THE BIRTH OF FRENCH NAVARRE
[Illustration]
Basse-Navarre or Navarre-Française, together with Béarn, made, under the
Emperor Hadrian, a part of Aquitaine.
The Roman conquest of Gaul was the first impetus given towards a
coherent massing of the peoples. Formerly there had been many tribes and
races, but the three divisions made by the Romans reduced things to a
minimum. Cisalpine Gaul was that part where the inhabitants wore a sort
of adaptation of the Roman toga. In Trans-Alpine Gaul, situated in the
Rhône basin and along the Mediterranean between Italy and Spain, the
inhabitants wore _braies_ or _bragues_--a sort of jacket extending down
almost to the knees, a detail of dress which has evolved itself into the
blouse, and perhaps even the great cloak of the mountaineers of the
Pyrenees. The remainder of ancient Gaul was known as the country where
the natives wore their long hair hanging,--literally the _Gaule
chevelue_.
Through the times of Cæsar the divisions became indifferently known by
various names, until with Augustus there came to be four great
divisions, the Narbonnaise, Aquitaine, Lyonnaise and Belgique.
Towards the fifth century the Vascons, or Gascons, the ancient
inhabitants of Spanish Cantabria, established themselves snugly in these
well protected valleys of the Pyrenees. They warred with the Saracens,
and for five centuries were in a continual uproar of battle and
bloodshed.
Among themselves, the dukes and counts of Gascogne quarrelled
continuously, and disputed the sovereignty of the country with the
Vicomtes de Béarn.
In the ninth century a treaty was consummated which assured to Bernard,
Comte d'Armagnac, the Comté de Gascogne, and to Gaston de Centulle the
suzerainty of Béarn, while Navarre came by heritage to the Comtes de
Champagne, and in the thirteenth century to Philippe-le-Bel as a dot
with Jeanne, his wife. In the same manner it came to the house of Evreux
through Jeanne II, daughter of Louis-le-Hutin.
With the marriage of Blanche II, the grand-daughter of Jeanne II,
Navarre passed to the king of Aragon and to Eléonore, and later with the
Comté de Foix et de Bigorre and the Vicomté de Béarn, went to Jean,
Sieur d'Albret, with whom the history of the kingdom is so commonly
associated.
Jean d'Albret II, by reason of his marriage with Catherine of Béarn, the
heiress to the crown of Navarre, became joint ruler of the kingdom. He
was a gentle, easy-going prince, liberal, but frivolous, and loved no
serious occupation in life. He was popular to excess and dined, say the
chronicles, "without ceremony, with any one who asked him," a custom
which still obtains with many who are not descendants of a king of
Navarre. He danced frequently in public with the wives and daughters of
his subjects, a democratic proceeding which was not liked by his court,
who told him that he "danced on a volcano." This in a measure was true,
for he lost that part of the kingdom known as Spanish Navarre to
Ferdinand of Aragon.
Up to the commencement of the sixteenth century, the Royaume de Navarre
occupied both slopes of the Pyrenees and had Pamplona for its capital,
but in 1512, Ferdinand the Catholic, of Aragon, with the approbation of
the Pope, usurped most of the territory and left the king of Navarre,
the legitimate sovereign, only a small morsel eight leagues long by five
in width, with St. Jean-Pied-de-Port as its principal city.
A picturesque figure was Ferdinand, King of Aragon on his own part, King
of Castille by his wife Isabella, and King of Grenada by conquest; "a
heritor of three bastard crowns," he was called. At his death he was
succeeded by the infamous and cruel Charles V.
That which remained, French Navarre, was the portion of the united
kingdom lying on the French slopes of the Pyrenees. The loss of the
Spanish province was really due to the excommunication of Jean d'Albret
and Catherine by the Pope, thus giving the Catholic Ferdinand power to
compel a division.
The then ruling monarchs of Béarn and Navarre came to a sad realization
of their position. It was this circumstance which gave birth to one of
the famous _mots_ of history. "If we had not been born, we would not
have lost Navarre," said the unhappy Catherine to her spouse.
Previously, though, the region had been known as Basse-Navarre; and in
Spanish, Navarra Baja, and had had its _États_ or _Parlement_, and its
own special laws. Its _Parlement_ was composed of three orders, the
clergy, the noblesse and the _tiers_. Two great families stood out in
Basse-Navarre in these times above all others, the Seigneurs de Grammont
et Bidache and those of Lux and Ostabat. Béarn at the time was composed
of twelve ancient baronies, the bishoprics of Lescar and Oloron, and the
seigneuries of Navailles, Andoins, Lescun, Correze, Miossens, Arros and
Lons.
