ambassador is set forth in a noble letter of Morvilliers, Bishop of
Orleans, from which I permit myself to quote a few sentences: "Il y en a
toutesfois qui pensent que, pour estre habille homme, il fault tousjours
aller masque, laquelle opinion j'estime du tout erronee, et celluy qui la
suit grandement deceu. Le temps m'a donne quelque experience des choses;
mais je n'ay jamais veu homme, suivant ces chemins obliques, qui n'ait
embrouille les affaires de son maistre, et, luy, perdre beaucoup plus
qu'acquerir de reputation; et au contraire ceux, qui se sont conduits
prudemment avec la verite, avoir, pour le moins, rapporte de leur
negotiation ce fruict et l'honneur d'y avoir faict ce que les hommes, avec
le sens et jugement humain, peuvent faire." Correspondance diplomatique de
Bertrand de Salignac de la Mothe Fenelon, vii. 97.
[419] Journal de Jehan de la Fosse, 79, 80; Vie de Coligny (Cologne,
1686), 321-323; Gasparis Colinii Vita, 1575, 55; Agrippa d'Aubigne, Hist.
univ., 1, 207.
[420] Journal d'un cure ligueur (Jehan de la Fosse), 81.
[421] "December (1566.) Au commencement vinrent plusieurs ambassades a
Paris, tant de la part de l'Empereur, que du Pape, que du roy d'Espagne,
lesquels manderent au roy de France, qu'il eust a faire casser l'esdict de
janvier, ou autrement qu'ils se declareroient ennemys." Ibid., 80. The
fanatical party affected to regard the Edict of Amboise, March, 1563, as a
mere re-establishment of the edict of January 17, 1562.
[422] Memoires de Castelnau, liv. vi., c. ii. Castelnau was certainly in a
favorable position for learning the truth respecting these matters; and
yet even he speaks of the "holy league," formed at Bayonne, as of
something beyond controversy. According to a treaty and renewal of
alliance between Charles the Ninth and the Roman Catholic cantons of
Switzerland, entered into Dec. 7, 1564, for Charles's lifetime, and seven
years beyond, the Swiss were to furnish him, when attacked, not less than
six nor more than sixteen thousand men for the entire war. The success of
the negotiation occasioned great rejoicing at Paris, and corresponding
annoyance in the Spanish dominions. Du Mont, Corps diplomatique, v.
129-131; Jehan de la Fosse, 70; Papiers d'etat du card. de Granvelle,
viii. 599.
[423] Mem. de Fr. de la Noue, c. xi.
[424] He did more than this, according to the belief of the times, as
expressed by Jean de Serres; for, "having been present at the Bayonne
affair," he brought him irrefragable proof of the "holy league entered
into by the kings of France and Spain for the ruin of the religion."
Comment. de statu. rel. et reip., iii. 126.
[425] Yet so much were intelligent observers deceived respecting the signs
of the times, that only a little over two months before the actual
outbreak of the second civil war (July 4, 1567), Judge Truchon
congratulated France on the edifying spectacle of loving accord which the
court furnished. "I have this very day," he writes, "seen the king
holding, with his left hand, the head of my lord, the prince [of Conde],
and with his right the head of my lord the Cardinal of Bourbon, and
_playfully trying to strike their foreheads together_. The Duke d'Aumale
was paying his attentions to Madame la Mareschale [de Montmorency.] ...
The Cardinal of Chatillon was not far off. In short, all, without
distinction, seemed to me to be so harmonious that I wish there may never
be greater divisions in France. It was a fine example for many persons of
lower rank," etc. Letter to M. de Gordes, MS. in Archives de Conde, Duc
d'Aumale, Princes de Conde, i. 540, Pieces inedites.
[426] Jean de Serres, iii. 128, 129. See, also, Conde's letter of Aug. 23,
1568. Ibid., iii. 201.
[427] Norris to Queen Elizabeth, Aug. 29, 1567, State Paper Office, Duc
d'Aumale, Pieces inedites, i. 559.
[428] "Sed ne frustra laborare viderentur, de Albani consilio, 'Satius
esse unicum salmonis caput, quam mille ranarum capita habere,' ineunt
rationes de intercipiendis optimatum iis, qui Religionem sequerentur,
Condaeo, Amiralio, Andelotio, Rupefocaldio aliisque primoribus viris. Ratio
videbatur praesentissima, ut a rege accerserentur, tanquam consulendi de
iis rebus quae ad regnum constituendum facerent," etc. Jean de Serres, iii.
125. It will be remembered that this volume was published the year before
the St. Bartholomew's massacre. The persons enumerated, with the exception
of those that died before 1572, were the victims of the massacre.
[429] "Ita Edicti nomen usurpabatur, dum Edictum revera pessundaretur."
Jean de Serres, iii. 60.
CHAPTER XV.
THE SECOND CIVIL WAR AND THE SHORT PEACE.
[Sidenote: Coligny's pacific counsels.]
[Sidenote: Rumors of plots to destroy the Huguenots.]
[Sidenote: D'Andelots warlike counsels prevail.]
[Sidenote: Cardinal Lorraine to be seized and King Charles liberated.]
A treacherous peace or an open war was now apparently the only alternative
offered to the Huguenots. In reality, however, they believed themselves to
be denied even the unwelcome choice between the two. The threatening
preparations made for the purpose of crushing them were indications of
coming war, if, indeed, they were not properly to be regarded, according
to the view of the great Athenian orator in a somewhat similar case, as
the first stage in the war itself. The times called for prompt decision.
Within a few weeks three conferences were held at Valery and at Chatillon.
Ten or twelve of the most prominent Huguenot nobles assembled to discuss
with the Prince of Conde and Coligny the exigencies of the hour. Twice was
the impetuosity of the greater number restrained by the calm persuasion of
the admiral. Convinced that the sword is a fearful remedy for political
diseases--a remedy that should never be applied except in the most
desperate emergency--Coligny urged his friends to be patient, and to show
to the world that they were rather forced into war by the malice of their
enemies than drawn of their own free choice. But at the third meeting of
the chiefs, before the close of the month, they were too much excited by
the startling reports reaching them from all sides, to be controlled even
by Coligny's prudent advice. A great friend of "the religion" at court had
sent to the prince and the admiral an account of a secret meeting of the
royal council, at which the imprisonment of the former and the execution
of the latter was agreed upon. The Swiss were to be distributed in equal
detachments at Paris, Orleans, and Poitiers, and the plan already
indicated--the repeal of the Edict of Toleration and the proclamation of
another edict of opposite tenor--was at once to be carried into effect.
"Are we to wait," asked the more impetuous, "until we be bound hand and
foot and dragged to dishonorable death on Parisian scaffolds? Have we
forgotten the more than three thousand Huguenots put to violent deaths
since the peace, and the frivolous answers and treacherous delays which
have been our only satisfaction?" And when some of the leaders expressed
the opinion that delay was still preferable to a war that would certainly
expose their motives to obloquy, and entail so much unavoidable misery,
the admiral's younger brother, D'Andelot, combated with his accustomed
vehemence a caution which he regarded as pusillanimous, and pointedly
asked its advocates what all their innocence would avail them when once
they found themselves in prison and at their enemy's mercy, when they were
banished to foreign countries, or were roaming without shelter in the
forests and wilds, or were exposed to the barbarous assaults of an
infuriated populace.[430] His striking harangue carried the day. The
admiral reluctantly yielded, and it was decided to anticipate the attack
of the enemy by a bold defensive movement. Some advocated the seizure of
Orleans, and counselled that, with this refuge in their possession,
negotiations should be entered into with the court for the dismissal of
the Swiss; others that the party should fortify itself by the capture of
as many cities as possible. But to these propositions the pertinent reply
was made that there was no time for wordy discussions, the controversy
must be settled by means of the sword;[431] and that, of a hundred towns
the Protestants held at the beginning of the last war, they had found
themselves unable to retain a dozen until its close. Finally, the prince
and his companions resolved to make it the great object of their endeavors
to drive the Cardinal of Lorraine from court and liberate Charles from his
pernicious influence. This object was to be attained by dispersing the
Swiss, and by conducting hostilities on a bold plan--rather by the
maintenance of an army that could actively take the field,[432] than by
seizing any cities save a few of the most important. On the twenty-ninth
of September, the feast-day of St. Michael, the Huguenots having suddenly
risen in all parts of France, Conde and Coligny, at the head of the troops
of the neighboring provinces, were to present themselves at the court,
which would be busy celebrating the customary annual ceremonial of the
royal order. They would then hand to the king a humble petition for the
redress of grievances, for the removal of the Cardinal of Lorraine, and
for the dispersion of the Swiss troops, which, instead of being retained
near the frontiers of the kingdom which they had ostensibly come to
protect, had been advanced to the very vicinity of the capital.[433] It
might be difficult to prevent the enterprise from wearing the appearance
of a plot against the king, in whose immediate vicinity the cardinal was;
but the event, if prosperous, would demonstrate the integrity of their
purpose.[434]
[Sidenote: The secret slowly leaks out.]
The plan was well conceived, and better executed than such schemes usually
are. The great difficulty was to keep so important a secret. It was a
singular coincidence that, as in the case of the tumult of Amboise, over
seven years before, the first intimations of their danger reached the
Guises from the Netherlands.[435] But the courtiers, whose minds were
taken up with the pleasures of the chase, and who dreamed of no such
movement, were so far from believing the report, that Constable
Montmorency expressed vexation that it was imagined that the Huguenots
could get together one hundred men in a corner of the kingdom--not to
speak of an army in the immediate vicinity of the capital--without the
knowledge of himself, the head of the royal military establishment; while
Chancellor de l'Hospital said that "it was a capital crime for any servant
to alarm his prince with false intelligence, or give him groundless
suspicions of his fellow-subjects."[436]
The news, however, being soon confirmed from other sources, a spy was sent
to Chatillon-sur-Loing to report upon the admiral's movements. He brought
back word that he had found Coligny at home, and apparently engrossed in
the labors of the vintage--so quietly was the affair conducted until
within forty-eight hours of the time appointed for the general
uprising.[437] It was not until hurried tidings came from all quarters
that the roads to Chatillon and to Rosoy--a small place in Brie, where the
Huguenots had made their rendezvous--were swarming with men mounted and
armed, that the court took the alarm.
[Sidenote: Flight of the court to Paris.]
It was almost too late. The Huguenots had possession of Lagny and of the
crossing of the river Marne. The king and queen, with their suite, at
Meaux, were almost entirely unprotected, the six thousand Swiss being
still at Chateau-Thierry, thirty miles higher up the Marne. Instant orders
were sent to bring them forward as quickly as possible, and the night of
the twenty-eighth of September witnessed a scene of abject fear on the
part of the ladies and not a few of the gentlemen that accompanied Charles
and his mother. At three o'clock in the morning, under escort of the
Swiss, who had at last arrived, the court started for Paris, which was
reached after a dilatory journey that appeared all the longer because of
the fears attending it.[438] The Prince of Conde, who had been joined as
yet only by the forerunners of his army, engaged in a slight skirmish with
the Swiss; but a small band of four or five hundred gentlemen, armed only
with their swords, could do nothing against a solid phalanx of the brave
mountaineers, and he was forced to retire. Meanwhile Marshal Montmorency,
sent by Catharine to dissuade the prince, the admiral, and Cardinal
Chatillon from prosecuting their enterprise, had returned with the message
that "the Huguenots were determined to defeat the preparations made to
destroy them and their religion, which was only tolerated by a conditional
edict, revocable by the king at his pleasure."[439]
[Sidenote: Cardinal Lorraine invites Alva to invade France.]
The Cardinal of Lorraine did not share in the flight of the court to
Paris. Never able to boast of the possession of overmuch courage, he may
have feared for his personal safety; for it was not impossible that he
might be sacrificed by a queen rarely troubled with any feelings of
humanity, to allay the storm raging about the ship of state; or he may
have hoped to be of greater service to his party away from the
capital.[440] However this may be, the Cardinal betook himself in hot
haste to the city of Rheims, but reached his palace only after an almost
miraculous escape from capture by his enemies.[441] Once in safety, he
despatched two messengers in rapid succession[442] to Brussels, and begged
Alva to send him an agent with whom he might communicate in confidence.
The proposals made when that personage arrived at Rheims were sufficiently
startling; for, after calling attention to Philip's rightful claim to the
throne of France, in case of the death of Charles and his brothers, he
offered in a certain contingency to place in the Spanish monarch's hands
some strong places that might prove valuable in substantiating that claim.
In return, the Cardinal wished Philip to assume the defence of the papal
church in France, and particularly desired him to undertake the protection
of his brothers and of himself. The message was not unwelcome either to
Alva or to his royal master. They were willing, they said, to assist the
King of France in combating the Huguenots,[443] and they made no objection
to accepting the cities. At the worst, these cities would serve as pledges
for the repayment of whatever sums the King of Spain might expend in
maintaining the Roman Catholic faith in France. With respect to the
propriety of Philip's becoming the formal guardian of the Guises, Alva
felt more hesitation, for who knew how matters might turn out? And Philip,
never quite ready for any important decision, praised his lieutenant's
delay, and inculcated further procrastination.[444] But the succession to
the throne of France was worthy of deep consideration. As Alva intimated,
the famous Salic law, under which Charles's sister Isabella was excluded
from the crown, was merely a bit of pleasantry, and force of arms would
facilitate the acknowledgment of her claims.[445]
[Sidenote: Conde at Saint Denis.]
