which was never wholly won or lost, no, not to this day; for France
is the arena of Europe. Each of these little scenes was an origin:
the one of the force that half-reconquered Europe for the Church, the
Jesuits; the other of the force that, taking arms for Calvinism, all
but conquered the crown--the force of the great nobles in rebellion,
of the gentry, of the merchants in their towns, and of the peasants
in the central hills, the Huguenots.
* * * * *
In the morning of Saturday, August the 15th, in the year 1534, the
Feast of the Assumption, six men of various age came to the little
room on the hill of the university, where lived, determined, eager,
somewhat silent, a dark, square-headed Basque, whose military temper
was to half change the world. An intense devotion, a burning life
within, an absorption in divine things and in the fate of the soul,
made this man single from all of his fellows. None met him but went
away with an impression as of flame. It was Ignatius of Loyola in his
forty-fourth year.
The six who thus came together up the stone stairs to that little
room, with its crucifix, its narrow bed, its bare table, its empty
walls, were all men who had come under that profound influence;
men of the university, like himself--men already filled with the
conception of a mission. There, leading them, was yet another Basque,
called from his mother’s name Xavier, six years younger than the
chief. There was young Salman of Toledo, a boy of nineteen; there was
Laynez the Castilian, just of age; Alphonso of Valladolid; Rodriguez
of Portugal; and (the only Gaul among them) a peasant from the hills
of Savoy, long plunged into the study of the academies, not yet
thirty: Faber, from the hamlet, and the Alpine huts of Villaret. He
alone was a priest.
When they were thus assembled they set out about their purpose.
They went them down the university hill by that straight and narrow
Roman street which crosses Paris from south to north, and is here
the street of St. James, there of St. Martin. They traversed the
twin bridges of the island, they went the full mile to the city wall,
passed through St. Martin’s Gate, and, outside, were in the fields.
The hill of Montmartre stood before them, its gypsum quarries, its
crazy windmills, and on the summit a little old church--poor, for
it had few parishioners. It was called Our Lady of the Martyrs, and
thither were they bound upon this, Her feast day.
They climbed the hill. They went down by the little stair near the
porch, which leads into the crypt of that strange place, and where
the stones go back to the temple of the pagan days. Faber vested and
began the Mass.
When he came to the Communion, the six laymen rose and knelt at
the altar rails. Then, one by one in order each, before receiving
the Host, took in a loud voice the vow of their companionship, and
Faber himself, the last, pronounced those words. The Ablutions were
received. The post-Communions read, the last Gospel recited. The
Society of Jesus was founded.
* * * * *
The winter was not over in Blois--the winter of 1560. The old king,
who had so sternly maintained the national religion, was dead; a boy
of fifteen reigned--frail, incompetent, diseased--the son of that
Medicean woman whom an enemy has called “the worm from the tomb of
Italy.”
The child was married to a child-wife, the daughter of the King of
Scotland, Mary Stuart. It was she, in part, already masterful, that
had called to that Court her mother’s brothers, the sons of Lorraine,
the Guises; grandsons of that same man who had entered his capital of
Nancy on the death of Charles the Bold.
And they were hated. They were not of the national nobility; they had
enriched themselves scandalously. If they were to be the protectors
of the Church, it was but another weakness for the Church. One
of their group, a child of fourteen, had been made Archbishop of
Rheims, and loaded with the wealth of such great names as Cluny--St.
Bernard’s glorious house; as Marmoutier--St. Martin’s immemorial
foundation. Scandal! Scandal!
Against these men, against the new, feeble, immature king, rose
muttering throughout the commonwealth all forms of opposition,
linked under the bond (here loose, there strict) of the Reform,
of the Gospellers, of them that would be rid of their fathers,
and who were clamped to the iron of Calvin. He, far off in Geneva,
commanded. Already, some few months since, the Reformers had
organized everywhere. They had held their first synod, making them
one thing throughout the territory of France, and, by hundreds, the
armed gentry were rallying, though secretly, to that standard. Men
from all countries leaked in to take service in the coming war as
mercenaries. Many from the Germanies, many from Switzerland. They
were sworn in secrecy by the German freebooters’ oath: “To follow the
dumb captain.” And of the native people crowds were ready, when the
signal should be given, to join the nobles who were moving. By little
groups, and as single men, they came filtering through towards the
Loire.
