WHEN THE religious frontiers were fixed in the rest of Europe, in
France, the most important state of all, they were still unsettled.
There the struggle was obstinate and sanguinary, and lasted more than
thirty years, ending, towards the close of the century, with the
triumph of the Crown over the nation, and the State over the Church.
Although the French had had at least one reformer before the
Reformation, and were prepared by the Gallican system for much
divergence from prevailing forms of medieval Catholicism; they
received the new ideas as an importation from Germany. In that shape,
as Lutheranism, they never became an important force in the country,
though there was, a time of comparative toleration, followed, after
1535, by the severities which at that time became usual in Europe.
The number of victims in the last years of Francis I is supposed to
have been eighty-five or a little more. Luther, in his life and
thought, presented so many characteristics of the exclusively German
type as to repel the French, who, during many years of that
generation, were at war with Germany. After his death, the first man
among the reformers was a Frenchman, and the system as he recast it
was more congenial. Calvinism possessed the important faculty of
self-government, whilst Lutheranism required to be sustained by the
civil power. For these reasons the Calvinistic doctrines obtained a
far more favourable hearing, and it is in that shape only that the
Reformation struck root in France.
King Henry II, who had been educated in Spain, where he was detained
as a hostage, was resolutely intolerant, and when the general peace
was concluded he turned his thoughts to the state of religion. He
made an attempt to introduce the Inquisition, but was killed in a
tourney before he had achieved his purpose. The Protestants at that
time were estimated by Calvin at about 300,000, and in certain
districts they were increasing rapidly. They had two translations of
the Bible, and a celebrated book of hymns; and they now began to
combine and organise. They were strongest in Dauphiny, which was near
Geneva, and at Lyons, which was a centre of trade. Then they spread
to Normandy, and in the west, and as time went by it became difficult
to say which part of the country or which class of the population was
most deeply influenced by their doctrine. No province ever became
Protestant, and hardly any town. There never was any prospect that
the Reformation would prevail; but at first, in the tide of early
expansion, this was not quite evident, and they dreamt, not of liberty
only, but of predominance. They did not profess the liberal
principle, and never repudiated the maxim of their chief at Geneva
regarding the repression of other sects. They thought it a life and
death struggle, persuaded that the Catholics were irreconcilable, and
impossible fellow-subjects and neighbours. By image-breaking,
assaults on processions, and general violence, they made the part of
tolerant Catholics difficult to play. As a religious body, guided by
the counsels of Calvin, they should have professed passive obedience.
But they were associated with vast political interests, and with men
less eager about points of doctrine than about affairs of state, who
brought them into action against the government. As there were
princes of the blood among them, and even crowned heads, resistance to
the authority of the day was not felt to be seditious. In this way it
came to pass that while Calvin at Geneva was preaching non-resistance,
Calvinists in France formed an armed opposition and became involved in
plots.
As the new king was too young to govern, Queen Catharine, his mother,
became nominal regent; but as he was married to Mary Stuart, her
uncles governed the kingdom. One of them was the Duke of Guise, the
conqueror of Calais, and the most popular soldier in France. His
brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine, one of the most conspicuous
ecclesiastics of the age, was a Gallican prelate, obnoxious to Rome,
and willing to concede much in favour of the Confession of Augsburg as
an arm against Geneva, maintaining his power by every means, and an
avowed and unshrinking advocate of assassination. Against the
administration of these men, princes and Protestants combined. Their
plans were detected; many accomplices were put to death at Amboise,
and the Prince of Conde was arrested, tried, and in imminent danger of
execution, when Francis II died, and the reign of the Guises was at an
end.
Catharine, whose effective regency now began in the name of Charles
IX, her second son, rested on the moderates. There was so little
passion in her religion that people doubted whether there was much
conviction. When Pius V proffered advice as to the king's marriage,
she replied that he was old enough to act for himself, without foreign
interference. She assured Elizabeth that she would have no objection
if she treated her Catholics as Protestants were treated in France on
St. Bartholomew's day. Once, on the report of a Protestant victory,
she declared that she was quite ready to say her prayers in French.
In Italy, her want of zeal made people suppose that she was at heart a
Huguenot. She encouraged the liberal and conciliatory legislation of
L'Hopital; for the most striking feature of the time is the sudden
outbreak of tolerant opinion.
