THE ARGUMENT of the following half century, from the civil wars to the
death of Richeleau, as in the English parallel from the Armada to the
Long Parliament, was the rise of political absolutism. Henry IV, the
prince who made it acceptable and national, and even popular in
France, was fitted to disarm resistance, not only by brilliant
qualities as a soldier and a statesman, but also by a charm and
gladness of character in which he has hardly a rival among crowned
heads. He succeeded in appeasing a feud which had cost oceans of
blood, and in knitting together elements which had been in conflict
for thirty years. The longing for rest and safety grew strong, and
the general instinct awarded him all the power that was requisite to
restore public order and dominate surging factions.
The Catholics held out till 1594 at Paris, and still longer in Rome.
But the League began to go to pieces when its invincible protector,
Farnese, died in 1592. Then Mayenne, the general of the League, who
was a Guise, and his brothers successor as leader of the Catholic
nobility, came to a breach with the fierce democracy of Paris. The
siege, by intensifying antagonism and passions, had produced new
combinations in politics and a wider horizon. The Parisians who,
twenty years earlier, had adopted massacre as a judicious expedient,
now adopted revolution. The agitators and preachers who managed
opinion, taught the right of armed resistance, the supremacy of the
masses, the duty of cashiering kings, the lawfulness of tyrannicide.
The blending of inquisition with revolution was a novelty.
Since the popes had become temporal sovereigns, like the of the
Gentiles, the tendency of the Church was towards conservatism and
sympathy with authority. But the Parisian clergy, when opposing
monarchy associated 'with Protestantism, endeavoured to employ the
utmost violence of popular feeling. And they had the support of Rome.
A papal legate was shut up in the capital, encouraging it to resist.
He belonged to the ancient and illustrious house of Caetani. The last
head of that family, the father of the Duke of Sermoneta, lately
minister of foreign affairs, once showed me an inscription, in
monumental Latin, setting forth how he had at last paid off the
immense debt incurred by the legate in the defence of Paris. With
Caetani was Bellarmin, the most famous controversialist of the
sixteenth century, who there imbibed the doctrines which made him one
of the masters of revolutionary Catholicism, and a forerunner of
Algernon Sidney. There, too, Mariana had witnessed the scenes of
1572, and learnt the mingled lesson of conditional authority, revolt,
and murder, which he taught publicly, and without incurring censure at
Madrid or Rome. For thirty years these views prevailed over a wider
circle, and were enforced in many volumes too ponderous to survive.
In France the revival of these sanguinary sentiments served to
increase reaction and to strengthen the party of the throne. In
preference to such defenders of religion and the public good, people
turned to the austere Royalists and Gallicans. The change was not
final or complete, and did not carry all men with it. Imitators of
Jacques Clement arose among the clergy, and Henry fell at last by the
hand of a fanatic. When Mayenne sent the leaders of the populace to
the scaffold, the defence became hopeless. Henry foiled his enemies
by becoming a Catholic. He was not capable of taking dogmatic issues
much to heart, and never ceased to hope for reunion, believing that
the breach could be repaired, and that men who took pains to
understand each other would find that there was no insurmountable
obstacle to reconciliation. Many profited by the change who doubted
his sincerity. But Henry was in the hands of Duperron, one of the
most expert divines of modern times, who proved more than a match for
Duplessis Mornay, and whom Casaubon, a better scholar than Duplessis
Mornay, described as a thunderbolt of a man. Nobody supposed that he
would have conformed if it had involved the sacrifice of the crown.
It is not clear that it did actually involve the sacrifice of his
conviction. The Pope, under Spanish influence, hesitated long to
acknowledge him. It was a defeat and a humiliation to accept as
eldest son of the Church an excommunicated heretic, who, by the law of
the Supreme Tribunal, deserved to die, and to submit to him because he
was victorious over Catholics of France and Spain. His elevation was
a boon to the French, because he restored the prosperity of their
Church; but it was none to Rome, because his belief was a compromise
between Roman doctrine and ethics the reverse of Roman. The delicate
negotiation was carried to a satisfactory end by Cardinal D'Ossat,
whose despatches were long received, and perhaps still are, as the
best in the language, and the model of all diplomacy. Spain followed
Rome, and a conference was held under the presidency of the Pope,
which concluded peace in the Treaty of Vervins. Then Philip II died,
a defeated and disappointed man, whose schemes were wrecked by an
inflexible intolerance; but with his military power undiminished,
still the master of incomparable legions, still the ruler of the
greatest empire in History.