What could the Guises bring against that? There were no armies in
those days, save such guards as the king could pay, or such gentry as
would still obey his summons.
The plot was laid to seize the crowned boy while the Court thus still
sat in Blois, for the town was open and without walls. A mob could
carry it. The leaders still professed that to this boy they wished
no harm. It was his counsellors they would be rid of, and all their
hatred was for the Guises--especially for the duke, their head, the
real ruler.
But before the appointed day the young king, restless, must be moving
down river. He would hunt, and he was tired of the woods to the west
and to the south. The Court set out. It was through this chance whim
that the rising was postponed and lost its vigour. It was through
this chance whim that the threatened Court found itself safe in the
little stronghold of Amboise.
As it there sat it felt in the air a menace all around. They had
summoned and held hostage in the castle one or two of the greatest
among those whom they knew to be their secret enemies. But the
populace also was astir. Not all looks were kind, and there were
strange men on market days.
Some order misunderstood, some rashness, provoked a misfire. A crowd
of men made for the castle, not all of them unarmed, professing that
they must see the king. They were rejected; contemptuously enough
young Francis II. even scattered coins among them, as being of the
poor and common people. That was only the grumbling of something
distant.
It was on Saturday, the 16th of March, that the storm broke; but
even then, ill-led. Men came swarming out from the woods on the south
of the town. It was an armed attack. It has been called “The Tumult
of Amboise.” The leaders were few, ill-chosen and worse followed. Not
enough of the gentry were there. Horsemen and armour were lacking.
It could but fail. The gates were shut in time, the ramparts armed,
the wave of attack broke against impregnable walls; it was shot down
under the trained aim of the archers; it was pursued, dispersed,
driven to its woods again, and, on the way, whole dozens were
rounded up and bound, and beaten, and thrust back into the castle as
prisoners. For days the hanging of them went on, from the gibbet of
the town itself, from the beams of the main gateway of the castle,
from the iron crooks on its walls.
The thing was over, and it had seemed small. The young queen had
laughed at it. But it was the beginning of that tremendous business
which was to fill all France with death and the destruction of
lovely stone; to sow a permanent division, to leave, much later,
the Bourbons supreme, and not even to end when the thirteenth Louis
should have ridden out to strike the last blow at La Rochelle--how
many years to come!
THE FRONTIER
(_September 9, 1642_)
Richelieu, the Cardinal, was growing old, his work was nearly
accomplished. It was the recovery of the frontiers, and on the south
those limits were the Pyrenees.
The long process of the hotch-potch of popular movement and feeling
over fifteen hundred years had blurred the outline of Gaul. It
was his business to restore an exact shape and a true wall to the
inheritance of the kings--“The Square Field.”
To the east the thing had never been possible, and perhaps never
will be. The Rhine stood clearly before all eyes. The Rhine could
be reached, but never made a final decision. Reached, it must be
crossed; but reached at one point it could not be reached in all.
There would ever be a struggle in those march lands. It is a struggle
woefully present to us to-day. Elsewhere the sea, the Alps, made
definite boundaries. There remained the Pyrenees.
But until this time the Pyrenees had not been attained. The tide of
Gallic power had overflowed them, and again had ebbed; and those
confused and noble valleys held races which overspread the crest,
and none of which had felt themselves at heart to be either of the
northern or of the southern land; neither of the pastures and the
rivers and the woods of Gascony, nor of the hard and burnt Iberian
rock and dust. Richelieu desired that crest and those limits, and
that long mountain boundary against the sky.