To arrest this surrender of Counter-Reformation policy, and the ruin
which it portended to the Church in France, Guise fell upon a
congregation of Protestants, and mingled their blood with their
sacrifices. This is the massacre of Vassy, which provoked the wars of
religion. They lasted, with intervals, sometimes of several years,
for a whole generation, and effaced the country as a European Power.
This long obliteration protracted the struggle in the Netherlands, led
to the fall of Mary Stuart, and assisted the triumphant rise and
growth of England in the middle years of Elizabeth. During the
sixties Coligny advanced steadily to the highest place in his party
and in the State, and he repeatedly secured terms which satisfied the
Protestant leaders, though at the expense of their followers.
The third war of religion, the war of 1569, in which the Huguenots
were defeated in the historic battles of Jarnac and Moncontour, had
been so devastating that the government lost the disposition to go on
fighting, and counsels of moderation prevailed. Coligny, summoned to
advise, was listened to with attention, and a marriage was decided on
between the king's sister, Margaret of Valois, and Henry of Bourbon,
the young King of Navarre, whose birthright made him the head of
the Protestant interest. Before the wedding was celebrated a change
occurred in the European situation which profoundly affected the
policy of France. The revolt broke out in the Netherlands, the real
revolt, which was not the work of Belgian nobles, but of the Water
Beggars, who took advantage of the maritime configuration, and
accomplished the deliverance of the northern provinces.
This was Coligny's opportunity. It was the manifest policy of France
to intervene, now that the conflict was a serious one, and to rectify
the frontier along the line of peril, by which the capital was exposed
to attack. What could not have been attempted while Alva held the
provinces in subjection, was possible now that his power was shaken to
its foundation. England was an obstacle, because England preferred
Spanish masters in the Low Countries to French; but it was possible to
negotiate compensation with Elizabeth; and Charles IX, under pressure
from Coligny, concluded a treaty with her. He also decided that a
Protestant force should join the Flemish insurgents in their
operations against the Duke of Alva. If they succeeded, their success
was to be followed up, and the merit of the expected conquest would be
theirs. Conciliation and peace at home would be purchased by
victories over the Spaniard. If they failed, they would be disavowed.
Accordingly, in July 1572, an expedition under Genlis went to the
relief of Mons, and was betrayed and defeated. The Huguenots had had
their opportunity and had made nothing of it. The perfidy of the
French government was detected, and the king, in his embarrassment,
denounced the invaders, and urged Alva to make short work with
prisoners. At the same time, he did not give up the scheme that had
begun so badly, the scheme for the conquest of Flanders by a forlorn
hope of Huguenots.
Coligny was to have another chance of securing liberty by the
splendour of his services to the country, and the wedding of the
Princess Margaret of Valois with Navarre, in defiance of the Pope's
refusal of the requisite dispensation, proclaimed that the court had
gone over to the Protestants. France was on the brink of a war with
Spain, in which the admiral would have the command of her armies. It
was to be a war for Protestant dominance, with France at the head of
the Protestant interest in Europe, and Protestants in high offices at
home. Queen Catharine was resolved not to submit to their ascendency,
and she knew a short way out of it. There was a blood-feud of nine
years' standing between the House of Guise and the admiral who had
never succeeded in vindicating himself from the suspicion that he was
cognisant of the murder of the former Duke of Guise at the siege of
Orleans. They were glad to obtain their revenge; and one of their
bravos, after two days' watching, shot Coligny, wounding him severely
but not mortally. His friends, who were collected at Paris in large
numbers, insisted on satisfaction. Catharine then informed her son
that there could be no punishment and no inquiry, that the real
culprit was herself, and that if anything was done, by way of justice,
Guise would cast upon her all the ignominy of the attempt, all
the ignominy of its failure. Nothing could save her but the immediate
destruction of Coligny and his chief adherents, all conveniently
within reach. The king hesitated. Not from any scruple; for when the
Parliament had offered a reward for the capture of the admiral, he had
obliged them to add the words--alive or dead. But he hesitated to
surrender the hope of annexing Flanders, the constant and necessary
object of national policy.