The blow which the Huguenots had aimed at the tyrannical government of the
Cardinal of Lorraine had missed its mark, through premature disclosure;
but they still hoped to accomplish their design by slower means. Shut up
in Paris, the court might be frightened or starved into compliance before
the Roman Catholic forces could be assembled to relieve the capital. With
this object the Prince of Conde moved around to the north side of the
city, and took up his quarters, on the second of October, in the village
of Saint Denis. With the lower Seine, which, in one of its serpentine
coils, here turns back upon itself, and retreats from the direction of the
sea, in his immediate grasp, and within easy striking distance of the
upper Seine, and its important tributary the Marne--the chief sources of
the supply of food on which the capital depended--the Prince of Conde
awaited the arrival of his reinforcements, and the time when the hungry
Parisians should compel the queen to submit, or to send out her troops to
an open field. At the same time he burned the windmills that stretched
their huge arms on every eminence in the vicinity. It was an ill-advised
measure, as are all similar acts of destruction, unless justified by
urgent necessity. If it occasioned some distress in Paris,[446] it only
embittered the minds of the people yet more, and enabled the municipal
authorities to retaliate with some color of equity by seizing the houses
of persons known or suspected to be Huguenots, and selling their goods to
defray part of the expense incurred in defending the city.[447]
[Sidenote: The Huguenot movement alienates the king.]
The attempt "to seize the person of the king"--for such the movement was
understood to be by the Roman Catholic party--was even more unfortunate.
It produced in Charles an alienation[448] which the enemies of the
Huguenots took good care to prevent him from ever completely forgetting.
They represented the undertaking of Meaux as aimed, not at the counsellors
of the monarch, but at the "Sacred Majesty" itself, and Conde and Coligny,
with their associates, were pictured to the affrighted eyes of the
fugitive boy-king as conspirators who respected none of those rights which
are so precious in the view of royalty.
[Sidenote: Negotiations opened. The Huguenots gradually abate their
demands.]
[Sidenote: Constable Montmorency the mouthpiece of intolerance.]
Meantime Catharine was not slow in resorting to the arts by which she was
accustomed to seek either to avert the evil consequences of her own
short-sighted policy, or to gain time to defeat the plans of her
opponents.[449] The Huguenots received a deputation consisting of the
chancellor, the Marshal de Vieilleville, and Jean de Morvilliers--three of
the most influential and moderate adherents of the court--through whom
Charles demanded the reason of the sudden uprising which causelessly
threatened his own person and the peace of the realm. The Huguenot leaders
replied by denying any evil design, and showing that they had armed
themselves only in self-defence against the manifested malice of their
enemies.[450] Subsequent interviews between Conde and the envoys of
Charles seemed to hold forth some hopes of peace. The king declared
himself ready to furnish the Protestants with proofs of the uprightness of
his intentions, and L'Hospital even exhibited the draft of an edict in
which their rights should be guaranteed. As this proved unsatisfactory,
the prince, at the chancellor's suggestion, submitted the requests of his
associates. These related to the banishment of the foreign troops, the
permission to come and present their petitions to the king, the
confirmation and maintenance of the past edicts, with the repeal of all
restrictive interpretations, the assembling of the states general, and
the removal of the burdensome imposts under which the people groaned, and
which were of advantage only to the crowd of Italians and others enjoying
extraordinary credit at court.[451] If the first of these demands were
sufficiently bold, the last demand was little calculated to conciliate
Catharine, who naturally conceived herself doubly insulted by the covert
allusion to her own prodigality and by the reference to her countrymen.
She found no difficulty in inducing Charles to answer through a
proclamation sent by a herald to the confederates, commanding Conde,
Coligny, D'Andelot, La Rochefoucauld, Genlis, and the other leaders, by
name, to lay down the arms which they had taken up without his
consent.[452] Perceiving the mistake they had committed in making requests
which, although just and appropriate, were in part but ill-suited to the
times, the Protestants began to abate their demands. Confining themselves
to the matter of religion, they now petitioned only for an unrestricted
liberty of conscience and worship, confirmed by the repeal of all
ordinances or parliamentary decisions conflicting with it. Their
moderation inspired fresh hopes of averting the resort to arms, and a new
conference was held, between the Huguenot position and the city of Paris,
at the hamlet of La Chapelle Saint Denis. It was destined to be the last.
Constable Montmorency, the chief spokesman on the Roman Catholic side,
although really desirous of peace, could not be induced to listen to the
only terms on which peace was possible. "The king," he said, "will never
consent to the demand for religious toleration throughout France without
distinction of persons or places. He has no intention of permanently
tolerating two religions. His edicts in favor of the Protestants have been
intended only as temporary measures; for his purpose is to preserve the
old faith by all possible means. He would rather be forced into a war with
his subjects than avoid it by concessions that would render him an object
of suspicion to neighboring princes."[453]
[Sidenote: Insincerity of Alva's offers of aid.]
The simultaneous rising of the Huguenots in every quarter of the kingdom,
and the immediate seizure of many important cities, had surprised and
terrified the court; but it had also stimulated the Roman Catholic leaders
to put forth extraordinary efforts to bring together an army superior to
that of their opponents. Besides the Parisian militia and the troops that
flocked in from the more distant provinces, it was resolved to call for
the help repeatedly promised by Philip of Spain and his minister, the Duke
of Alva, when urging Charles to break the compacts he had entered into
with his reformed subjects. But the assistance actually furnished fell far
short of the expectations held forth. When Castelnau, after two efforts,
the first of which proved unsuccessful,[454] reached Brussels by a
circuitous route, he found Alva lavish of good wishes, and urgent, like
his master, that no arrangement should be made with the rebels before they
had suffered condign punishment. But the envoy soon convinced himself that
all these protestations meant little or nothing, and that the Spaniards
were by no means sorry to see the French kingdom rent by civil war.
Ostensibly, Alva was liberal above measure in his offers. He wished to
come in person at the head of five thousand horse and fifteen thousand
foot, and make short work of the destruction of Conde and his followers--a
proposition which Castelnau, who knew that Catharine was quite as jealous
of Spanish as of Huguenot interference in her schemes, felt himself
compelled politely to decline; especially as the very briefest term within
which Alva professed himself ready to move was a full month and a half.
For seven or eight days the duke persisted in refusing the Spanish troops
that were requested,[455] and in insisting upon his own offer--precious
time which, had it been husbanded, might have changed the face of the
impending battle before the walls of Paris. When, at length, pressed by
the envoy for a definite answer or for leave to return, the duke offered
to give him, in about three weeks' time, a body of four or five thousand
German lansquenets--troops that would have been quite useless to Charles,
who already had at his disposition as many pikemen as he needed, in the
six thousand Swiss. All that Castelnau was finally able to bring home was
an auxiliary force of about seventeen hundred horse, under Count Aremberg.
Even now, however, the officer in command was bound by instructions which
prevented him from taking the direct road to the beleaguered capital of
France, and compelled him to pass westward by Beauvais and Poissy.[456]
[Sidenote: Battle of Saint Denis, Nov. 10, 1567.]
[Sidenote: The constable is mortally wounded.]
The impatience of the Parisians, who for more than a month had been
inactive spectators, while their city was besieged by an insignificant
force and they were deprived of the greater part of their ordinary
supplies of food, could scarcely be restrained. They were the more anxious
for battle since they had received encouragement by the recapture of a few
points of some military importance along the course of the lower Seine.
Unable to resist the pressure any longer, Constable Anne de Montmorency
led out his army to give battle to the Huguenots on the tenth of November,
1567. Rarely has such an engagement been willingly entered into, where the
disproportion between the contending parties was so considerable. The
constable's army consisted of sixteen thousand foot soldiers (of whom six
thousand were Swiss, and the remainder in part troops levied in the city
of Paris) and three thousand horse, and was provided with eighteen pieces
of artillery. To meet this force, Conde had barely fifteen hundred hastily
mounted and imperfectly equipped gentlemen, and twelve hundred foot
soldiers, gathered from various quarters and scarcely formed as yet into
companies. He had not a single cannon. Of his cavalry, only one-fifth part
were provided with lances, the rest having swords and pistols. The greater
number had no defensive armor; and not a horse was furnished with the
leathern _barbe_ with which the knight continued, as in the middle ages,
to cover his steed's breast and sides. The constable had wisely chosen a
moment when the prince had weakened himself by detaching D'Andelot, with
five hundred horse and eight hundred arquebusiers, to seize Poissy and
intercept the Count of Aremberg.[457] In the face of such a disparity of
numbers and equipment, the Huguenots exhibited signal intrepidity.[458]
With Coligny thrown forward on the right, in front of the village of Saint
Ouen, and Genlis on the left, near Aubervilliers, they opened the attack
upon the overwhelming numbers of the enemy, who descended from higher
ground to meet them. Marshal de Montmorency, the constable's eldest son,
commanding a part of the royal army, alone was successful, and had the
valor of his troops been imitated by the rest, the defeat of the Huguenots
would have been decisive; but the "Parisian regiment," despite its gilded
armor,[459] yielded at the first shock of battle and fled in confusion to
the walls of Paris. Their cowardice uncovered the position of the
constable, and the cavalry of the Prince penetrated to the spot where the
old warrior was still fighting hand to hand, with a vigor scarcely
inferior to that which he had displayed more than fifty years earlier, in
the first Italian campaign of Francis the First.[460] A Scottish
gentleman, according to the most probable account--for the true history of
the affair is involved in unusual obscurity--Robert Stuart by name, rode
up to Montmorency and demanded his surrender. But the constable, maddened
at the suggestion of a fourth captivity,[461] for all reply struck Stuart
on the mouth, with the hilt of his sword, so violent a blow that he broke
three of his teeth. At that very moment he received, whether from Stuart
or from another of the Scottish gentlemen is uncertain,[462] a pistol-shot
that entered his shoulder and inflicted a mortal wound. At a few paces
from him, Conde, with his horse killed under him, nearly fell into the
hands of the enemy. At last, however, his partisans succeeded in rescuing
him, and, while he retired slowly to Saint Denis, the dying constable was
carried to Paris, whither the Roman Catholic army returned at
evening.[463]
[Sidenote: Character of Anne de Montmorency.]
The battle of Saint Denis was indecisive, and the victory was claimed by
both sides. The losses of the Huguenots and the Roman Catholics were about
equal--between three and four hundred men--although the number of
distinguished Huguenot noblemen killed exceeded that of the slain
belonging to the same rank in the royal army. If the possession of the
field at the end of the day, and the relief of Paris, be taken as
sufficient evidence, the honor of success belonged to the Roman Catholic
army. But the loss of their chief commander far more than counterbalanced
any advantage they may have gained. Not that Anne de Montmorency was a
general of remarkable abilities. Although he had been present in a large
number of important engagements ever since the reign of Louis the Twelfth,
and had proved himself a brave man in all, he was by no means a successful
military leader. The late Duke of Guise had eclipsed his glory, and in a
much briefer career had exhibited much more striking tactical skill. The
battle of Saint Denis, it was alleged by many, had itself been marred by
his clumsy disposition of his troops. Proud and overbearing in his
deportment, he alienated even those with whom his warm attachment to the
Roman Catholic Church ought to have made him popular. Catharine de'
Medici, we have seen, had long been his enemy. In like manner, even the
bigoted populace of Paris forgot the pious exploits that had earned him
the surname of "le Capitaine Brulebanc," and remembered only his
suspicious relationship to Cardinal Chatillon, Admiral Coligny, and
D'Andelot, those three intrepid brothers whose uncompromising morality and
unswerving devotion to their religious convictions made them, even more
than the Prince of Conde, true representatives of the dreaded Huguenot
party.[464]
But the loss of the principal general at this important juncture in
military affairs dealt a severe blow to the Roman Catholic cause. There
was no other leader of sufficient prominence to put forth an indisputable
claim to succeed him. Catharine, not sorry to be relieved of so formidable
a rival, was resolved that he should have no troublesome successor.
Accordingly she induced the king to leave the office of constable vacant,
and to confer upon her second surviving son, Henry, Duke of Anjou, whose
unscrupulous character had already made him her favorite, the supreme
command of the army, with the less ambitious title of royal
lieutenant-general.[465]
The death of the constable, who survived his wound only a single day, and
the subsequent divisions of the court, furnished the Prince of Conde with
an immunity from attack, of which, in view of his great inferiority in
number of troops, he deemed it most prudent to take advantage by promptly
retiring from his exposed position. Besides this, he had now an imperative
summons to the eastern frontier of the kingdom.
[Sidenote: The Protestant princes of Germany determine to aid the
Huguenots.]
At the very commencement of the war the Protestants had sent a deputation
to the German princes to solicit their support in a struggle in which the
adherents of the Augsburg Confession were no less vitally interested than
the reformed. But Bochetel, Bishop of Rennes, the envoy of Charles the
Ninth, had so skilfully misrepresented the true character of the contest,
that the Landgrave of Hesse, and the Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg,
persuaded that political motives, rather than zeal for religion, were the
occasion of the revolt, had refused to assist the Huguenots, while
permitting William of Saxony and the Marquis of Baden to levy troops for
the king. To the Elector Palatine, Frederick the Third, surnamed "the
Pious," who from a Lutheran had become a Calvinist, a special ambassador
was despatched in the person of M. de Lansac. This gentleman, by more than
usually reckless misstatements, sought to persuade the elector to abandon
the enterprise of assistance which he had intended to intrust to his
second son, John Casimir. But his falsehoods were refuted by the
straightforward expose of the prince's agents,[466] and Lansac was only so
far successful that the elector consented to delay the departure of the
troops until he had sent a messenger to France to acquaint himself with
the true state of the case. It needed no more than this to determine him;
for the minister whom the elector had intrusted with the commission, after
visiting successively the court of the king and the camp of the prince of
Conde, returned with certain proofs that the representations of Bochetel
and of Lansac were altogether false.[467] Consequently the army which John
Casimir had gathered was speedily despatched to furnish Conde the support
the Huguenots so much needed.