Henry IV closed the era of religious wars by granting liberty to
Protestants on terms intended to ensure permanence. All offices,
civil and military, were thrown open; they retained their cities of
refuge, and acquired the machinery of equal justice, by the expedient
of mixed tribunals. The Catholics gained even more; for whereas
Protestant churches were excluded from Paris, and from certain towns
which had capitulated on that condition, the mass was restored
everywhere, and particularly in two hundred and fifty towns from which
the Huguenots, who predominated in the west and south, had banished
it.
The Edict of Nantes forms an epoch in the progress of toleration,
that is, in the history of liberty, which is the marrow of all modern
History. It is a more liberal scheme than the Peace of Religion,
which satisfied the previous generation of Germans. It pacified
France and afforded to the minority sufficient strength and safety,
not on the basis of religious equality, but in the shape of
circumscribed and definite privilege. Some of the Acts of
Pacification which failed had been more ample. Socinians went much
deeper in the sixteenth century, and Independents in the seventeenth.
The edict involved no declaration of new principles, and no surrender
of ancient claims. The government made concessions of a purely
practical kind, which might be revoked thereafter, if the Huguenots
became less formidable and the crown more powerful. There was no
recognition that they were concessions of the moral order, which it
would be usurpation to refuse, or to which the subject had a right
under a higher law. The action of the crown was restricted, without
detriment to its authority. No other religious body was admitted but
that which had made its power felt by arms in eight outbreaks of civil
war. Beyond them, persecution was still legitimate. The power of the
Protestants was acknowledged, not the prerogative of conscience. The
Edict of Nantes was not one of those philosophical instruments which
breed unending consequences, growing from age to age, and modifying
the future more and more. It was a settlement, not a development.
This was the method chosen in order to evade resentment on the part of
Catholics and the weakening of the crown. To speak in general or
abstract terms of the sovereign conscience was to urge the contrast
between the Roman Inquisition and the spirit of early Christianity,
and to promote a breach with the Catholicism of Southern Europe. To
proclaim that the civil magistrate has no right to regulate belief was
to limit monarchy and to repel the Politiques, who were the
legislators of the day, and who attributed all power on earth to the
State, admitting a wise restraint, but no renunciation of right.
The plan adopted achieved the desired result. The Protestants enjoyed
the faculty of self-government, and their great writers and scholars
were free to influence opinion by their writings. While the stubborn
fixity of German Lutherans and Swiss Calvinists lifted them out of the
stream of actual history, French Protestantism, like English, was full
of growth and originality. The law of the new government was to raise
the Crown above parties, and the State above the nation. It was part
of the doctrine which Machiavelli revealed to the men of the
Renaissance. The Middle Ages had practised class government. The
interests dominant in society dominated the State, and employed it for
their own advantage. The territorial aristocracy, or the clergy,
legislated for themselves and controlled taxation. Venice, which was
a republic not of landowners but of shipowners, was the first to
revert to the ancient notion of the State acting for its own purposes,
bound to no interest, following the opinion of no majority. Venice
turned from the sea to the land, and became an Italian Power, in
obedience to no class, on public grounds only, regardless of other
influences. The French monarchy, as Henry restored it, was of
necessity raised above the contending parties, and was the organ of no
inspiration but its own. He dropped the states-general, which had
been turbulent and hostile, and carried out his measures in defiance
of the parliaments. That of Rouen refused for ten years to register
the Edict of Nantes. Feeling safe with the Protestants and with the
Politiques, who were the real basis of his administration, he devoted
himself to the task of winning over their Catholic opponents. The
Jesuits represented Rome, the Counter-Reformation, and the League, and
were banished for tyrannicide. Henry recalled them, and made one of
them, a divine whose life has been written in four volumes, the keeper
of his conscience. He was solicitous of the friendship of Rome, and
of influence in the College of Cardinals, where his moderating hand
was soon felt.
