[Illustration: Henry III----388]
Though elected King of Poland on the 9th of May, 1573, Henry, Duke of
Anjou, had not yet left Paris at the end of the summer. Impatient at his
slowness to depart, Charles IX. said, with his usual oath, “By God’s
death! my brother or I must at once leave the kingdom: my mother shall
not succeed in preventing it.” “Go,” said Catherine to Henry; “you will
not be away long.” She foresaw, with no great sorrow one would say, the
death of Charles IX., and her favorite son’s accession to the throne of
France. Having arrived in Poland on the 25th of January, 1574, and been
crowned at Cracow on the 24th of February, Henry had been scarcely four
months King of Poland when he was apprised, about the middle of June,
that his brother Charles had lately died, on the 30th of May, and that he
was King of France. “Do not waste your time in deliberating,” said his
French advisers; “you must go and take possession of the throne of France
without abdicating that of Poland: go at once and without fuss.” Henry
followed this counsel. He left Cracow, on the 18th of June, with a very
few attendants. Some Poles were apprehensive of his design, but said
nothing about it. He went a quarter of a league on foot to reach the
horses which were awaiting him, set off at a gallop, rode all night, and
arrived next day early on the frontier of Moravia, an Austrian province.
The royal flight created a great uproar at Cracow; the noblemen, and even
the peasants, armed with stakes and scythes, set out in pursuit of their
king. They did not come up with him; they fell in with his chancellor
only, Guy du Faur, Sieur de Pibrac, who had missed him at the appointed
meeting-place, and who, whilst seeking to rejoin him, had lost himself in
the forests and marshes, concealed himself in the osiers and reeds, and
been obliged now and then to dip his head, in the mud to avoid the arrows
discharged on all sides by the peasants in pursuit of the king. Being
arrested by some people who were for taking him back to Cracow and paying
him out for his complicity in his master’s flight, he with great
difficulty obtained his release and permission to continue his road.
Destined to become more celebrated by his writings and by his Quatrains
moraux than by his courtly adventures, Pibrac rejoined King Henry at
Vienna, where the Emperor Maximilian II. received him with great
splendor. Delivered from fatigue and danger, Henry appeared to think of
nothing but resting and diverting himself; he tarried to his heart’s
content at Vienna, Venice, Ferrara, Mantua, and Turin. He was everywhere
welcomed with brilliant entertainments, which the Emperor Maximilian and
the senators of Venice accompanied with good advice touching the
government of France in her religious troubles; and the nominal sovereign
of two kingdoms took nearly three months in going from that whence he had
fled to that of which he was about to take possession. Having started
from Cracow on the 18th of June, 1574, he did not arrive until the 5th of
September at Lyons, whither the queen-mother had sent his brother, the
Duke of Alencon, and his brother-in-law, the King of Navarre, to receive
him, going herself as far as Bourgoin in Dauphiny, in order to be the
first to see her darling son again.
The king’s entry into France caused, says De Thou, a strange revulsion in
all minds. “During the lifetime of Charles IX., none had seemed more
worthy of the throne than Henry, and everybody desired to have him for
master. But scarcely had he arrived when disgust set in to the extent of
auguring very ill of his reign. There was no longer any trace in this
prince, who had been nursed, so to speak, in the lap of war, of that
manly and warlike courage which had been so much admired. He no longer
rode on horseback; he did not show himself amongst his people, as his
predecessors had been wont to do; he was only to be seen shut up with a
few favorites in a little painted boat which went up and down the Saone
he no longer took his meals without a balustrade, which did not allow him
to be approached any Hearer; and if anybody had any petitions to present
to him, they had to wait for him as he came out from dinner, when he took
them as he hurried by. For the greater part of the day he remained
closeted with some young folks, who alone had the prince’s ear, without
any body’s knowing how they had arrived at this distinction, whilst the
great, and those whose services were known, could scarcely get speech of
him. Showiness and effeminacy had taken the place of the grandeur and
majesty which had formerly distinguished our kings.” [De Thou, _Histoire
universelle,_ t. vii. p. 134.]
[Illustration: Indolence of Henry III---390]
“The time was ill chosen by Henry III. for this change of habits and for
becoming an indolent and voluptuous king, set upon taking his pleasure in
his court and isolating himself from his people. The condition and ideas
of France were also changing, but to issue in the assumption of quite a
different character and to receive development in quite a different
direction. Catholics or Protestants, agents of the king’s government or
malcontents, all were getting a taste for and adopting the practice of
independence and a vigorous and spontaneous activity. The bonds of the
feudal system were losing their hold, and were not yet replaced by those
of a hierarchically organized administration. Religious creeds and
political ideas were becoming, for thoughtful and straightforward
spirits, rules of conduct, powerful motives of action, and they furnished
the ambitious with effective weapons. The theologians of the Catholic
church and of the Reformed churches--on one side the Cardinal of
Lorraine, Cardinals Campeggi and Sadolet, and other learned priests or
prelates, and on the other side Calvin, who had been nursed, so to speak,
in the lap of war, of that manly and warlike courage which had been so
much admired. He no longer rode on horseback; he did not show himself
amongst his people, as his predecessors had been wont to do; he was only
to be seen shut up with a few favorites in a little painted boat which
went up and down the Saone he no longer took his meals without a
balustrade, which did not allow him to be approached any nearer; and if
anybody had any petitions to present to him, they had to wait for him as
he came out from dinner, when he took them as he hurried by. For the
greater part of the day he remained closeted with some young folks, who
alone had the prince’s ear, without anybody’s knowing how they had
arrived at this distinction, whilst the great, and those whose services
were known, could scarcely get speech of him. Showiness and effeminacy
had taken the place of the grandeur and majesty which had formerly
distinguished our kings.” [De Thou, Histoire universelle, t. vii.
p. 134.]
The time was ill chosen by Henry III. for this change of habits and for
becoming an indolent and voluptuous king, set upon taking his pleasure in
his court and isolating himself from his people. The condition and
ideas of France were also changing, but to issue in the assumption of
quite a different character and to receive development in quite a
different direction. Catholics or Protestants, agents of the king’s
government or malcontents, all were getting a taste for and adopting the
practice of independence and a vigorous and spontaneous activity. The
bonds of the feudal system were losing their hold, and were not yet
replaced by those of a hierarchically organized administration.