In the letter which the elector palatine sent about the same time to the
King of France, the motives of this apparently inimical action are vividly
set forth. His envoy, the Councillor Zuleger, says the elector, has made a
careful examination. Lansac and his companion have industriously
circulated throughout Germany the report that the Edict of Toleration is
kept entire, that Conde and the Protestants have no other object in view
but a horrible rebellion against Charles to deprive him of his crown, and
that the prince has had money struck as if he were king himself.[468] But
Zuleger has, on the contrary, reported that when, in the presence of the
royal council, he asked for proofs of Conde's intention to make himself
king, Catharine de' Medici replied that it was a "mockery," and that,
though Conde had struck money, both in the late and in the present
troubles, it was with the king's inscription and arms, and not as though
he were himself king. So far from that, Zuleger declares that, during the
eleven days of his stay in the prince's camp, he heard prayers offered
morning and night for the preservation of the state and for the king's
safety. As to the maintenance of the edict, the constable before his death
openly affirmed that Charles would not permit a free exercise of religion,
and never intended the Edict of Orleans to be other than _provisional_.
Indeed, the queen-mother remarked to Zuleger that it is a privilege of the
French monarchs never to make a perpetual edict; to which Charles, who was
present, promptly responded, "Pourquoi non?"[469]
It was to form a junction with the force brought by John Casimir that the
prince now raised the siege of Paris, two or three days subsequently to
the battle of Saint Denis,[470] and after that D'Andelot, disappointed in
having had no share in the engagement, had scoured the field, driving back
into Paris an advanced guard of the enemy, and burning, by way of bravado,
some windmills in the very suburbs.[471]
[Sidenote: The Huguenots go to meet the Germans.]
[Sidenote: Treacherous diplomacy.]
The purpose of the Huguenot leaders could not be mistaken, and Catharine
was determined to frustrate it. The chief object at which all her
intrigues now aimed was to delay the Protestant army in its march toward
Lorraine, until the Duke of Anjou, at the head of a force which was daily
gaining new accessions of strength from the provinces, should be able to
overtake Conde and bring on a general and decisive action. From Saint
Denis the Huguenots had first followed the course of the upper Seine to
Montereau. Crossing the stream at this point, Coligny, as usual commanding
the vanguard, had, at Pont-sur-Yonne, received a powerful detachment,
under the Count of La Rochefoucauld, which had made its way from the
provinces of Poitou, Saintonge, and Guyenne, across the valley of the
Loire, to reinforce the Prince of Conde's army.[472] Having effected a
junction, the united body had changed its course, recrossed the Seine, and
countermarched to the river Marne, at Epernay and Chalons. Coligny's
skilful manoeuvre had disappointed the queen's plan, and she resorted to
her accustomed arts of negotiation. So flattering, indeed, were her
promises, that Conde, had he not been restrained by the more prudent
counsels of his associates (among whom the Vidame of Chartres was most
urgent in his protests against so suicidal a policy), would instantly have
relaxed the sinews of war.[473] A petty act of treachery served to open
his eyes, and to prevent the Protestants from involving themselves in more
serious disaster; for the Count de Brissac took advantage of a three days'
armistice to fall unexpectedly upon an outpost of the prince's army and
gain an advantage, which was duly magnified by report at Paris into a
brilliant victory.[474] Unabashed by this incident, Catharine soon after
renewed her seductive offers (on the twentieth of December, 1567). She
invited a conference with the Cardinal of Chatillon and other Protestant
leaders, and herself went so far as Chalons to meet them. Thence the scene
of the negotiations was transferred to Vincennes, in the vicinity of
Paris, and for a time the prospect of reconciliation was bright and
encouraging. The king's envoys consented to the re-establishment of the
Edict of Amboise, without any past or future restrictions, until the
decision of the religious question by that mythical assembly which, like a
mirage of the desert, ever and anon arose to entrance and disappoint the
longing eyes of thoughtful men in this century--a free, universal, and
legitimate council of the Church. But the hopes founded on these promises
were as illusory as any previously conceived. Instead of a formal and
unambiguous ratification of the terms by Charles himself, the Cardinal of
Chatillon was treated only to complaints about the causeless rising of the
Protestants, and expressions of astonishment that Conde had not instantly
countermanded the approach of the German auxiliaries on receiving the
king's gracious proffers.[475]
[Sidenote: Catharine implores Alva's assistance.]
[Sidenote: Alva's view of accommodations with heretics.]
Meantime Catharine was not idle in soliciting foreign aid. The Duke
d'Aumale--who had also marched to Lorraine, in order to meet the Germans
coming to the assistance of the Roman Catholics, under command of the
Marquis of Baden--not being strong enough to block the passage of Conde's
troops, Catharine wrote to Alva, begging him to send to the duke, in this
emergency, two thousand arquebusiers. She warned him that if, through the
failure to procure them, the German reiters of John Casimir should be
permitted to enter the kingdom, she would hold herself exonerated, in the
sight of God and of all Christian princes, from the blame that might
otherwise attach to her for the peace which she would be compelled to
make with the heretics.[476] Alva, in reply, declined to send the Spanish
arquebusiers, who, he said, were needed by him, and could do little good
in France; but he added that, if Aumale, who was a soldier, would
guarantee with this accession to stop the reiters, he would let them go,
useful as they were in the Netherlands. As to the accommodation with the
Huguenots, which Catharine suggested, he viewed it as a frightful evil,
and exclaimed "that it was better to have a kingdom ruined in preserving
it for God and the king, than to retain it whole, but without religion,
for the advantage of the devil and his partisans, the heretics."[477]
[Sidenote: Conde and John Casimir meet in Lorraine.]
[Sidenote: Generosity of the Huguenot troops.]
About the beginning of the new year the foot-sore Huguenot army, after
nearly two months of tedious marches through a hostile country, and no
less tedious negotiations, reached Lorraine, only to find that their
German allies had not yet arrived. Sick at heart, with a powerful enemy
hanging on their rear, and seeking only an opportunity to make a sudden
descent upon them, many of the Huguenots were disposed to take advantage
of the proximity of the German cities to disperse and find a refuge there.
But Conde, with his never-failing vivacity and cheerfulness, and Coligny,
with his "grave words," succeeded in checking their despondency until the
welcome news of John Casimir's approach was announced. He brought six
thousand five hundred horse, three thousand foot, and four cannon of
moderate size. His arrival did not, however, prove an occasion of
unmingled satisfaction. The reiters, serving from purely mercenary
motives, demanded the immediate payment of one hundred thousand crowns,
promised as a first instalment on account of their wages, and were
resolved to go no farther without receiving it. The Prince of Conde had
but two thousand crowns to meet the engagement. In this new perplexity the
Huguenots, from the leaders down to the very lowest, gave a noble
illustration of devotion to their religion's cause. Conde and Coligny set
the example by giving up their plate to replenish the empty coffers of the
army. The captains urged, the ministers of the gospel preached, a generous
sacrifice of property in the common interest. Their exhortations did not
fall upon dull ears. Money, gold chains, silver, articles of every
description, were lavishly contributed. An unpaid army sacrificed its own
private property, not only without a murmur, but even joyfully. The very
camp-servants vied with their masters, and put them to shame by their
superior liberality.[478] In a short time a sum was raised which, although
less than what had been pledged, contented the reiters, who declared
themselves ready to follow their Huguenot fellow-soldiers into the heart
of the kingdom.[479] Well might an army capable of such heroic contempt
for personal gain or loss be deemed invincible!
[Sidenote: The march toward Orleans.]
And now, with feelings widely different from those which had possessed
them in the journey toward Lorraine--a movement too nearly akin to a
flight to inspire anything but disgust--the Huguenot soldiers, over twenty
thousand strong, turned their faces once more westward. Their late
pursuers, no longer seeking an engagement where the result might be worse
than doubtful, confined themselves to watching their progress from a safe
distance. As all the cities upon their route were in the hands of the
Roman Catholics, the Huguenots were forced to take more circuitous and
difficult paths through the open country. But the dispositions made by
Coligny are said to have been so thorough and masterly, that they
travelled safely and in comfort.[480] Not that the soldiers, dispersed at
night through the villages, were freed from the necessity or the
temptation to pillage;[481] for the poor farmers, robbed of the fruits of
their honest toil, frequently had good reason to complain that those who
had recently dispensed their own treasure with so liberal a hand were even
more lavish of the property of others. But they were far more merciful and
considerate toward their enemies than the Roman Catholic army to its
friends. Even a curate of Brie--no very great lover of the Huguenots, who
relates with infinite gusto the violation of Huguenot women by Anjou's
soldiers[482]--admits that, excepting in the matter of the plundering of
the churches and the distressing of priests, the Roman Catholics were a
little worse than the heretics.[483]
[Sidenote: The "Michelade" at Nismes.]
Leaving the Huguenot army on its march toward Orleans, let us glance at
the operations of the party in other quarters of the kingdom. Southern
France, where the Protestants were most numerous, and where the excitable
character of the people disposed them more easily than elsewhere to sudden
outbreaks, was not behind the north in rising at the appointed time
(September, 1567). At Nismes, indeed, a furious commotion broke out--the
famous "Michelade," as it was called, because it immediately followed the
feast-day of St. Michael--a commotion whose sanguinary excesses gave it an
unenviable notoriety, and brought deep disgrace upon the Protestant cause.
Here the turbulent populace was encouraged by the report that Lyons was in
friendly hands, and maddened by the intelligence that, besides the common
dangers impending over all the Huguenots of France, the Huguenots of
Nismes had more particular occasion for fear in the troops of the
neighboring Comtat Venaissin. These troops, it was said, had been summoned
by the bishop and chapter of the cathedral of Nismes. The mob accordingly
took possession of the city, closing the gates, and imprisoning a large
number of persons--consuls, priests, and other obnoxious characters. That
night the cathedral and the chapter-house witnessed a wild scene of
destruction. Pictures of the saints, and altars, including everything
associated with Roman Catholic worship, were ruthlessly destroyed. But the
most terrible event occurred in the episcopal palace. The bishop was saved
from capture and certain death by the intervention of a courageous man,
himself a Protestant; but others were less fortunate. No fewer than eighty
prisoners, brought in detachments to the court of the palace, were
butchered in rapid succession, and their corpses thrown promiscuously into
a well. The next morning the Protestant pastors and elders assembled, and,
sending to the ringleaders a minister and a deacon, begged them to
discontinue their horrible work. Already, however, had returning shame
made everybody unwilling to avow his complicity in the crime. Quiet was
restored. The Protestant seneschal and council released such prisoners as
had escaped the fate of their comrades, and the bishop himself was sent
away under an escort to a place of safety, by order of the very judge whom
the clergy had, a year before, sought to deprive of his office as a
heretic.[484] Nismes remained in the hands of the Protestants through the
war.
[Sidenote: Huguenot successes in the south and west.]
[Sidenote: La Rochelle secured for Conde.]
Meanwhile more important movements took place. Rene of Savoy, son of the
Count de Tende, but better known as Cipierre, was Conde's agent in
assembling the Huguenots of Provence; but Paul de Mouvans, whom we have
met with before in this history, was the real hero of the region. In
Dauphiny, Montbrun commanded. In Bourbonnais and the neighboring provinces
west of the Rhone, Parcenac and Verbelai raised three thousand foot and
five hundred horse, but sustained so severe a loss while passing through
Forez, that the number was soon reduced to barely twelve hundred. Nearer
the Pyrenees, seven thousand men were assembled, known as "the army of the
viscounts," to which further reference will shortly be made. Lyons, one of
the Huguenot strongholds in the first war, the Protestants failed to
capture.[485] But Orleans was secured by the skill of Francois de la Noue,
a young champion whose name was destined long to figure in the most
brilliant deeds of arms of his party, both in France and in the Low
Countries.[486] In the west, too, the Huguenots made the most important
gain of the war in the city of La Rochelle, for the next half-century and
more their secure refuge on approach of danger.
This place, strong by nature, surrounded by low, marshy grounds, rendering
it almost unapproachable from the land side, save by the causeways over
which the roads ran, with a large and convenient harbor and with easy
access to the sea, was already rich and populous. The citizens of La
Rochelle were noted for their independent spirit, engendered or fostered
by their maritime habits. Although the great importance of the city dates
from the civil wars, when its wharves received the commerce driven from
older ports, and when its privateers swept the shores of Brittany and the
bosom of the English channel, it had long boasted extraordinary
privileges, among which the most highly prized was the right to refuse
admission to a royal garrison.[487] Besides this, the citizens were
accustomed to choose three candidates for the office of major, from whom
the king or the royal governor made his selection; and the magistrate thus
appointed enjoyed an authority which the Rochellois would scarcely concede
to their monarch.[488] La Rochelle--whose former orthodoxy Father Soulier
attempts to establish by instancing the sentence which the "presidial" of
the city pronounced in 1552 against some Protestants, condemning them to
be dragged on a hurdle with a fagot of sticks bound to their backs, and
afterward to be burned, one of them alive[489]--had been so far affected
by the progress of the Reformation, that it was perhaps only the fear of
losing its trade and privileges that prevented it from openly siding with
Conde in the first religious war.[490] By this time, however,
Protestantism had struck such deep roots, that one of the three candidates
for the mayoralty, at the Easter elections of 1567, was Truchares, a
political Huguenot. The king was, indeed, warned of his sentiments; but
the royal governor, M. de Jarnac, supported his claims, and Truchares
received the requisite confirmation.[491] Still La Rochelle hesitated to
espouse the Protestant side. It was not until midwinter,[492] that Conde,
returning from Lorraine, commissioned M. de Sainte-Hermine to assume
command of the city in his name; and on the tenth of February, 1568, the
mayor and echevins of La Rochelle opened their gates to their new friends,
with protestations of their purpose to devote their lives and property to
the advancement of the common cause. "The sequel proved only too clearly,"
writes a Roman Catholic historian, "that they were very sincere in their
promises; for, having soon after demolished all the churches, they
employed the materials to fortify this city in such a manner that it
served from this time forward as a citadel for the Protestants, and as a
secure retreat for all the apostates and malcontents of the kingdom until
it was reduced by Louis the Thirteenth."[493]
[Sidenote: Spain and Rome oppose the negotiations for peace.]