Where that singular straight line of division, the most unbroken
wall in Europe, reaches the Mediterranean, the Catalonian people
and their language held all the passes and spread to the north and
to the south, one nation--or at least one race. These, so early as
Charlemagne, had been the march of the Ebro, and Barcelona, the
great port, had remained the capital of one countryside. But in the
darkness after the death of Charlemagne no man could tell you whether
its fate would fall to the north or to the south. It acquired an
independence which at first was feudal, and might later well have
been national, as that of Portugal became, as that which little
Andorra still holds in its fantastic isolated cup. Through the Middle
Ages the thing had swung now to the French, now to the Spaniards,
but still was Catalan: one thing. The genius of Richelieu, to the
disadvantage of that entity, to the advantage of his sovereign, was
to divide it by the crest of the Pyrenees, and to push the writ of
Paris up to that sombre line where the peaks go down in lessening
but rugged summits, and lose themselves in the salt--diminishing to
mere rocks at last. For Richelieu had determined, not that all the
Catalonian land, but only this province--this northern province of
it, the Roussillon, hither of the Pyrenees--should be French; the
rest he would leave to Spain.
He played for the furtherance of this end upon a spirit which he
flattered and nourished, but did not fulfil--the spirit of Catalan
independence.
The great Spanish monarchy, almost the master of the world, had,
in the century before, firmly established itself over the whole
Peninsula, suppressing local liberties, centralizing, despotic.
Against that awful monarchy, against its symbol, the angry Catalans
had risen; and, supporting that rising in the enormous duel between
the house of Spain and the house of France, Richelieu had permitted
the rebels to elect his master their Count.
On January 23, 1641, following upon treaties of alliance between the
Catalan rebels and the French Crown, Louis XIII. was admitted Count
of Barcelona, monarch of all that country on either side of the
hills. But the game which Richelieu played had not Barcelona for its
stakes; he was gambling for the Roussillon only, and for Perpignan.
All the strength of Castille, all the men Spain could spare from the
universal war, were poured into the defence of Perpignan, and La Rena
was sent as governor to hold that northern bastion, and prevent the
French advance to the Pyrenees.
The town lies sloping downwards westward from its citadel. It stands
in a sheet of vineyards; a plain having to the east, solemnly
dominating it, all the huge mass of the Canigou. La Rena held it
strongly. He would quarter his soldiers upon the townsmen. They
resisted. He turned his guns from the citadel upon the burghers, and
they surrendered, but not before nearly six hundred of their houses
had been ruined by the fire. They had attempted a truce; the bishop
had gone up to the citadel with the Sacrament in a procession. They
obtained no truce; goods were looted, gallows were raised in the
market-place, and Olivares, the great minister of the Spanish king,
was supreme.
So Perpignan was held in that summer of 1641 for Spain.
The plain around was flooded with the French. South, north, east,
west of the city their eight thousand infantry, their two regiments
of cavalry, garrisoned the villages and towns, until at last, by
the end of the year, Perpignan itself was blockaded, and before any
siege lines were formed a famine had begun. In that winter, in the
January of 1642, the struggle opened between the two powers. Brézé,
coming to Catalonia as the Viceroy of Louis XIII., sat down before
Perpignan; but he could not quite cut off relief--some wheat got in
before the end of the month. From Castille no further troops could
come in relief. Still the French flooded on, La Meilleraye at their
head; and with him, second in command, a name that was to be more
than famous--Turenne.
By April the last of the small desperate Spanish garrisons in the
neighbourhood of Collioure had surrendered, but Perpignan still held.
All France seemed to be pressing on to that one point. The Cardinal
himself took the long journey, fell ill, and stopped at Narbonne. His
master, the king, Louis XIII., went forward, and on the 23rd May took
up his station in the farm which used to be called the Mas of John
Pauques, which is still known to-day as the King’s Farm; near St.
Stevens, looking upon the city.
By this time all Europe looked on.
The cavalry of the guard was there: Enghien, Polignac, Cinq-Mars,
Schomberg--all the great names; and the musketeers of the Cardinal
were there as well. Nearly thirty thousand men stood thus before the
walls, which had become the test of whether the government of Paris
should or should not come up to the Pyrenees.
Behind those walls, unsuccoured, the last veterans of the Thirty
Years’ War--not three thousand of them, and of these but a nucleus
Castillian--still held. They were the men whom all Europe had learnt
to regard as masters, but the odds were too great. They could stand
one to ten, even famished, behind a formidable trench and wall, but
as they stood they died of the fever and of the famine.