Religious creeds and political ideas were becoming, for thoughtful and
straightforward spirits, rules of conduct, powerful motives of action,
and they furnished the ambitious with effective weapons. The theologians
of the Catholic church and of the Reformed churches--on one side the
Cardinal of Lorraine, Cardinals Campeggi and Sadolet, and other learned
priests or prelates, and on the other side Calvin, Theodore de Beze,
Melancthon, and Bucer--were working with zeal to build up into systems of
dogma their interpretations of the great facts of Christianity, and they
succeeded in implanting a passionate attachment to them in their flocks.
Independently of these religious controversies, superior minds, profound
lawyers, learned scholars were applying their energies to founding, on a
philosophical basis and historic principles, the organization of
governments and the reciprocal rights of princes and peoples. Ramus,
one of the last and of the most to be lamented victims of the
St. Bartholomew; Francis Hotman, who, in his Franco-Gallia, aspired to
graft the new national liberties upon the primitive institutions of the
Franks; Hubert Languet, the eloquent author of the _Vindicice contra
tyrannos, or de la Puissance legitime du Prince cur le Peuple et du
Peuple sur le Prince;_ John Bodin, the first, in original merit, amongst
the publicists of the sixteenth century, in his _six livres de LA
REPUBLIQUE;_ all these eminent men boldly tackled the great questions of
political liberty or of legislative reforms. _Le Contre-un,_ that
republican treatise by De la Boetie, written in 1546, and circulated, at
first, in manuscript only, was inserted, between 1576 and 1578, in the
_Memoires de l’Etat de France,_ and passionately extolled by the
independent thinker Michael de Montaigne in his Essais, of which nine
editions were published between 1580 and 1598, and evidently very much
read in the world of letters. An intellectual movement so active and
powerful could not fail to have a potent effect upon political life.
Before the St. Bartholomew, the great religious and political parties,
the Catholic and the Protestant, were formed and at grips; the house of
Lorraine at the head of the Catholics, and the house of Bourbon, Conde,
and Coligny at the head of the Protestants, with royalty trying feebly
and vainly to maintain between them a hollow peace. To this stormy
and precarious, but organized and clearly defined condition, the
St. Bartholomew had caused anarchy to succeed. Protestantism,
vanquished but not destroyed, broke up into provincial and municipal
associations without recognized and dominant heads, without discipline
or combination in respect of either their present management or their
ultimate end. Catholicism, though victorious, likewise underwent a
break-up; men of mark, towns and provinces, would not accept the
St. Bartholomew and its consequences; a new party, the party of the
policists, sprang up, opposed to the principle and abjuring the practice
of persecution, having no mind to follow either the Catholics in their
outrages or royalty in its tergiversations, and striving to maintain in
the provinces and the towns, where it had the upper hand, enough of order
and of justice to at least keep at a distance the civil war which was
elsewhere raging. Languedoc owed to Marshal de Damville, second son of
the Constable Anne de Montmorency, this comparatively bearable position.
But the degree of security and of local peace which it offered the people
was so imperfect, so uncertain, that the break-up of the country and of
the state went still farther. In a part of Languedoc, in the Vivarais,
the inhabitants, in order to put their habitations and their property in
safety, resolved to make a league amongst themselves, without consulting
any authority, not even Marshal de Damville, the peace-seeking governor
of their province. Their treaty of alliance ran, that arms should be
laid down throughout the whole of the Vivarais; that none, foreigner or
native, should be liable to trouble for the past; that tillers of the
soil and traders should suffer no detriment in person or property; that
all hostilities should cease in the towns and all forays in the country;
that there should everywhere be entire freedom for commerce; that cattle
which had been lifted should be immediately restored gratis; that
concerted action should be taken to get rid of the garrisons out of the
country and to raze the fortresses, according as the public weal might
require; and finally that whosoever should dare to violate these
regulations should be regarded as a traitor and punished as a disturber
of the public peace. “As soon as the different authorities in the state,
Marshal de Damville as well as the rest, were informed of this novelty,”
says De Thou, “they made every effort to prevent it from taking effect.
‘Nothing could be of more dangerous example,’ they said, ‘than to suffer
the people to make treaties in this way and on their own authority,
without waiting for the consent of his Majesty or of those who
represented him in the provinces.’ The folks of the Vivarais, on the
contrary, presumed to justify themselves by saying that the step they had
taken did not in any way infringe the king’s authority; that it was
rather an opening given by them for securely establishing tranquillity in
the kingdom; that nothing was more advantageous or could contribute more
towards peace than to raze all those fortresses set up in the heart of
the state, which were like so many depots of revolt; that by a diminution
of the garrisons the revenues of his Majesty would be proportionately
augmented; that, at any rate, there would result this advantage, that the
lands, which formed almost the whole wealth of the kingdom, would be
cultivated, that commerce would flourish, and that the people, delivered
from fear of the many scoundrels who, found a retreat in those places,
would at last be able to draw breath after the many misfortunes they had
experienced.”
It was in this condition of disorganization and red-hot anarchy that
Henry III., on his return from Poland, and after the St. Bartholomew,
found France; it was in the face of all these forces, full of life, but
scattered and excited one against another, that, with the aid of his
mother, Catherine, he had to re-establish unity in the state, the
effectiveness of the government, and the public peace. It was not a task
for which the tact of an utterly corrupted woman and an irresolute prince
sufficed. What could the artful manoeuvrings of Catherine and the
waverings of Henry III. do towards taming both Catholics and Protestants
at the same time, and obliging them to live at peace with one another,
under one equitable and effective power? Henry IV. was as yet unformed,
nor was his hour yet come for this great work. Henry III. and Catherine
de’ Medici failed in it completely; their government of fifteen years
served only to make them lose their reputation for ability, and to
aggravate for France the evils which it was their business to heal. In
1575, a year only after Henry III.’s accession, revolt penetrated to the
royal household. The Duke of Alencon, the king’s younger brother, who,
since his brother’s coronation, took the title of Duke of Anjou, escaped
on the 15th of September from the Louvre by a window, and from Paris by a
hole made in the wall of circumvallation. He fled to Dreux, a town in
his appanage, and put himself at the head of a large number of
malcontents, nobles and burgesses, Catholic and Reformed, mustered around
him under this name of no religious significance between the two old
parties. On the 17th of September, in his manifesto, he gave as reasons
for his revolt, excessive taxation, waste of the public revenues, the
feebleness of the royal authority, incapable as it was of putting a stop
to the religious troubles, and the disgrace which had been inflicted upon
himself “by pernicious ministers who desire to have the government in
their sole patronage, excluding from it the foremost and the most
illustrious of the court, and devouring all that there is remaining to
the poor people.” He protested his devotion to the king his brother, at
the same time declaring war against the Guises.