Meantime the irresolute queen mother, always oscillating between war and
peace, had again begun to treat with the Huguenots. Between the fifth and
twentieth of January she held repeated interviews with Cardinal Chatillon,
D'Esternay, and Teligny. The bigots took the alarm. The Papal Nuncio and
the ambassadors of Spain and Scotland did their utmost "to impeach the
accord." A post arrived from Philip the Second, offering a hundred
thousand crowns of gold if Charles would continue the war. The doctors of
the Sorbonne remonstrated. All united in a common cry that "it was
impossible to have two religions in one realm without great confusion."
Poor Charles was so moved by the stale falsehood, as well as by the large
promises made him, that he sent the Protestant envoys word that he would
treat no further unless Conde and his "complices" would send the reiters
back to Germany, and, wholly disarming, come to him with their ordinary
retinues to purge themselves of the attempt made at Meaux.
[Sidenote: Cardinal Santa Croce demands that Cardinal Chatillon be
surrendered to the Pope.]
[Sidenote: Retort of Marshal Montmorency.]
Even this amount of complaisance on the part of the weak monarch, however,
did not satisfy Cardinal Santa Croce, who, on one occasion entering the
council chamber (on the twentieth of January), boldly demanded the
fulfilment of the queen mother's promise to surrender Cardinal Chatillon
into the Pope's hands. Catharine did not deny the promise, but interposed
the plea that the present was a very unsuitable time, since Chatillon had
come to court upon the king's safe-conduct. To this the churchman replied
that no respect ought to be had toward the Cardinal, for he was "an
excommunicate person," condemned of schism, and dead in the eyes of the
law. Up to this point the Duke de Montmorency, who was present, had kept
silence; but now, turning to the queen mother, he is reported by the
English ambassador to have made a pungent address. "But, madam," he said,
"is it possible that the Cardinal Chatillon's delivery should come in
question, being warranted by the king and your Majesty to the contrary,
and I myself being made a mean therein? Wherefore this matter is odious to
be talked of, and against the law of arms and all good civil policy; and I
must needs repute them my enemies who go about to make me falsify my
promise once made." After these plain words Santa Croce "departed without
attaining his most cruel request."[494]
[Sidenote: March of the viscounts to meet Conde.]
During the first few months after the assumption of arms, the Huguenots of
southern France, surrounded by domestic enemies, had confined themselves
to attempting to secure their own safety and that of their neighbors, by
taking the most important cities and keeping in check the forces of the
provincial governors--an undertaking in which they met with more success
in the districts bordering upon the Mediterranean than in those adjoining
the Bay of Biscay. These events, although in themselves important and
interesting, would usurp a disproportionate place in this history. While
Conde was absent from the vicinity of the capital, however, a body of six
thousand troops, drawn from the army of the _viscounts_, under Mouvans and
other experienced southern leaders, undertook a hazardous march from
Dauphiny, intending to join the prince's army at Orleans.[495] The cities
were in the possession of the enemy, the fords were carefully guarded, the
entire country was hostile. But the perils which might have deterred less
resolute men only enhanced the glory of the success of the gallant
Huguenots. Abandoned by a considerable number of their comrades, who
preferred a life of plunder to a fatiguing journey under arms, they met
(on the eighth of January, 1568) and defeated, with a force consisting
almost exclusively of infantry, the cavalry which the governor of Auvergne
and the local nobility had assembled near the village of Cognac[496] to
dispute their passage. Continuing their march, they reached Orleans in
time to relieve that city, to whose friendly protection against the Roman
Catholic bands of Martinengo and Richelieu that infested its neighborhood
and threatened its capture Conde and the other Huguenot leaders of the
north had entrusted their wives and children.[497]
[Sidenote: Siege of Chartres.]
Having stopped a brief time to rest the soldiers after the protracted
march, the viscounts turned their victorious arms against the city of
Blois. After the surrender of this place, they had proceeded down the
valley of the Loire, and were about to take Montrichard, on the Cher, when
recalled by Conde. The prince had by forced marches anticipated the army
of Anjou, resolving to strike a blow which should be felt at the hostile
capital itself, and had selected Chartres, an important city about fifty
miles in a south-westerly direction from Paris, as the most convenient
place to besiege.[498] Rapid, however, as had been his advance--and a part
of his army had travelled sixty miles in two days--the enemy had
sufficient notice of his intention to throw into the city a small force of
soldiers; and when Conde arrived before the walls (on the twenty-fourth of
February, 1568), he found the place prepared to sustain an attack, in
which the courage of the assailants was equalled by the skill and
resolution of the defenders. As usual, the Huguenots were badly off for
artillery; the united armies could only muster five siege-pieces and four
light culverines. "For, although the Catholics esteem the Huguenots to be
'fiery' men," says a quaint old writer, who was as ready with his sword as
with his pen, "they have always been poorly provided with such implements.
Nor have they, like the former, a Saint Anthony, who, they say, presides
over the element in question."[499]
The operations of the siege of Chartres were interrupted by fresh
negotiations for peace. Half a year had the flames of war been desolating
the fairest parts of France; yet the court was no nearer the attainment of
its ends than at the outbreak of hostilities. If the Roman Catholic forces
had been swollen to about forty thousand men, they were confronted by a
Huguenot army of twenty-eight or thirty thousand men in the very
neighborhood of the capital. The voice of prudence dictated an immediate
settlement of the dispute before more lives were sacrificed, more towns
and villages destroyed, more treasure squandered. Catharine, reigning
supreme under her son's name, with her usual inconstancy of purpose, was
ready to exchange the war, into which she had plunged France by lending
too willing an ear to the suggestions of Philip of Spain, as they came to
her through the Cardinal of Lorraine and others, and which had produced
only bloodshed, devastation of the kingdom, and deeper depression of the
finances, for the peace to which Michel de l'Hospital, her better genius,
was constantly urging her by every consideration of policy and justice.
[Sidenote: Chancellor Michel de l'Hospital's memorial.]
In a paper, wherein about this time the chancellor committed to writing
the arguments he had often ineffectually employed to persuade the king and
his mother, he combats with patriotic indignation the flimsy pretexts of
which the priests and the Spaniard made use in pressing the continuance of
hostilities. "'The king has more men than the Huguenots.' True, but we
find twice as many battles on record gained by the smaller as by the
greater number; in consequence of which fact all princes and nations have
recognized the truth that victory is the gift of God. 'The king's cause is
the more just.' Grant it--yet God makes use of such instruments as He
wills to punish our iniquities--the Babylonians, for instance, of old, the
Turks in our own days. The Huguenots have thus far succeeded beyond all
expectation. They have little money, but what they have they use well, and
they can get more. Their devotion to their cause is conspicuous. They are
not a rabble hastily gotten together, which has risen imprudently, in
disorder, without a leader, without discipline. They are experienced,
resolute, desperate warriors, with plans formed long ago--men ready to
risk everything for the attainment of their matured designs. Necessity and
despair render them docile and wonderfully subject to discipline; and with
this cooperates the high esteem they have conceived of their leaders,
whose ambition is restrained, whose union is cemented by the same
necessity which the ancients called 'the bond of concord.' On the
contrary, the king's camp is rent by quarrels, envy, and rivalry; ambition
is unbridled, avarice reigns supreme. With the termination of so wretched
a war, there will shine forth a joyous and blessed peace, which I can
justly term a 'precious conquest,' since it will render his Majesty
redoubtable to all Europe, which has learned the greatness of the two
powers which the king will restore to his own subjection.
"The true method of breaking up the leagues of the Huguenots is to remove
the necessity for forming them. This must be done by treating the
Huguenots no longer as enemies, but as friends. For, if we examine
carefully into the matter, we shall find that hitherto they have been
dealt with as rebels; and this has compelled them to resort to all means
of self-preservation. This has placed arms in their hands; this has
engendered the horrible desolation of France. For the intrigues set on
foot against them in all quarters were conducted with so little attempt at
secrecy--the disfavor was so evident, the disdain was so apparent, the
threats of the rupture of the Edict of Pacification and of the publication
of the decrees of the Council of Trent were so open, and the injustice of
their handling was so manifest, that they had been too dull and stupid,
had they not avoided the treachery in store for them.[500] Even brute
beasts perceive the coming of the storm, and seek the covert; let us not
find fault if men, perceiving it, arm themselves for the encounter. Our
menaces have been the messengers of our plots, as truly as the lightning
is the messenger of the thunderbolt. We have shown them our preparatives;
let us, therefore, cease to wonder that they stand ready to start on the
first intimation of danger.[501] When they see that they have no longer
anything to fear, they will certainly return to their accustomed
occupations."[502]
[Sidenote: Edict of Pacification, Longjumeau, March 23, 1568.]
L'Hospital was right. The Huguenots wanted nothing but security of person
and conscience--the latter even more than the former. And they were ready
to lay down their arms so soon as the court could bring itself to concede
the restoration of the Edict of Amboise, without the restrictive
ordinances and interpretations which had shorn it of most of its value. On
this basis negotiations now recommenced. The more prudent Huguenots
suggested that the party ought to receive at the king's hands some of the
cities in their possession, to be held as pledges for the execution of the
articles of the compact. But Charles and his counsellors resented the
proposal as insulting to the dignity of the crown,[503] and the Huguenots,
not yet fully appreciating the fickleness or treachery of the court, did
not press the demand--a fatal weakness, soon to be atoned for by the
speedy renewal of the war on the part of the Roman Catholics.[504] After
brief consultation the terms of peace were agreed upon, and were
incorporated in the royal edict of the twenty-third of March, 1568, known,
from the name of the place where it was signed, as the "Edict of
Longjumeau." The cardinal provisions were few: they re-established the
supremacy of the Edict of Amboise, expressly repealing all the
interpretations that infringed upon it; and permitted the nobles, who
under that law had been allowed to have religious exercises in their
castles, to admit strangers as well as their own vassals to the services
of the reformed worship. Conde and his followers were, at the same time,
recognized as good and faithful servants of the crown, and a general
amnesty was pronounced covering all acts of hostility, levy of troops,
coining of money, and similar offences. On the other hand, the Huguenots
bound themselves to disband and lay down their arms, to surrender the
places they held, to renounce foreign alliances, and to eschew in future
all meetings other than those religious gatherings permitted under the
last peace. The new edict was not a final and irrevocable law, but was
granted "until, by God's grace, all the king's subjects should be reunited
in the profession of one and the same religion."[505]
[Sidenote: Conde favors and Coligny opposes the peace.]
The Huguenots gained by this peace all their immediate demands, and so far
the edict might be deemed satisfactory. But what better security had they
for its observance more than they had had for the observance of that which
had preceded it? Coligny, prudent and far-sighted, had shown himself as
averse to concluding it without sufficient guarantees for its faithful
execution, as he had been opposed to beginning the war a half-year before.
The peace, he urged, was intended by the court only as a means of saving
Chartres, and of afterward overwhelming the reformers;[506] and he
attempted to prove his assertions by the signal instances of bad faith
which had provoked the recourse to arms. But Conde was impatient. If we
may believe Agrippa d'Aubigne, his old love of pleasure was not without
its influence;[507] but he covered his true motives under the specious
pretext afforded him by the Huguenot nobles, who, fatigued with the
incessant toils of the campaign, reduced to straits by a warfare which
they had carried on at their own expense, and longing to revisit homes
which had been repeatedly threatened with desolation, had abandoned their
standards and scattered to their respective provinces at the first mention
of peace.[508] Francois de la Noue, more charitable to the prince, regards
the universal desire for peace, without much concern respecting its
conditions, as the wild blast of a hurricane which the Huguenot captains
could not resist if they would.[509] When whole cornets of cavalry started
without leave, before the siege of Chartres was actually raised, what
could generals, deserted by volunteers who had come of their own accord
and had served for six months without pay, expect to accomplish?
[Sidenote: Was the court sincere?]
[Sidenote: A treacherous plot detected. The king indignant.]