French Navarre--the Navarre-Française--was by this time a reality and
has been variously known since to historians; to the French as
Basse-Navarre and Navarre du Nord; to the Spaniards as Navarra Baja; to
the Basques as Navarra-deca-ports, and Navarra-françia; and to the
kings of France as the Royaume de Navarre.
Henri, son of Jean d'Albret, married the first Marguerite de Valois,
sister of François I, the "Marguerite of Marguerites." The only daughter
of this marriage was wed with Antoine Bourbon-Vendome and became the
mother of Henri IV.
By an edict of 1620 Louis XIII united the crown of France with that of
Navarre, Béarn and the other patrimonial states. Such is the evolution
of the little Royaume de Navarre and its incorporation into French
domain.
The king of Navarre's title was a formidable one, and even included the
word monsieur. Princes, bishops, popes and saints were at that time
known as Monsieur, a title even more dignified than Monseigneur, and the
"_Messieurs de France_" were as much of the noblesse of France as were
the "_Milords d'Angleterre_" of the nobility of England.
The full title of the king of Navarre in the fifteenth century was as
follows:--
Monsieur François-Phoebus, par la grace de Dieu, Roi de Navarre, Duc
de Nemours, de Guandi, de Montblanc et de Penafiel, et, par la même
grace Comte de Foix, Seigneur de Béarn, Comte de Bigorre et de
Rivegorce, Vicomte de Castelbon, de Marsau, Gavardan et Nébouzan,
Seigneur de la ville de Valaguer et Pair de France.
[Illustration:
Catherine de Foix et Jean III d'Albret
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---+--------+-----+----+-----+-------+----------+--------------+---
| | | | | | | |
Madeleine Jean Andre | | | | |
| | | | |
+------------+ +--+ | | |
| | | | |
Henri I Isabelle, Anne, Catherine, "Fils naturel"
de Béarn et II de Married Married who became of Jean III
Navarre--d'Albret. René, Jean, the abbesse d'Albret.
1517-1555. Vicomte Comte of La He became
Married, in 1527, de Rohan d'Astarac Trinite at Évêque de
Marguerite Caen in Comminges
d'Angouleme, Normandy
Duchesse
d'Alençon
[Maltese Cross]1549
|
+--------+----------+-------------+---------------+
| | | |
Jeanne d'Albret. Jean Princesse Princesse
1555-1572.
Married (1), in 1541,
Guillaume Duc de Cleves.
This marriage annulled 1545.
Married (2), in 1548,
Antoine de Bourbon.
[Maltese Cross]1562
|
--------+---+-----------+--------+-------+--------+--------+--------
| | | | | |
Henri de Bourbon Louis | Princesse | |
Duc de Beaumont Comte de Marl | | |
| | |
| | |
+--------------------+ +------------+ |
| | |
Henri II de Béarn, Catherine, Charles
III de Navarre (1572) et who married "Batart du
IV de France, Henri de Roi."
Called le Grand. Lorraine, He also became
Married (1), in 1572, Duc de Bar Évêque de
Marguerite de Valois Comminges
whom he repudiated and afterwards
in 1599, (she died 1615 Archevêque
sans posterity). de Rouen
Married (2), in 1600,
Marie de Medici
[Maltese Cross]1642
|
Louis XIII
Roi de France et
Navarre 1610.
Union of the two Kingdoms,
France and Navarre 1620.
]
[Illustration: _The Arms of Navarre_]
The arms of Navarre have ever been a mystery to antiquarians, but it
seems there is some semblance of Basque tradition and folk-lore in it
all, in that there is an old Basque game which is played upon a diagram,
or scale, traced upon the ground, and following the principal outlines
of the blazonings of the ancient kings of Navarre. Which came first, the
hen or the egg?
Authorities differ, and so it is with the Basque game of _laz Marellas_,
and the royal arms of the Navarres. Labastide says the game came down
from the time when the Basques of to-day were originally Phoenicians.
If this be so, the royal arms were but a copy of something that had gone
before. Certainly they form as curious and enigmatic an armorial device
as is found in heraldry.