King Henry of Navarre, testifying little sympathy with the Duke of Anjou,
remained at court, abandoning himself apparently to his pleasures alone.
Two of his faithful servants (the poet-historian D’Aubigne was one of
them) heard him one night sighing as he lay in bed, and humming half
aloud this versicle from the eighty-eighth Psalm:--
“Removed from friends, I sigh alone,
In a loathed dungeon laid, where none
A visit will vouchsafe to me,
Confined past hope of liberty.”
“Sir,” said D’Aubigne eagerly, “it is true, then, that the Sprit of God
worketh and dwelleth in you still? You sigh unto God because of the
absence of your friends and faithful servants; and all the while they are
together, sighing because of yours and laboring for your freedom. But
you have only tears in your eyes, and they, arms in hand, are fighting
your enemies. As for us two, we were talking of taking to flight
tomorrow, when your voice made us draw the curtain. Bethink you, sir,
that, after us, the hands that will serve you would not dare refuse to
employ poison and the knife.” Henry, much moved, resolved to follow the
example of the Duke of Anjou. His departure was fixed for the 3d of
February, 1576. He went and slept at Senlis; hunted next day very early,
and, on his return from hunting, finding his horses baited and ready,
“What news?” he asked. “Sir,” said D’Aubigne, “we are betrayed; the king
knows all; the road to death and shame is Paris; that to life and glory
is anywhere else.” “That is more than enough; away!” replied Henry.
They rode all night, and arrived without misadventure at Alencon. Two
hundred and fifty gentlemen, having been apprised in time, went thither
to join the King of Navarre. He pursued his road in their company. From
Senlis to the Loire he was silent but when he had crossed the river,
“Praised be God, who has delivered me!” he cried; “at Paris they were the
death of my mother; there they killed the admiral and my best servants;
and they had no mind to do any better by me, if God had not had me in his
keeping. I return thither no more unless I am dragged. I regret only
two things that I have left behind at Paris--mass and my wife. As for
mass, I will try to do without it; but as for my wife, I cannot; I mean
to see her again.” He disavowed the appearances of Catholicism he had
assumed, again made open profession of Protestantism by holding at the
baptismal font, in the conventicle, the daughter of a physician amongst
his friends. Then he reached Bearn, declaring that he meant to remain
there independent and free. A few days before his departure he had
written to one of his Bearnese friends, “The court is the strangest you
ever saw. We are almost always ready to cut one another’s throats. We
wear daggers, shirts of mail, and very often the whole cuirass under the
cape. I am only waiting for the opportunity to deliver a little battle,
for they tell me they will kill me, and I want to be beforehand.”
Mesdames de Carnavalet and de Sauve, two of his fair friends, had warned
him that, far from giving him the lieutenant-generalship, which had been
so often promised him, it had been decided to confer this office on the
king’s brother, in order to get him back to court and seize his person as
soon as he arrived.
It was the increasing preponderance of the Guises, at court as well as in
the country, which caused the two princes to take this sudden resolution.
Since Henry III.’s coming to the throne, war had gone on between the
Catholics and the Protestants, but languidly and with frequent
suspensions through local and shortlived truces. The king and the
queen-mother would have been very glad that the St. Bartholomew should be
short-lived also, as a necessary but transitory crisis; it had rid them
of their most formidable adversaries, Coligny and the Reformers of note
who were about him. Henry and Catherine aspired to no more than resuming
their policy of manoeuvring and wavering between the two parties engaged
in the struggle; but it was not for so poor a result that the ardent
Catholics had committed the crime of the St. Bartholomew; they promised
themselves from it the decisive victory of their church and of their
supremacy. Henry de Guise came forward as their leader in this grand
design; there are to be read, beneath a portrait of him done in the
sixteenth century, these verses, also of that date:--
“The virtue, greatness, wisdom from on high,
Of yonder duke, triumphant far and near,
Do make bad men to shrink with coward fear,
And God’s own Catholic church to fructify.
In armor clad, like maddened Mars he moves;
The trembling Huguenot cowers at his glance;
A prop for holy church is his good lance;
His eye is ever mild to those he loves.”
Guise cultivated very carefully this ardent confidence on the part of
Catholic France; he recommended to his partisans attention to little
pious and popular practices. “I send you some paternosters [meaning, in
the plural, the beads of a chaplet, or the chaplet entire],” he wrote to
his wife, Catherine of Cleves; “you will have strings made for them and
string them together. I don’t know whether you dare offer some of them
to the queens and to my lady mother. Ask advice of Mesdames de Retz and
de Villeroy about it.” The flight and insurrection of the Duke of Anjou
and the King of Navarre furnished the Duke of Guise with a very natural
occasion for re-engaging in the great struggle between Catholicism and
Protestantism, wherein the chief part belonged to him. Let us recur, for
a moment, to the origin of that struggle and the part taken in it, at the
outset, by the princes of the house of Lorraine. “As early as the year
1562, twenty-six years before the affair of the barricades,” says M.
Vitet in the excellent introduction which he has put at the head of his
beautiful historic dramas from the last half of the sixteenth century,
“Cardinal Charles of Lorraine, being at the Council of Trent, conceived
the plan of a Holy League, or association of Catholics, which was to have
the triple object of defending, by armed force, the Romish church in
France, of obtaining for the cardinal’s brother, Duke Francis de Guise,
the lieutenant-generalship of the kingdom, and of helping him to ascend
the throne, in case the line of the Valois should become extinct. The
death of Duke Francis, murdered in front of Orleans by Poltrot, did not
permit the cardinal to carry out his plan. Five years afterwards, Henry
de Guise, eldest son of Francis, and then eighteen years of age, caused
to be drawn up, for the first time, a form of oath whereby the
dignitaries bound themselves to sacrifice their goods and lives in
defence of the Catholic religion in the face of and against all, except
the king, the royal family, and the princes of their connection. This
form was signed by the nobility of Champagne and Brie, a province of
which Henry de Guise was governor, and on the 25th of July, 1568, the
bishop and clergy of Troyes signed it likewise. The association is
named, in the form, _Holy League, Christian and royal_. Up to the year
1576 it remained secret, and did not cross the boundaries of Champagne.”
To this summary of M. Vitet’s may be added that independently of the
Champagnese league of 1568 and in the interval between 1568 and 1575
there had been formed, in some provinces and towns, other local
associations for the defence of the Catholic church against the heretics.