Late in the day after that on which Coligny received his wound, the
civic authorities were warned to hold their men in readiness, when the
bell of the church near the Louvre, St. Germain of Auxerre, rang the
tocsin. This was the beginning of that alliance between the rural
aristocracy of Catholic France and the furious democracy of the
capital which laid the inauspicious foundation of the League. Their
objects were not entirely the same. The Parisian populace were
indiscriminately murderous and cruel, killing every Huguenot they
knew. The Spanish envoy wrote: "not a child has been spared. Blessed
be God!" Guise had his thoughts fixed on political enemies. Some
Protestant officers who lived beyond the Seine, hearing the tumult,
took horse and made off before it reached them, and were pursued by
Guise for many hours along the north road. When Guise gave up the
chase and returned to Paris, his house became a refuge for many
obscure persons from whom he had nothing to fear. In his absence, the
king had laid the blame upon him, and described the massacre as a
result of the old quarrel between Guise and Chatillon. This was not
to be borne, and another explanation was speedily devised. It was now
stated that a Protestant conspiracy had been discovered, and happily
crushed in time by a prompt effort in self-defence. This was
suggested by the threatening attitude assumed by Coligny's friends in
order to compel punishment for the attempt on his life. Both theories
were adopted in dealing with England and the German princes. Whilst
orders went forth to the local authorities all over France to imitate
the example of the capital, every effort was made to avert a breach
with the Protestant Powers.
These efforts were so successful that Elizabeth stood godmother to the
daughter of Charles IX, while his brother, Henry of Anjou, was elected
King of Poland by a union of parties, although his share in the
slaughter was notorious. This idea soon became preponderant; and when
provincial governors neglected or refused to obey the sanguinary
commands, nothing was done to enforce them. The actual massacre was a
momentary resolve: it was not a change of front.
The premeditation of St. Bartholomew has been a favourite controversy,
like the Casket Letters; but the problem is entirely solved, although
French writers, such as Guizot and Bordier, believe in it; and the
Germans, especially Baumgarten and Philippson, deny it. It is
perfectly certain that it was not a thing long and carefully prepared,
as was believed in Rome, and those who deny premeditation in the
common sense of the word are in the right. But for ten years the
court had regarded a wholesale massacre as the last resource of
monarchy. Catharine herself said that it had been in contemplation,
if opportunity offered, from the year 1562. Initiated observers
expected it from that time; and after the conference with Alva at
Bayonne, in 1565, it was universally considered probable that some of
the leaders, at least, would be betrayed and killed. Two cardinals,
Santa Croce and Alessandrina, announced it at Rome, and were not
believed. In 1569 Catharine admitted that she had offered 50,000
crowns for the head of Coligny, and corresponding sums for others.
The Archbishop of Nazareth reported to the Pope in the autumn of 1570
that the Treaty of St. Germain had been concluded with the intention
of slaughtering the Protestants when they were beguiled by the
favourable conditions granted them, but that the agents disobeyed. He
hoped that the Peace of St. Germain had the same legitimate motive
and excuse, and advised that a list of proscription should be drawn
up. In short, the idea had been long entertained, and had been more
than once near execution. At last, the murder of Coligny was provoked
by the imminent war with Spain, and the general slaughter followed.
The clergy applauded, but it did not proceed from them. Excepting
Sorbin at Orleans and the Jesuit Auger in the south, few of them were
actual accomplices before the fact. After the energetic approval
given by the court of Rome, it was not quite easy for a priest to
express dissent.
One dauntless ecclesiastic warned the Pope to prohibit demonstrations
which revealed the secret of the priesthood. The man who thus
disturbed the unanimity of exultant cardinals was Montalto, afterwards
Sixtus V, and he deserves to be recorded, because he outweighs many
names. He thought so ill of his predecessor, Gregory XIII, that he
was tempted to revoke the best act of his pontificate, the reformation
of the Calendar; and he was quite perspicacious enough to understand
that the massacre was the height of folly as well as the worst of
crimes.
We have no reliable statistics of the slain. The fugitives who
escaped to England spoke of one hundred thousand. At Rome they put
the figure for Paris alone at sixty thousand. For the capital a basis
of calculation is supplied by the number of bodies found in the river.