The Royaume de Navarre has so completely disappeared and been so
absorbed by France that it takes a considerable knowledge of geography
and history to be able to place it precisely upon the map of modern
Europe, hidden away as it was in what are now the two arrondissements of
Bayonne and Saint-Palais.
They were a noble race, the men of Béarn and Navarre, the Basques
especially, and the questionable traits of the _cagots_ and gypsies have
left but little impress on the masses.
Henri IV, faithful in his sentiment for his first subjects, would have
shown them his predilection by allowing them to remain an independent
monarchy. He would not that the kingdom of his mother be mingled with
that of France, but intriguing counsel prevailed and the alliance was
made, though Navarre escaped conquest and was still ruled by the sceptre
of its legitimate sovereign.
How near France came to being ruled by Navarre instead of Navarre by
France is recalled by the following bit of recorded history. When
Philippe V (le Long) came to the throne of France (1316) his right was
contested by many princes. Among others the crown was claimed by Jeanne
de Navarre, but an assembly of bishops, seigneurs and bourgeois of Paris
declared for the Salic law--which proscribed the right to rule the
French to one of the female sex, and this against feudal rights as they
were known and protected in the satellite kingdoms surrounding the royal
domain. It was agreed later (by Philippe-le-Long) that if the widow of
Louis X should have another female child, the rights appertaining to
Navarre should belong to her and her stepsister Jeanne, making it an
independent monarchy again.
When Philippe-le-Bel came to the throne of France it was his wife Jeanne
who, by common consent, administered the affairs of Navarre. She chased
the Aragonians and Castilians from her fair province, and put her people
into a state of security hitherto unknown. "She held," said Mézeray the
historian, "every one enchanted by her eyes, her ears, and her heart,
and she was equally eloquent, generous and liberal." A veritable paragon
of a woman evidently.
Henri II, son of Catherine and Jean d'Albret II, succeeded to the throne
of French Navarre at the age of thirteen. He followed the French king,
François, to Italy, and was made prisoner at the unfortunate battle of
Pavia, finally escaping through a ruse.
François Premier, king of France, and Henri d'Albret, king of Navarre,
each nourished an equal aversion for the king of Spain, the prime cause
of that fateful day at Pavia. The first hated the Spanish monarch as a
rival; the second as the usurper of his lands. They united arms, but the
battle of Pavia, when "all was lost save honour," gave matters such a
setback that naught but time could overcome them.
It was Henri II's marriage with Marguerite of Valois, the Duchesse
d'Alençon, in 1526, by which he acquired the Armagnac succession as a
gift from his brother-in-law, François Premier, that brought to
Navarre's crown nearly all of Guyenne. In 1555 the young king died at
Pau, leaving a daughter, Jeanne d'Albret, who with her second husband,
Antoine de Bourbon, Duc de Vendome, succeeded to the throne.
The new rulers did not attempt or accomplish much, save to embrace
Calvinism with zeal. Suffice to recall the well-known facts that Antoine
died in 1562 from a wound received in the siege of Rouen, and that
Jeanne herself died from the poison of the wicked Catherine de Medici's
gloves at Paris.
Their son, Henri III of Navarre, was the Henri IV of France. Born at Pau
in 1553, he was first only the Comte de Viane. When he came to Paris he
would not have allied his Pyrenean possessions with those of France but
for the pressure brought to bear upon him. He declared that his
ancestral lands should remain entirely separate, but the procureur
general, La Guesle, forced his hand, and it was thus that the Royaume de
France became augmented by Basse-Navarre, the Comtés d'Armagnac, Foix,
d'Albret and Bigorre, the Duché de Vendome, the Comté de Périgord and
the Vicomté de Limoges.
The story of Béarn and Navarre, for most folk, begins with those kings
of Navarre who were also kings of France. The first of these was the
white-plumed knight Henri III, Prince of Béarn, who became Henri IV of
France. The France of the Valois, which strain died with Henri III,
murdered by the black monk Clement, was much more narrow in its confines
than now. In the northeast it lacked Lorraine, Franche Comté, Bresse,
Dombes and Bucey; in the south Roussillon, Béarn and Basse-Navarre, and
there was a sort of quasi-independence observed by the former great
states of Bretagne, Bourgogne and Dauphiné.
With the coming of the king of Navarre to the throne of France, the
three great movements which took place in the religious situation, the
manners and customs of the court and noblesse, and in the aspirations of
the people gave an aspect of unity and solidarity to France.