When, in 1575, first the Duke of Anjou and after him the King of Navarre
were seen flying from the court of Henry III. and commencing an
insurrection with the aid of a considerable body of German auxiliaries
and French refugees, already on French soil and on their way across
Champagne, the peril of the Catholic church appeared so grave and so
urgent that, in the threatened provinces, the Catholics devoted
themselves with ardor to the formation of a grand association for the
defence of their cause. Then and thus was really born the League, secret
at first, but, before long, publicly and openly proclaimed, which held so
important a place in the history of the sixteenth century. Picardy and
Champagne were the first scene of its formation; but in the neighboring
provinces the same travail took place and brought forth fruits. At
Paris, a burgess named La Roche-Blond, and devoted to the Guises, a
perfumer named Peter de la Bruyere and his son Matthew de la Bruyere,
councillor at the Chatelet, were, says De Thou, the first and most
zealous preachers of the Union. “At their solicitation,” continues the
austere magistrate, “all the debauchees there were in this great city,
all folks whose only hope was in civil war for the indulgence of their
libertinism or for a safe means of satisfying their avarice or their
ambition, enrolled themselves emulously in this force. Many, even of the
richest burgesses, whose hatred for Protestants blinded them so far as
not to see the dangers to which such associations expose public
tranquillity in a well-regulated state, had the weakness to join the
seditious.”
Many asked for time to consider, and, before making any engagement, they
went to see President de Thou [Christopher, premier president of the
Parliament of Paris since 1562, and father of the historian James
Augustus de Thou], informed him of these secret assemblies and all that
went on there, and begged him to tell them whether he approved of them,
and whether it was true that the court authorized them. M. de Thou
answered them at once, with that straightforwardness which was innate in
him, that these kinds of proceedings had not yet come to his knowledge,
that he doubted whether they had the approbation of his Majesty, and that
they would do wisely to hold aloof from all such associations. The
authority of this great man began to throw suspicion upon the designs of
the Unionists, and his reply prevented many persons from casting in their
lot with the party; but they who found themselves at the head of this
faction were not the folks to so easily give up their projects, for they
felt themselves too well supported at court and amongst the people. They
advised the Lorraine princes to have the Union promulgated in the
provinces, and to labor to make the nobility of the kingdom enter it.
Henry de Guise did not hesitate. At the same time that he avowed the
League and labored to propagate it, he did what was far more effectual
for its success: he entered the field and gained a victory. The German
allies and French refugees who had come to support Prince Henry de Conde
and the Duke of Anjou in their insurrection advanced into Champagne.
Guise had nothing ready, neither army nor money; he mustered in haste
three thousand horse, who were to be followed by a body of foot and a
moiety of the king’s guards. “I haven’t a son,” he wrote to his wife;
“take something out of the king’s chest, if there is anything there;
provided you know that there is something there, don’t be afraid; take it
and send it me at once. As for the _reitres,_ they are more afraid of us
than we of them; don’t be frightened about them on my account; the
greatest danger I shall run will be that a glass of wine may break in my
hand.” He set out in pursuit of the Germans, came up with them on the
10th of October, 1575, at Port-a-Binson, on the Marne, and ordered them
to be attacked by his brother the Duke of Mayenne, whom he supported
vigorously. They were broken and routed. The hunt, according to the
expression at the time, lasted all the rest of the day and during the
night. “A world of dead covers the field of battle,” wrote Guise. He
had himself been wounded: he went in obstinate pursuit of a mounted foe
whom he had twice touched with his sword, and who, in return, had fired
two pistol-shots, of which one took effect in the leg, and the other
carried away part of his cheek and his left ear. Thence came his name of
Henry the Scarred (_le Balafre_), which has clung to him in history.
[Illustration: Henry le Balafre----400]
Scarcely four years had rolled away since the St. Bartholomew. In vain
had been the massacre of ten thousand Protestants, according to the
lowest, and of one hundred thousand, according to the highest estimates,
besides nearly all the renowned chiefs of the party. Charles IX.’s
earnest prayer, “That none remain to reproach me!” was so far from
accomplishment that the war between Catholicism and Protestantism
recommenced in almost every part of France with redoubled passion, with a
new importance of character, and with symptoms of much longer duration
than at its first outbreak. Both parties had found leaders made, both
from their position and their capacity, to command them. Admiral Coligny
was succeeded by the King of Navarre, who was destined to become Henry
IV.; and Duke Francis of Guise by his son Henry, if not as able, at any
rate as brave a soldier, and a more determined Catholic than he. Amongst
the Protestants, Sully and Da Plessis-Mornay were assuming shape and
importance by the side of the King of Navarre. Catherine de’ Medici
placed at her son’s service her Italian adroitness, her maternal
devotion, and an energy rare for a woman between sixty and seventy years
of age, for forty-three years a queen, and worn out by intrigue, and
business, and pleasure. Finally, to the question of religion, the
primary cause of the struggle, was added a question of kingship, kept in
the background, but ever present in thought and deed: which of the three
houses of Valois, Bourbon, and Lorraine should remain in or enter upon
possession of the throne of France. The interests and the ambition of
families and of individuals were playing their part simultaneously with
the controversies and the passions of creed.
This state of things continued for twelve years, from 1576 to 1588, with
constant alternations of war, truce, and precarious peace, and in the
midst of constant hesitation, on the part of Henry III., between alliance
with the League, commanded by the Duke of Guise, and adjustment with the
Protestants, of whom the King of Navarre was every day becoming the more
and more avowed leader. Between 1576 and 1580, four treaties of peace
were concluded; in 1576, the peace called Monsieur’s, signed at Chastenay
in Orleanness; in 1577, the peace of Bergerac or of Poitiers; in 1579,
the peace of Nerac; in 1580, the peace of Fleix in Perigord. In
November, 1576, the states-general were convoked and assembled at Blois,
where they sat and deliberated up to March, 1577, without any important
result. Neither these diplomatic conventions nor these national
assemblies had force enough to establish a real and lasting peace between
the two parties, for the parties themselves would not have it; in vain
did Henry III. make concessions and promises of liberty to the
Protestants; he was not in a condition to guarantee their execution and
make it respected by their adversaries. At heart neither Protestants nor
Catholics were for accepting mutual liberty; not only did they both
consider themselves in possession of all religious truth, but they also
considered themselves entitled to impose it by force upon their
adversaries. The discovery (and the term is used advisedly, so slow to
come and so long awaited has been the fact which it expresses), the
discovery of the legitimate separation between the intellectual world and
the political world, and of the necessity, also, of having the
intellectual world free in order that it may not make upon the political
world a war which, in the inevitable contact between them, the latter
could not support for long, this grand and salutary discovery, be it
repeated, and its practical influence in the government of people cannot
be realized save in communities already highly enlightened and
politically well ordered. Good order, politically, is indispensable
if liberty, intellectually, is to develop itself regularly and do the
community more good than it causes of trouble and embarrassment. They
only who have confidence in human intelligence sincerely admit its right
to freedom; and confidence in human intelligence is possible only in the
midst of a political regimen which likewise gives the human community the
guarantees whereof its interests and its lasting security have absolute
need. The sixteenth century was a long way from these conditions of
harmony between the intellectual world and the political world, the
necessity of which is beginning to be understood and admitted by only the
most civilized and best governed amongst modern communities. It is one
of the most tardy and difficult advances that people have to accomplish
in their life of labor. The sixteenth century helped France to make
considerable strides in civilization and intellectual development; but
the eighteenth and nineteenth have taught her how great still, in the art
of governing and being governed as a free people, are her children’s want
of foresight and inexperience, and, to what extent they require a strong
and sound organization of political freedom in order that they may
without danger enjoy intellectual freedom, its pleasures and its glories.