Was the peace of Longjumeau--"the patched-up peace," or "the short peace,"
as it was called; that "wicked little peace," as La Noue styles it[510]--a
compact treacherously entered into by the court? This is the old, but
constantly recurring question respecting every principal event of this
unhappy period; and it is one that rarely admits of an easy or a simple
answer. So far as the persons who had been chiefly instrumental in
forwarding the negotiations which ended in the peace of Longjumeau were
concerned, they were Chancellor L'Hospital and the Bishops of Orleans and
Limoges--the most moderate members of the royal council,[511] whose fair
spirit was so conspicuous that for years they had been exposed to insult
and open hostility as supposed Huguenots. Nothing is clearer than that the
purpose of these men was the sincere and entire re-establishment of peace
on a lasting foundation. The arguments of L'Hospital which I have laid
before the reader furnish sufficient proof. This party had, through the
force of circumstances, temporarily obtained the ascendancy in the
council, and now had the ear of the queen mother. But there were by the
side of its representatives at the council-board men of an entirely
different stamp--advocates of persecution, of extermination; a few, from
conscientious motives, preferring, with Alva, a kingdom ruined in the
attempt to root out heresy, to one flourishing, with heresy tolerated; a
larger number--and Cardinal Lorraine, who had now resumed his seat and his
influence, must be classed with these--counting upon deriving personal
advantage from the supremacy of the papal faction. It is equally manifest
that this party could have acquiesced in the peace, which again formally
acknowledged the principle of religious toleration, only with the design
of embracing the first favorable opportunity for crushing the Huguenots,
when scattered and disarmed. Their desires, at least, deceived no one of
ordinary perspicacity. Indeed, the peace came near failing to go into
effect at all, in consequence of the discovery of the fact that a "privy
council" had been held in the Louvre, to which none but sworn enemies of
the Huguenots were admitted, "wherein was conspired a surprise of Orleans,
Soissons, Rochelle, and Auxerre," to be executed by four designated
leaders, while the Protestants were laying down their arms. In an age of
salaried spies, it is not astonishing that by ten o'clock the next morning
the whole plot was betrayed to Cardinal Chatillon, who immediately sent
word to stay the publication of the peace. When Charles heard of it, we
are told that he swore, by the faith of a prince, that, if there had been
any such conspiracy, it had been formed wholly without his knowledge, and,
laying his hand on his breast, said: "This is the cardinal and Gascoigne's
practice. In spite of them, I will proceed with the peace;" and,
commanding pen and ink to be brought, he wrote Conde a letter promising a
good and sincere observance of the articles agreed upon.[512]
[Sidenote: Short-sightedness of Catharine.]
But, besides the two parties, and wavering between them--fluctuating in
her own purposes, as false to her own plans as she was to her promises,
with no principles either of morality or of government, intent only on
grasping power, the enemy of every one that stood in the way of this, even
if it were her son or her daughter--was that enigma, Catharine de' Medici,
whose secret has escaped so many simply because they looked for something
deep and recondite, when the solution lay almost upon the very surface.
Was Catharine sincerely in favor of peace? She was never sincere. Her
Macchiavellian training, the enforced hypocrisy of her married life, the
trimming policy she had thought herself compelled to pursue during the
minority of the kings, her two sons, had eaten from her soul, even to its
root, truthfulness--that pure plant of heaven's sowing. Loving peace only
because it freed her from the fears, the embarrassments, the vexations of
war--not because she valued human life or human happiness--she embraced it
as a welcome expedient to enable her to escape the present perplexities of
her position. It is improbable that Catharine distinctly premeditated a
treacherous blow at the Huguenots, simply because she rarely premeditated
anything very long. I am aware that this estimate of the queen is quite at
variance with the views which have obtained the widest currency; but it is
the estimate which history, carefully read, seems to require us to adopt.
Catharine's plans were proverbially narrow in their scope, never extending
much beyond the immediate present. After the catastrophe, which had
perhaps been the result of the impulse of the moment, she was not,
however, unwilling to accept the homage of those who deemed it a high
compliment to her prudence to praise her consummate dissimulation. She
probably entered upon the peace of Longjumeau without any settled purpose
of treachery--unless that state of the soul be in itself treachery that
has no fixed intention of upright dealing. But she had not, in adopting
the advice of Chancellor de l'Hospital, renounced the policy of the
Cardinal of Lorraine, in case that policy should at some future time
appear to be advantageous; and it was much to be feared that the
contingency referred to would soon arrive. Catharine, not less than
Charles himself, resented "the affair of Meaux" of the preceding
September. It was studiously held up to their eyes by the enemies of the
Huguenots as an attempt upon the honor, and indeed even upon the personal
liberty and life of their Majesties. Might not Catharine and Charles be
tempted to retaliate by trying the effect of a surprise upon the Huguenots
themselves?
[Sidenote: Imprudence of the Huguenots.]
The Huguenots had certainly been grossly imprudent in putting themselves
at the mercy of a woman whom they had greatly offended, and whose natural
place, according to those mysterious sympathies which bind men of similar
natures, was with their adversaries. They had been warned by their secret
friends at court, some of them by Roman Catholic relatives.[513] But the
caution was little heeded. It was not long[514] before those who had been
the most strenuous advocates of peace began to admit that the draught they
had put to their own lips, and now must needs drink, was likely to prove
little to their taste.[515]
[Sidenote: Judicial murder of Rapin, at Toulouse.]
The parliaments made serious objections to the reception of the edict.
Toulouse was, as usual, pre-eminent for its intolerance. The king sent
Rapin, a Protestant gentleman who had served with distinction under Conde
in Languedoc, to carry the law to the parliament, and require its official
recognition. The choice was unfortunate, for it awakened all the hatred of
a court proverbial for its hostility to the Reformation. An accusation of
matters quite foreign to his mission was trumped up against Rapin, and,
contrary to all the principles of justice, and notwithstanding the
privileged character he bore as the king's envoy, he was arrested,
condemned to death, and executed. So atrocious a crime might perhaps have
been punished, had not the new commotions to which we shall soon be
obliged to pay attention, intervened and screened the culprits from their
righteous retribution.[516] Not content with murdering Rapin, the
Parliament of Toulouse still refused to register the edict, and not less
than four successive orders were sent by the king before his refractory
judges yielded an unwilling consent, even then annexing restrictive
clauses which they took care to insert in their secret records.[517]
[Sidenote: Seditious preachers and mobs.]
Again Roman Catholic pulpits resounded, as they did whenever any degree of
toleration was accorded the Protestants, with denunciations of Catharine,
of Charles, of all in the council who had advocated such pernicious views.
Again Ahab and Jezebel appear; but while Catharine is always Jezebel, it
is Charles that now figures, in place of poor Antoine of Navarre, as
Ahab.[518] Again, in the struggle of royalty with priests and monks
breathing sedition, it is the churchman who by his arrogance carries off
the victory with the common people, while from the sensible he receives
merited contempt.[519] So fine a text as the edict afforded for spirited
Lenten discourses did not present itself every day, and the clergy of
France improved it so well that the passions of their flocks were inflamed
to the utmost.[520] Except where their numbers were so large as to command
respect, the Protestants scarcely dared to return to their homes.
[Sidenote: Riot when the edict is published at Rouen.]
The very mention of the peace, with its favorable terms for the
Protestants, was enough to stir up the anger of the ignorant populace.
When the Parliament of Rouen, after agreeing to the Edict of Longjumeau in
private session, threw open its doors (on the third of April, 1568) to
give it official publication, a rabble that had come purposely to create a
tumult, interrupted the reading with horrible imprecations against the
peace, the Huguenots, the edicts, the "preches," and the magistrates who
approved such impious acts. The presidents and counsellors fled for their
lives. The populace, as though inspired by some evil spirit, raged and
committed havoc in the "palais de justice." The mob opened the prisons and
liberated eight or ten Roman Catholics; then flocked to the ecclesiastical
dungeons and would have massacred the Protestants that were still confined
there, had these not found means to ransom their lives with money. It was
not until six days later that the royal edict was read, in the presence of
a large military force called in to preserve order.[521]
[Sidenote: Treatment of the returning Huguenots.]
In spite of the provisions of the edict, the Huguenots wandered about in
the open country, avoiding the cities where they were likely to meet with
insult and violence, if not death. The Protestants of Nogent, Provins, and
Bray hesitated for three months, and then we are told that each man
watched his opportunity and sought to enter when his Roman Catholic
friends might be on guard to defend him from the insolence of others.
[Sidenote: At Provins.]
But the sufferings of the Huguenot burgess were not ended when he was once
more in his own house. He was studiously treated as a rebel. Every
movement was suspicious. A Roman Catholic chronicler, who has preserved in
his voluminous diary many of the details that enable us to restore
something of its original coloring to the picture of the social and
political condition of the times, vividly portrays the misfortunes of the
unfortunate Huguenots of Provins. They were not numerous. One by one,
thirty or forty had stealthily crept into town, experiencing no other
injury than the coarse raillery of their former neighbors. Thereupon the
municipal government met and deliberated upon the measures of police to be
taken "in order to hold the Huguenots in check and in fear, and to avoid
any treachery they might intend to put into practice by the introduction
of their brother Huguenots into the city to plunder and hold it by force."
The determination arrived at was that each of the four captains should
visit the Huguenot houses of his quarter, examine the inmates, and take
all the weapons he found, giving a receipt to their owners. This was not
the only humiliation to which the Protestants were subjected. A
proclamation was published forbidding them from receiving any person into
their houses, from meeting together under any pretext, from leaving their
houses in the evening after seven o'clock in summer, or five in winter,
from walking by day or night on the walls, or, indeed, from approaching
within two arquebuse shots' distance of them--all upon pain of death! They
could not even go into the country without a passport from the bailiff and
the captain of the gate, the penalty of transgressing this regulation
being banishment. No wonder that the Huguenots were irritated, and that
most of them wished that they had not returned.[522] Since, however, a
royal ordinance of the nineteenth of May expressly enjoined upon all
fugitive Huguenots to re-enter the cities to which they belonged, and in
case of refusal commanded the magistrates to raise a force and attack them
as presumptive robbers and enemies of the public peace,[523] they were
perhaps quite as safe within the walls as roaming about outside of them.
[Sidenote: Expedition and fate of De Cocqueville.]
Early in the summer an event occurred on the northern frontier, which,
although in itself of little weight, augmented the suspicions which the
Protestants began to entertain of the Spanish tendencies of the
government. One Seigneur de Cocqueville, with a party of French and
Flemish Huguenots, had crossed the northern boundary and invaded Philip's
Netherland provinces. He had, however, been driven back into France. As he
was believed to have acted under Conde's instructions, that prince was
requested by Charles to inform him whether Cocqueville were in his
service. When Conde disavowed him, and declined all responsibility for
the movement, Marshal Cosse was directed to march against Cocqueville,
and, on the eighteenth of July, the Huguenot chieftain was captured at the
town of Saint Valery, in Picardy, where he had taken refuge. Of
twenty-five hundred followers, barely three hundred are said to have been
spared. In order to please Alva, the Flemings received no quarter. The
leaders, Cocqueville, Vaillant, and Saint Amand, were brought to Paris and
gibbeted on the Place de Greve.[524]
[Sidenote: Attitude of the government suspicious.]
[Sidenote: Garrisons and interpretative ordinances.]
The central government itself gave the gravest grounds for fear and
suspicion. The Huguenots had promptly disbanded. They had lost no time in
dismissing their German allies, who, retiring with well-filled pockets to
the other side of the Rhine, seemed alone to have profited by the
intestine commotions of France.[525] On the contrary, the Roman Catholic
forces showed no disposition to disarm. It is true that, in the first
fervor of the ascendancy of the peace party, Catharine countermanded a
levy of five thousand Saxons, much to the annoyance of Castelnau, who had
by his unwearied diligence brought them in hot haste to Rethel on the
Aisne, only to learn that the preliminaries of peace were on the point of
being concluded, and that the troopers were expected to retrace their
steps to Saxony.[526] But the Swiss and Italian soldiers, as well as the
French gens-d'armes, were for the most part retained. To Humieres, who
commanded for the king in Peronne, Charles wrote an explanation of his
course: "Inasmuch as there are sometimes turbulent spirits so constituted
that they neither can nor desire to accommodate themselves so soon to
quiet, it has appeared to me extremely necessary to anticipate this
difficulty, and act in such a manner that, force and authority remaining
on my side, I may be able to keep in check those who might so far forget
themselves as to set on foot new disturbances and be the cause of
seditious uprising."[527] Large garrisons were thus provided for those
towns which had rendered themselves conspicuous in the defence of the
Huguenots during the late war, and the sufferings of the Protestants, upon
whom, in preference to their Roman Catholic neighbors, the insolent
soldiers were quartered, were terrible beyond description.[528] The
horrors of the "dragonnades" of the reign of Louis the Fourteenth were
rivalled by these earlier military persecutions. Multitudes were despoiled
of their goods, hundreds lost their lives at the hands of their cruel
guests. France assumed the aspect of a great camp, with sentries posted
everywhere to maintain it in peace against some suspected foe. The
sea-ports, the bridges, the roads were guarded; the Huguenots themselves
were placed under a species of surveillance. Nor were the old resorts of
the court forgotten. Again interpretative ordinances were called in to
abrogate a portion of the law itself. Charles declared in a new
proclamation that he had not intended by the Edict of Longjumeau to
include Auvergne, nor any district belonging as an appanage to his mother,
to Anjou, Alencon, or the Bourbon princes, in the toleration guaranteed by
the edict. And thus a very considerable number of Protestants were by a
single stroke of the pen stripped of the privileges solemnly accorded to
them but a few weeks before.[529] Other pledges were as shamelessly
broken. The Huguenot gentlemen whom the court had attempted to punish by
declaring them to have forfeited their honors and dignities, were not
reinstated according to the terms of the edict.[530]
[Sidenote: Oppression by royal governors.]