The religious question was already momentous when Henri IV was crowned,
and Protestantism and its followers were gaining ground everywhere,
though the real Français--the Guises and the Bourbons, the princes of
Lorraine and the "princes of the blood"--were on the side of
Catholicism, and had their swords ever unsheathed in its behalf.
The court, in the midst of this great religious quarrel, was also in a
state of transition. Catherine and her gay troupe of damsels had
passed, as also had Charles IX, who died shortly after the Huguenot
massacre of St. Bartholomew's night. His brother, and successor to the
throne, Henri III, Duc d'Anjou, was a weakling, and he too died
miserably at the point of the assassin's knife, and few seemed to regret
the passing of him who devoted himself more to monkeys, parrots and
little dogs than to statecraft. Henri of Béarn was the strong man in
public view, and of him great things were expected by all parties in
spite of his professed Calvinism of the time.
It was during the reign of the feeble-witted Henri III that Henri, king
of Navarre, became the titular head of the Huguenots; thus abjuring the
Catholic religion that he had previously embraced under pressure. The
Protestant League became a powerful institution, and the _gentilshommes_
of Béarn, Guienne, Poitou and Dauphiné became captains in the cause,
just as the _gentilshommes_ of Picardie and Artois became captains of
Catholicism. The whole scheme was working itself out on traditional
hereditary lines; it was the Protestantism of the mountains against the
Catholicism of the lowlands. As for the people, the masses, they simply
stood by and wondered, ready for any innovation which augured for the
better.
[Illustration: _Arms of Henri IV of France and Navarre_]
This was the state of France upon the coming of Henri IV to the throne,
and the joining of Basse-Navarre and Béarn to the royal domain.
Unquestionably it is a fact that the feudality in France ceased only
with the passing of Louis XI, and the change in the Pyrenean states was
contemporary. The Renaissance made great headway in France, after its
importation from Italy at the hands of Charles VIII and his followers.
Constantinople had been taken; art and letters were everywhere in the
ascendency; printing had been invented; and America was on the verge of
being discovered. The golden days of the new civilization were about
dawning.
The Renaissance here in Béarn and Navarre, under the shadow of the
Pyrenees, flowered as it did nowhere else out of Italy, so far as its
application to life and letters went. Many celebrated litterateurs and
poets had been persecuted and chased from France, and here they found a
welcome refuge. To remark only two, Desperriers and Marat, it is
interesting to note that the sympathetic Marguerite of Navarre took them
under her patronage, and even made them _valets de chambre_.
Marguerite's passions were, according to the historians, noble, but
according to the romancers they were worldly. Said Erasmus: "_Elle
était chaste et peu sujette aux passions_," and contemporary historians
agree with him; while Marat, the poet _valet de chambre_, wrote the
following:--
"Que je suis serf d'un monstre fort étrange,
Monstre je dis, car pour tout vrai, elle a
Corps féminin, coeur d'homme et tête d'ange."
In 1574 Brantome, the chronicler, had finished his military career and
was retained by Henri III of France as a gentleman of the bed-chamber.
Here he passed through many affairs of intrigue and the heart. In 1581
he received a mission to go and interview the king of Navarre, for which
he received the sum of six hundred _écus soleil_. What the subject of
this mission was no one knows; there is no further mention of it either
in the works of Brantôme or the letters of the king of Navarre, but at
any rate he became enamoured of Marguerite, and his account of his first
meeting with her is one of the classic documents of French history. "I
dare to say," said he, "that she was _si belle et si admirable_ that all
the three hundred persons of the assembly were ravished and astounded."
It is on Marguerite of Navarre, no less than on the plumed Henry, that
the popular interest in Navarre and its history has been built.
_A Brief Chronology of French and Spanish Navarre_
Spanish Navarre came to be annexed to the Spanish crown in 1512 through
the efforts and energies of Ferdinand the Catholic king of Aragon.
French Navarre virtually came to France in 1328, but its independent
monarchs since that time have been:
Jeanne II (et Philippe) 1328
Charles II (le Mauvais) 1349
Charles III 1387
Jean II (et Blanche) 1425
Eléonore 1479
Phoebus de Foix 1479
Catherine (et Jean d'Albret II) 1484
Henri II 1517
Jeanne d'Albret (et Antoine de Bourbon) 1555
Henri III 1589-1610
It was Henri III of Navarre who became Henri IV of France and it was he
who first brought the little kingdom to the crown of France, the double
title being borne by his successors up to the abdication of Charles X in
1830.