From 1576 to 1588, Henry III. had seen the difficulties of his government
continuing and increasing. His attempt to maintain his own independence
and the mastery of the situation between Catholics and Protestants, by
making concessions and promises at one time to the former and at another
to the latter, had not succeeded; and in 1584 it became still more
difficult to practise. On the 10th of June in that year Henry III.’s
brother, the Duke of Anjou, died at Chateau-Thierry. By this death the
leader of the Protestants, Henry, King of Navarre, became lawful heir to
the throne of France. The Leaguers could not stomach that prospect. The
Guises turned it to formidable account. They did not hesitate to make
the future of France a subject of negotiation with Philip II. of Spain,
at that time her most dangerous enemy in Europe. By a secret convention
concluded at Joinville on the 31st of December, 1584, between Philip and
the Guises, it was stipulated that at the death of Henry III. the crown
should pass to Charles, Cardinal of Bourbon, sixty-four years of age, the
King of Navarre’s uncle, who, in order to make himself king, undertook to
set aside his nephew’s hereditary right, and forbid, absolutely,
heretical worship in France. He published on the 31st of March, 1585,
a declaration wherein he styled himself premier prince of the blood, and
conferred upon the Duke of Guise the title of lieutenant-general of the
League. By a bull of September 10, 1585, Sixtus V., but lately elected
pope, excommunicated the King of Navarre as a heretic and relapsed,
denying him any right of succession to the crown of France, and releasing
his Narvarrese subjects from their oath of fidelity. Sixtus V. did not
yet know what manner of man he was thus attacking. The King of Navarre
did not confine himself to protesting in France, on the 10th of June,
1585, against this act of the pope’s: he had his protest placarded at
Rome itself upon the statues of Pasquin and Marforio, and at the very
doors of the Vatican, referring the pope, as to the question of heresy,
to a council which he claimed at an early date, and at the same time
appealing against this alleged abuse of power to the court of peers of
France, “of whom,” said he, “I have the honor to be the premier.” The
whole of Italy, including Sixtus V. himself, a pope of independent mind
and proud heart, was struck with this energetic resistance on the part of
a petty king. “It would be a good thing,” said the pope to Marquis
Pasani, Henry III.’s ambassador, “if the king your master showed as much
resolution against his enemies as the King of Navarre shows against those
who attack him.” At the first moment Henry III. had appeared to unravel
the intentions of the League and to be disposed to resist it; by an edict
of March 28, 1585, he had ordered that its adherents should be
prosecuted; but Catherine de’ Medici frightened him with the war which
would infallibly be kindled, and in which he would have for enemies all
the Catholics, more irritated than ever. And Henry III. very easily took
fright. Catherine undertook to manage the recoil for him. “I care not
who likes it and who doesn’t,” she was wont to say in such cases. She
asked the Duke of Guise for an interview, which took place, first of all
at Epernay, and afterwards at Rheims. The hard demands of the Lorrainers
did not deter the queen-mother, and, on the 7th of July, 1585, a treaty
was concluded at Nemours between Henry III. and the League, to the effect
“that by an irrevocable edict the practice of the new religion should be
forbidden, and that there should henceforth be no other practice of
religion, throughout the realm of France, save that of the Catholic,
Apostolic, and Roman; that all the ministers should depart from the
kingdom within a month; that all the subjects of his Majesty should be
bound to live according to the Catholic religion and make profession
thereof within six months, on pain of confiscation both of person and
goods; that heretics, of whatsoever quality they might be, should be
declared incapable of holding benefices, public offices, positions, and
dignities; that the places which had been given in guardianship to them
for their security should be taken back again forthwith; and, lastly,
that the princes designated in the treaty, amongst whom were all the
Guises at the top, should receive as guarantee certain places to be held
by them for five years.”
This treaty was signed by all the negotiators, and specially by the
queen-mother, the Cardinals of Bourbon and Guise, and the Dukes of Guise
and Mayenne. It was the decisive act which made the war a war of
religion.
On the 18th of July following, Henry III., on his way to the Palace of
Justice to be present at the publication of the edict he had just issued
in virtue of this treaty with the League, said to the Cardinal of
Bourbon, “My dear uncle, against my conscience, but very willingly, I
published the edicts of pacification, because they were successful in
giving relief to my people; and now I am going to publish the revocation
of those edicts in accordance with my conscience, but very unwillingly,
because on its publication hangs the ruin of my kingdom and of my
people.” When he issued from the palace, cries of “Long live the king!”
were heard; “at which astonishment was expressed,” says Peter de
l’Estoile (t. i. p. 294), “because for a long time past no such favor
had been shown him. But it was discovered that these acclamations were
the doing of persons posted about by the Leaguers, and that, for doing
it, money had been given to idlers and sweetmeats to children.” Some
days afterwards, the King of Navarre received news of the treaty of
Nemours. He was staying near Bergerac, at the castle of the Lord of La
Force, with whom he was so intimate that he took with him none of his
household, as he preferred to be waited upon by M. de la Force’s own
staff. “I was so grievously affected by it,” said he himself at a later
period to M. de la Force, “that, as I pondered deeply upon it and held my
head supported upon my hand, my apprehensions of the woes I foresaw for
my country were such as to whiten one half of my mustache.” [_Memoires
du Due de la Force,_ t. i. p. 50.] Henry III., for his part, was but
little touched by the shouts of Long live the king! that he heard as he
left the palace; he was too much disquieted to be rejoiced at them. He
did not return the greeting of the municipal functionaries or of the mob
that blocked his way. “You see how reluctant he is to embroil himself
with the Huguenots,” said the partisans of the Guises to the people.