The conduct of individual governors furnished still greater occasion for
complaint and alarm. The Duke of Nemours, who, in marrying Anne of Este,
Guise's widow, two years before, seemed also to have espoused all the
hatred which the Lorraines felt for Protestantism, and for the family of
the Chatillons, its most prominent and faithful defenders, was governor of
the provinces of Lyonnais and Dauphiny. This insubordinate nobleman loudly
proclaimed his intention to disregard the Edict of Longjumeau, as opposed
to the Roman Catholic Church and to the king's honor. In vain did the
Protestants, who were numerous in the city of Lyons, demand to be allowed
to enjoy the two places of worship they had possessed, before the late
troubles, within the city walls. The duke would not listen to their just
claims, and the court, in answer to their appeals, only responded that the
king did not approve of the holding of Protestant services inside of
cities, and that a place would shortly be assigned for their use in the
vicinity.[531] Unrebuked by the queen or her son for his flagrant
disobedience, Nemours received nothing but plaudits from the fanatical
adherents of the religion he pretended to maintain, and was honored by the
Pope, Pius the Fifth (on the fifth of July, 1568), with a special brief,
in which he was praised for being the first to set a resplendent example
of resistance to the execution of an unchristian peace.[532]
Marshal Tavannes, in Burgundy, earned equal gratitude for his opposition
to the concession of Protestant rights. Not content with remonstrance
respecting a peace which had excited every one "to raise his voice against
the king and Catharine," and with dark hints of the danger of handling so
carelessly a border province like Burgundy,[533] he openly favored the
revival of those "Confraternities of the Holy Ghost" which Charles had so
lately condemned and prohibited. Being himself detained by illness, two of
his sons were present at a meeting of one of these seditious assemblages,
held in Dijon, the provincial capital, where, before a great concourse of
people, the most inflammatory language was freely uttered.[534]
[Sidenote: The "Christian and Royal League."]
[Sidenote: Insubordination to royal authority.]
At Troyes, the capital of Champagne, a similar association assumed the
designation of "the Christian and Royal League." The document, containing
the oath taken by the clergy whom the king's lieutenant had associated
with the nobility and the provincial estates in the "holy" bond, is still
extant, with the signatures of the bishop, the deans, canons, and inferior
ecclesiastics appended.[535] The primary object was the maintenance of
"the true Catholic and Roman Church of God;" and after this the
preservation of the crown for the house of Valois was mentioned. It was to
be sustained "against all persons, without excepting any, save the persons
of the king, his sons and brothers, and the queen their mother, and
without regard to any relationship or alliance," and "so long as it might
please God that the signers should be governed according to the Roman and
Apostolic Church."[536] In less public utterances the spirit of
insubordination to the regal authority made itself understood even more
clearly. When the formation of such associations was objected to, on the
ground of the king's prohibition, the response given by those who
pretended to be better informed than the rest was that the Cardinal of
Lorraine could make the matter agreeable to his Majesty. Others more
boldly announced the intention of the Roman Catholic party, in case
Charles should refuse to sanction its course, to send him to a monastery
for the rest of his days, and elect another king in his place. Three
months' time was all that these blatant boasters allowed for the utter
destruction of the Huguenots in France. An end would be made of them as
soon as the harvest and vintage were past.[537]
[Sidenote: Admirable organization of the Huguenots.]
If the Roman Catholics had resolved upon a renewal of the war, they
certainly had reason to desire a better combination of their forces than
they had effected in the late contest. They had been startled and amazed
at the rapidity with which, although embracing but an inconsiderable
minority of the population, the Huguenots had succeeded in massing an army
that held at bay that of the king. They admired the completeness of the
organization which enabled the Prince of Conde and the admiral to summon
the gentry of the most distant provinces, and bring them to the very
vicinity of the court before the movement was suspected even by Constable
Montmorency, who believed himself to be kept advised of the most trifling
occurrences that took place in any part of France. The triumph of the
Huguenots--for was it not a triumph which they had achieved in securing
such terms as the Edict of Longjumeau conceded?--was a disgrace to the
papists, who had not known how to use their overwhelming preponderance in
numbers. Never had a more signal example been given of the superiority of
united and zealous sympathy over discordant and soulless counsels.[538]
While their enemies, with nothing in common but their hatred of
Protestantism, were hampered by the want of concert between their leaders,
or cheated of their success by their positive jealousies and quarrels, the
Huguenots had in their common faith, in their well-ordered form of church
government, combining the advantages of great local efficiency with those
of a representative union, and in their common danger, the instruments
best adapted to secure the ends they desired. "They were so closely bound
together by this order and by these objects," wrote the Venetian
ambassador Correro, "that there resulted a concordant will and so perfect
a union that it made them prompt in rendering instant obedience and in
forming common designs, and most ready to execute the commands of their
superiors."[539]
[Sidenote: Murder runs riot throughout France.]
With such associations as "the Confraternities of the Holy Ghost," and
"the Christian and Royal League" springing up in various parts of France,
under the express sanction of the provincial governors, and publishing as
their chief aim the extirpation of heresy from the realm; with priests and
monks, especially those of the new order of Jesus, inflaming the passions
of the people by seditious preaching, and persuading their hearers that
any toleration of heretics was a compact with Satan, it is not strange
that murder held high carnival wherever the Protestants were not so
numerous as to be able to stand on the defensive. The victims were of
every rank and station, from the obscure peasant to the distinguished
Cipierre, son of the Count de Tende and a relative of the Duke of Savoy,
the orders for whose assassination were confidently believed to have
issued from the court.[540] At Auxerre, which had been given up by the
Huguenots in accordance with the provisions of the peace, one hundred and
fifty Protestants paid with their lives the price of their good faith.
Their bodies were thrown into the public sewers. In the city of Amiens one
hundred and fifty persons were slaughtered at one time. Instead of
punishment, the rioters obtained their object: the reformed worship was
forbidden in Amiens, or within three leagues of the city.[541] At Clermont
the assassins, after plundering the wares of a wealthy merchant, who had
refused to hang tapestry before his house at the time of the procession on
Corpus Christi Day--La Fete-Dieu--buried him in a fire made of furniture
taken from his own house.[542] At Ligny, in Champagne, a Huguenot was
pursued into the very bedchamber of a royal officer, and there killed.
Troyes, Bourges, Rouen, and a host of other places, witnessed the
commission of atrocities which it would be rather sickening than
profitable to narrate.[543] In Paris itself the murders of Huguenots were
frequent. "On Sunday last," wrote Norris, the English envoy, to his royal
mistress, "the Prince of Conde sent a gentleman to the king, to beseech
his Majesty to administer justice against such as murder them of the
religion, and as he entered into the city there were five slain in St.
Anthony's street, not far from my lodging."[544] The aggregate of
homicides committed within the brief compass of this so-called peace was
enormous. Jean de Serres and Agrippa d'Aubigne may possibly go somewhat
beyond the mark when they state the number of victims in three
months--April, May, and June, 1568--at over ten thousand;[545] but they
are substantially correct in saying that the number far exceeded that of
the armed Huguenots slain during the six months of the preceding war;[546]
for the Venetian ambassador, who certainly had no motive for exaggeration,
asserts that "the principal cities of the kingdom, notwithstanding the
conditions of the peace, refused to readmit 'the preachings' to their
territories, and slew many thousands of Huguenots who dared to rise and
complain."[547]
[Sidenote: Rochelle and other cities refuse to receive garrisons.]
[Sidenote: Conde and Coligny retire.]
[Sidenote: D'Andelot's remonstrance.]
While the majority of the cities held by the Protestants had, as we have
seen, promptly opened their gates to the king, a number, perceiving the
dangers to which they were exposed, alarmed by the attitude of the Roman
Catholics, and doubtful of the good faith of the court, declined to allow
the garrisons to enter. This was the case with La Rochelle, which defended
its course by appealing to its privileges, and with Montauban, Albi,
Milhau, Sancerre, Castres, Vezelay, and other less important towns.[548]
The events of a few weeks had amply vindicated the wisdom and justice of
their refusal. La Rochelle even began to repair its fortifications,
confident that the papal faction would never rest until it had made the
attempt to destroy the great Huguenot stronghold in the west. Evidently
there was no safety for a Protestant under the aegis of the Edict of
Longjumeau. The Prince of Conde dared not resume the government of the
province nominally restored to his charge, and retired to Noyers, a small
town in Burgundy, belonging to his wife's dower, where he would be less
exposed than in the vicinity of Paris to any treacherous attempt upon his
person. Admiral Coligny was not slow in following his example. He
abandoned his stately manor of Chatillon-sur-Loing, where, with a heart
saddened by recent domestic affliction,[549] he had been compelled to
exercise a princely hospitality to the crowds that daily thronged to
consult with him and to do him honor,[550] and took up his abode in the
castle of Tanlay, belonging to his brother D'Andelot, and within a few
miles of the prince's retreat.[551] D'Andelot himself had recently started
for Brittany, where his first wife, Claude de Rieux, had held extensive
possessions.[552] Before leaving, however, he had written to Catharine de'
Medici, a letter of remonstrance full of noble sentiments. The occasion
was the murder of one of his gentlemen, whom he had sent to the
neighboring city of Auxerre; but his letter embraced a complete view of
"the calamitous state of the poor kingdom," whose misery "was such as to
cause the hair of all that heard to stand on end." "Not only," said
D'Andelot, "can we feel no doubt that God will not leave unpunished so
much innocent blood, which continues to cry before Him for vengeance, as
well as so many violations of women and maidens; so many robberies; so
much oppression--in one word, every species of iniquity. But, besides
this, we can look for nothing else than the near-approaching desolation
and ruin of this state: for no one that has read sacred and profane
history will be able to deny that such things have always preceded the
overthrow of empires and monarchies. I am well aware, madam, that there
will be those who, on seeing this letter, will ridicule me, and will say
that I am playing the part of prophet or preacher. I am neither the one
nor the other, since God has not given me this calling. But I will yet
say, with truth, that there is not a man in the kingdom, of any rank or
quality, who loves his king and his kingdom better than I do, or who is
more grieved at seeing those disorders that I see, which can, in the end,
result only in general confusion. I know full well that I shall be met
with the taking up of arms, in which I participated, with so many others,
on the eve of last St. Michael's Day, as if we had intended to attack the
persons of your Majesties, or anything belonging to you, or this state, as
was published wherever it was possible, and as is still daily asserted.
But, not to undertake other justification, I will only say that, if such
wickedness had entered into my heart, though I might conceal it from men,
I could not hide it from God, from whom I never have asked forgiveness for
it, nor ever shall I." D'Andelot proceeded to show that the movement in
question had been caused by absolute necessity, and that this was rendered
evident to all men by that which was now occurring in every part of
France. He told her that it was sufficiently manifest that this universal
oppression was only designed to provoke "those of the religion" to such a
point that they would lose patience, and to obtain a pretext for attacking
and exterminating them. He reminded her that he had often insisted "that
opinions in matters of religion can be changed neither by fire nor by
force of arms, and that those deem themselves very happy who can lay down
their lives for the service of God and for His glory." He warned her of
those who, unlike the Huguenots, would sacrifice the interests of the
state to their own individual ends of ambition or revenge. In conclusion,
after alluding to a recent sudden death which much resembled a mark of the
divine displeasure upon the murderous assault that had called forth this
letter, he exclaimed: "I do not mean to be so presumptuous as to judge the
dealings of God; but I do mean to say, with the sure testimony of His
word, that all those who violate public faith are punished for it."[553]
[Sidenote: Catharine takes side with the chancellor's enemies.]
That salutary warning had been rung in Catharine's ears more than once,
and was destined to be repeated again and again, with little effect: "All
those who violate public faith are punished for it." L'Hospital had but a
few months before been urging to a course of political integrity, and
pointing out the rock on which all previous plans of pacification had
split. There was but one way to secure the advantages of permanent peace,
and that was an upright observance of the treaties formed with the
Huguenots. But Catharine was slow to learn the lesson. Crooked paths, to
her distorted vision, seemed to be the shortest way to success. Her
Italian education had taught her that deceit was better, under all
circumstances, than plain dealing, and she could not unlearn the
long-cherished theory. Whether L'Hospital's views were originally the
chief motives that influenced her in consenting to the peace of
Longjumeau, or whether she had acquiesced in it as a cover to treacherous
designs, certain it is that she now began to side openly with the
chancellor's enemies, and that the Cardinal of Lorraine regained his old
influence in the council. The fanatical sermons that had been a
premonitory symptom of the previous wars were again heard with complacency
in the court chapel; for, about the month of June, the king appointed as
his preachers four of the most blatant advocates of persecution: Vigor, a
canon of Notre Dame; De Sainte Foy; the gray friar, Hugonis; and Claude de
Sainctes, whose acquaintance the reformers had made at the Colloquy of
Poissy.[554]
[Sidenote: Remonstrance of the three marshals.]
[Sidenote: Catharine's intrigues.]
There had been a desperate struggle in the royal council ever since the
conclusion of the peace. The extreme Roman Catholics, recognizing the
instability of Catharine, had long since begun to base their hopes upon
Henry of Anjou's influence. Their opponents accepted the issue, and
resolved to circumscribe the duke's inordinate powers. Three of the
marshals of France--Montmorency, his brother Damville, and
Vieilleville--presented themselves at a meeting of the royal council held
in the queen mother's sick-chamber (on the second of May, 1568), to
remonstrate against Anjou's retaining the office of lieutenant-general.