The result would be something over two thousand. In the provinces
there are reports from about forty towns. The Protestant martyrology
assigns two thousand to Orleans alone. But Toussaint, one of the
ministers, who was there, and had the good fortune to escape, knew
only of seven hundred, and that is still the belief in the town
itself. It was said that two hundred perished at Toulouse. But the
president, Durand, who lost some of his own friends, and whose Memoirs
were not written for the public, speaks of thirty-six. In five towns
the victims amounted to between one hundred and seven hundred. In all
the rest they were fewer. Taking the more authentic figures, and in
cases where we cannot decide between statements that conflict,
preferring the lower figure, because of the tendency to exaggerate
where there is passion or excitement, we arrive at rather more than
five thousand for the whole of France. The editor of Queen
Catharine's correspondence, La Ferriere, urged me to make some
allowance for persons who lost their lives on the byways in attempting
to escape. That is a probable conjecture, but no evidence takes us as
high as eight thousand. I reached that conclusion many years ago, and
it is confirmed by what has since appeared, especially by the new
Histoire Generale, which accepts the limit I have mentioned. The
higher estimates commonly given are not based on a critical
investigation. The character of the event, and of its authors and
admirers, is not affected by numbers. For the massacres of September
and the revolutionary tribunal wrought less bloodshed in twenty-three
months than the French Catholics had done in about as many days. At a
time when papal agents estimated the Huguenots at one-fifth of the
entire population, the loss of five thousand, or even of eight
thousand, would not seriously weaken them. It checked their increase,
and injured mainly the royalist element among them, for Coligny was
the leader of the party that desired to support the monarchy.
Lord Clarendon has said that it was a massacre that all pious
Catholics, in the time in which it was committed, decried, abominated,
and detested. There were, of course, many in France who thought it
possible to be a good Christian without being a professional murderer,
and who sincerely desired toleration. For such men it was impossible
to continue associated with the Catholics of the League, and they were
in far closer sympathy with the Protestants. In this way a new party
arose, which was called the Politiques, and consisted of those whose
solicitude for dogma did not entirely silence the moral sense and the
voice of conscience, and who did not wish religious unity or
ascendency to be preserved by crime. It was on an ethical issue that
the separation took place, but it necessarily involved political
consequences of a definite kind.
The Politiques became promoters of the regal authority against the
aggression of the clergy, the aristocracy, and the democracy. They
had their strength among the jurists and the scholars in an age when
France was at the head of all scholarship and jurisprudence. The very
reason of their existence was the desire to resist the influence and
the spirit of Rome, and to govern France on contrary principles to
those professed by ecclesiastical authority and enforced by
ecclesiastical law. Therefore they strove to reduce the action of the
Papacy within very strictly defined limits, to abolish ultramontanism,
and to develop the Gallican theory of Church and State which French
divines had produced at the reforming councils of the fifteenth
century. As the clergy were subject to a Power which had encouraged
extermination, they aimed at the supremacy of the secular order, of
the lawyer over the priest, and of the State over the Church. They
were the most intelligent advocates of the modern state in relation to
society. For them, the representative of the State was the crown, and
they did their utmost to raise it above the restraining forces. For
the purpose that animated them the sole resource was the monarchy; and
it is they who terminated the wars of religion, the League, and the
Revolution, and prepared the great period of the Bourbon kings. Their
ideas survive, and are familiar to the later world in the classic
History of Thuanus.
The survivors closed their ranks and rapidly established a system of
self-government, which sought safety in its own organisation, not in
the protection of the crown. The intense conservatism of the early
Protestants was already giving way in the Netherlands, and it now made
way in France for the theory of resistance. A number of books
appeared, asserting the inalienable right of men to control the
authority by which they are governed, and more especially the right of
Frenchmen, just as, in the following century, Puritan writers claimed
a special prerogative in favour of Englishmen, as something distinct
from the rest of mankind. The most famous is the Vindiciae contra
Tyrannos, by Junius Brutus, generally attributed to Hubert Languet,
but written, as I believe, by Duplessis Mornay, a man eminent as a
party leader, who lost ground by entering on religious controversy.
As an adherent and even a friend of Henry of Navarre, he was moderate
in his language. This is the beginning of the literature of
revolution. But the Huguenots quickly restrained themselves, for the
same reason which, as we shall see, drove the Catholics of the League
to the extremity of violence and tyrannicide. The cause of these
dissimilar consequences was the problem of succession to the crown.
Henry III had no children, and the future of the Valois dynasty rested
on his only brother, the duke of Anjou, formerly of Alencon, the
favoured and apparent suitor of Elizabeth, who by his perfidy and
incompetence lost the government of the Netherlands.