The king's conciliatory policy triumphed in a quarrel which broke out
between Rome and Venice. The Papacy desired to enforce a system of
its own in matters of Church and State, and, in other words, to make
laws for the nations to obey. The Canon Law did not come down from
heaven, but was enacted from time to time in the past, and was to be
enacted furthermore in the future. Venice, as a modern state,
self-sufficing and concentrating power, legislated for its clergy as
well as for its laity, resenting interference outside questions of
pure doctrine. The two pretensions clashed under Paul V, a zealous
and uncompromising pontiff, the founder of the House of Borghese. He
claimed a jurisdiction in Venice which could not have been asserted
successfully in France or Spain, because a surrender of authority
which may be made to superior force cannot be made voluntarily where
there is no compulsion. But the court of Rome was the chief seat of
those aspirations after the control of states, which had been so
lately renewed.
Since the failure of the schemes against Elizabeth and the victory of
Gallicans over the League and the medieval ideal, a new heresy, the
political heresy, had been discovered, which Cardinal Baronius, the
foremost of the Roman divines, denounced as the most damnable of all
heresies. By that was meant the notion of a science of politics
limiting the ecclesiastical domain; an ethical and political system
deriving its principles elsewhere than from the Church, and setting up
a new and rival authority yet to be defined, ascertainable in no book,
and not accepted by the nations. Those amongst us who deny the
existence of a political science, and believe that ethics cannot be
made to include politics, have ardent supporters in the Roman clergy
of three centuries ago. The Venetian theorists who could be caught
were burnt at Rome. One, who did not trust himself in Roman hands,
was badly wounded near his own door. This was the famous Father Paul,
whose History of the Council of Trent issued from this controversy.
He was a Servite monk and theological adviser to the government, and
the emissaries who flocked from England, France, Geneva, and the
German states, to see how far the Venetians would move away from Rome,
believed that he was at heart a Calvinist. In reality Sarpi had more
of the eighteenth century than of the sixteenth in his turn of mind,
and stood far aloof from the doctrines over which his contemporaries
contended, and the expectations entertained of his countrymen were
illusory. The city was placed under an interdict, and the orders that
were faithful to Rome departed across the Lagoon, singing hymns. The
Pope looked about for means of coercion when Henry mediated. He owed
much to Venice, which was the first of the Catholic Powers to
recognise him. In action, he called to his men to watch where his
white plume waved, and to follow wherever they saw it. In gratitude
to the Republic he presented it with his suit of armour, which is
still conspicuous at the Arsenal, the helmet still displaying the
famous feather, changed to a melancholy yellow. Henry induced both
parties to yield something of their extreme attitude, and prevented a
collision. No such conflict has ever since occurred in Europe.
The other great event in his foreign policy was his protectorate of
the Netherlands. By his influence, pursued through an intricate
negotiation, the twelve years' truce was concluded. Spain would not
consent to a permanent treaty, and when the Thirty Years' War broke
out, again fought with her ancient enemy. It was during this truce
that the best-known events of Dutch history occurred--the Synod of
Dort, the suppression of the Republicans and Arminians by Maurice of
Nassau, when he put Olden Barnevelt to death, and compelled the most
illustrious of all Dutchmen, Grotius, to make his escape packed in a
box of books.
After some years of prosperous tranquillity, Henry IV found himself
the first personage in Europe. He had done much for the army,
something for the finances and the national wealth. He was watching
for an opportunity to break the power of the Habsburgs, which
surrounded him everywhere, and threatened Amiens, not a hundred miles
from Paris. He relied on Protestant alliances, and did not despair of
the Pope. From Sully's Memoirs, and also from other sources, we learn
the lines upon which he schemed to remodel the map of Europe. The
Memoirs are not written by Sully himself, and have been tampered with.
The Grand Design was never executed, never even attempted, and need
not be discussed. Henry boasted to the Spanish ambassador that he
would lose no time over Italy; that he would breakfast at Milan, hear
mass at Rome, and dine at Naples. "Then," said the Spaniard, "you will
be in time for vespers in Sicily." Before starting for his expedition
Henry had his queen crowned, that she might act as regent in his
absence. On his way to arrange the ceremony of her entrance into
Paris he met his death. Rumours of a plot had reached him and made
him nervous. While the conspirators were watching for him to pass, a
solitary fanatic, Ravaillac, drove a knife between his ribs, and gave
a respite to the House of Austria.