Even Cardinal Bourbon supported their movement, and, sinking for the time
his extreme religious partisanship, threatened to leave the court, and
give the world to understand how much he had at heart the honor of his
house and the welfare of his friends. The object of the marshals could not
be mistaken: it was nothing less than the overthrow of the Cardinal of
Lorraine, who sought supreme power under cover of Anjou's name. The end of
the war, remarked the ambassador, Sir Henry Norris, had brought no end to
the mortal hatred between the houses of Guise and Montmorency. The
prospect of permanent peace was dark. The king was easy to be seduced, his
mother bent upon maintaining these divisions in the court, and Anjou so
much under the cardinal's influence that it was to be feared that the
Huguenots would in the end be forced to have recourse once more to arms.
In the midst of these perils, the queen mother had been exercising her
ingenuity in playing off one party against the other; now giving
countenance to the Guises, now to the Montmorencies. At one time she used
Limoges, at another Morvilliers or Sens, in her secret intrigues.
Presently she resorted to Lorraine, and, when jealous of his too great
forwardness, would turn to the chancellor himself, "undoing in one day
what the cardinal had intended long afore." Besides these prominent
statesmen, she had not scrupled to take up with meaner tools--men whose
elevation boded no good to the commonwealth, and with whom she conferred
about the imposition of those onerous taxes which had cost her the
forfeiture of the good-will of the people. To add to the confusion, the
jealousy between the king and his brother Anjou had reappeared, and the
chancellor had lost his characteristic courage and avowed his utter
despair of being able to stem the fierce tide of human selfishness and
passion. Cardinal Lorraine was realizing his long-cherished hope: "for
this one man's authority had been the greatest countermand of his
devices."[555]
[Sidenote: The court tries to ruin Conde and Coligny.]
The Huguenot leaders had entered into engagements to repay to the king the
nine hundred thousand francs advanced by him to the German reiters of
Count Casimir. This sum--a large one for the times--Charles now called
upon Conde and Coligny to refund, and he expressly commanded that it
should not be levied upon the Protestant churches, but be raised by those
who had taken up arms in the late contest.[556] It was a transparent
attempt to array the masses that had suffered little pecuniarily in the
war against the brave men who had not only impoverished themselves, but
hazarded their lives in defence of the common cause. Nothing less than the
financial ruin of the prince and the admiral, who had voluntarily become
sureties, seemed likely to satisfy their enemies.
[Sidenote: Teligny sent to carry a reply.]
The Prince of Conde despatched young Teligny to carry his spirited reply
to this extraordinary demand, and, not confining himself to the exhibition
of its flagrant injustice, he recapitulated the daily multiplying
infractions upon the edict. The Protestants were treated as enemies, he
said, and were safe neither at home nor abroad. An open war could not be
more bitter.[557] Besides countless general massacres, he complained of
the recent assassination of two of his own dependants, and of the
surveillance exercised over all the great noblemen "of the religion," who
were closely watched in their castles by the commanders of neighboring
forces. Against himself the unparalleled insult had been shown of placing
a garrison in the palace of a prince of the blood. Nay, he had arrested a
spy caught in the very act of measuring the height of the fortifications
of Noyers, and sounding the depth of the moat, with a view to a subsequent
assault, and the capture not only of the prince, but of the admiral, who
frequently came there to see him. He rehearsed the grounds of just alarm
which the Protestants had in the threats their indiscreet enemies were
daily uttering, and in "the confraternities of the Holy Ghost," defiantly
instituted with the approval of the king's own governors. What safety was
there for the Huguenots when a counsellor of a celebrated parliament had
lately asserted, in the presence of an assembly of three thousand persons,
"that he had commands from the leading men of the royal council
admonishing the Catholics that they ought to give no credence to any
edicts of the king unless they contained a peculiar mark of authenticity."
And he was induced to believe him right, by noticing the fact that, since
the establishment of peace, no one had obeyed the royal letters. Finally,
in decided but respectful language, he remonstrated against the pernicious
precedent which the court was allowing to become established, when the
express commands of the monarch were set at naught with impunity.[558]
[Sidenote: An oath to be exacted of the Huguenots.]
As the time approached for the blow to be struck that should forever put
an end to the exercise of the reformed faith in France, the conspirators
began to betray their anxiety lest their nefarious designs might be
anticipated and rendered futile by such a measure of defence as that which
the Huguenots had taken on the eve of Michaelmas. They resolved,
therefore, if possible, to bind their victims hand and foot; and no more
convenient method presented itself than that of involving them in
obligations of implicit obedience which would embarrass, if they did not
absolutely preclude, any exercise of their wonderful system of combined
action. About the beginning of August, Charles despatched to all parts of
his dominions the form of an oath which was to be demanded of every
Protestant subject, and the royal officers and magistrates were directed
to make lists of those who signed as well as of those who refused to sign
it.[559] "We protest before God, and swear by His name"--so ran the
oath--"that we recognize King Charles the Ninth as our natural sovereign
and only prince ... and that we will never take up arms save by his
express command, of which he may have notified us by his letters patent
duly verified; and that we will never consent to, nor assist with counsel,
money, food, or anything else whatsoever, those who shall arm themselves
against him or his will. We will make no levy or assessment of money for
any purpose without his express commission; and will never enter into any
secret leagues, intrigues, or plots, nor engage in any underhand practices
or enterprises, but, on the contrary, we promise and swear to notify him
or his officers of all that we shall be able to learn and discover that is
devised against his Majesty.... Moreover, we protest that we will not
leave the city, whatever necessity may arrive, but will join our hearts,
our wills, and our abilities with our fellow-citizens in defence of that
city, to which we will always entertain the devotion of true and faithful
citizens, whilst the Catholics will find in us sincere and fraternal
affection: awaiting the time when it may please God to put an end to all
troubles, to which we hope that this reconciliation will be a happy
prelude."[560]
The trap was not ill contrived, and its bars were strong enough to hold
anything that might venture within. Fortunately, however, the bait did not
conceal the cruel design lurking behind it. Why, it might be asked, this
new test? Was Conde, whom the king had only four or five months ago
recognized by solemn edict as his "dear cousin and faithful servant and
subject," a friend or a foe? Had peace been concluded with the Huguenots
only that they might anew be treated as rebels and enemies? What had
become of the prescribed amnesty? Was it at all likely that private
citizens would bury in oblivion their former dissensions and abstain from
mutual insults, when the monarch officially reminded them that there was
one class of his subjects whose past conduct made them objects of grave
suspicion? While, therefore, the Huguenots professed themselves ready to
give the king all possible assurances of their loyal devotion, they
declined to swear to a form that bore on its face the proof that it was
composed, not in accordance with Charles's own ideas, but by an enemy of
the crown and of public tranquillity. They requested that it might receive
such modifications as would permit them to sign it with due regard to
their own self-respect and to their religious convictions, and they
entreated Charles to confirm their liberty of conscience and of religious
observance; for, without these privileges, which they valued above their
own existence, they were ready to forsake, not only their cities, but
their very lives also.[561]
[Sidenote: The plot disclosed by an intercepted letter.]
At this critical moment the destiny of France was wavering in the balance,
and the decision depended upon the answer to be given to the question
whether Chancellor L'Hospital or Cardinal Lorraine should retain his place
in the council. The tolerant policy of the former is too well understood
to need an explanation. The designs of the latter are revealed by an
intercepted letter that fell into the hands of the Huguenots about this
time. It was written (on the ninth of August) at the little country-seat
named Madrid,[562] whose ruins are still pointed out, near the banks of
the Seine, on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, and not far from the walls
of the city of Paris. The writer, evidently a devoted partisan of the
house of Guise, had been entrusted by the Cardinal of Lorraine[563] with a
glimpse at the designs of the party of which the latter was the declared
chief. A proclamation was soon to be made in the king's name, through
Marshal Cosse, to the Protestant nobles, assuring them of the monarch's
intention to deal kindly and peaceably with them, to preserve their
religious liberties, and to treat them as his faithful subjects; and
explaining the design of the movement which he was now setting on foot to
be merely the reduction of the inhabitants of some insolent cities (those
that, like La Rochelle, had refused to admit garrisons) to his authority.
This announcement, the cardinal proceeded to say, might disturb some good
Catholics, who would think that their labors and the dangers they had
undergone were all in vain. In reality, however, it was only intended to
secure the power in the hands of the king, and to take away from the
Protestant leaders all occasion for assembling, until, being reduced to
straits, that rabble, so hostile to the king and the kingdom, should be
wholly destroyed. Thus the very remnants would be annihilated; for the
seed would assuredly spring up again, unless the same course should be
pursued as that of which the French had resplendent examples shown them by
their neighbors.[564] Meanwhile, until these plans could be carried into
effect, as they would doubtless be within the present month, the
Protestant nobles must be carefully diverted, as some were already showing
signs of security, and others of falling into the snare prepared for them.
The cardinal, so he informed the writer, was confident, with God's favor,
of an easy and most certain victory over the enemies of the faith.[565]
[Sidenote: Isabella of France again her husband's mouthpiece.]
Such were the cardinal's intentions as expressed by himself and reported
almost word for word[566] in a letter to which I shall presently have
occasion again to direct the reader's attention. It was the policy
advocated persistently both by Pius the Fifth and by Philip the Second,
and embodied in counsel which would have been resented by a court
possessed of more self-respect than the French court, as impertinent
advice. For, in the report made to Catharine by one of her servants at the
Spanish capital, there is a wonderful similarity in the language employed
to that used at the conference of Bayonne. Isabella of France is again the
speaker, though much suspected of uttering rather the sentiments of
Philip, her husband, who was present,[567] than her own. Again, after
expressing the most vehement zeal for the welfare of her native country,
she advocated rigorous measures against the Huguenots, in phrases almost
identical with those which, as the Duke of Alva relates, she had addressed
to her mother three years before. "She told me among other things," says
the queen's agent, "that she would never believe that either the king her
brother, or you, will ever execute the design already entered into between
you (although, by your command, I had notified the king [Philip] and
herself of your good-will respecting this matter), until she saw it
performed; for you had often before made them the same promises, but no
result had ever followed. She feared that your Majesties might be
dissuaded from action by the smooth speeches of certain persons in your
court, until the enemy gained the opportunity of forming new designs, not
only against the king's authority, but even against yourselves. The
apprehension kept her in a constant state of alarm."[568]
[Sidenote: King Charles entreats his mother to avoid war.]
But, although Catharine had now given in her adhesion to the Spanish and
Lorraine party, the success of that party was as yet incomplete.
L'Hospital was still in the privy council, and Charles himself greatly
preferred the conciliation and peace advocated by the chancellor. The
same letter from the pleasure-palace of "Madrid," on the banks of the
Seine, whose contents have already occupied our attention, makes important
disclosures respecting the attitude of the unhappy prince, of whom it may
be questioned whether his greatest misfortune was that he had so
unprincipled a mother, or that he had not sufficient strength of will to
resist her pernicious designs. "I observed," wrote this correspondent
still further in reference to the Cardinal of Lorraine, "that he was very
much excited on account of a conversation which the king had recently had
with the queen, and which he believed to have been suggested to him by
others. For the king entreated his mother, almost as a suppliant, 'to take
the greatest care lest war should again break out, and that the edict
should everywhere be observed: otherwise he foresaw the complete ruin of
his kingdom.'[569] And when the queen alleged the rebellion of the
inhabitants of La Rochelle, he replied, as he had been instructed
beforehand, 'that the Rochellois only desired to retain their ancient
privileges. Their demand was not unreasonable; and even if it were, it was
better to make a temporary sacrifice to the welfare of the realm than to
plunge in new turmoil. As to the nobles, he was persuaded that they would
live peaceably if the edict were properly executed. In short, he was
earnestly desirous that matters should be restored to their best and most
quiet state.' The queen and very many other illustrious persons have but
one object of fervent desire, and that is to see the kingdom of France
return to the condition it was in under Francis and Henry. The queen
mother knows that this speech was dictated to him by certain men, and she
owes the authors of it no good-will. So much the more anxiously does she
desire, in common with a vast multitude of good Catholics, to prove to
the king that whatever is done in this affair has for its sole object to
liberate him from servitude and make him a king in reality, and to expel
the pestilence and those infected by it--a result utterly unattainable in
any other way."[570]
[Sidenote: Catharine's animosity against L'Hospital.]
Catharine could not doubt that it was Michel de l'Hospital that had
infused into Charles his own just and pacific spirit. From the moment she
had come to this conclusion the chancellor's fall was inevitable. The
particular occasion of it, however, seems to have been the opposition
which he offered to the reception of a papal bull. To relieve the royal
treasury, the court had applied to Rome for permission to alienate
ecclesiastical possessions in France yielding an income of fifty thousand
crowns (or one hundred and fifty thousand francs), on the plea that the
indebtedness had been incurred in defence of the Roman Catholic faith.
Pius the Fifth granted the application, but in his bull of the first of
August, 1568, he not only made it a condition that the funds should be
exclusively employed under the direction of a trustworthy person--and as
such he named the Cardinal of Lorraine--in the extermination of the
heretics of France, or their reconciliation with the Church of Rome, but
he ascribed to Charles in making the request the declared purpose of
continuing a work for which his own means had proved inadequate. The
reception of the document was in itself an act of bad faith, and the
chancellor resisted it to the utmost of his power, urging that the pontiff
should be requested to alter its objectionable form.[571]
[Sidenote: Another quarrel between Lorraine and the chancellor.]