In 1584 Anjou died, and nobody remained between the king and Henry of
Navarre, the head of the Bourbons. Therefore, if the king died, the
next heir would be the chief of the Protestants, a relapsed heretic,
whom the Pope had excommunicated. It would be the ruin of the
Catholics as a political party, and the renunciation of Catholicism as
a system of law and authority, for a relapsed heretic was a culprit to
whom the Church could show no mercy. To make him king was to defy the
ecclesiastical code, and to abandon the practice of Rome and Spain for
that of Germany under the Peace of Religion. The example of Denmark,
of Sweden, and of England showed that a Protestant king would impose
his religion on the people. They preferred to fight for the principle
that a people should impose its religion on the king. This
consideration was the origin of the League, as a great confederation
distinct from earlier and less important associations. It was
constituted out of three distinct elements: first, Guise and his
partisans, who had carried on the civil wars, and were the Catholic
portion of the aristocracy; then the Parisian democracy, who had acted
with the others against Coligny and the Huguenots, who cherished a
strong municipal spirit, and eventually created a supreme commune,
such as had existed in the fourteenth century, and was seen again in
1792 and in 1871; lastly, Philip II of Spain, who gave a million
crowns.
Gregory XIII bestowed a qualified sanction, which was not enough to
allay the scruples of some men. Beyond the suppression of
Protestantism and the restored ascendency of the Church, on which all
were agreed, there was a design to develop local self-government and
provincial institutions. All the liberties, they said, that had come
down from Clovis, and more if possible. The League was a movement
directed against the crown, even if it surrendered to them. There was
an idea, vague at first, afterwards more distinct, that Guise
descended from Charlemagne, and had a valid claim to the throne; and
this was a rift in his alliance with the King of Spain. For Philip
hoped to secure the crown of France for his own daughter Isabella, who
became the ruler, and the successful ruler, of Belgium. At the time
when the League was formed, in January 1585, Philip had reached the
highest point in his career. He had annexed Portugal and its immense
dominion. William of Orange was dead, and Farnese had already
recovered an important part of the insurgent region. He had
succeeded, for a quarter of a century, in avoiding a breach with
Elizabeth, in spite of the expulsion of his ambassador and of Drake's
victorious piracies. If he had pursued the same cautious policy, and
had employed, under Farnese against the Dutch, the resources he wasted
against England, he might have ended his reign in triumph. The
prudence for which he was renowned deserted him when he joined the
League, and then made it subservient to the purposes of the Armada.
His object was that France should continue to be divided against
itself, and that neither Henry III nor his own confederate Guise
should prevail. While those disorders continued, and made the French
powerless abroad, the expedition of the Armada was carried out,
without interference, and failed by mismanagement.
Meantime, Henry III was supported in a half-hearted way by Protestants
and Politiques, who did not trust him, and Guise, at the head of the
population, made himself master of Paris. Henry retired to Blois.
After that outrage, refusing to acknowledge that the breach was
irremediable, the duke followed, and trusted himself, undefended, in
his enemy's hands. Then followed the only thing by which Henry III
could retain his power. He took six days to make up his mind that it
was right, and then ordered Guise to be dispatched. His brother, the
cardinal, met with the same fate. Catharine of Medici, who was in the
castle of Blois when this happened, and also had thirty years'
experience in such things, died immediately, after giving her son
warning that the merit is not in the way you cut the thread, but in
the way you sew it. He thought that he was safe at last, and the
applause of Europe followed him on his march against the capital. He
had shown so much weakness of will, such want of clearness and
resource, that nobody believed he had it in him. In the eyes of
Parisians he was guilty of the unpardonable sin, for he had killed the
popular leader and the champion of orthodoxy. As he was also an ally
of heretics and an accomplice of Navarre, a young Dominican came into
his camp and stabbed him. His name was Jacques Clement, and he became
a popular hero and martyr, and his example is cited by Mariana as the
true type of tyrannicide. The action of the crazy friar produced
effects that were not intended, for it made Henry of Navarre King of
France. A long struggle awaited him before he prevailed against the
League, the armed citizens of Paris, the Pope, and the King of Spain.
He succeeded by the support of the Royalists and Legitimists, who
detached themselves from the theological conflict, and built up an
independent ideal of political right.