Henry's institutions broke down immediately after his death. His
widow, Mary of Medici, was unequal to the task of continuing a policy
of independent action, relying on no group of friends and on no
established force of opinion. The clergy influenced her as they had
never influenced her husband. The princes of the blood, the great
nobles, the Protestants, became turbulent; and the states-general,
summoned for the last time before Lewis XVI, afforded no assistance:
The queen gave her confidence to Concini, a Florentine like herself,
whom she created a marshal of France. Her son, Lewis XIII, ordered
him to be killed in the courtyard of the palace; and his wife, the
queen's foster-sister, was put to death by complaisant judges. The
young king's favourite, Luynes, governed for a time, until the queen
obtained the first post for an adviser of her own, who was the
strongest Frenchman of the old regime.
With Richelieu, as with all great men, we do well to ascertain
low-water mark, that praise and admiration may not be carried too far.
He was not a good administrator, for he considered the general
interest, not that of any number of individual men. Every Frenchman
had felt the benefit of Henry's appeasing wisdom, and a season of
prosperity had ensued. But no individual was the better for
Richelieu's eighteen years of supreme office. He wasted the treasure
of ambitious enterprises, and sacrificed the happiness of the people
to the greatness of the king. No man was richer in sagacious maxims,
or in experience of mankind; but he was destitute of principle--I mean
of political principles, which are the guide of public life as moral
principles are the guide of our private lives. To serve his
deliberate purpose, he shrank from no arbitrary or violent excess,
putting innocent men to death without scruple, if he thought them
dangerous. In such cases, he said, it is better to do too much than
too little. He retained a superstitious belief in magic, and never
soared above his age with the vision of great truths and prevision of
the things to come. But he understood and relentlessly pursued the
immediate purpose of his time.
The work of Henry IV had been undone during his son's minority, and
had to be begun over again. The crown was only one among many rival
forces. Richelieu decided that they should all be made subject and
subservient, that the government alone should govern, not any men or
any group behind the government, striving for their own ends. He
meant that there should be no dominant interest but the reason of
State, no authority but the sovereign, no will but his own. He
pursued this object with perfect distinctness and resolution, and had
succeeded when he died in 1642.
The court was an obstacle. The queen-mother, who had made his
fortune, went against him, and the king's brother became a pivot of
conspiracy. For a moment, they triumphed. Lewis withdrew his
confidence from the too imperious and successful minister, who had
made his master so powerful and so helpless; but in one short
interview the cardinal recovered his position. The queen retired from
the council, went out of the country, and died, an exile, in the house
of Rubens at Cologne. When the greatest nobles of France, strong in
their feudal traditions, rose against his new, and illegal, and
oppressive authority, Richelieu repressed every attempt, and cut off
the head of every offender. For he said that clemency was the bane of
France.
The Huguenots, safe but not satisfied under Henry, had felt that they
were in danger after his death, and sought to transform the
self-government ceded to them at Nantes into a defensive association
against the sovereign. The spectre of federalism threatened the
hard-won unity of France, and challenged the very essence of
Richelieu's policy. The decisive struggle took place at La Rochelle.
Richelieu directed the siege himself, carrying out works as enormous
as those of the siege of Tyre, and infusing his spirit into men who
did not see that the political issue was superior to the military.
The English fleet outside was helpless to assist, and the starving
town yielded to the clerical warrior. Many thousands had perished,
fighting, as they averred, for toleration, in reality for
predominance.