Another of those painful scenes occurred in the privy council (on the
nineteenth of September), of which there had been so many within the past
four or five years. Again the disputants were the Cardinal of Lorraine and
the chancellor. The former angrily demanded the reason why L'Hospital had
refused to affix his signature to the bull; whereupon the latter alleged,
among many other grounds, that to revoke the Edict of Pacification, as
demanded by the Pope, "was the direct way to cause open wars, and to bring
the Germans into the realm." The cardinal was "much stirred." He called
L'Hospital a hypocrite; he said that his wife and daughter were
Calvinists. "You are not the first of your race that has deserved ill of
the king," he added. "I am sprung from as honest a race as you are,"
retorted the other. Beside himself with fury, Lorraine "gave him the lie,
and, rising incontinently out of his chair," would have seized him by the
beard, had not Marshal Montmorency stepped in between them. "Madam," said
the cardinal, "in great choler," turning to the queen mother, in whose
presence the angry discussion took place, "the chancellor is the sole
cause of all the troubles in France, and were he in the hands of
parliament his head would not tarry on his shoulders twenty-four hours."
"On the contrary, Madam," rejoined L'Hospital, "the cardinal is the
original cause of all the mischiefs that have chanced as well to France,
within these eight years, as to the rest of Christendom. In proof of which
I refer him to the common report of even those who most favor him."[572]
[Sidenote: The chancellor's fall.]
But the chancellor accomplished nothing. Catharine had overcome her weak
son's partiality for the grave old counsellor by persuading him that, as
the chancellor's wife, his daughter, his son-in-law, and indeed his entire
house, were avowedly Huguenots, it was impossible but that he was himself
only restrained from making an open profession of Protestantism by the
fear of losing his present position.[573] Finding himself not only
stripped of all influence, and compelled to witness the enactment of
measures repugnant to his very nature, but an object of hatred to his
associates, Michel de l'Hospital withdrew from a council board where, as
he asserted, even Charles himself did not dare to express his opinions
freely.[574] Subsequently retiring altogether from the court to his
country-seat of Vignai, not far from Etampes, he surrendered his insignia
of office to a messenger of Catharine, who came to recommend him, in the
king's name, to take that rest which his advanced years demanded. Monsieur
de Morvilliers succeeded him, with the title of keeper of the seals, but
the full powers of chancellor.[575] In quiet retirement, the venerable
judge and legislator lingered more than four years, unhappy only in being
spared to see the melancholy results of the rejection of his prudent
counsels, the desolation of his native land, and the transformation of an
amiable king into a murderer of his own subjects. Few days in this
eventful reign were more lasting in their consequences than that which
beheld the final removal from all direct influence upon the court of the
only leading politician or statesman who could have forestalled the
horrors of a generation of inhuman wars.
[Sidenote: The plot.]
[Sidenote: Marshal Tavannes its author.]
The crisis now rapidly approached. The Huguenot chiefs were widely
separated from each other--Montgomery in Normandy, Genlis and Mouy in
Picardy, Rochefoucauld at Angouleme, D'Andelot in Brittany, Conde and
Coligny in Burgundy. The royal court, now entirely in the interest of the
Guises, resolved to execute the plan which the Roman Catholic nobles of
this faction had sketched to Alva three years before at Bayonne, by the
seizure of five or six of the leaders, as a measure preliminary to the
total suppression of Protestantism in France. Gaspard de Tavannes was
entrusted with the execution of the most important part of the scheme--the
arrest of the prince and the admiral. Fourteen companies of gens-d'armes
and as many ensigns of infantry stood under his orders, and Noyers was
closely beset on all sides.[576] It was at this moment, when secrecy was
all important to the success of the plot, that the tidings of the
threatening storm reached its destined victims. It has long been believed
and reported that Tavannes, unwilling to lend himself to unworthy
machinations whose execution would have wounded his soldierly pride, took
measures to warn Conde and Coligny of their danger. Unfortunately, the
story rests on no better authority than his "Memoires," written by a son
who has often shown a greater desire to vindicate his father's memory than
to maintain historical truth, and who, writing under the rule of the
Bourbons, had in this case, as in that of the pretended deliverance of
Henry of Navarre and Henry of Conde, at the great Parisian massacre four
years later, sufficient inducements for endeavoring to represent the
reigning family as indebted to his father for its preservation.[577]
Brantome is consistent with the entire mass of contemporary documents in
representing Tavannes as the author of the whole scheme; and certainly one
who was so deeply implicated in the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day
cannot have been too humane to think of capturing, or even assassinating,
two nobles, although one of them was a prince of the blood. A more
probable story is that Tavannes was the unintentional instrument of the
disclosure, a letter of his having fallen into Huguenot hands, containing
the words: "The deer is in the net; the game is ready."[578] But, in
point of fact, the Huguenots needed no such hints. With their perfect
organization, in the face of so treacherous a foe, after so many
violations as they had of late witnessed of the royal edict, they were
already on their guard, and the hostile preparations had not escaped their
notice.
[Sidenote: Conde's last appeal to the king.]
When the news first reached him that the troops sent ostensibly to besiege
La Rochelle were recalled, Conde, alarmed by what he heard from every
quarter, had begged his mother-in-law, the Marchioness de Rothelin, to go
to the court and entreat the king, in his name, to maintain the sanctity
of his engagements, confirmed by repeated oaths. Scarcely had she
departed, however, before he received fresh and reiterated warnings that
his safety depended upon instant escape. He determined, nevertheless, to
make a last attempt to avert the horrid prospect of a war which, from the
malignant hatred exhibited by all classes of Roman Catholics, he rightly
judged would exceed the previous contests both in duration and in
destructiveness. He addressed to his young sovereign a letter explaining
the necessity of the step he was about to take, accompanied by a long
appeal, of which it would be impracticable to give even a brief summary.
Every point in the multitudinous grievances of which the Huguenots
complained was recapitulated. Every counter-charge with which the court
had endeavored to parry the force of previous remonstrances was
satisfactorily answered. In eloquent terms the prince indicted Charles,
Cardinal of Lorraine, as the enemy alike of the royal dignity and of the
liberties of the people, as the author of all the troubles of France, and
the advocate and defender of robbers and murderers.[579] He reminded the
king of the declaration of Maximilian, the present Emperor of Germany, in
a letter written before his election to Charles himself: "All the wars and
all the dissensions that are to-day rife among the Christians have
originated from two cardinals--Granvelle and Lorraine."[580] And he closed
the long and eloquent document by protesting, in the sight of God and of
all foreign nations, that the Huguenot nobles sought the punishment of
Lorraine and his associates alone, as the guilty causes of all the
calamities that portended destruction to the French crown, and would
pursue them as perjured violators of the public faith and capital enemies
of peace and tranquillity. He therefore hoped that no one would be
astonished if he and his allies should henceforth refuse to receive as the
king's commands anything that might be decided upon by the royal council,
so long as the cardinal might be present at its sessions, but should
regard them as fabrications of the cardinal and his fellows. The causes of
the misfortunes that might arise must be attributed, not to himself and
his Huguenot allies, but to the cardinal and his Roman Catholic
confederates.[581]
[Sidenote: The flight of the prince and the admiral.]
[Sidenote: Proves wonderfully successful.]
Having despatched "this testimony of the innocence, integrity, and faith"
of himself and of his associates, "to be transmitted to posterity in
everlasting remembrance," the Prince of Conde set out on the same day (the
twenty-third of August) from Noyers. Coligny had joined him, bringing from
Tanlay his daughter, the future bride of Teligny--and, after that
nobleman's assassination on St. Bartholomew's Day, of William of Orange,
the hero of the revolt of the Netherlands--and his young sons, as well as
the wife and infant son of his brother D'Andelot. Conde was himself
accompanied by his wife, who was expecting soon to be confined, and by
several children. His own servants and those of the admiral, with a few
noblemen that came in from the neighborhood, swelled their escort to about
one hundred and fifty horse.[582] With such a handful of men, and
embarrassed in their flight by the presence of those whom their age or
their sex disqualified for the endurance of the fatigues of a protracted
journey, Conde and Coligny undertook to reach the friendly shelter of the
walls of La Rochelle. It was a perilous attempt. The journey was one of
several hundred miles, through the very heart of France. The cities were
garrisoned by their enemies. The bridges and fords were guarded. The
difficulties, in fact, were apparently so insurmountable, that the Roman
Catholics seem to have expected that any attempt to escape would be made
in the direction of Germany, where Casimir, their late ally, would
doubtless welcome the Protestant leaders. This mistake was the only
circumstance in their favor, for it diminished the number and the
vigilance of the opposing troops.
The march was secret and prompt. Contrary to all expectation, an unguarded
ford was discovered not far from the city of Sancerre,[583] by which, on a
sandy bottom, the fugitive Huguenots crossed the Loire, elsewhere deep and
navigable as far as Roanne.[584] If the drought which had so reduced the
stream as to render the passage practicable was justly regarded as a
providential interposition of Heaven in their behalf, the sudden rise of
the river immediately afterward, which baffled their pursuers, was not
less signal a blessing.[585] Other dangers still confronted them, but
their prudence and expedition enabled them to escape them, and on the
eighteenth of September[586] the weary travellers, with numbers
considerably increased by reinforcements by the way, entered the gates of
La Rochelle amid the acclamations of the brave inhabitants.
[Sidenote: The third civil war opens.]
The escape of the prince and the admiral rendered useless all further
attempt at the concealment of the treacherous designs of the papal party;
and the third religious war dates from this moment.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The city of La Rochelle and its privileges.]
The city of La Rochelle, said to have become a walled place
about 1126, had received many tokens of favor at the hands of
its successive masters before the accession of Queen Alienor,
or Eleonore, last Duchess of Aquitaine. It was by a charter of
this princess, in 1199, that the municipality, or "commune,"
was established. (Arcere, Hist. de la Rochelle, ii., Preuves,
660, 661.) The terms of the charter are vague; but, as
subsequently constituted, the "commune" consisted of one
hundred prominent citizens, designated as "pairs," or peers,
in whom all power was vested. The first member in dignity was
the "maire" or mayor, selected by the Seneschal of Saintonge
from the list of three candidates yearly nominated by his
fellow-members. The historian of the city compares him, for
power and for the sanctity attaching to his person, to the
ancient tribunes of Rome. Next were the twenty-four
"echevins," or aldermen, one-half of whom on alternate years
assisted the mayor in the administration of justice. Last of
all came seventy-five "pairs" having no separate designation,
who took part in the election of the mayor, and voted, on
important occasions, in the "assemblee generale." (See a
historical discussion, Arcere, i. 193-199.)
From King John Lackland, of England, the Rochellois are said
to have received express exemption from the duty of marching
elsewhere in the king's service, without their own consent,
and from admitting into their city any troops from abroad. (P.
S. Callot, La Rochelle protestante, 1863, p. 6.) When, in
1224, after standing a siege of three weeks, La Rochelle fell
into the hands of Louis VIII. of France, its new master
engaged to maintain all its privileges--a promise which was
well observed, for not only did the city lose nothing, but it
actually received new favors at the king's hands. (Arcere, i.
212; Callot, 6.) In 1360, the disasters of the French,
consequent upon the battle of Poitiers, compelled the monarch
to surrender the city of La Rochelle to his captors in order
to regain his liberty. The concession was reluctantly made,
with the most flattering testimony to the past fidelity of the
inhabitants (see letters of John II. of France, to the
Rochellois, Calais, Oct., 1360, Arcere, ii, Preuves, 761), and
it was with still greater reluctance that the latter consented
to carry it into effect. "They made frequent excuses," says
Froissard, "and would not, for upwards of a year, suffer any
Englishman to enter their town. The letters were very
affecting which they wrote to the King of France, beseeching
him, by the love of God, that he would never liberate them of
their fidelity, nor separate them from his government and
place them in the hands of strangers; for they would prefer
being taxed every year one-half of what they were worth,
rather than be in the hands of the English." (Froissard, i. c.
214, Johnes's Trans.) When compelled to yield, it was with the
words: "We will honor and obey the English, but our hearts
shall never change." Edward the Third had solemnly confirmed
their privileges (Callot, 8).
But La Rochelle's unwilling subjection to the English crown
was of brief duration. By a plot, somewhat clumsily contrived,
but happily executed (Aug., 1372), the commander of the
garrison, who did not know how to read, was induced to lead
his troops outside of the castle wall for a review. The royal
order that had been shown him was no forgery, but had been
sent on a previous occasion, and the attesting seal was
genuine. At a preconcerted signal, two hundred Rochellois rose
from ambush, and cut off the return of the English. The
latter, finding their antagonists reinforced by two thousand
armed citizens under the lead of the mayor himself, soon came
to terms, and, withdrawing the few men they had left behind in
the castle, accepted the offer of safe transportation by a
ship to Bordeaux. (See the entertaining account in Froissard,
i. c. 311.) The wary Rochellois took good care, before even
admitting into their city Duguesclin, Constable of France,
with a paltry escort of two hundred men-at-arms, to stipulate
that pardon should be extended to those who immediately after
the departure of the English had razed the hateful castle to
the ground, and that no other should ever be erected; that La
Rochelle and the country dependent upon it should henceforth
form a particular domain under the immediate jurisdiction of
the king and his parliament of Paris; that its militia should
be employed only for the defence of the place; and that La
Rochelle should retain its mint and the right to coin both
"black and white money." (Froissard, _ubi supra_, corrected by
Arcere, i. 260.) Not only did the grateful monarch readily
make these concessions, and confirm all La Rochelle's past
privileges, but, for its "immense services," by a subsequent
order he conferred nobility upon the "mayor," "echevins" and
"conseillers" of the city, both present and future, as well as
upon their children forever. (Letters of January 8, 1372/3,
Arcere, ii., Preuves, 673-675.)