It was the recommencement of religious civil war, with more deadliness
than ever. The King of Navarre left no stone unturned to convince
everybody, friends and enemies, great lords and commonalty, Frenchmen and
foreigners, that this recurrence of war was not his doing, and that the
Leaguers forced it upon him against his wish and despite of the justice
of his cause. He wrote to Henry III., “Monseigneur, as soon as the
originators of these fresh disturbances had let the effects appear of
their ill-will towards your Majesty and your kingdom, you were pleased to
write to me the opinion you had formed, with very good title, of their
intentions; you told me that you knew, no matter what pretext they
assumed, that they had designs against your person and your crown, and
that they desired their own augmentation and aggrandizement at your
expense and to your detriment. Such were the words of your letters, Mon
seigneur, and you did me the honor, whilst recognizing the connection
between my fortunes and those of your Majesty, to add expressly that they
were compassing my ruin together with your own. . . . And now,
Monseigneur, when I hear it suddenly reported that your Majesty has made
a treaty of peace with those who have risen up against your service,
providing that your edict be broken, your loyal subjects banished, and
the conspirators armed, and armed with your power and your authority
against me, who have the honor of belonging to you, I leave your Majesty
to judge in what a labyrinth I find myself. . . . If it is I whom
they seek, or if under my shadow (on my account) they trouble this realm,
I have begged that, without henceforth causing the orders and estates of
this realm to suffer for it, and without the intervention of any army,
home or foreign, this quarrel be decided in the Duke of Guise’s person
and my own, one to one, two to two, ten to ten, twenty to twenty, in any
number that the said Lord of Guise shall think proper, with the arms
customary amongst gentlemen of honor. ... It will be a happiness for
us, my cousin [Henry de Conde] and myself, to deliver, at the price of
our blood, the king our sovereign lord from the travails and trials that
are a-brewing for him, his kingdom from trouble and confusion, his
noblesse from ruin, and all his people from extreme misery and calamity.”
The Duke of Guise respectfully declined, at the same time that he thanked
the King of Navarre for the honor done him, saying that he could not
accept the offer, as he was maintaining the cause of religion, and not a
private quarrel. On his refusal, war appeared to everybody, and in fact
became, inevitable. At his re-engagement in it, the King of Navarre lost
no time about informing his friends at home and his allies abroad, the
noblesse, the clergy, and the third estate of France, the city of Paris,
the Queen of England. the Protestant princes of Germany, and the Swiss
cantons, of all he had done to avoid it; he evidently laid great store
upon making his conduct public and his motives understood. He had for
his close confidant and his mouth-piece Philip du Plessis-Mornay, at
that time thirty-six years of age, one of the most learned and most
hard-working as well as most zealous and most sterling amongst the
royalist Protestants of France. It was his duty to draw up the
documents, manifestoes, and letters published by the King of Navarre,
when Henry did not himself stamp upon them the seal of his own language,
vivid, eloquent, and captivating in its brevity.
Henry III. and the queen-mother were very much struck with this
intelligent energy on the part of the King of Navarre, and with the
influence he acquired over all that portion of the French noblesse and
burgesses which had not fanatically enlisted beneath the banner of the
League. Catherine, accustomed to count upon her skill in the art of
seductive conversation, was for putting it to fresh proof in the case of
the King of Navarre. Louis di Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers, an Italian, like
herself, and one of her confidants, was sent in advance to sound Henry of
Navarre. He wrote to Henry III., “Such, sir, as you have known this
prince, such is he even now; nor years nor difficulties change him; he is
still agreeable, still merry, still devoted, as he has sworn to me a
hundred times, to peace and your Majesty’s service.” Catherine proposed
to him an interview. Henry hesitated to comply. From Jarnac, where he
was, he sent Viscount de Turenne to Catherine to make an agreement with
her for a few days’ truce. “Catherine gave Turenne to understand that,
in order to have peace, the King of Navarre must turn Catholic, and put a
stop to the exercise of the Reformed religion in the towns he held.”
When this was reported by his envoy, Henry, who had set out for the
interview, was on the point of retracing his steps; he went on, however,
as he was curious to see Catherine, to satisfy his mind upon the point
and to answer her.” They met on the 14th of December, 1586, at the
castle of St. Brice, near Cognac, both of them with gloomy looks.
Catherine asked Henry whether Turenne had spoken to him about what, she
said, was her son’s most express desire.
“I am astounded,” said Henry, “that your Majesty should have taken so
much pains to tell me what my ears are split with hearing; and likewise
that you, whose judgment is so sound, should delude yourself with the
idea of solving the difficulty by means of the difficulty itself. You
propose to me a thing that I cannot do without forfeiture of conscience
and honor, and without injury to the king’s service. I should not carry
with me all those of the religion; and they of the League would be so
much the more irritated in that they would lose their hope of depriving
me of the right which I have to the throne. They do not want me with
you, madame, for they would then be in sorry plight, you better served,
and all your good subjects more happy.” The queen-mother did not dispute
the point. She dwelt “upon the inconveniences Henry suffered during the
war.” “I bear them patiently, madame,” said Henry, “since you burden me
with them in order to unburden yourself of them.” She reproached him
with not doing as he pleased in Rochelle. “Pardon me, madame,” said he,
“I please only as I ought.” The Duke of Nevers, who was present at the
interview, was bold enough to tell him that he could not impose a tax
upon Rochelle. “That is true,” said Henry: “and so we have no Italian
amongst us.” He took leave of the queen-mother, who repeated what she
had said to Viscount de Turenne, “charging him to make it known to the
noblesse who were of his following.” “It is just eighteen months,
madame,” said he, “since I ceased to obey the king. He has made war upon
me like a wolf, you like a lioness.” “The king and I seek nothing but
your welfare.” “Excuse me, madame; I think it would be the contrary.”
“My son, would you have the pains I have taken for the last six months
remain without fruit?” “Madame, it is not I who prevent you from resting
in your bed; it is you who prevent me from lying down in mine.” “Shall I
be always at pains, I who ask for nothing but rest?” “Madame, the pains
please you and agree with you; if you were at rest you could not live
long.” Catherine had brought with her what was called her flying
squadron of fair creatures of her court: but, “Madame,” said Henry, as he
withdrew, “there is nothing here for me.”