The fall of Rochelle was the end of political Protestantism in France
as it issued from the civil war; of the attempt to imitate that which
the League had done, and to build up a confederation too strong for
the State. But the strictly religious privileges conceded thirty
years earlier were immediately renewed, and they were faithfully
observed. What Richelieu resisted implacably was disintegration, not
Calvinism. He had no difficulty in tolerating religious dissent. He
would not tolerate political opposition. Richelieu was a bishop, a
cardinal, a practised writer of theological controversy, a
passionately resolved defender of the national unity, and of the
French patriotism, which the religious struggle had imperilled, but he
was not intolerant. Under him, and under his successor, the Sicilian
Cardinal Mazarin, the religion which had been thought so dangerous was
allowed to prosper, and the highest offices were crowded with
Huguenots. The rapid expansion of French power was largely due to
this policy. It was then that the French proved superior to the
Spaniards in war, and the long supremacy of Spain came to an end on
land half a century after it had terminated at sea. Several of the
marshals were Protestants, including Turenne, the most illustrious of
them all. The tolerant spirit of the ecclesiastical statesmen caused
the rise of France, and its decline followed the intolerance of Lewis
XIV.
Richelieu, if not deeply religious, was thoroughly a Churchman; but
his attitude towards Protestants separated him, on most fundamental
points, from the Spanish and Roman persecutors, and he differed
considerably from the great divines of the preceding generation.
He had just come to power when a book was published at Rome by
Sanctarelli renewing the theories of Bellarmin and Suarez, which had
excited the indignant resentment of the university and the Parliament.
Richelieu required the Paris Jesuits to renounce the doctrines which
their brethren proclaimed essential to orthodoxy. And they did what
he required of them, accepting, in France, the sentiments of France,
and protesting, at Rome, that they retained the sentiments of Rome.
They became the friends of their very arbitrary protector. When
Father Caussin, the king's confessor, warned him against the
cardinal's wars, and his Protestant alliances, his superiors agreed
to remove him.
Richelieu refused allegiance to system or party, and opposed the
Jansenist and the Gallican as he did the Jesuit extreme. He desired
to be aided, not hampered, by the Church and cultivated as much
independence as allowed friendship with Rome. Towards the end of his
life it was his object to become patriarch of France. The Pope who
reigned in his time had been in France when Cardinal Barberini. He
was a pontiff of a modern type, when compared with many of his recent
predecessors; and it was in his pontificate that the Roman Inquisition
put out its fires. He did not escape the influence of the Frenchman's
more vigorous personality. He shared his dread of the Habsburgs and
his interest in Gustavus, but they came to a breach at last.
It was in Richelieu's time, and under his auspices, that the great
division occurs between the modern Papacy and the medieval, which the
Counter-Reformation had revived. The striking contrast between France
under Richelieu and France under Lewis XIV is the tolerance of the one
and the intolerance of the other. But no spirit of independence could
be safe under the absolutism which the cardinal inaugurated, and which
was a glaring inconsistency as long as consciences were free. The
change, which was sure to come, came when, under very peculiar
constellations, Lewis XIV desired to show that he was a better
Catholic than the Pope.
The cardinal never abandoned the hope of healing the division of
churches, which was a calamity in his eyes, both as a statesman and a
divine. He provided for Huguenot ministers who were reconciled, and
he made serious plans to prepare for reunion, plans which Bossuet
resumed, but which had to be given up when the king resorted to
violence. The deepest part of the scheme to exalt the throne was the
endeavour to raise France above the nations. The opportunity was
afforded by the Thirty Years' War. All Europe was involved, the
Protestant Powers uniting against the House of Habsburg, which, by
tradition, by pretension, and by its actual position and power, was
the one constant obstacle to the desired supremacy of the French king.
Richelieu assisted them, and ended by openly joining them. Once he
said, "I will prove to the world that the age of Spain is passing away
and the age of France has come."
It was the contrast of two different epochs of civilisation, of two
worlds succeeding each other, rather than a conflict of rival Powers.
Spain was inseparably united with the Church and a declared enemy to
the rest of Christendom. France lived at peace with Protestants, and
based her policy on their support, having political but not religious
enemies to combat, gaining all that Spain lost by exclusiveness. It
was the adoption of a new doctrine. The interest of the State above
the interest of the Church, of the whole above the aggregate of parts,
determined the foreign as well as the domestic policy of the
statesmanlike prelate. The formidable increase of State power, in the
form of monarchy, was an event of European proportion and
significance. General History naturally depends on the action of
forces that are not national, but proceed from wider causes. The rise
of modern kingship in France is part of a similar movement in England.
Bourbon's and Stuarts obeyed the same law, though with a different
result.
X