Before taking part in the war which was day by day becoming more and more
clearly and explicitly a war of religion, the Protestant princes of
Germany and the four great free cities of Strasbourg, Ulm, Nuremberg, and
Frankfort resolved to make, as the King of Navarre had made, a striking
move on behalf of peace and religious liberty. They sent to Henry III.
ambassadors, who, on the 11th of October, 1586, treated him to some frank
and bold speaking. “Our princes and masters,” they said to him, “have
been moved with surprise and Christian compassion towards you, as
faithful friends and good neighbors of yours, on hearing that you, not
being pleased to suffer in your kingdom any person not of the Roman
religion, have broken the edict of peace which was so solemnly done and
based upon your Majesty’s faith and promise, and which is the firm prop
of the tranquillity of your Majesty and your dominions; the which changes
have appeared to them strange, seeing that your royal person, your
dominions, your conscience, your honor, your reputation and good fame
happened to be very much concerned therewith.” Shocked at so rude an
admonition, Henry III. answered, “It is God who made me king; and as I
bear the title of Most Christian King, I have ever been very zealous for
the preservation of the Catholic religion. . . . It appertains to me
alone to decide, according to my discernment, what may contribute to the
public weal, to make laws for to procure it, to interpret those laws, to
change them, and to abolish them, just as I find it expedient. I have
done so hitherto, and I shall still do so for the future;” and he
dismissed the ambassadors. That very evening, on reflecting upon his
words, and considering that his answer had not met the requirements of
the case, he wrote with his own hand on a small piece of paper, “that
whoever said that in revoking the edict of pacification he had violated
his faith or put a blot upon his honor, had lied;” and he ordered one of
his officers, though the night was far advanced, to carry that paper to
the ambassadors, and read it to them textually. They asked for a copy;
but Henry III., always careful not to have to answer for his words, had
bidden his officer to suppress the document after having read it; and the
Germans departed, determined upon war as well as quite convinced of the
king’s arrogant pusillanimity.
Except some local and short-lived truces, war was already lazing
throughout nearly the whole of France, in Provence, in Dauphiny, in
Nivernais, in Guienne, in Anjou, in Normandy, in Picardy, in Champagne.
We do not care to follow the two parties through the manifold but
monotonous incidents of their tumultuous and passionate strife; we desire
to review only those events that were of a general and a decisive
character. They occurred, naturally, in those places which were the
arena, and in those armies which were under the command, of the two
leaders, Duke Henry of Guise and King Henry of Navarre. The former took
upon himself the duty of repulsing, in the north-west of France, the
German and Swiss corps which were coming to the assistance of the French
Reformers; the latter put himself at the head of the French Protestant
forces summoned to face, in the provinces of the centre and south-west,
the royalist armies. Guise was successful in his campaign against the
foreigners: on the 26th of October, 1587, his scouts came and told him
that the Germans were at Vimory, near Montargis, dispersed throughout the
country, without vedettes or any of the precautions of warfare; he was at
table with his principal officers at Courtenay, almost seven leagues away
from the enemy; he remained buried in thought for a few minutes, and then
suddenly gave the order to sound boot-and-saddle [_boute-selle,_
i.e., put-on saddle]. “What for, pray?” said his brother, the Duke of
Mayenne. “To go and fight.” “Pray reflect upon, what you are going to
do.” “Reflections that I haven’t made in a quarter of an hour I
shouldn’t make in a year.” Mounting at once, the leader and his
squadrons arrived at midnight at the gates of Vimory; they found,
it is said, the Germans drunk, asleep, and scattered; according to the
reporters on the side of the League, the victory of Guise was complete;
he took from the Germans twenty-eight hundred horses: the Protestants
said that the body he charged were nothing but a lot of horse-boys, and
that the two flags he took had for device nothing but a sponge and a
currycomb. But fifteen days later, on the 11th of November, at Auneau,
near Chartres, Guise gained an indisputable and undisputed victory over
the Germans; and their general, Baron Dohna, and some of his officers
only saved themselves by cutting their way through sword in hand. The
Swiss, being discouraged, and seeing in the army of Henry III. eight
thousand of their countrymen, who were serving in it not, like
themselves, as adventurers, but under the flags and with the
authorization of their cantons, separated from the Germans and withdrew,
after receiving from Henry III. four hundred thousand crowns as the
price of their withdrawal. In Burgundy, in Champagne, and in Orleanness,
the campaign terminated to the honor of Guise, which Henry III. was far
from regarding as a victory for himself.
But almost at the same time at which the League obtained this success in
the provinces of the east and centre, it experienced in those of the
south-west a reverse more serious for the Leaguers than the Duke of
Guise’s victory had been fortunate for them. Henry III. had given the
command of his army south of the Loire to one of his favorites, Anne,
Duke of Joyeuse, a brilliant, brave, and agreeable young man, whose
fortunes he had advanced beyond measure, to the extent of marrying him to
Marguerite de Lorraine, the queen’s sister, and raising for him the
viscountship of Joyeuse to a duchy-peerage, giving him rank, too, after
the princes of the blood and before the dukes of old creation. Joyeuse
was at the head of six thousand foot, two thousand horse, and six pieces
of cannon. He entered Poitou and marched towards the Dordogne, whilst
the King of Navarre was at La Rochelle, engaged in putting into order two
pieces of cannon, which formed the whole of his artillery, and in
assembling round him his three cousins, the Prince of Conde, the Count of
Soissons, and the Prince of Conti, that he might head the whole house of
Bourbon at the moment when he was engaging seriously in the struggle with
the house of Valois and the house of Lorraine. A small town, Coutras,
situated at the confluence of the two rivers of L’Isle and La Dronne, in
the Gironde, offered the two parties an important position to occupy.
“According to his wont,” says the Duke of Aumale in his _Histoire des
Princes de Conde,_ “the Bearnese was on horseback whilst his adversary
was banqueting.” He outstripped Joyeuse; and when the latter drew near
to Contras, he found the town occupied by the Protestant advance-guard,
and had barely time to fall back upon La Roche-Chalais. The battle began
on the 20th of October, 1587, shortly after sunrise. We will here borrow
the equally dramatic and accurate account of it given by the Duke of
Aumale: “At this solemn moment the King of Navarre calls to his side his
cousins and his principal officers; then, in his manly and sonorous
voice, he addresses his men-at-arms: ‘My friends, here is a quarry for
you very different from your past prizes. It is a brand-new bridegroom,
with his marriage-money still in his coffers; and all the cream of the
courtiers are with him. Will you let yourselves go down before this
handsome dancing-master and his minions? No, they are ours; I see it by
your eagerness to fight. Still we must all of us understand that the
event is in the hands of God. Pray we Him to aid us. This deed will be
the greatest that we ever did; the glory will be to God, the service to
our sovereign lord the king, the honor to ourselves, and the benefit to
the state.’ Henry uncovers; the clergymen Chandieu and Damours intone
the army’s prayer, and the men-at-arms repeat in chorus the twenty-fourth
versicle of the hundred and eighteenth Psalm: ‘This is the day which the
Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.’ As they were
hastening each to his post, the king detains his cousins a moment.
‘Gentlemen,’ he shouts, ‘I have just one thing to say: remember that you
are of the house of Bourbon; and, as God liveth, I will let you see that
I am your senior.’ ‘And we will show you some good juniors,’ answered
Conde.”
Before midday the battle was won and the royalist army routed, but
not without having made a valiant stand. During the action, D’Epinay
Saint-Luc, one of the bravest royalist soldiers, met the Duke of Joyeuse
already wounded. “What’s to be done?” he asked. “Die,” answered
Joyeuse; and a few moments afterwards, as he was moving away some paces
to the rear in order to get near to his artillery, says D’Aubigne, he was
surrounded by several Huguenots, who recognized him. “There are a
hundred-thousand crowns to be gained,” he shouted; but rage was more
powerful than cupidity, and one of them shattered his skull with a
pistol-shot. “His body was taken to the king’s quarters: there it lay,
in the evening, upon a table in the very room where the conqueror’s
supper had been prepared: but the King of Navarre ordered all who were in
the chamber to go out, had his supper things removed else-whither, and,
with every mark of respect, committed the remains of the vanquished to
the care of Viscount de Turenne, his near relative. Henry showed a
simple and modest joy at his splendid triumph. It was five and twenty
years since the civil war commenced, and he was the first Protestant
general who had won a pitched battle; he had to regret only
twenty-five killed, whereas the enemy had lost more than three thousand,
and had abandoned to him their cannon, together with twenty-nine flags or
standards. The victory was so much the more glorious in that it was
gained over an army superior in numbers and almost equal in quality.
It was owing to the king’s valor, decision, vigilance, quick eye,
comprehension of tactics, and that creative instinct which he brought
into application in politics as well as in war, and which was destined to
render him so happily inspired in the beautiful defensive actions of
Arques, at the affair of Ivry, and on so many other occasions.”
[_Histoire des Princes de Conde, &c.,_ by M. le Due D’Aumale, t. ii.
pp. 164-177.]
And what was Henry III., King of France, doing whilst two great parties
and two great men were thus carrying on, around his throne and in his
name, so passionate a war, on the one side to maintain the despotic unity
of Catholic Christianism, and on the other to win religious liberty for
Christian Protestantism? We will borrow here the words of the most
enlightened and most impartial historian of the sixteenth century, M. de
Thou; if we acted upon our own personal impressions alone, there would be
danger of appearing too severe towards a king whom we profoundly despise.
“After having staid some time in Bourbonness, Henry III. went to Lyons in
order to be within hail of his two favorites, Joyeuse and Epernon, who
were each on the march with an army. Whilst he was at Lyons as
unconcerned as if all the realm were enjoying perfect peace, he took to
collecting those little dogs which are thought so much of in that town.
Everybody was greatly surprised to see a King of France, in the midst of
so terrible a war and in extreme want of money, expending upon such
pleasures all the time he had at disposal and all the sums he could
scrape together. How lavish soever this prince may have been, yet, if
comparison be made between the expenditure upon the royal household and
that incurred at Lyons for dogs, the latter will be found infinitely
higher than the former; without counting expenses for hunting-dogs and
birds, which always come to a considerable sum in the households of
kings, it cost him, every year, more than a hundred thousand gold crowns
for little Lyonnese dogs; and he maintained at his court, with large
salaries, a multitude of men and women who had nothing to do but to feed
them. He also spent large sums in monkeys, parrots, and other creatures
from foreign countries, of which he always kept a great number.
Sometimes he got tired of them, and gave them all away then his passion
for such creatures returned, and they had to be found for him at no
matter what cost. Since I am upon the subject of this prince’s
attachment to matters anything but worthy of the kingly majesty, I will
say a word about his passion for those miniatures which were to be found
in manuscript prayer-books, and which, before the practice of printing,
were done by the most skilful painters. Henry III. seemed to buy such
works, intended for princes and laid by in cabinets of curiosities, only
to spoil them; as soon as he had them, he cut them out, and then pasted
them upon the walls of his chapels, as children do. An incomprehensible
character of mind: in certain things, capable of upholding his rank; in
some, rising above his position; in others, sinking below childishness.”
[_Histoire universelle de F. A. de Thou,_ t. ix. p. 599.]
A mind and character incomprehensible indeed, if corruption, lassitude,
listlessness, and fear would not explain the existence of everything that
is abnormal and pitiable about human nature in a feeble, cold, and
selfish creature, excited, and at the same time worn out, by the business
and the pleasures of kingship, which Henry III. could neither do without
nor bear the burden of. His perplexity was extreme in his relations with
the other two Henries, who gave, like himself, their name to this war,
which was called by contemporaries the war of the three Henries. The
successes of Henry de Guise and of Henry de Bourbon were almost equally
disagreeable to Henry de Valois. It is probable that, if he could have
chosen, he would have preferred those of Henry de Bourbon; if they caused
him like jealousy, they did not raise in him the same distrust; he knew
the King of Navarre’s loyalty, and did not suspect him of aiming to
become, whilst he himself was living, King of France. Besides, he
considered the Protestants less powerful and less formidable than the
Leaguers. Henry de Guise, on the contrary, was evidently, in his eyes,
an ambitious conspirator, determined to push his own fortunes on to the
very crown of France if the chances were favorable to him, and not only
armed with all the power of Catholicism, but urged forward by the
passions of the League, perhaps further and certainly more quickly than
his own intentions travelled. Since 1584, the Leaguers had, at Paris,
acquired strong organization amongst the populace; the city had been
partitioned out into five districts under five heads, who, shortly
afterwards, added to themselves eleven others, in order that, in the
secret council of the association, each amongst the sixteen quarters of
Paris might have its representative and director. Thence the famous
Committee of Sixteen, which played so great and so formidable a part in
the history of that period. It was religious fanaticism and democratic
fanaticism closely united, and in a position to impose their wills upon
their most eminent leaders, upon the Duke of Guise himself.